Chapter title: Atisha the Thrice Great

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‌Chapter title: Atisha the Thrice Great‌

11 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive

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FIRST, LEARN THE PRELIMINARIES.

THINK THAT ALL PHENOMENA ARE LIKE DREAMS. EXAMINE THE NATURE OF UNBORN AWARENESS.

LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO FREE ON ITS OWN. SETTLE IN THE NATURE OF BASIC COGNITION, THE ESSENCE. BETWEEN SESSIONS, CONSIDER PHENOMENA AS PHANTOMS. TRAIN IN JOINING, SENDING AND TAKING TOGETHER.

DO THIS BY RIDING THE BREATH.

THREE OBJECTS, THREE POISONS, THREE BASES OF VIRTUE. TRAIN WITH PHRASES IN EVERY MODE OF BEHAVIOR.

Religion is not a science.… Religion is not a science in the sense physics, mathematics and chemistry are sciences. But still it is a science because it is the ultimate knowing: the word science means knowing. And if religion is not a science, what else can be? It is the highest knowing, it is the purest knowing.

Ordinary science is knowledge, not knowing: religion is knowing itself. Ordinary science is object-oriented -- it knows something, hence it is knowledge. Religion is not object-oriented; it has no object, it knows nothing. Knowing knows itself, as if the mirror is reflecting itself. It is utterly pure of all content. Hence religion is not knowledge but knowing.

Science is a lower kind of knowing, religion is a higher kind. Religion is PHILOSOPHIA ULTIMA: the ultimate knowing. The difference between the two is not of the spirit -- the spirit is the same -- but the difference is certainly of purity.

Science is mixed with much mud. Religion is pure essence, pure fragrance. The mud has disappeared, the lotus has appeared. And at the ultimate stage even the lotus has disappeared, only the fragrance abides. These are the three stages of knowing: the mud, the lotus and the fragrance.

Religion cannot be grasped, because there is no object in it. But still it can be understood.

It cannot be explained, but it can be experienced. There is no way of informing you about religion, because it cannot be reduced to information. But you can be shown the way, the path to it -- fingers pointing to the moon. The fingers are not the moon, obviously, but the fingers can point to the moon.

These "Seven Points of Mind Training" of the great master Atisha, are fingers, seven fingers pointing to the moon. Don't be caught by the fingers, don't become too much obsessed with the fingers. That is not the point, that will be missing the point. Use the fingers and forget them, and look where the fingers are pointing. And when you see the moon, who bothers about the fingers? Who remembers

them? They automatically become nonessential; they disappear.

That's why for those who have experienced religion, all the scriptures become utterly useless, all methods become nonessential. When the goal is achieved, the path is forgotten.

Atisha is one of the rare masters, rare in the sense that he was taught by three enlightened masters. It has never happened before, and never since. To be a disciple of three enlightened masters is simply unbelievable -- because one enlightened master is enough.

But this story, that he was taught by three enlightened masters, has a metaphorical significance also. And it is true, it is historical too.

The three masters that Atisha remained with for many years were: first, Dharmakirti, a great Buddhist mystic. He taught him no-mind, he taught him emptiness, he taught him how to be thoughtless, he taught him how to drop all content from the mind and be contentless. The second master was Dharmarakshita, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him love, compassion. And the third master was Yogin Maitreya, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him the art of taking the suffering of others and absorbing it into your own heart: love in action.

This could happen because all these three masters were great friends. They had started their search together; while they were on the way they had remained together, and when they attained they were still together.

Atisha became a disciple of Dharmakirti. Dharmakirti said to him, "I will teach you the first principle. And for the second you go to Dharmarakshita, and for the third to Yogin Maitreya. This way you will know all the three faces of the ultimate reality, the three faces of God -- the trinity, the TRIMURTI. And this way you will learn each face from the person who is the most perfect in it."

These are the three ways people reach to the ultimate. If you reach through emptiness you attain the other two also, but your path remains basically that of emptiness -- you know more about emptiness, so emptiness will be emphasized in whatsoever you teach.

That's what happened in Buddha's case. He had attained through emptiness, hence his whole teaching became emptiness-oriented. There is no God in

Buddha's teaching, because God is a thought, a content, an object -- God is the other, and Buddha had attained by dropping the other. Buddha had attained by emptying his mind totally, hence there is no place for God, no place for anything at all. His path is the purest VIA NEGATIVA.

That was also the case with Dharmakirti. He was the perfect master of emptiness, a master par excellence of emptiness. And when Atisha had learned how to be empty, the master said, "It will be better for you to go to Dharmarakshita for the next step, because he has attained from a totally different path. Just as you can reach Everest from different sides, he has reached from a totally different path, the path of compassion. I can also teach you the path of compassion, but my knowing about that path is only known from the top.

"I have reached through the path of emptiness. Once you reach the top, you can look down at all the paths, they are all available to your vision. But to follow a path in its different dimensions, to follow a path in all its details, small details, is a totally different thing." And to look at it from a helicopter or from the mountain-top is certainly a different vision; it is a bird's-eye view.

And Dharmakirti said, "If there had been nobody available here, I would have taught you the other too. But when a man like Dharmarakshita is just here, my neighbor, living in another cave just nearby, it is better you go to him."

First one has to become empty, utterly empty. But you have not to cling to emptiness, otherwise your life will never know the positive expression of religion. Your life will miss the poetry, the joy of sharing; you will remain empty. You will have a kind of freedom, but your freedom will be only freedom from, it will not be freedom FOR. And unless a freedom is both -- freedom from and freedom for -- something is missing, something is lacking; your freedom will be poor. Just to be free from is a poor kind of freedom.

The real freedom starts only when you are free for. You can sing a song and you can dance a dance and you can celebrate and you can start overflowing. That's what compassion is.

Man lives in passion. When the mind disappears, passion is transformed into compassion.

Passion means you are a beggar with a begging-bowl; you are asking and asking for more and more from everybody; you are exploiting others. Your relationships

are nothing but exploitations -- cunning devices to possess the other, very clever strategies to dominate.

When you are living in the mind, in passion, your whole life is power politics. Even your love, even your social service, even your humanitarian works, are nothing but power politics. Deep down, there is a desire to be powerful over others.

The same energy, when the mind is dropped, becomes compassion. And it takes a totally new turn. It is no longer begging; you become an emperor, you start giving. Now you have something -- you had it always, but because of the mind, you were not aware of it.

The mind was functioning like darkness around you, and you were unaware of the light within. The mind was creating an illusion of being a beggar, while all the time you had been an emperor. The mind was creating a dream; in reality you never needed anything.

All had already been given. All that you need, all that you can need, is already the case.

God is within you, but because of the mind -- mind means dreaming, desiring -- you never look within, you go on rushing outwards. You keep yourself in the background, your eyes are turned towards the outside, they have become focused there. That's what the mind is all about: focusing the eyes on the outside.

And one has to learn how to unfocus them from there -- how to make them loose, less rigid, more liquid, so that they can turn inwards. Once you have seen who you are, the beggar disappears. In fact it had never existed; it was just a dream, an idea.

The mind is creating all your misery. With the mind gone, misery is gone, and suddenly you are full of energy. And the energy needs expression, sharing; it wants to become a song, a dance, a celebration. That is compassion: you start sharing.

Atisha learned compassion from Dharmarakshita. But compassion has two faces. One is inactive compassion: the meditator sits silently in his cave, showering his compassion over the whole existence. But it is a very inactive kind of compassion. You have to go to him to partake of it, he will not come to you. You

will have to go to the mountains to his cave to share his joy; he will not come to you. He will not move in any way, he will not take any active step. He will not flow towards others, he will not seek and search for the people with whom he can share his dance. He will wait.

This is a feminine kind of compassion: just like a woman waits -- she never takes the initiative, she never goes to the man. She may love the man, but she will never be the first to say "I love you." She will wait; she will hope that one day or other, sooner or later, the man will propose. Woman is inactive love, passive love. Man is active love, man takes the initiative.

And in the same way, compassion has two possibilities: the feminine and the masculine.

From Dharmarakshita, Atisha learned the feminine art of being in love with existence.

One more step was needed: Dharmarakshita told him, "Go to Yogin Maitreya" -- these three masters were all living together in the same vicinity -- "Go to Yogin Maitreya and learn how to transform the baser energy into active energy, so love becomes active."

And once love is active, compassion is active, you have passed through all the three dimensions of truth -- you have known all. You have known utter emptiness, you have known compassion arising, you have known compassion showering. Life is fulfilled only when all these three have happened.

Because Atisha learned under three enlightened masters, he is called Atisha the Thrice Great. Nothing more is known about his ordinary life, when and where exactly he was born. He existed somewhere in the eleventh century. He was born in India, but the moment his love became active he started moving towards Tibet, as if a great magnet were pulling him there. In the Himalayas he attained; then he never came back to India.

He moved towards Tibet, his love showered on Tibet. He transformed the whole quality of Tibetan consciousness. He was a miracle-worker; whatsoever he touched was transformed into gold. He was one of the greatest alchemists the world has ever known.

These "Seven Points of Mind Training" are the fundamental teaching that he

gave to Tibet -- a gift from India to Tibet. India has given great gifts to the world. Atisha is one of those great gifts. Just as India gave Bodhidharma to China, India gave Atisha to Tibet.

Tibet is infinitely indebted to this man.

These seven points, the smallest treatise you can find, are of immense value. You will have to meditate over each statement. They are the whole of religion condensed: you will have to unfold each statement. They are like seeds, they contain much. It may not be apparently so, but the moment you move into the statements deeply, when you contemplate and meditate and start experimenting with them, you will be surprised -- you will be going into the greatest adventure of your life.

The first:

FIRST, LEARN THE PRELIMINARIES.

What are the preliminaries? These are the preliminaries. First: truth is. Truth is not something to be created, truth is not something that is far away. Truth is herenow, truth surrounds you like the ocean surrounds the fish. The fish may not be aware -- once the fish becomes aware of the ocean, the fish is enlightened. The fish is not aware, cannot be aware, because the fish is born in the ocean, has always lived in the ocean, is part of the ocean as any wave is part of the ocean. The fish is also a wave -- a little more solid, but born out of the ocean, lives in the ocean and one day disappears in the ocean. The fish may never come to know about the ocean. To know something, a little distance is needed.

To know something, perspective is needed. And the ocean is so close, that's why the fish may not be aware of it.

And so is the case with truth, or if you like you can use the word god. So is the case with god. It is not that he is far away, and that's why we don't know about him; it is because he is not far away but very close by. Even to say that it is close by is not right, because you are it. He is within you and without: he is all and all.

This is the first thing that has to be allowed to sink deep in your heart: truth already is, we are in it. This is the most fundamental thing to begin with. You are not to discover it; it is not covered. All that is needed is a new kind of awareness which is missing in you. Truth is there, but you are not aware, you are not

mindful, you are not alert. You don't know how to watch, you don't know how to observe, you don't know how to look and see. You have eyes but still you are blind, you have ears but you are deaf.

The first preliminary is: truth is.

The second preliminary is: mind is the barrier. Nothing else is hindering you from truth, just your own mind. Mind surrounds you like a film, like a movie that goes on and on, and you remain engrossed in it, fascinated by it. It is a fantasy that surrounds you, a continuous story that goes on and on. And because you are so fascinated by it, you go on missing that which is. And mind is not; it is only a fantasy, it is only a faculty for dreaming.

Mind is nothing but dreams and dreams -- dreams of the past, dreams of the future, dreams of how things should be, dreams of great ambitions, achievements. Dreams and desires, that is the stuff mind is made of. But it surrounds you like a China Wall. And because of it the fish remains unaware of the ocean.

So the second preliminary is: mind is the only barrier.

And the third: no-mind is the door. Atisha calls no-mind BODHICHITTA: that is his word for no-mind. It can be translated as buddha-mind, buddha- consciousness, too. Or if you like you can call it christ-consciousness, krishna- consciousness. It doesn't make any difference what name is used, but the basic quality of bodhichitta is that it is no-mind. It looks paradoxical: the mind in the state of no-mind. But the meaning is very clear: mind without content, mind without thoughts, is what is meant, is what is indicated.

Remember the word bodhichitta, because Atisha says the whole effort of religion, the whole science of religion, is nothing but an endeavor to create bodhichitta, buddha-consciousness: a mind which functions as a no-mind, a mind which dreams no more, thinks no more, a mind which is just awareness, pure awareness.

These are the preliminaries. The second sutra:

THINK THAT ALL PHENOMENA ARE LIKE DREAMS.…

Now the work starts. Atisha is very condensed, seedlike. That is the meaning of a sutra: it is just a thread, just a hint, and then you have to decode it.

THINK THAT ALL PHENOMENA ARE LIKE DREAMS.

"Phenomena" means all that you see, all that you experience. All that can ever be experienced is all phenomena. Remember, not only are the objects of the world phenomena and dreams, but also objects of consciousness. They may be objects of the world, they may be just objects of the mind. They may be great spiritual experiences.

You may see kundalini rising in you: that too is a phenomenon -- a beautiful dream, a very sweet dream, but it is a dream all the same. You may see great light flooding your being, but that light is also a phenomenon. You may see lotuses blooming inside you and a great fragrance arising within your being: those too are phenomena, because you are always the seer and never the seen, always the experiencer and never the experienced, always the witness and never the witnessed.

All that can be witnessed, seen, observed, is phenomena. Material phenomena, psychological phenomena, spiritual phenomena -- they are all the same. There is no need to make any distinction. The basic thing to remember is: that which can be seen is a dream.

THINK THAT ALL PHENOMENA ARE DREAMS.

This is a tremendously powerful technique. Start contemplating in this way: if you are walking on the street, contemplate that people passing by are all dreams. The shops and the shopkeepers and the customers and the people coming and going, all are dreams. The houses, the buses, the train, the airplane, all are dreams.

You will be immediately surprised by something of tremendous import happening within you. The moment you think "All are dreams" suddenly, like a flash, one thing comes into your vision: "I am a dream too." Because if the seen is a dream, then who is this 'I'? If the object is a dream, then the subject is also a dream. If the object is false, how can the subject be the truth? Impossible.

If you watch everything as a dream, suddenly you will find something slipping out of your being: the idea of the ego. This is the only way to drop the ego, and

the simplest.

Just try it -- meditate this way. Meditating this way again and again, one day the miracle happens: you look in, and the ego is not found there.

The ego is a by-product, a by-product of the illusion that whatsoever you are seeing is true. If you think that objects are true, then the ego can exist; it is a by- product. If you think that objects are dreams, the ego disappears. And if you think continuously that all is a dream, then one day, in a dream in the night, you will be surprised: suddenly in the dream you will remember that this is a dream too! And immediately, as the remembrance happens, the dream will disappear. And for the first time you will experience yourself deep asleep, yet awake -- a very paradoxical experience, but of great benefit.

Once you have seen your dream disappearing because you have become aware of the dream, your quality of consciousness will have a new flavor to it. The next morning you will wake up with a totally different quality you had never known before. You will wake up for the first time. Now you will know that all those other mornings were false; you were not really awake. The dreams continued -- the only difference was that in the night you were dreaming with eyes closed, in the day you were dreaming with eyes open.

But if the dream has disappeared because awareness happened, suddenly you became aware in the dream.… And remember, awareness and dreaming cannot exist together.

Here, awareness arises, and there, the dream disappears. When you become awake in your sleep, the next morning is going to be something so important that it is incomparable. Nothing like it has ever happened. Your eyes will be so clear, so transparent, and everything will look so psychedelic, so colorful, so alive. Even rocks will be felt to be breathing, pulsating; even rocks will have a heartbeat. When you are awake, the whole existence changes its quality.

We are living in a dream. We are asleep, even when we think we are awake. THINK THAT ALL PHENOMENA ARE LIKE DREAMS.

First, objects will lose their objectivity. And second, the subject will lose its subjectivity.

And that brings you to a transcendence. The object is no longer important, the subject is no longer important, then what is left? A transcendental consciousness: bodhichitta -- just a witnessing, with no idea of 'I' and 'thou'; just a pure mirror which reflects that which is.

And God is nothing but that which is. The third sutra:

EXAMINE THE NATURE OF UNBORN AWARENESS.

Now you know what awareness is. You have known this transcendental awareness where objects and subjects are no more existential. You have known for the first time this purity, this crystal-clear mirror. Now examine the nature of this awareness.

Look into it, look deep into it. Shake yourself into as full alertness as possible. Wake up and see! And you will start laughing -- because now you will see there has never been a birth, and there is never going to be a death.

This is unborn and undying consciousness. It has always been here. It is eternal, it is timeless. And how afraid you were of death, and how afraid you were of old age, and how afraid you were of a thousand and one things! And nothing has ever happened: all was a dream.

Seeing this, one smiles, one laughs. Your whole life up to now has been ridiculous, absurd. You were unnecessarily afraid, unnecessarily greedy, unnecessarily suffering.

You were living in a nightmare and it was your own creation. EXAMINE THE NATURE OF UNBORN AWARENESS.

And you are freed from all misery, all suffering, all hell.

LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO FREE ON ITS OWN.

And now don't start clinging to the remedy, to the method. That temptation arises. It is the last temptation, the very last effort of the mind to survive. The mind comes from a back door, it tries once more. Before it disappears forever, it

makes one more effort, and that effort is to cling to the method -- the method of thinking that all phenomena are dreams.

It has given you such joy, such a deep experience of reality, that naturally you would like to cling to it. And once you cling you are back in the same old rut again: the mind is back in disguise. Cling to anything and the mind is back, because clinging is mind. Hold on to anything, depend on anything, and the mind is back, because the mind is dependence, slavery. Possess anything -- even a spiritual method, even a method of meditation --

become a possessor, and you are possessed by it. Whether you possess money or you possess a tremendously significant method of meditation, it doesn't matter. Whatsoever you possess, you will be possessed by it and you will be afraid to lose it.

Once a Sufi mystic was brought to me. For thirty years continuously he had used the Sufi method ZIKR, and he had attained to great experiences. One could see it; even ordinary people were aware that he was living in a totally different world. You could see it in his eyes, they were shining with joy. His very being had a vibe of the beyond.

His disciples brought him to me, and they said, "Our master is a realized soul. What do you say about him?"

I said, "Leave your master with me for three days, and then come back."

The master stayed with me for three days. On the third day he was very angry, and he said, "You have destroyed my thirty years' work!" Because I told him a simple thing --

just this sutra of Atisha: LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO.…

I told him, "Now for thirty years you have been remembering one thing, that all is divine.

The tree is God, the rock is God, the people are God, the dog is God, everything is God --

for thirty years you have been remembering it continuously." And he had really made a sincere effort.

He said, "Yes."

I said, "Now stop remembering. How long are you going to remember? If it has happened, then stop remembering and let us see what happens. If it has really happened, then even after dropping remembering, it will remain."

It was so logical that he agreed. He said, "It has happened."

I said, "Then give it a try. For three days you forget remembering, stop remembering."

He said, "I cannot stop, it has become automatic." I said, "You just wait and try."

It took him at least two days, forty-eight hours, to stop. It was hard to stop, it had become automatic. There was now no need to remember; for thirty years he had been remembering, it was simply there like an undercurrent. But within forty- eight hours it stopped.

And on the morning of the third day he was very angry. He said, "What have you done?

All that joy has disappeared. I am feeling very ordinary, I am feeling the same as I was before I started on the journey thirty years ago." He started crying out of anger and out of sadness; tears started coming to his eyes. He said, "Give me back my method -- please don't take it!"

I said, "Just look! If this is so dependent on the method, then nothing has happened. It is just an illusion that you are creating by continuous remembering. This is nothing but autohypnosis."

All the great masters say this, that one day you have to drop the method. And the sooner you drop it, the better. The moment you attain, the moment awareness is released in you, immediately drop the method.

Just look: this is only the fourth sutra. In the third sutra Atisha says: EXAMINE THE NATURE OF UNBORN AWARENESS.

And in the fourth, immediately:

LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO.…

Now no more examination, no more mindfulness, no more remembering that all is a dream. Once the first taste of awareness has happened on your tongue, be quick! Because the mind is very cunning -- the mind can start telling you, "Look, you are no longer ordinary, you are extraordinary. Look, you have attained. Look, you have become a buddha, you are enlightened. Look, this is the goal of all human beings, and very rarely, one in a million attains. You are that one in a million."

The mind will say all these beautiful sweet nothings, and of course the ego can come back. You can start feeling very good, holier than thou. You can start feeling special, spiritual, saintly. And all is lost. Through the remedy, the disease is back. Cling to the remedy, and the disease is back.

One has to be very alert about dropping the method. Once you attain something, immediately drop the method, otherwise your mind will start clinging to the method. It will talk very logically to you, saying, "It is the method that is important."

Buddha used to tell a story again and again. Five idiots passed through a village. Seeing them, people were surprised, because they were carrying a boat on their heads. The boat was really big; it was almost crushing those five idiots, they were almost dying under the weight of it. And people asked, "What are you doing?"

They said, "We cannot leave this boat. This is the boat that helped us to come from the other shore to this shore. How can we leave it? It is because of it that we have been able to come here. Without it we would have died on the other shore. The night was coming close, and there were wild animals on the other shore. It was as sure as anything that by the morning we would have been dead. We will never leave this boat, we are indebted forever. We will carry it on our heads in sheer gratitude."

This can happen, because all minds are idiots. Mind as such is idiotic.

The origin of the word idiot is beautiful to remember. Idiocy means something private, something special, something that is your own, something eccentric. That is the basic meaning of idiocy -- to function in an eccentric way.

The mind always functions in an eccentric way, the mind is always an idiot. The really intelligent person has no mind. Intelligence arises out of no-mind, idiocy out of the mind.

Mind is idiotic, no-mind is wise. No-mind is wisdom, intelligence.

Mind depends on knowledge, on methods, on money, on experience, on this and that.

Mind always needs props, it needs supports, it cannot exist on its own. On its own, it flops.

So the ultimate effort of the mind to come back will be when you attain to some awareness. It will say, "Look, so we have arrived." The moment something inside you says, "We have arrived," beware! Be very very cautious now, each step has to be of great caution.

LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO FREE ON ITS OWN.

Now please don't cling to the remedy, to the method. This is the emphasis of J.

Krishnamurti -- but this is his first sutra. It should be the fourth. That's where he is wrong; it cannot be the first sutra. How can you drop a method that you have never used?

You can only drop a method that you have used.

Atisha is far more logical, far more scientific, than J. Krishnamurti. But I can understand why he emphasizes it, because he is afraid that if you go into the first three sutras the fourth may never arrive, you may be lost in the first three. Many are lost in the preliminaries, many are lost in the methods. So he has become too cautious, extremely cautious.

Those five idiots were carrying the boat, and J. Krishnamurti is on the other shore teaching people: "Don't enter the boat" -- too cautious! -- "because if you enter the boat, who knows, you may start carrying the boat on your head. So please don't enter it."

And there are many who have become afraid of entering the boat. But to be afraid of entering the boat is the same idiocy; there is no difference. One who is

afraid of entering the boat is the same person who will carry the boat; otherwise why should you be afraid?

There are old friends of mine who have followed J. Krishnamurti for their whole life.

They come to me and say, "We would like to come here, but we are afraid of all the methods that you teach. Methods are dangerous," they say.

Methods are dangerous only if you are unaware; otherwise they can be used beautifully.

Do you think a boat is dangerous? It is dangerous if you are thinking to carry it on your head for your whole life out of sheer gratitude; otherwise it is just a raft to be used and discarded. All methods are rafts to be used and discarded, used and abandoned, used and never looked back at again -- there is no need, no point!

These are two extremes. At one extreme are those five idiots, and at the other extreme are the followers of J. Krishnamurti. There is no need to be either. My approach is: Use the boat, use beautiful boats, use as many boats as possible; with this awareness, when the shore is reached the boat is abandoned with no clinging. While you are in the boat, enjoy it, be thankful to it. When you get out of the boat, say thank you and move on.

The fifth sutra:

SETTLE IN THE NATURE OF BASIC COGNITION, THE ESSENCE.

If you drop the remedy, automatically you will start settling in your being. The mind clings; it never allows you to settle in your being. It keeps you interested in something that you are not: the boats.

When you don't cling to anything, there is nowhere to go -- all boats have been abandoned, you cannot go anywhere; all paths have been dropped, you cannot go anywhere; all dreams and desires have disappeared, there is no way to move. Relaxation happens of its own accord. Just think of the word relax. Be, settle, you have come home.

SETTLE IN THE NATURE OF BASIC COGNITION, THE ESSENCE.

And when you settle, there is pure awareness, with no effort, with no method. If awareness needs a method it is still not true awareness, not the essential awareness, not the natural spontaneous awareness. It is still a by-product of the method; it is cultivated, created. It is a by-product of the mind, it is not yet the truth.

SETTLE IN THE NATURE OF BASIC COGNITION, THE ESSENCE.

Now there is nothing to do. See, be, enjoy: only this moment exists. This now, this here, this cawing of the crows... and all is silence.

To know this serenity is to know who you are, what this existence is all about. This is samadhi, in the words of Patanjali. This is SAMBODHI, in the words of Gautam Buddha.

This is bodhichitta, in the words of Atisha.

BETWEEN SESSIONS, CONSIDER PHENOMENA AS PHANTOMS.

Now Atisha is really very aware of the disciple. He knows that these experiences of settling into your being will be only momentary in the beginning. One moment you will find yourself relaxed into your being, another moment it will be gone. In the beginning it is bound to be so: one moment you are flooded with the unknown, with the mysterious, another moment it is no more there. One moment all is fragrance, and the next moment you are searching for it and you cannot find it, where it has gone.

Only glimpses will happen in the beginning. Slowly slowly they become more and more solid, they abide more and more. Slowly slowly, slowly slowly, very slowly, they settle forever. Before that you cannot be allowed to take it for granted; that will be a mistake.

Hence he says: Between sessions.…

When you are sitting in meditation, a session of meditation, this will happen -- but it will go. So what are you supposed to do between sessions?

BETWEEN SESSIONS, CONSIDER PHENOMENA AS PHANTOMS.

Between sessions, continue to use the method. Drop the method when you are

deep in meditation. The moment comes, as awareness is getting purer and purer, when suddenly it is utterly pure: drop the method, abandon the method, forget all about the remedy, just settle and be.

But this will happen only for moments in the beginning. Sometimes it happens here listening to me. Just for a moment, like a breeze, you are transported into another world, the world of no-mind. Just for a moment, you know that you know -- but only for a moment. And again the darkness gathers and the mind is back with all its dreams, with all its desires and all its stupidities.

For a moment the clouds had separated and you had seen the sun. Now the clouds are there again; it is all dark and the sun has disappeared. Now even to believe that the sun exists will be difficult. Now to believe that what you had experienced a moment before was true will be difficult. It may have been a fantasy; the mind may say it may have just been imagination.

It is so incredible, it looks so impossible, that it could have happened to YOU. With all this stupidity in the mind, with all these clouds and darknesses, it had happened to you: you saw the sun for a moment. It doesn't look probable -- you must have imagined it; maybe you had fallen into a dream and seen it.

Between sessions start again, be in the boat, use the boat again.

... CONSIDER PHENOMENA AS PHANTOMS.

Atisha is very considerate to the disciples. Otherwise the fourth sutra would have been the last -- or, at the most, the fifth:

SETTLE IN THE NATURE OF BASIC COGNITION, THE ESSENCE.

If Atisha had been a man like Bodhidharma, the treatise would have finished at the fifth sutra, or even at the fourth:

LET EVEN THE REMEDY ITSELF GO FREE ON ITS OWN.

Then the settling happens on its own. Bodhidharma was very miserly, he would not have used the fifth, but Atisha is very considerate to the disciple. He had been a disciple, so he knew the difficulties of a disciple. And he had been a disciple of three great masters, so he knew all the difficulties that a disciple has to face. He had been a pilgrim; he knew all the problems. And he had been a

pilgrim on three paths, all the three possible paths, so he knew all the problems and all the difficulties and all the pitfalls and all the obstacles that are bound to arise on the path of a disciple. Hence his considerateness. He says: Between sessions.…

Between these moments of meditativeness, between these moments of utter joy, emptiness and purity, between these moments of being, remember that all are dreams, that every phenomenon is a phantom. Go on using this method till the settling has happened forever.

TRAIN IN JOINING, SENDING AND TAKING TOGETHER.DO THIS BY RIDING

THE BREATH.

Now emptiness has been experienced -- this is what he had learned. Up to this sutra he had been with the first master, Dharmakirti. With this sutra, the second master, Dharmarakshita.

TRAIN IN JOINING, SENDING AND TAKING TOGETHER.DO THIS BY RIDING

THE BREATH.

Now he says: Start being compassionate. And the method is, when you breathe in -- listen carefully, it is one of the greatest methods -- when you breathe in, think that you are breathing in all the miseries of all the people in the world. All the darkness, all the negativity, all the hell that exists anywhere, you are breathing it in. And let it be absorbed in your heart.

You may have read or heard about the so-called positive thinkers of the West. They say just the opposite -- they don't know what they are saying. They say, "When you breathe out, throw out all your misery and negativity; and when you breathe in, breathe in joy, positivity, happiness, cheerfulness."

Atisha's method is just the opposite: when you breathe in, breathe in all the misery and suffering of all the beings of the world -- past, present and future. And when you breathe out, breathe out all the joy that you have, all the blissfulness that you have, all the benediction that you have. Breathe out, pour yourself into existence. This is the method of compassion: drink in all the

suffering and pour out all the blessings.

And you will be surprised if you do it. The moment you take all the sufferings of the world inside you, they are no longer sufferings. The heart immediately transforms the energy. The heart is a transforming force: drink in misery, and it is transformed into blissfulness... then pour it out.

Once you have learned that your heart can do this magic, this miracle, you would like to do it again and again. Try it. It is one of the most practical methods -- simple, and it brings immediate results. Do it today, and see.

That is one of the approaches of Buddha and all his disciples. Atisha is one of his disciples, in the same tradition, in the same line. Buddha says again and again to his disciples, "IHI PASSIKO: come and see!" They are very scientific people. Buddhism is the most scientific religion on the earth; hence, Buddhism is gaining more and more ground in the world every day. As the world becomes more intelligent, Buddha will become more and more important. It is bound to be so. As more and more people come to know about science, Buddha will have great appeal, because he will convince the scientific mind -- because he says, "Whatsoever I am saying can be practiced." And I don't say to you, "Believe it," I say, "Experiment with it, experience it, and only then if you feel it yourself, trust it. Otherwise there is no need to believe."

Try this beautiful method of compassion: take in all the misery and pour out all the joy.

TRAIN IN JOINING, SENDING AND TAKING TOGETHER. DO THIS BY RIDING

THE BREATH. THREE OBJECTS, THREE POISONS, THREE BASES OF VIRTUE.

There are three objects which can either function as three poisons or can become three bases of infinite virtue. Atisha is talking of the inner alchemy. The poison can become the nectar, the baser metal can be transformed into gold.

What are these three objects? The first is aversion, the second is attachment, and the third is indifference. This is how the mind functions. You feel aversion to whatsoever you dislike, you feel attachment to whatsoever you like, and you feel indifferent to things which you neither dislike nor like. These are the three

objects. Between these three, the mind exists. These are the three legs of the tripod called the mind: aversion, attachment and indifference. And if you live in these three as they are, you are living in poison.

This is how we have created a hell out of life. Aversion, dislike, hatred, repulsion

-- that creates one-third of your hell. Attachment, liking, clinging, possessiveness

-- that creates the second one-third of your hell. And indifference to all that you are neither attracted to nor repulsed by -- that creates the third part, the third one- third of your hell.

Just watch your mind, this is how your mind functions. It is always saying, "I like this, I don't like that, and I am indifferent to the third." These are the three ways the mind goes on moving. This is the rut, the routine.

Atisha says: These are the three poisons, but they can become the three bases of virtue.

How can they become three bases of great virtue? If you bring in the quality of compassion, if you learn the art of absorbing suffering, as if all the suffering of the world is coming riding on the breath, then how can you be repulsed? How can you dislike anything and how can you be indifferent to anything? And how can you be attached to anything? If you are unconditionally taking in all the suffering in the world, drinking it, absorbing it in your heart, and then instead of it pouring blessings onto the whole of existence unconditionally -- not to somebody in particular, remember; not only to man but to all: to all beings, trees and rocks and birds and animals, to the whole existence, material, immaterial -- when you are pouring out blessings unconditionally, how can you be attached?

Attachment, aversion, indifference: all disappear with this small technique. And with their disappearance the poison is transformed into nectar, and the bondage becomes freedom, and the hell is no more a hell, it is heaven.

In these moments you come to know: This very body the buddha, this very earth the lotus paradise.

And the last sutra:

TRAIN WITH PHRASES IN EVERY MODE OF BEHAVIOR.

Atisha is not an escapist. He does not teach escapism, he does not tell you to

move from situations which are not to your liking. He says: You have to learn to function in bodhichitta, in buddha-consciousness, in all kinds of situations -- in the marketplace, in the monastery; with people in the crowd or alone in a cave; with friends or with enemies; with family, familiar people, and with strangers; with men and with animals. In all kinds of situations, in all kinds of challenges, you have to learn to function in compassion, in meditation -- because all these experiences of different situations will make your bodhichitta more and more ripe.

Don't escape from any situation -- if you escape, then something will remain missing in you. Then your bodhichitta will not be that ripe, will not be that rich. Live life in its multidimensionality.

And that's what I teach you too: Live life in its totality. And living in the world, don't be of it. Live in the world like a lotus flower in water: it lives in water, but the water touches it not. Only then will bodhichitta flower in you, bloom in you. Only then will you come to know the ultimate consciousness which is freedom, which is joy, eternal joy, which is benediction. Not to know it is to miss the whole point of life; to know it is the only goal.

The only goal -- remember it.

And remember, Atisha's sutras are not philosophical, not speculative, not abstract. They are experimental, they are scientific.

Let me repeat again: religion is a science in the sense that it is the purest knowing. Yet it is not a science in the sense of chemistry and physics. It is not the science of the outward, it is the science of the inward. It is not the science of the exterior, it is the science of the interior. It is the science that takes you beyond, it is the science that takes you into the unknown and the unknowable. It is the greatest adventure there is. It is a call and a challenge to all those who have any courage, any guts, any intelligence.

Religion is not for cowards, it is for people who want to live dangerously. Enough for today.

The Book of Wisdom Chapter #2

Chapter title: The Enlightenment of the Lily 12 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive

code:

7902120

ShortTitle:

WISDOM02

Audio:

Yes Video: No Length:

102

mins

The first question:

Question 1 BELOVED OSHO,

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A SILLY QUESTION. I AM NOT SURE THAT I WANT TO

BECOME ENLIGHTENED. I AM SURPRISED TO SEE SO MANY PEOPLE AROUND WHO SEEM TO HAVE THAT DESIRE. I FEEL VERY MUCH

ATTACHED TO MY COUNTRY AND I LOVE MY WORK THERE. STILL I WANT

TO TAKE SANNYAS. IS THAT POSSIBLE? IS IT NOT A CONTRADICTION?

Goran Strandberg, all questions are silly and so are all answers. Questions come out of the mind like leaves come out of the trees. Questions are part of the mind that has to be dropped; questions keep the mind nourished.

A question is really a search for food. The answer is the food. The question is a groping: the mind is feeling hungry, it wants to be strengthened, it wants to be fed, it searches for food. Wherever it can find something satisfying... any answer that makes the mind knowledgeable, that gives the mind the feeling "Now I know," functions as a food. And the mind can go on and on asking, collecting answers, becoming knowledgeable.

The more knowledgeable the mind is, the more difficult it is to drop it. And it has to be dropped, because unless questioning ceases in you, you will never be silent. Unless questioning disappears totally, you will not find that space, that serenity, that stillness, which can make you aware of who you are, and of what this reality is.

Remember, reality is never going to come to you in the form of an answer. It has never happened that way, it is not going to happen that way. It CAN'T happen that way, it is not in the nature of things. Reality comes to you when there is no question left; reality comes to an unquestioning state of awareness.

So the first thing to be remembered is: all questions are silly, and all answers are too.

Then you will be a little puzzled -- why do I go on answering your questions? If you look deep down into my answers you will see that they are not answers. They don't nourish your mind, they destroy your mind, they shatter you. They are meant to be shocks. The purpose of my answering is to hammer your mind -- it is hammering, it is not answering.

In the beginning, when you come here for the first time and you don't understand me and my purpose, you may think that I am answering you. The longer you are here, the deeper you become attuned with me, the more you know that my answering is not to give you answers. It is not to make you more knowledgeable

-- just the opposite. It is to take your knowledge away, to make you unknowledgeable, to make you ignorant -- ignorant again, innocent again -- so

that questioning disappears.

And when there is no questioning, there is a totally new quality to your consciousness.

That quality is called wonder. Wondering is not questioning, it is feeling mystified by existence. Questioning is an effort to demystify existence; it is an effort not to accept the mystery of life. Hence we reduce every mystery to a question. The question means the mystery is only a problem to be solved, and once solved, there will be no mystery.

My effort in answering you is not to demystify existence but to mystify it more. Hence my contradictions. I cannot be consistent, I am not answering you. I cannot be consistent, because I am not here to make you more knowledgeable. If I am consistent, you will have a body of knowledge -- very satisfying to the mind, nourishing, strengthening, gratifying.

I am deliberately inconsistent, contradictory, so that you cannot make any body of knowledge out of me. So if one day you start gathering something, another day I take it away. I don't allow you to gather anything. Sooner or later, you are bound to be awakened to the fact that something totally different is transpiring here. It is not that I am giving you some dogma to be believed in, some philosophy to be lived by, no, not at all. I am utterly destructive, I am taking everything away from you.

Slowly slowly your mind will stop questioning. What is the point? When no answer answers, then what is the point? And the day you stop questioning is a day of great rejoicing, because then wondering starts. You have moved into a totally new dimension; you are again a child.

Jesus says, "Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God." He means unless you are ignorant again, innocent again, unquestioning and wondering, certainly.

Hence there is a difference between the question of a child and a grown-up person. The difference is of quality. The child asks, not to be answered; he is simply being articulate about his wonder. So if you don't answer the child he forgets about his question and he starts asking another question. His purpose is not to be answered, his purpose is simply that he is talking to himself. He is being articulate about his wonder, he is trying to figure out what it is -- the

wonder, the mystery. He is not hankering for an answer, so no answer will satisfy him. If you give him an answer he will ask another question about the answer.

His wondering continues.

When a grown-up person -- educated, sophisticated, well-read, informed -- asks a question, he asks it out of his knowledge, to gather more knowledge. The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. Mind lives in the "more."

And this is the way you go on and on avoiding reality. Reality is a mystery, it is not a question to be asked. It is a mystery to be lived, a mystery to be experienced, a mystery to be loved, a mystery to be dissolved in, to be drowned in.

I am answering you, not to answer but to simply destroy the question. I am not a teacher.

The teacher teaches you; the master does not teach you, he helps you unlearn.

Goran Strandberg, you say: "This sounds like a silly question." Not only does it sound, it is. All questions are -- what can I do? What can you do?

You say: "I am not sure that I want to become enlightened."

That shows how the mind functions, it is never sure of anything. Mind is always unsure; it lives in unsureness. Mind lives in confusion, it can never have any clarity. Clarity is not part of the mind at all; clarity is the absence of the mind, confusion is the presence of the mind. Confusion and mind are synonymous.

You can't have a clear mind. If you have clarity, you cannot have the mind; if you have the mind, you can't have clarity. The mind is always divided against itself, it lives in conflict. Divisibility is its nature. Hence those who live in the mind never become individuals, indivisibles. They remain divided: one part wants this, another part wants that.

Mind is a crowd of many desires; it is not a single desire. Mind is multi-psychic, and all the fragments are falling apart in different directions. It is a miracle how we go on keeping ourselves together; it is a hard struggle to keep oneself

together. Somehow we manage, but that togetherness remains only on the surface. Deep down there is turmoil.

You fall in love with a woman: are you sure that you are in love? Really sure? I have never come across a lover who is really sure. You may even get married, but were you sure? You may have children, but were you sure that you really wanted to have children?

That's how you are living: nothing is sure. But one has to do something or other to keep oneself occupied, so you go on keeping yourself occupied. But surety is not of the mind, it cannot be. And the same problem will arise on every level. The same problem is facing you again.

You say: "I am not sure that I want to become enlightened."

But there must be a certain desire, otherwise why the question? A part of your mind must be saying, "Strandberg, become enlightened" -- just a part. Another part must be saying,

"Are you mad? Have you lost your senses? You have a wife at home, and children, and work, and you love your country -- and you are trying to become enlightened? You must have become a victim of mass hypnosis: so many people in orange, it is dangerous to live with such mad people. So many mad people, enjoying and laughing and loving and looking so happy! Strandberg, keep on remembering: you have a wife, children, a job.

Keep alert!"

But again and again the desire will come. When so many people are interested in enlightenment, there must be something in it. You can deceive one, you can deceive two, but how can you deceive so many? Thousands of people interested in enlightenment? It can't be all bullshit. So a desire arises: have a little taste of it. And fear is there too.

But this is the situation; always it is so, in everything it is so. You want to purchase a car, and it is the same: whether to purchase a Chevrolet or a Ford or a Benz? If your wife is not there to help you, you will never purchase any car! Women are more decisive; they are still less in the mind than men. They function out of the heart, their feeling side is still alive. Fortunately they are not yet so civilized; they are still primitive, a little wild, leaning towards the intuitive and

not towards the intellect, still capable and courageous enough to act decisively, to act intuitively, to act illogically.

All decisions come from the heart. The mind is never decisive, it cannot be. If you want to decide through the mind, you never can. And I am not talking about great things like enlightenment and the existence of God or the existence of life after death. I am not talking about great things, just small things -- whether to purchase this soap or that, or which toothpaste -- and you will find the same difficulty. Mind is fragmentary, divided.

Hence my consistent insistence that you get out of the mind and start living. The mind only thinks and never lives. It thinks beautiful thoughts, but they are thoughts all the same, just dreams.

Get out of the mind if you want to live. Get out of the mind if you want to live this moment. The mind cannot live in this moment, because first it has to decide, and the moment is lost in thinking. And by the time the mind has decided -- if it ever decides --

that moment is gone already. You are always lagging behind. Mind is always running after life, and lagging behind and missing it continuously.

Many of you must have dreamed something like this: Anand Maitreya continuously dreams that he is going to catch a train, and in the dream he always misses it. Many people, I think almost everybody, has dreams of that kind -- that you are just going to make it, just going to make it... and you miss it. By the time you reach the platform, the train has left. You see it leaving, but it is too late; you cannot get on it.

Anand Maitreya's dream is a very significant dream and a very universal one. This is simply how the mind functions; this dream symbolizes the mind: it is always missing the train. It is bound to be so, because mind takes time to think, and time cannot stop for you; it goes on and on slipping out of your hands.

You never have two moments together in your hands, only one single moment. It is such a small moment that there is no space for thinking to move, no space for thoughts to exist. Either you can live it, or you can think. To live it is to be enlightened, to think is to miss.

Enlightenment is not a goal, Strandberg, that you have to decide whether to

accept it or not. It is not a goal. Enlightenment is the realization that we have only the present moment to live. The next moment is not certain -- it may come, it may not come.

In fact, the tomorrow never comes. It is always arriving and arriving, but never arrives.

And the mind lives in the tomorrows... and life is possible only in the present.

Jesus says to his disciples, "Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are! Even the great Solomon was not so beautiful attired in all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers." And what is the secret? The secret is that they think not of the morrow. They live now, they live here.

To live now is to be enlightened, to live here is to be enlightened, to be a lily is to be enlightened this very moment! Don't think about what I am saying. Don't think about it, just be here. This is the taste of enlightenment. And once you have tasted it, you will want to taste it more and more.

Don't make a goal out of it; it is not a goal, it is the most ordinary state of consciousness.

It is nothing extraordinary, it is nothing special. Trees are enlightened, and the birds are enlightened, and rocks are enlightened, and the sun and the moon are enlightened. Only man is not, because only man thinks and goes on missing.

The moment you realize that you are missing because you are brooding too much, then small glimpses start happening. Small gaps in the traffic of the mind, small gaps when there is no traffic: those are the moments of meditation. They can happen anywhere.…

Yes, Strandberg, in your country too! So, no need to be worried -- you need not be in India. India has no copyright on enlightenment; it is not patented yet, it cannot be patented. You can be enlightened anywhere. You can be enlightened remaining a husband, a father, a mother, a wife. You can be enlightened as an engineer, as a doctor, as a carpenter, as a vagabond -- even as a hippy. You can be enlightened anywhere.

Enlightenment is not something you have to work for, to strive for. It is something that you have to relax for -- not strive, but relax. Relax, and this

moment you are enlightened.

Many times you will become enlightened, and many times you will become unenlightened again, just because of the old habit.

You say: "I am surprised to see so many people around who seem to have that desire."

If they have that desire, they will never become enlightened. Either you can have the desire, or you can have enlightenment; you can't have both. Either you can eat the cake, or you can have it; you can't do both. If you have a desire for enlightenment, then enlightenment is never going to happen to you -- never, never. Because desiring is what prevents it, so enlightenment cannot be desired; that will be a contradiction in terms.

Either you are enlightened or you are not, it is as simple as that. And enlightenment is not caused by anything, it is your nature. So it is not a question of making a great endeavor. It is not an enterprise; you need not plan for it. It is already the case!

That is Atisha's first preliminary: Truth is.

Enlightenment is: it is as much as the sunlight showering all around. But you can remain with closed eyes, and you are in a dark night although the sun is showering everywhere.

Open your eyes and the night disappears and there is no darkness. Even when you were thinking there was darkness, there was not. It was a very private affair, idiotic; it was something eccentric that you were doing.

To be unenlightened is something that you have earned; great effort has been invested in being unenlightened. And continuously you have to go on making an effort to remain unenlightened. Just drop making any more efforts to remain unenlightened, and you are enlightened. Enlightenment is your natural state; it is what you are.

So please don't misunderstand my people. Newcomers are certainly desirous; they have come out of desire, in search of something. But those who have been here with me a little longer are no more in any desire. They are living moment to moment, enjoying the extraordinary ordinariness of life. Small things -- sipping

hot tea in the morning: you can sip it in an enlightened way, and you can sip it in an unenlightened way. If, sipping hot tea early in the morning, you are not in the moment but thinking of something else -- that you have to go to the morning discourse -- you are unenlightened. You missed an enlightened cup of tea. And remember, if that is your habit, you will miss the discourse too -- because this again is nothing but a cup of tea. Then in the discourse you will be thinking, "I have to do the Sufi meditation, I have to rush to do this and that and then come back."

It is not a question of one moment, it is a question of your pattern, your gestalt. If this is your gestalt, that you are always rushing ahead of time, thinking of the next moment, then you remain unenlightened. And this is your effort, this is something that you are doing.

For enlightenment nothing is needed to be done, only this understanding... "Why should I go on keeping myself unenlightened?"

That's what I decided one day: "Enough is enough. I have lived so many lives in an unenlightened way." And since then I have lived in an enlightened way. This is simply an understanding, it is not a desire.

You say: "I feel very much attached to my country and love my work there."

Perfectly good! Love your work, love your country, go back -- but live there in such a simple moment-to-moment way that you remain enlightened. Don't lag behind, don't rush ahead. Just be herenow, wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing.

"Still," you say, "I want to take sannyas. Is that possible? Is it not a contradiction?"

It is a contradiction. But you are living in contradictions, and this is the last contradiction.

Before you can come out of your contradictory life, your life of conflict, you have to close the doors of that life. Sannyas is nothing but closing the doors -- the last thing. It is simply a declaration that "I have lived in the mind for so long, and nothing but misery has been my experience. Now I am taking a jump out of the mind into the unknown. I am going into a totally different kind of life."

Sannyas is just a gesture from your side that yes, understanding has dawned, and you would like to come closer to me to see what it actually is.

To be close to a master, to be related to a master, to be intimate with a master, is nothing but an approach towards your own ultimate understanding, your own enlightenment.

Your mind will make you very much frightened of the unknown, it will drag you back.

And it is always safer to live with the known; it is familiar, you are efficient in living with it. To move into the unknown, you will need a guide -- a guide who has moved into the unknown, who lives in the unknown, who lives in innocence. Just to imbibe the spirit you need the guide -- not for any guidance, but just to imbibe the spirit of the unknown, the joy of the unknown, the celebration of the unknown.

Once you start drinking something of the master, you will not go back to the old ways of the mind. That's what sannyas is all about.

Yes, Strandberg, you can take sannyas. In the beginning it is bound to be the same conflict again: whether to take it or not, whether to go into it or not. It is natural, because that's how you have functioned for many lives. This has become your second nature.

I persuade you, I seduce you into sannyas. Great persuasion is needed, great seduction is needed. And that's why I have created sannyas. Otherwise there was no need; you could have come here, listened to me, and gone. You would have listened to me, but you would not have come close to me. This is a bridge. You would have heard me, but you would not have tasted of my silence. You would have known what I say about love, but you would not have known my love.

Sannyas makes it possible. It is an energy-field, it is a buddhafield. It is communion: nonverbal, heart-to-heart, and, one day, being-to-being.

The second question: Question 2

DEAR OSHO,

TODAY I SAW AND HEARD YOU IN THE FLESH AND I FOUND MYSELF IN

ACCORD WITH AND MOVED AND INSPIRED BY YOU SO MUCH THAT I FEEL

I MUST ASK YOU TWO QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH IT AND ANOTHER

NOT DIRECTLY CONNECTED.

WHY ARE YOU SO MUCH AGAINST THE MIND? SURELY WE ALL USE IT AND

NEED IT, AND IT SEEMS TO ME THAT IT IS ONLY WHEN WE ABUSE IT

--

THAT IS TO SAY, USING IT AS A DEFENSE AGAINST FEELING TOO DEEPLY

AND AGAINST TRANSCENDING ITSELF -- THAT WE ARE ENTITLED TO

CRITICIZE.

THE OTHER QUESTION IS CONCERNED MORE WITH MY PROBLEM, ALTHOUGH NO DOUBT THERE ARE OTHERS WHO FEEL AS I DO:

WHY DO YOU FIND IT SO NECESSARY, SO IMPORTANT, FOR SANNYASINS

TO WEAR ORANGE AND A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOURSELF -- IN FACT A SORT

OF UNIFORM AND AN ICON? IF I LEAVE HERE WITH A FEELING OF LOVE

AND DEEP RESPECT FOR A WISE MAN, A HEALER, I SHALL NOT NEED TO

CARRY HIS PHOTO AROUND WITH ME. HIS IMAGE WILL BE TOO DEEPLY

ENTRENCHED IN MY INNER SELF, AND IF I NEED TO CONSULT HIM IN MY

MIND, I SHALL "CONJURE HIM UP" AND SEE HIM MUCH MORE VIVIDLY

THAN IF I LOOK AT A PHOTO. I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO TAKE

SANNYAS, BUT BECAUSE OF THIS LAST QUESTION YOU MAY NOT ACCEPT

ME.

Joyce Brandt, dear lady, please excuse me. It must have been just coincidence that you felt in accord with me; it can only be a coincidence, otherwise it is impossible to feel in accord with me.

And don't decide so soon. You have heard me only once: just be here a little longer, and you will see so many contradictions! Wait a little, give me a little more time, and you will not feel in accord with me at all. In fact this time too, it was not you feeling in accord with me, but me somehow appearing in accord with you.

You already have great ideas, you are very knowledgeable. Your question is not out of innocence, it is out of knowledge.

So many people are here: I cannot say things which will shatter everybody's mind. If I say something and it shatters one person's mind, it may be in accord with somebody else's mind. For him I will work tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But sooner or later the hammer comes down on everybody -- and then you will not feel so inspired. In fact, answering your question, I will make you very much uninspired. Wait!

What do you mean by "inspiration"? It seems you already know something; otherwise, what do you mean by "inspiration"? What do you mean by "accord"? You already know something, and you say "Yes, this man is talking sense" -- sense, because this is what you have always believed in.

I am not here to support your belief: I have to take your beliefs away. I am not here to inspire you, because all inspiration creates slavery. If you are inspired by me, you will become a slave to me, you will become dependent on me. I don't inspire you, I simply go on shattering, shocking you. Sooner or later, I am here, you are here, and we are tremendously connected, but there is no slavery, no dependence. We relate, but there is no question of inspiration, because one who inspires you automatically becomes important for you -- so much so that you start feeling dependent.

You are searching for a father-figure who can inspire you, who can put a little fire in your dull and dead life. But if somebody else puts fire into your life, he becomes powerful over you.

I am not here to put any fire into you, I am just here to help you to see your own fire. Be a light unto yourself. Inspiration means you will follow somebody else, you will imitate them; you will become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Sannyas is a declaration that you are no longer a Hindu, no longer a Christian, no longer a Mohammedan, that you don't belong to any creed or any dogma. I have no creed, no dogma. Becoming a sannyasin simply means that you have declared your freedom.

But certainly the question arises: Why the orange, the mala and the photograph? Why?

This is a device, dear lady, to keep unwanted people out. This is not for the crowds, it is not for the mob, it is only for the chosen few. The ultimate -- call it God, enlightenment --

is only for those who are really courageous, immensely courageous, because the ultimate becomes available only to those who can drop the mind and move into the immediate.

The immediate is the door to the ultimate. And to drop the mind needs great courage -- it is not for everybody.

This is just a device. Orange is as good as any other color, or no color. It has nothing special about it. I could have chosen any -- green, black, that would have done. But its purpose is that it is a device. It is for people who are ready to do a few mad things --

because later on, bigger and bigger mad things are waiting. If you cannot do such a simple, silly thing as wearing orange, a locket and a mala, if you can't gather enough courage to look foolish, a laughing-stock wherever you go, and feel absurd and ridiculous

-- if you cannot do this much, then this place is not for you, because bigger and bigger things will have to be done.

As you move deeper into intimacy with me, I will demand more and more illogical things, because only through those demands can the mind disappear; there is no other way. Those demands are like electric shocks. Only then can your cultivated mind, cultivated for centuries, be shaken to the foundations.

This is just a simple device to help freak out people who are not meant to be here. They simply escape. Seeing such a mad crowd, seeing people in orange, they become afraid and they escape.

This is deliberately done. I could have made it easier for you to be here, to gather more knowledge and be inspired, and things like that. But this is not Christian Science. I am not Billy Graham, I am not here to inspire you. This is a totally different phenomenon. In fact I am not even religious; I am not spiritual at all. All these labels are utterly irrelevant.

This is just a device to choose those who are ready to go with me, who are ready to go with me to absurd limits.

But you are more clever. You say, "I can have you in my heart, entrenched deep in my being" -- as if you know what being is and what depth is. You are cunning and clever.

You say, "I can conjure you up." But whatsoever you conjure up will be your own mind, a figment of your own mind; it will not be me, it cannot be me.

You can have me only if you move with me unconditionally. No condition from your side can be accepted. And sometimes I demand things which are patently absurd, and I know that they are absurd.

My people slowly slowly start understanding that if you can do something absurd, that helps you become a little loose, out from your mind. Once you are unconditionally with me, then if I say, "Go and move naked in the streets," you

say, "Okay" If you can say that, simply and innocently, I am not going to send

you to move naked in the streets; the purpose is fulfilled. If you hesitate, if you say, "What do you mean?" then you will have to go.

These are small devices. And sometimes small devices work very deeply, because you cannot detect them. Big devices you can detect -- they are so big, any stupid person can see them.

Just the other day, Krishna Prem wrote a letter to me saying that he remembers that in many many past lives he has been related to Divyananda, with whom he is in love. In the past life, he was the mother and Divyananda was the son. And he could not fulfill all the motherly duties in that life, so that's why he is in love with Divyananda now. "But now it seems that the debts are paid, and Divyananda is hurting me in many ways, so should I finish the relationship?"

I sent him a message: "Go and talk to Teertha." He was very much hurt, naturally. He was talking about such big things: he must have been waiting for me to say, "Krishna Prem, you have arrived. Remembering your past lives, this is great! This is your first satori, Krishna Prem." Deep down, he must have waited for this.

Rather than saying anything about his great experience, I told him to go to Teertha and talk. That must have hurt him deeply because I am not directly answering him, I am sending him to Teertha. And who is this Teertha, anyhow? Krishna Prem being sent to Teertha? Krishna Prem is as highly evolved as Teertha, so why? Or maybe he is even higher and holier. Why? Why to Teertha?

For two days he lived in great despair. Now, such a small thing, and he could not detect it. It took forty-eight hours for him to detect it, then he understood: "This is just a shock to my ego." And then immediately, in that understanding, all despair disappeared. In that understanding, just that moment, all darkness was gone and he was light, happy, and back to his natural being again. But it took him forty-eight hours to detect it.

Now there is no need: Krishna Prem, you need not go to Teertha. Now I will find something else!

Small, very small things are more difficult to detect, for the simple reason that they are small. Big things you can see. When there are mountains you can see them, but just a small grain of sand is undetectable.

Joyce Brandt, if you want to be here, if you really want to relate with me, you will have to learn a totally different way of relating. I am not a teacher, so if you are only a student here to be inspired, and all that.… I am not a missionary, either; I am not here to convert you to some philosophy.

If you are really to relate with a master -- who has no knowledge but who knows, who has knowing but no knowledge -- then you will have to relax a little. You will have to drop your ideas of how things should be. Remember always, many times it happens: you want to become a sannyasin, but you forget who is the master and who is the disciple, and deep down you start expecting things to be fulfilled by the master. He has to be according to you, then he is right.

But any master worth the name can never be according to you. People who are according to you are politicians. They know that you will follow them only if they are according to you: that is a mutual arrangement. They have to follow you to make followers out of you: that is a mutual exploitation. That's what political leaders are, followers of the followers.

They go on looking at you, at what your expectations are, and they go on fulfilling them.

I offend in every way. I cannot fulfill your expectations. If I start fulfilling your expectations, I will not be of any use to you. Then really you will be the master and I will be the disciple.

Who is taking sannyas from whom? This has to be decided in the beginning. Am I taking sannyas from you, or are you taking sannyas from me? Let it be very clear. Many times you take sannyas and it is not clear, and you want me to be this way or that way, to live this way or to live that way. And if I am not according to you, then you are disappointed.

The real master will always disappoint you. He has to disappoint you. This is how, slowly slowly, chunks of your mind will be broken off and taken away from you. I have to continuously hammer you, and I have to be absolutely clear about it from the very beginning. The orange, the mala, the picture, have no other purpose. The purpose is that you have to know clearly that it is you who have to be unconditionally in accord with me, and that you have to drop all expectations of my being in accord with you. Only then can the work start. Those who are ready for it, sannyas is only for them. Those who are not ready

for it, sannyas helps them to run away, to get lost. You say: "Why are you so against the mind?"

I am not against the mind, I am simply stating the fact -- what the mind is. If you see what the mind is, you will drop it. When I say, "Drop the mind," I am not against the mind. I am simply making it clear to you what the mind is, what it has done to you, how it has become a bondage.

And it is not a question of using it or abusing it. Mind itself is the problem, not its use or abuse. And remember, you cannot use the mind till you know how to be without the mind. Only people who know how to be without the mind are capable of using the mind; otherwise the mind uses them. It is the mind that is using you. But mind is very clever, it goes on deceiving you. It goes on saying, "You are using me."

It is mind that is using you. You are being used; the mind has become the master of you, you are a slave. But the mind is very clever, it goes on buttressing you. It says, "I am just an instrument, you are the master." But watch, look into the mechanism of the mind, how it goes on using you. You think you are using it. You can use it only when you know that you are separate from it; otherwise how will you use it? You are identified with it.

If you say "I am a Christian," you are identified with the Christian mind. If you say "I am a Hindu," you are identified with the Hindu mind. If you say "I am German," you are identified with the German mind. This identification has to be broken. You have to know that you are not the mind. And only in moments when the mind is not functioning --

when you are unoccupied, when there is a gap, stillness, silence, when the mind has ceased -- will you be able to know who you are, to know yourself as consciousness. Then you can use the mind.

I am using the mind, Brandt, you are not using the mind. So how can I be against the mind? I am not against the mind. I may appear to be, but the whole effort is to disconnect you from the mind so that you can know your separation from it, your freedom. Once you know your freedom, you can use the mind. Then it is a beautiful instrument, one of the most beautiful instruments. Man has not yet been able to make something better. Even the biggest computer, the most efficient computer, is not yet capable of doing the things that the mind can do. A

single mind can contain all the libraries of the world.

It is tremendous to think of the powers of the mind. But because those powers are great, there is danger also: they can overpower you. That's what has happened: because the mind is such a beautiful, powerful instrument, you have become possessed by it. You cannot use it any more. It uses you, it directs you, it gives you programs. It goes on goading you in directions which it has decided to follow. It does not allow you any freedom, it does not leave you any choice. Unless it is convinced, it won't allow you to move even a single inch.

So who is the master? You cannot be the master unless you have come to know that you are not identified with the mind.

The man who is identified with his car cannot drive it; the car will drive him, and then some accident is bound to happen. You have to be separate from the car; you have to know that you are separate, that the car is beautiful, a beautiful mechanism to be used, and it can perform many things. But you have to be separate.

You say: "Why are you so against the mind? Surely we all use it "

No. All cannot use it. Only very rarely is there a person who uses the mind: a Buddha, a Jesus, an Atisha, a Tilopa -- only very rarely; and far and few between. Otherwise you are used by the mind. No, all are not using the mind; otherwise what will the difference be between a Buddha and you? There will be no difference. You use the mind and Buddha uses the mind: what is the difference? Buddha uses the mind, you are used by the mind --

that's the difference. And Buddha can use the mind because he knows he is utterly separate.

And remember, it is not a question of abuse. If you cannot use the mind, how can you abuse it? It is the mind: whether it uses you or abuses you, you cannot abuse it.

When scientists discovered atomic energy, do you think they used the mind or abused it?

When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein could not sleep the whole night; for days his nights were disturbed. He could not

sleep, he could not rest, he was really terribly disturbed. He had been instrumental in creating the atom bomb. It was he who wrote the letter to the president of America saying that the atom bomb was possible.

Now the question arises: was Einstein consciously using his mind writing the letter to the president of America releasing this powerful information to the politicians? Was he aware of the consequences? Did he ever think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- that thousands of people, innocent civilians, would be burned within seconds, for no fault of their own. No, he had not thought about it, he was not conscious about it. In fact he was not even alert to what use atom bombs would be put. And before he died somebody asked him, "If you are born again, what would you like to be? A great mathematician again, a great physicist, a great scientist?"

He is reported to have said, "No, never! Rather, I would like to be a plumber. But now it is too late."

Einstein had one of the most beautiful minds. Did he abuse it? Do you think the scientists who have created great technology and destroyed the whole ecology of the earth have used their minds or abused them?

If one day this planet earth is going to die, it will be because of the great minds of the twentieth century -- because if in the whole history of humanity there have been a hundred scientists, ninety-nine happen to be alive in the twentieth century. In fact seventy-five percent of the great scientists of all the ages are alive now.

Mind has gathered such a great momentum. We have created great technology within the last hundred years, particularly within these last ten years, but that technology is going to destroy this earth. Who will be responsible? And what will you say? The scientists used the mind or abused it?

If you ask me, I will say they were not masters of their minds. They neither used nor abused the mind; the mind used them, abused them.

Science now needs great meditators, otherwise this earth is doomed. Science now needs people who can use their minds, who are masters of their being, who can use science in a conscious way. Otherwise we are on the verge of committing universal suicide.

Man cannot live for more than twenty-five years the way he has lived up to now, unless a drastic change is made. And the greatest thing that can be of help, which can help humanity to survive, and the earth to still go on living.… And this is a beautiful earth.

Compared to this earth millions and millions of stars are just dead: no flowers bloom, no rivers flow, there are no birds, no animals, no people. This universe is almost a great desert. This earth is alive! Something tremendously important -- consciousness -- has happened here. But this consciousness is still not a master, it is a slave. It has to be freed.

That's my work here, my basic fundamental work: to help you be free of the mind so that you can use it. And if you are the master, you cannot abuse it; that is impossible. When you are alert, conscious, meditative, abuse is not possible.

If Einstein had also been a buddha, there would have been atomic energy but no atom bombs, and atomic energy would have become a blessing -- the greatest blessing ever.

The earth would have become a paradise. But Albert Einstein is not a buddha; unfortunately he knows nothing of meditation -- a great mind, but the master is missing; a great mechanism, a great airplane without the pilot.

I have heard that they made an airplane which could go to the farthest distances without any pilot -- pilotless, automatic. There was great thrill and enthusiasm, and on the first flight the automatic mechanism communicated to the people: "We are moving at such-and-such a height, at such-and-such a temperature, and at such-and-such a speed. Please be at ease, don't be worried. Nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong..." and it went on! It has already gone wrong. Think of those people, what must have happened to those people! Now, what to do?

Great science is there, a by-product of the mind, but it is in the hands of slaves. Buddhas are needed to take possession of humanity -- and one or two buddhas won't do. Many many buddhas are needed in every field, in every direction, in every dimension of life, so that the mind can be used. Otherwise the mind was never as efficient as it is now, and that is the danger. The mind was never as clever as it is now, never as powerful as it is now.

We have given atom bombs into the hands of children. If no accident happens,

that will be a miracle. There is every possibility that an accident is bound to happen. Children are playing with atom bombs.

Politicians are the most immature minds in the world. Only third-rate minds become interested in politics; mediocre people and people who are suffering from an inferiority complex, they become politicians. And in these people's hands are atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, laser beams, and this and that.

You can cease at any moment! -- I may not be able to finish my discourse. Any moment... we are sitting on a pile of hydrogen bombs, and there are so many... it is unbelievable how stupid man can be. We have so many hydrogen bombs that we can destroy every single human being seven hundred times. Now, what stupidity! For what?

A man simply dies a single time. If you want to be very cautious, twice will do -- but what is the point of seven hundred times?

And they are continuously creating more and more. The whole earth is full of hydrogen bombs; we can destroy seven hundred earths like this. And still, seventy percent of our energy is being put into war efforts. This whole earth seems to be a madhouse.

And you say, Brandt: "Surely we all use it and need it and it seems to me that it is only when we abuse it -- that is to say, using it as a defense against feeling too deeply and against transcending itself -- that we are entitled to criticize it."

I am not criticizing it. In fact, you will be able to appreciate it more if you understand what I am saying, you will be able to use it more if you understand what I am saying. If you become a transcendence of the mind, a witness to the mind, and you know that you are separate, and the mind no longer has any sway over you, you are no longer hypnotized by it, then you will be able to really appreciate it. I appreciate it. And you will also be able to use it, and you will never be able to abuse it. A conscious person cannot abuse anything.

The last question: BELOVED OSHO,

Question 3

I HAVE NOTICED THAT WHEN I SEE A WOMAN WHO IS PARTICULARLY

LOVELY, AND I AM TAKEN INTO THAT SWEET SILENCE, I FORGET ALL

ABOUT PHILOSOPHY OR RELIGION, BUT I AM LOST AND FOUND ENTERING

A MOMENT. I THINK ANIMALS ARE WISE BECAUSE GOD DOESN'T TROUBLE

THEM WITH METAPHYSICS. STILL, I WANT TO THROW MY BOOKS OUT...

BUT STILL I LIKE THEM.

David Light, a woman is metaphysics, philosophy, poetry. So is a man. Certainly one will forget metaphysics and philosophy when one comes across alive metaphysics, alive philosophy, alive poetry. That simply shows that you are still alive. To appreciate beauty, to be drowned and drunk with it, is something immensely valuable.

There would have been something wrong if, seeing a beautiful woman, you still remembered the Old Testament or the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran. That would have shown that something is wrong with you. This simply shows you are natural, human.

Let this sensitivity grow, and slowly slowly, as you become more and more sensitive, more and more sensuous, you will see more and more beauty around. The deeper your insight, the greater the beauty. And when you see this whole existence as a tremendous dance, a celebration, you are liberated by it.

It is celebration that liberates, it is love that liberates, it is beauty that liberates -- it is not metaphysics or philosophy.

But I am not saying that you have to throw your books out -- because there are beautiful books too; they are by-products of great experiences. Don't be lost in them, but to read something of Shakespeare or Kalidas or to read something from Buddha or Atisha is to move into the same world of beauty from a different

door.

There are many doors to God's temple. Beauty is one, wisdom is another, love still another, and so on and so forth. Music can do it, poetry can do it, literature can do it. The flowers on the trees are beautiful -- what do you think of great poems? They are flowers of consciousness.

You need not throw away your books. In fact, by throwing away your books, you will simply be saying that you are still attached to them. Hate is nothing but love standing on its head, love doing SIRSHASAN, a headstand. Love and hate are not separate, they are one. In fact we should stop using these two words separately, we should make one word: lovehate. Not even a hyphen is needed between the two; they are simply one energy like hot and cold, summer and winter, life and death, darkness and light.

There is no need to throw away your books: enjoy them! And there is no need to stop enjoying the beautiful form of a woman, because that too is divine. Enjoy life in all its dimensions. Why this continuous obsession to become one- dimensional, either this or that? Why not both? Why live in either/or? Why not live in both/and? That's my approach: live in both/and, and drop living in either/or.

Soren Kierkegaard has written a book, Either/Or. He lived his whole life in either/or. He could not decide whether to marry the woman he loved -- and loved tremendously; he could not decide. That either/or continued for so long that finally the woman decided to go with somebody else. For years he could not decide.

His book became so famous, he himself became so famous, that when he used to walk in Copenhagen, urchins and children and people would shout behind him, "Either/or!

Either/or! Here goes Either/or!" Even children had come to know that he used to stand at crossroads thinking, "Where to go? Either/or -- to move this way or that? Both roads lead to the same goal, both go to the station, but which one to follow?" And he would stand at the crossroads, thinking, for hours.

He lived only in thought; he was really a metaphysician. His father had left a heritage; he had enough money, so there was no need to work either. So the whole day, for twenty-four hours, he was thinking. And when he had drawn the

last money from the bank, on the way home, he dropped dead. He did well -- otherwise he would have been in difficulty.

My feeling is that he must have been thinking, "To be or not to be? Either/or." Because now there was no money left. He must have suffered a heart attack between that either/or.

That had been his whole way of life.

There is no need to choose. Why not live choicelessly? Why not live all that life makes available to you? Don't be a spiritualist and don't be a materialist: be both. Don't be a Zorba and don't be a Buddha; be both: Zorba the Buddha. Enjoy all that God has showered on you.

That's my message to my sannyasins. You are not yet my sannyasin, David Light. But if you start living in totality, accepting all, giving each moment its due, respecting all, and when a beautiful woman passes suddenly you are thrilled, that shows you are ALIVE, that you are not dead yet.

But this need not be just a sexual stirring in you -- that is very poor. It has to be something more; it can be a spiritual stirring too. I am not against sex, but to live only a sexual life is to live life at the minimum. Why not live the whole spectrum of it, from sex to samadhi?

When a really beautiful woman passes by, if only your sexuality is stirred, then the animal is alive but you are not. But if your spirituality is also stirred, then you are alive in your totality. And to be alive in totality is the way to God.

Enough for today. The Book of Wisdom Chapter #3

Chapter title: Sitnalta and the Seventeen Chakras 13 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall

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The first question:

Question 1

BELOVED OSHO, WHY DON'T I TRUST YOU?

Prem Prageeta, trust is possible only if first you trust in yourself. The most fundamental thing has to happen within you first. If you trust in yourself you can trust in me, you can trust in people, you can trust in existence. But if you don't trust in yourself then no other trust is ever possible.

And the society destroys trust at the very roots. It does not allow you to trust yourself. It teaches all other kinds of trust -- trust in the parents, trust in the church, trust in the state, trust in God, ad infinitum. But the basic trust is completely destroyed. And then all other trusts are phony, are bound to be phony. Then all other trusts are just plastic flowers. You don't have real roots for real flowers to grow.

The society does it deliberately, on purpose, because a man who trusts in himself is dangerous for the society -- a society that depends on slavery, a society that has invested too much in slavery.

A man trusting himself is an independent man. You cannot make predictions about him, he will move in his own way. Freedom will be his life. He will trust when he feels, when he loves, and then his trust will have a tremendous intensity and truth in it. Then his trust will be alive and authentic. And he will be ready to risk all for his trust, but only when he feels it, only when it is true, only when it stirs his heart, only when it stirs his intelligence and his love, otherwise not. You cannot force him into any kind of believing.

And this society depends on belief. Its whole structure is that of autohypnosis. Its whole structure is based in creating robots and machines, not men. It needs dependent people --

so much so that they are constantly in need of being tyrannized, so much so that they are searching and seeking their own tyrants, their own Adolf Hitlers, their own Mussolinis, their own Josef Stalins and Mao Zedongs.

This earth, this beautiful earth, we have turned into a great prison. A few power- lusty people have reduced the whole of humanity into a mob. Man is allowed to exist only if he compromises with all kinds of nonsense.

Now, to tell a child to believe in God is nonsense, utter nonsense -- not that God does not exist, but because the child has not yet felt the thirst, the desire, the longing. He is not yet ready to go in search of the truth, the ultimate truth of life. He is not yet mature enough to inquire into the reality of God. That love affair has to happen some day, but it can happen only if no belief is imposed upon him. If he is converted before the thirst has arisen to explore and to know, then his whole life he will live in a phony way, he will live in a pseudo way.

Yes, he will talk about God, because he has been told that God is. And he has been told authoritatively, and he has been told by people who were very powerful in his childhood -

- his parents, the priests, the teachers. He has been told by people and he had to accept it; it was a question of his survival. He could not say no to his parents, because without them he would not be able to live at all. It was too risky to say no, he had to say yes. But his yes can't be true.

How can it be true? He is saying yes only as a political device, to survive. You have not turned him into a religious person, you have made him a diplomat, you have created a politician. You have sabotaged his potential to grow into an

authentic being. You have poisoned him. You have destroyed the very possibility of his intelligence, because intelligence arises only when the longing arises to know.

Now the longing will never arise, because before the question has taken possession of his soul, the answer has already been supplied. Before he was hungry, the food has been forced into his being. Now, without hunger, this forced food cannot be digested; there is no hunger to digest it. That's why people live like pipes through which life passes like undigested food.

One has to be very patient with children, very alert, very conscious not to say anything that may hinder their own intelligence from arriving, not to convert them into Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans. One needs infinite patience.

One day that miracle happens when the child himself starts inquiring. Then too, don't supply him with readymade answers. Readymade answers help nobody, readymade answers are dull and stupid. Help him to become more intelligent. Rather than giving him answers, give him situations and challenges so that his intelligence is sharpened and he asks more deeply -- so that the question penetrates to his very core, so the question becomes a question of life and death.

But that is not allowed. Parents are very much afraid, the society is very much afraid: if children are allowed to remain free, who knows? They may never come to the fold the parents belonged to, they may never go to the church -- Catholic, Protestant, this or that.

Who knows what is going to happen when they become intelligent on their own? They will not be within your control. And this society goes into deeper and deeper politics to control everybody, to possess everybody's soul.

That's why the first thing they have to do is to destroy trust -- the trust of the child in himself, the confidence of the child in himself. They have to make him shaky and afraid.

Once he is trembling, he is controllable. If he is confident he is uncontrollable. If he is confident he will assert himself, he will try to do his own thing. He will never want to do anybody else's thing. He will go on his own journey, he will not fulfill somebody else's desires for some trip. He will never be an imitator, he will never be a dull and dead person. He will be so alive, so pulsating with life, that nobody will be able to control him.

Destroy his trust and you have castrated him. You have taken his power: now he will always be powerless and always in need of somebody to dominate, direct and command him. Now he will be a good soldier, a good citizen, a good nationalist, a good Christian, a good Mohammedan, a good Hindu. Yes, he will be all these things, but he will not be a real individual. He will not have any roots, he will be uprooted his whole life. He will live without roots -- and to live without roots is to live in misery, is to live in hell. Just as trees need roots in the earth, man is also a tree and needs roots in existence or else he will live a very unintelligent life. He may succeed in the world, he may become very famous.…

Just the other day, I was reading a story:

Three surgeons, old friends, met on holiday. On the beach, sitting under the sun, they started boasting. The first said, "I came across a man who had lost both of his legs in the war. I gave him artificial legs, and it has been a miracle. Now he has become one of the greatest runners in the world! There is every possibility that in the next coming Olympics he is going to win."

The other said, "That's nothing. I came across a woman who fell from a thirty- story building: her face was completely crushed. I did a great job of plastic surgery. Now just the other day I came to know through the newspapers that she has become the world beauty queen."

The third was a humble man. They both looked at him and asked, "What have you done lately? What's new?"

The man said, "Nothing much -- and moreover, I am not allowed to say anything about it."

Both his colleagues became more curious. They said, "But we are friends, we can keep your secret. You need not be worried, it will not leak out."

So he said, "Okay, if you say so, if you promise. A man was brought to me: he had lost his head in a car accident. I was at a loss to know what to do. I rushed into my garden just to think what to do, and suddenly I came across a cabbage. Finding nothing else, I transplanted the cabbage in place of the head. And do you know what? That man has become the prime minister of India."

You can destroy the child; still, he can become the prime minister of India. There is no inherent impossibility of becoming successful without intelligence. In fact

it is more difficult to become successful with intelligence, because the intelligent person is inventive. He is always ahead of his time; it takes time to understand him.

The unintelligent person is easily understood. He fits with the gestalt of the society; the society has values and criteria by which to judge him. But it takes years for the society to evaluate a genius.

I am not saying that a person who has no intelligence cannot become successful, cannot become famous -- but still he will remain phony. And that is the misery: you can become famous, but if you are phony you live in misery. You don't know what blessings life is showering on you, you will never know. You do not have enough intelligence to know.

You will never see the beauty of existence, because you don't have the sensitivity to know it. You will never see the sheer miracle that surrounds you, that crosses your path in millions of ways every day. You will never see it, because to see it you need a tremendous capacity to understand, to feel, to be.

This society is a power-oriented society. This society is still utterly primitive, utterly barbarian. A few people -- politicians, priests, professors -- a few people are dominating millions. And this society is run in such a way that no child is allowed to have intelligence. It is a sheer accident that once in a while a Buddha arrives on the earth -- a sheer accident.

Somehow, once in a while, a person escapes from the clutches of the society. Once in a while a person remains unpoisoned by the society. That must be because of some error, some mistake of the society. Otherwise the society succeeds in destroying your roots, in destroying your trust in yourself. And once that is done, you will never be able to trust anybody.

Once you are incapable of loving yourself, you will never be able to love anybody. That is an absolute truth, there are no exceptions to it. You can love others only if you are able to love yourself.

But the society condemns self-love. It says it is selfishness, it says it is narcissistic. Yes, self-love can become narcissistic but it is not necessarily so. It can become narcissistic if it never moves beyond itself, it can become a kind of selfishness if it becomes confined to yourself. Otherwise, self-love is the beginning of all other loves.

A person who loves himself sooner or later starts overflowing with love. A person who trusts himself cannot distrust anybody, even those who are going to deceive him, even those who have already deceived him. Yes, he cannot even distrust them, because now he knows trust is far more valuable than anything else.

You can cheat a person -- but in what can you cheat him? You can take some money or something else from him. But the man who knows the beauty of trust will not be distracted by these small things. He will still love you, he will still trust you. And then a miracle happens: if a man really trusts you, it is impossible to cheat him, almost impossible.

It happens every day in your life, too. Whenever you trust somebody it becomes impossible for him to cheat you, to deceive you. Sitting on the platform in a railway station, you don't know the person who is sitting by your side -- a stranger, a complete stranger -- and you say to him, "Just watch my luggage, I have to go to purchase a ticket.

Please, just take care of the luggage." And you go. You trust an absolute stranger. But it almost never happens that the stranger deceives you. He could have deceived you if you had not trusted him.

Trust has a magic in it. How can he deceive you now that you have trusted him? How can he fall so low? He will never be able to forgive himself if he deceives you.

There is an intrinsic quality in human consciousness to trust and to be trusted. Everybody enjoys being trusted, it is respect from the other person; and when you trust a stranger it is more so. There is no reason to trust him, and still you trust him. You raise the man to such a high pedestal, you value the man so much, it is almost impossible for him to fall from that height. And if he falls he will never be able to forgive himself, he will have to carry the weight of guilt his whole life.

A man who trusts himself comes to know the beauty of it -- comes to know that the more you trust yourself, the more you bloom; the more you are in a state of letgo and relaxation, the more you are settled and serene, the more you are calm, cool and quiet.

And it is so beautiful that you start trusting more and more people, because the

more you trust, the more your calmness deepens, your coolness goes deeper and deeper to the very core of your being. And the more you trust, the more you soar high. A man who can trust will sooner or later know the logic of trust. And then one day he is bound to try to trust the unknown.

It is only when you can trust the unknown that you can trust a master, never before it, because the master represents nothing but the unknown. He represents the uncharted, he represents the infinite, the unbounded. He represents the oceanic, he represents the wild, he represents God.

Prageeta, you say: "Why don't I trust you?"

It is simple: you don't trust yourself. Start trusting yourself -- that is the fundamental lesson, the first lesson. Start loving yourself. If you don't love yourself, who else is going to love you? But remember, if you only love yourself, your love will be very poor.

A great Jewish mystic, Hillel, has said, "If you are not for yourself, who is going to be for you?" And also, "If you are only for yourself, then what meaning can your life ever have?" -- a tremendously significant statement. Remember it: love yourself, because if you don't love yourself nobody else will ever be able to love you. You cannot love a person who hates himself.

And on this unfortunate earth, almost everybody hates himself, everybody condemns himself. How can you love a person who is condemnatory towards himself? He will not believe you. He cannot love himself -- how can you dare? He cannot love himself -- how can you love him? He will suspect some game, some trick, some trip. He will suspect that you are trying to deceive him in the name of love. He will be very cautious, alert, and his suspicion will poison your being.

If you love a person who hates himself, you are trying to destroy his concept about himself. And nobody easily drops his concept about himself; that is his identity. He will fight with you, he will prove to you that he is right and you are wrong.

That's what is happening in every love relationship -- let me call it every so- called love relationship. It is happening between every husband and wife, every lover and beloved, every man and every woman. How can you destroy the other's concept about himself?

That is his identity, that is his ego, that's how he knows himself. If you take it away he will not know who he is. It is too risky; he cannot drop his concept so easily. He will prove to you that he is not worth loving, he is only worth hating.

And the same is the case with you. You also hate yourself; you cannot allow anybody else to love you. Whenever somebody comes with loving energy around you, you shrink, you want to escape, you are afraid. You know perfectly well that you are unworthy of love, you know that only on the surface do you look so good, so beautiful; deep down you are ugly. And if you allow this person to love you, sooner or later -- and it is going to be sooner than later -- he will come to know who you are in reality.

How long will you be able to pretend with a person with whom you have to live in love?

You can pretend in the marketplace, you can pretend in the Lions' Club and the Rotary Club -- smiles, all smiles. You can do beautiful acting and role-playing. But if you live with a woman or a man for twenty-four hours a day, then it is tiring to go on smiling and smiling and smiling. Then the smile tires you, because it is phony. It is just an exercise of the lips, and the lips become tired.

How can you go on being sweet? Your bitterness will surface. Hence by the time the honeymoon is over, everything is over. Both have known each other's reality, both have known each other's phoniness, both have known each other's falsity.

One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to put aside the role. And you know who you are: worthless, just dirt. That's what you have been told from the very beginning. Your parents, your teachers, your priests, your politicians, all have been telling you that you are dirt, worthless. Nobody has ever accepted you.

Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed --

that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same, that without you there will be a hole. Without you this universe is going to lose some poetry, some beauty: a song will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap -- nobody has told you that.

And that's what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in

you about yourself, to destroy all condemnation that has been imposed on you, to take it away from you and to give you a feeling that you are loved and respected, loved by existence. God has created you because he loved you. He loved you so much that he could not resist the temptation to create you.

When a painter paints, he paints because he loves. Vincent van Gogh continuously painted the sun his whole life, he loved the sun so much. In fact it was the sun that drove him mad. For one year continuously he was standing and painting under the hot sun. His whole life revolved around the sun. And the day he was content painting the painting that he had always wanted to paint -- and to paint this painting he had painted many others, but he had not been contented with them -- the day he was contented, the day he could say, "Yes, this is the thing that I wanted to paint," he committed suicide, because, he said,

"My work is done. I have done the thing that I came for. My destiny is fulfilled, now it is pointless to live."

His whole life a devotion to a certain painting? He must have been madly in love with the sun. He looked at the sun so long that it destroyed his eyes, his vision, it drove him mad.

When a poet composes a song it is because he loves it. God has painted you, sung you, danced you. God loves you! If you don't see any meaning in the word god don't be worried; call it existence, call it the whole. The existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here.

Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole. That's why the whole goes on breathing in you, pulsating in you. Once you start feeling this tremendous respect and love and trust of the whole in you, you will start growing roots into your being. You will trust yourself. And only then can you trust me. Only then can you trust your friends, your children, your husband, your wife. Only then can you trust the trees and the animals and the stars and the moon. Then one simply lives as trust. It is no more a question of trusting this or that; one simply trusts. And to trust is simply to be religious.

That's what sannyas is all about. Sannyas is going to undo all that the society has done. It is not just accidental that priests are against me, politicians are against me, parents are against me, the whole establishment is against me; it is not accidental. I can understand the absolutely clear logic of it. I am trying to undo

what they have done. I am sabotaging the whole pattern of this slave society.

My effort is to create rebels, and the beginning of the rebel is to trust in oneself. If I can help you to trust in yourself, I have helped you. Nothing else is needed, everything else follows of its own accord.

The second question:

BELOVED OSHO,

Question 2

JOHN LILLY HAS SAID, "WHAT THE MIND BELIEVES IS TRUE OR BECOMES

TRUE." WOULD YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS?

Sambuddho, that's what has been happening down the ages. That is the way of autohypnosis. John Lilly is absolutely wrong. "What the mind believes," he says, "is true " It is not. It only appears true.

And he says " or it becomes true." It never becomes true by being believed, but

it starts appearing true. Yes, for the believer it becomes true, although it is not true, because belief begins in ignorance. Belief cannot create truth; truth is already the case.

Remember the first preliminary of Atisha: truth is. You need not believe in it for it to be.

Your belief or your disbelief is not going to make any difference to the truth. Truth is truth, whether you believe or you disbelieve.

But if you believe in something it starts appearing as true to you at least. That's what the meaning of belief is: belief means to believe in something as true -- you know that you don't know, you know that the truth is unknown to you, but in your ignorance you start believing, because belief is cheap.

To discover truth is arduous, it needs a long pilgrimage. It needs a great emptying of the mind, it needs a great cleansing of the heart. It needs a certain innocence, a rebirth: you have to become a child again.

Only very few people have ever dared to discover truth. And it is risky, because it may not console you; it has no obligation to console you. It is risky: it may shatter all that you have known before, and you will have to rearrange your whole life. It is dangerous: it may destroy all your illusions, it may shatter all your dreams. It is really going through fire; it is going to burn you as you are, it is going to kill you as you are. And who knows what will happen later on?

How can the seed know that by dying in the soil it will become a great tree? It will not be there to witness the happening. How can the seed know that one day, if it dies, there will be great foliage, green leaves, great branches, and flowers and fruits? How can the seed know? The seed will not be there. The seed has to disappear before it can happen. The seed has never met the tree. The seed has to disappear and die.

Only very few people have that much courage. It really needs guts to discover truth. You will die as yourself. You will certainly be born, but how can you be convinced of it?

What guarantee is there? There is no guarantee.

Hence, unless you are with a master who has died and is reborn, who has crucified himself and is resurrected -- unless you come across a man like Christ or Buddha or Atisha -- you will not be able to gather enough courage.

Seeing Atisha, something may start stirring in your heart, a chord may be touched, something may be triggered, a synchronicity. The presence of somebody who has arrived may create a great longing in you, may become the birth of an intense passionate search for truth.

Belief cannot give you the truth, it only pretends. It is cheap, it is a plastic flower. You need not take all the trouble of growing a rosebush, you can simply go to the market and purchase plastic flowers -- and they are more lasting too, in fact they are almost eternal.

Once in a while you can wash them, and they are fresh again. They will not deceive you, but at least they can deceive the neighbors, and that is the point. You will know all along that they are plastic flowers. How can you forget it? You have purchased them! The neighbors may be deceived, but how can you be deceived?

And I don't think that even the neighbors are deceived, because they have also purchased plastic flowers. They know they are deceiving you, they know you are deceiving them.

Everybody is perfectly aware that everybody else is deceiving. "But this is how life is,"

people say. Nobody is really deceived. People just pretend to be deceived. You pretend that you have real flowers, others pretend that they are deceived. Just watch, observe, and what I am saying will be experienced by you. It is a simple fact; I am not talking philosophy, just stating facts.

What John Lilly says is utter nonsense. He says, "What the mind believes is true." It is never true, because belief has nothing to do with truth. You can believe that this is night but just by your believing, this is not going to become night. But you can believe, and you can close your eyes and for you it is night -- but only for you, remember, not in truth.

You are living in a kind of hallucination.

There is this danger in belief: it makes you feel that you know the truth. And because it makes you feel that you know the truth, this becomes the greatest barrier in the search.

Believe or disbelieve and you are blocked -- because disbelief is also nothing but belief in a negative form.

The Catholic believes in God, the communist believes in no God: both are believers. Go to Kaaba or go to the Comintern, go to Kailash or to the Kremlin, it is all the same. The believer believes it is so, the nonbeliever believes it is not so. And because both have already settled without taking the trouble to go and discover it, the deeper is their belief, the stronger is their belief, the greater is the barrier. They will never go on a pilgrimage, there is no point. They will live surrounded by their own illusion, self-created, self-sustained; it may be consoling, but it is not liberating. Millions of people are wasting their lives in belief and disbelief.

The inquiry into truth begins only when you drop all believing. You say, "I would like to encounter the truth on my own. I will not believe in Christ and I will not believe in Buddha. I would like to become a christ or a buddha myself, I

would like to be a light unto myself."

Why should one be a Christian? It is ugly. Be a christ if you can be, but don't be a Christian. Be a buddha if you have any respect for yourself, but don't be a Buddhist. The Buddhist believes. Buddha knows.

When you can know, when knowing is possible, why settle for believing? But again, the society would like you to believe, because believers are good people, obedient, law-abiding. They follow all formalities and etiquette, they are never trouble-makers. They simply follow the crowd, whichever crowd they happen to be in; they simply go with the crowd. They are not real men, they are sheep. Humanity has not yet arrived.

Somebody once said to George Bernard Shaw, "What do you think about civilization?"

He said, "It is a good idea. Somebody should try it."

It has not yet been tried. Humanity is still arriving; we are still groping between animality and humanity. We are in limbo: man has to be born, man has to be given birth to; we have to prepare the ground for man to appear.

And the most significant thing that will help that man to come will be if we can drop believing -- if we can drop being Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, communists. If you can drop believing, immediately your energy will take a new turn: it will start inquiring. And to inquire is beautiful. Your life will become a pilgrimage to truth, and in that very pilgrimage you grow.

Growth is a by-product of the inquiry into truth. Believers never grow, they remain childish. And remember, to be childlike and to be childish are poles apart, they are not the same thing. It is beautiful to be childlike. The man of trust is childlike and the man of belief is childish. To be childlike is the ultimate in growth; that is the very culmination --

consciousness has come to the ultimate peak. To be childlike means to be a sage, and to be childish means to be just un-grownup.

The average mental age of human beings on the earth today is not more than twelve years. When for the first time this was discovered, it was such a shock.

Nobody had ever thought about it; it was just by accident that it became known. In the First World War, for the first time in human history, the people who were candidates, who wanted to enter the army, were examined. Their mental age was inquired into, their IQ was determined. This was a great revelation -- that they were not more than twelve years; the average age was just twelve years.

This is childishness. The body goes on growing, and the mind has stopped at the age of twelve. What kind of humanity have we created on this earth? Why does the mind stop at twelve? Because by the time one is twelve, one has gathered all kinds of beliefs; one is already a believer, one already "knows" what truth is. One is a Christian, another is a communist; one believes in God, one does not believe in God; one believes in The Bible and the other believes in Das Kapital; one believes in the Bhagavad Gita, another believes in the Red Book of Mao Zedong.

We have drilled concepts and ideologies into the innocent minds of poor children. They are already becoming knowers. Do you know -- by the age of seven, a child already knows fifty percent of all that he will ever know. And by the time he is fourteen he has almost arrived; now there is nowhere to go, he has only to vegetate. Now he will exist as a cabbage. If he goes to college then, as they say, he may become a cauliflower. A cabbage with a college education is a cauliflower. But there is not much difference, just labels change. The cabbage becomes an M.A., a Ph.D., this and that, and just to show respect we call it a cauliflower. But the mental age is twelve.

The real man grows to the very end. Even while he is dying, he is growing. Even the last moment of his life will still be an inquiry, a search, a learning. He will still be inquiring --

now inquiring into death. He will be fascinated: death is such an unknown phenomenon, such a mystery, far more mysterious than life itself -- how can an intelligent man be afraid? If in life he has not been afraid to go into the uncharted and the unknown, at the moment of death he will be thrilled, ecstatic. Now the last moment has come: he will be entering into the darkness, the dark tunnel of death. This is the greatest adventure one can ever go on; he will be learning.

A real man never believes; he learns. A real man never becomes knowledgeable; he always remains open, open to truth. And he always remembers that "It is not

that truth has to adjust to me, but just vice versa: I have to adjust to truth." The believer tries to adjust truth to himself, the seeker adjusts himself to truth. Remember the difference; the difference is tremendous. One who believes, he says, "Truth should be like this, this is my belief."

Just think of a Christian.… If God appears not like Jesus Christ but like Krishna, not on the cross but with a flute and girlfriends dancing around him, the Christian will close his eyes; he will say, "This is not my cup of tea." Girlfriends? Can you think of Jesus with girlfriends? The cross and girlfriends can't go together. Jesus hanging on the cross and girlfriends dancing around? It won't fit, it will be very bizarre. He was waiting for Christ to appear, and instead of Christ this guy, Krishna, appears: he seems to be debauched.

And the flute? The world is suffering and people are hungry and they need bread

-- and this man is playing on the flute? He seems to be utterly uncompassionate, he seems to be indulgent. The Christian cannot believe in Krishna: if God appears as Krishna, then the Christian will say, "This is not God."

And the same will be the case with the Hindu who was waiting for Krishna: if Christ appears, that will not be his idea of God -- so sad, such a long face, so gloomy, with such suffering on his face.

Christians say Jesus never laughed. I don't think they are right, and I don't think they are representing the real Christ, but that's what they have managed to propagate. The Hindu cannot accept the revelation; he must think this is some kind of nightmare. Jesus will not appeal to him.

The believer cannot even trust his own experience. Even if truth is revealed, he will reject it, unless it fits with him. He is more important than truth itself: truth has an obligation to fit with him. He is the criterion, he is the decisive factor. This kind of man can never know truth; he is already prejudiced, poisoned.

The man who wants to know truth has to be capable of dropping all concepts about truth.

Everything about truth has to be dropped. Only then can you know truth. Know well: to know about truth is not to know truth. Whatsoever you know may be utter nonsense; there is every possibility that it is utter nonsense. In fact people can be conditioned to believe any kind of nonsense; they can be convinced.

Once I went to address a conference of theosophists. Now, theosophists are people who will believe any bullshit -- ANY! The more shitty it is, the more believable. So I just played a joke on them. I simply invented something; I invented a society called

"Sitnalta." They were all dozing, they became alert. "Sitnalta?" I made the word by just reading "Atlantis" backwards. And then I told them, "This knowledge comes from Atlantis, the continent that disappeared in the Atlantic ocean."

And then I talked about it: "There are really not seven chakras but seventeen. That great ancient esoteric knowledge is lost, but a society of enlightened masters still exists, and it still works. It is a very very esoteric society, very few people are allowed to have any contact with it; its knowledge is kept utterly secret."

And I talked all kinds of nonsense that I could manage. And then the president of the society said, "I have heard about this society." Now it was my turn to be surprised. And about whatsoever I had said, he said that it was the first time that the knowledge of this secret society had been revealed so exactly.

And then letters started coming to me. One man even wrote saying, "I thank you very much for introducing this inner esoteric circle to the theosophists, because I am a member of the society, and I can vouch that whatsoever you have said is absolutely true."

There are people like these who are just waiting to believe in anything, because the more nonsensical a belief is, the more important it appears to be. The more absurd it is, the more believable -- because if something is logical, then there is no question of believing in it.

You don't believe in the sun, you don't believe in the moon. You don't believe in the theory of relativity: either you understand it or you don't understand it; there is no question of belief. You don't believe in gravitation; there is no need. Nobody believes in a scientific theory -- it is logical. Belief is needed only when something illogical, something utterly absurd, is propounded.

Tertullian said, "I believe in God because it is absurd: CREDO QUIA ABSURDUM, my creed is the absurd."

All beliefs are absurd. If a belief is very logical, it will not create belief in you.

So people go on inventing things.

Man is basically a coward, he does not want to inquire. And he does not want to say "I don't know" either.

Now, that president of the theosophical society who said, "I have heard about this society" -- he cannot say that he does not know, he does not have even that much courage. To accept one's ignorance needs courage. To accept that you don't know is the beginning of real knowledge. You go on believing, because there are holes in your life which have to be filled, and belief is easily available.

There are three hundred religions on the earth. One truth, and three hundred religions?

One God, and three hundred religions? One existence, and three hundred religions? And I am not talking about sects -- because each religion has dozens of sects, and then there are sub-sects of sects, and it goes on and on. If you count all the sects and all the sub-sects, then there will be three thousand or even more.

How can so many beliefs, contradictory to each other, go on? People have a certain need

-- the need not to appear ignorant. How to fulfill this need? Gather a few beliefs. And the more absurd the belief is, the more knowledgeable you appear, because nobody else knows about it.

There are people who believe in a hollow earth, and that inside the earth there is a civilization. Now, if somebody says so you cannot deny it; you cannot accept it, but at least you have to listen attentively. And that serves a purpose: everybody wants to be listened to attentively. And one thing is certain, this man knows more than you. You don't know whether the earth is hollow or not; this man knows. And who knows? He may be right. He can gather a thousand and one proofs; he can argue for it, he can propound it in such a way that you at least have to be silent if you don't agree.

Believers and believers and believers -- but where is truth? There are so many believers, but where is truth? If John Lilly is right, then the world would be full of truth, you would come across it everywhere. Everybody would have truth, because everybody is a believer. No, it is all nonsense.

He says, "What the mind believes is true or becomes true." No. What the mind believes is never true, because truth needs no belief. Belief is a barrier to truth. And what the mind believes never becomes true, because truth is not becoming, truth is being; it is already the case. You have to see it -- or you can go on avoiding seeing it, but it is there. Nothing has to be added to it, it is eternally there.

And the best way to avoid truth is to believe. Then you need not look at it. Your eyes become full of belief; belief functions as dust on the eyes. You become closed into yourself, the belief becomes a prison around you. Belief closes you: then you are living within yourself in a windowless existence, and you can go on believing whatsoever you want to believe. But remember, it is belief, and belief is a lie.

Let me say that even when the truth is told to you, don't believe in it! Explore, inquire, search, experiment, experience: don't believe in it. Even when truth is conveyed to you, if you believe in it, you turn it into a lie. A truth believed is a lie, belief turns truth into a lie.

Believe in Buddha and you believe in a lie. Believe in Christ and you believe in a lie.

Don't believe in Christ, don't believe in Buddha, don't believe in me. What I say, listen to it attentively, intelligently; experiment, experience. And when you have experienced, will you need to believe in it? There will be no doubt left, so what will be the point of belief?

Belief is a way of repressing doubt: you doubt, hence you need belief. The rock of belief represses the spring of doubt.

When you know, you know! You know it is so; there is no doubt left. Your experience has expelled all darkness and all doubt. Truth is: you are full of it. Truth never creates belief.

How to attain to truth? By dropping all kinds of beliefs. And remember, I am saying all kinds -- belief in me is included. Experience me, come along with me, let me share what I have seen, but don't believe, don't be in a hurry. Don't say, "Now what is the point? Now Osho has seen it, all that is left for me is to believe it."

What I have seen cannot become your experience unless you see it. And it is the experience of truth that delivers you from ignorance, from bondage, from misery. It is not the belief that delivers you, it is truth.

Jesus says, "Truth liberates." But how to attain to truth? It is not a question of belief, but a question of meditativeness. And what is meditation? Meditation is emptying your mind completely of all belief, ideology, concept, thought. Only in an empty mind, when there is no dust left on the mirror, truth reflects. That reflection is a benediction.

The last question:

BELOVED OSHO,

Question 3

THANK YOU SO MUCH JUST FOR LIFE. ALL THE BEAUTIFUL METHODS ARE

NO GOOD ANY MORE. 'I' WILL LET THE MIND DROP AND THE METHODS

TOO. I FEAR THAT YOU WILL SEND ME BACK TO HELL.

Sarvesh, methods are never of any use. Methods have never been any good, but they still serve a purpose. The purpose is negative. If you have a thorn in your foot, you need another thorn to pull it out. Once the first thorn is pulled out by the second, don't put the second back in the wound just out of gratefulness. Throw away both! The second thorn is as much a thorn as the first; their qualities are not different.

Because your mind is so full of rubbish, you need something to pull it out. But whatsoever is going to pull it out is rubbish in its own way; it is the same. Poison is needed to kill poison. Don't cling to the second poison, thinking it is medicine; don't become addicted to the second poison.

It is good that you say: "All the beautiful methods are no good any more."

They never were. But they still serve a purpose, because man lives in such stupidity that he has to be pulled out of it. And remember, your lies, your beliefs,

your ignorance, have to be dropped somehow; some ways and means have to be invented. Once your mind is dropped, you will see the whole ridiculousness of all the methods. Then you will understand that they were never needed at all.

But don't start talking about it to others, because there are many people who may drop them from the very beginning, seeing that if they are not needed then why bother? They are needed, although there comes a time when they have to be dropped. Use them, and drop them. All methods are like ladders: when you have climbed up the ladder and you have reached the upper floor, you need not bother about it, it can be thrown away.

In fact it should be thrown away. Keeping it may show some unconscious desire in you to go back; you want to keep the ladder there in case you decide to go back to your old rubbish. The ladder can help in that way too. A ladder is neutral

-- it can take you to the upper floor, it can bring you back down to the old situation. But the ladder cannot direct you.

In fact the moment you have climbed up the ladder, you have used it and reached a different plane of life, a different plane of understanding, throw the ladder away immediately, before you start clinging to it.

So it is good that you think methods are no good any more. "...'I' will let the mind drop and the methods too."

If methods are no good any more, Sarvesh, where is the mind? And if the mind is still there to be dropped, then please don't be in a hurry: the methods still have a little function to fulfill.

You will not be able to let the mind drop. Who are you except the mind? Who will drop the mind, who will let the mind drop? You are not yet; you will know yourself only when the mind is dropped. When the mind disappears, you will know who you are. Before that, you don't know. It is just the mind thinking about dropping the mind. Mind is very subtle, very cunning; it can go on playing new games. It can say, "Yes it is so beautiful to drop the mind." And it is still the mind! And the mind can say, "There is no need for any method, Sarvesh. You can drop me easily -- it is up to you."

The mind is playing a very subtle trick. It is helping you to drop the methods first, and then the mind thinks, "We will see -- we will see if you can drop me!"

If it has really been understood -- that methods are no longer useful -- it is synonymous to that understanding that the mind is dropped. They mean the same thing: to know that methods are no longer needed, no longer useful, is to see that the mind is no more there.

Mind is method, mind is technique. Mind cannot exist without methods, methods cannot exist without mind; they go together. They are two aspects of the same energy.

And you say: "I fear that you will send me back to hell."

If methods are really dropped, there is no way to go back to hell. Even if I want to send you, I cannot. Methods are needed to go to hell. Methods are needed to come out of hell, methods are needed to go into hell, but no method is needed to go to heaven. When you are out of hell, you are in heaven.

So the whole question is how to be out of hell? Out of hell is heaven. Heaven is not some place where you have to go, otherwise methods would be needed, paths and ways would be needed. No paths and no ways are needed. All paths, all ways, lead into hell. But if you are in hell, then you will have to use the same paths and the same ways to come back.

Let me tell you one of the most beautiful parables that has ever been invented by man, the parable of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The moment they have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they fall -- the original fall. They are no more in paradise, they are no more deathless, they are no more in eternity; they have lost contact. What has happened? Mind has been created.

That is the meaning of the parable. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge creates the mind; the moment they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, mind was created. Adam and Eve are still in the same place, in the same space, they have not gone anywhere. But the mind is created -- and once the mind is there, paradise is lost, forgotten. One falls asleep and starts dreaming of hells, death, etcetera, etcetera. Now you will have to vomit the fruit of knowledge.

You will have to vomit the mind out of your system. Once you have vomited knowledge out of your system, suddenly you will be awakened to the fact that you are in paradise.

And you will start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it, because you will know, you will become perfectly aware, that you had never been anywhere else. You have always been here, always and always: you had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. Now that the poison is out of your system, the nightmare is finished.

We are in the garden of Eden, right now, this very moment. Nobody can send you to hell, Sarvesh, except knowledge, except methods, except the mind.

Try to understand. Rather than being in a hurry to drop anything, try to understand.

Become more aware, become more alert, more watchful, more observant, and methods will disappear and mind will disappear in the same instant. And then there is no hell -- in fact there never has been, you had only imagined it. It is all paradise and always paradise.

We are in God, we are gods. Enough for today.

The Book of Wisdom Chapter #4

Chapter title: The Last Chance to Rebel 14 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive

code: 7902140

ShortTitle: WISDOM04

Audio:

Yes Video: No Length:

101

mins

The first question:

BELOVED OSHO,

Question 1

SOME TIME AGO, WHILE ASLEEP IN THE NIGHT, I DREAMED I WAS AT A LECTURE. IN THE MORNING I COULD NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING YOU'D

SAID EXCEPT THE PHRASE "POETRY IS SURRENDER." SINCE THEN I HAVE

BEEN WONDERING WHAT POETRY HAS TO DO WITH SURRENDER, AND

VICE VERSA, AND HOW POETRY CAN BE A PATH LIKE LOVE, PRAYER AND

MEDITATION.

Deva richa, poetry contains all: it contains love, it contains prayer, it contains meditation, and much more. All that is divine, all that is beautiful, all that can take you to the transcendental, is contained in poetry.

Poetry is not just poetry: poetry is essential religion. Poetry means a state of being where the mind is no longer interfering between you and existence; when there is communion between you and existence -- direct, immediate; when you are suddenly possessed by the whole, where you disappear as a separate entity and the whole starts speaking through you, starts dancing through you; where

you become a hollow bamboo and the whole transforms you into a flute.

Poetry is the whole descending into the part, the ocean disappearing into the dewdrop.

Poetry is a miracle.

And when I use the word poetry my fingers are not pointing to the Shakespeares, the Kalidases; they are only partial poets. Yes, they knew certain moments of poetry, but they are not poets. They had a few glimpses when the doors of the unknown were open to them, they had some access to the deepest sources of life, but those moments were sheer gifts from the unknown. They knew nothing of how to reach them, they knew nothing about how the whole reached them. It was almost a state of unconsciousness. It happened in a dream, just as it has happened to you in a dream. They were dreamers.

All the so-called great poets of the world, great painters, musicians, sculptors, they were all dreamers. Yes, they had a few glimpses in their dreams: something infiltrated, here and there a ray of light was able to pass through the dream barrier, and even that single ray was enough to create a Shakespeare or a Kalidas. But that's not what I am pointing to.

When I say poetry, I mean that which flowed through the buddhas. That is true poetry.

Buddha is not a dreamer, Atisha is not a dreamer; if they are anything they are awakened people. Dreams have disappeared, evaporated. Now it is not only a glimpse of truth that comes to them unawares, possesses them, and then leaves them empty, spent, exhausted.…

The ordinary poet simply hops; for a moment he is off the ground, but only for a moment, and then he is back on the ground again.

A buddha has wings -- he does not hop. He knows how to go to the farthest star. He knows the way to approach the unknown, he has the key to unlock the doors to the mysterious. He is a master. And then something starts flowing through him which is not his own. He is only a medium: he is possessed. Then whatsoever he says is poetry; or, even if he keeps silent, his silence is poetry. His silence has tremendous music in it; whether he speaks or not doesn't matter. Speaking, he speaks poetry; not speaking, he remains poetry. He is surrounded

by poetry: he walks in poetry, he sleeps in poetry, poetry is his very soul, it is his essential being.

How does this poetry happen? It happens in surrender, it happens when the part gathers enough courage to surrender to the whole, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes the ocean.

Surrender is a very paradoxical state: on one hand you disappear, on the other hand you appear for the first time in your infinite glory, in your multidimensional splendor. Yes, the dewdrop is gone, and gone forever; there is no way to recapture it, to reclaim it. The dewdrop has died as a drop, but in fact the dewdrop has become the ocean, has become oceanic. It still exists, no more as a finite entity, but as something infinite, shoreless, boundless.

This is the meaning of the myth of the phoenix. He dies, he is utterly burned, reduced to ashes, and then suddenly he is reborn out of the ashes -- resurrection. The phoenix represents Christ: crucifixion and resurrection. The phoenix represents Buddha: death as an ego, and a new birth as utter egolessness. It represents all those who have known; to know means to be a phoenix. Die as you are, so that you can be that which you really are!

Die in all your inauthenticity, phoniness, separation from existence.

We go on believing that we are separate. We are not, not even for a single moment. In spite of your belief, you are one with the whole. But your belief can create nightmares for you; it is bound to create them. To believe that "I am separate" means to create fear.

If you are separate from the whole, you can never get rid of fear, because the whole is so vast and you are so small, so tiny, so atomic, and you constantly have to fight the whole so that it does not absorb you. You have to be constantly alert, on guard, so the ocean does not simply take you in. You have to protect yourself behind walls and walls and walls. All this effort is nothing but fear. And then you are constantly aware that death is reaching you and death is going to destroy your separation. That's what death is all about: death is the whole claiming the part back. And you are afraid that death will come and you will die. How to live long? How to attain a kind of deathlessness? Man tries it in many ways. To have children is one of the ways, hence the continuous urge to have children. The root of this desire to have children has nothing to do with children

at all, it has something to do with death.

You know you will not be able to be here forever; howsoever you try, you are going to fail, you know it, because millions have failed and nobody has ever succeeded. You are hoping against hope. Then find some other ways. One of the simplest ways, the most ancient way, is to have children: you will not be here, but something of you, a particle of you, a cell of you, will go on living. That is a vicarious way of becoming immortal.

Now science is finding far more sophisticated ways -- because your child may look a little bit like you, or may not look like you at all, and he will only be just a little bit like you; there is no intrinsic necessity for him to appear exactly like you. So now science has found ways to duplicate you. Some of your cells can be preserved, and when you die, a duplicate can be created out of those cells. And the duplicate will be exactly like you; not even twins are so alike. If you meet your duplicate you will be surprised: he will be exactly like you, absolutely like you.

Now they say that to be safer, a duplicate can be created while you are alive, and the duplicate can be kept in deep freeze, so if some accident happens, if you die in a car accident, you can be immediately replaced. Your wife will never be able to detect it, your children will never come to know that this daddy is just an imitation, because he will be exactly like you.

Men have tried in other ways also, far more sophisticated than this one. Write books, paint pictures, compose great symphonies: you will be gone but the music will remain; you will be gone, but your signature will be there on the book; you will be gone, but the sculpture that you created will be there. It will remind people of you, you will persist in their memories. You will not be able to walk on the earth, but you will be able to walk in people's memories. It is better than nothing. Become famous, leave some marks in the history books -- of course they will be only footnotes, but still, something is better than nothing.

Man has been trying, down the ages, somehow to have some kind of immortality. The fear of death is so much, it haunts you your whole life.

The moment you drop the idea of separation, the fear of death disappears. Hence I call this state of surrender the most paradoxical. You die of your own accord and then you cannot die at all, because the whole never dies, only its parts are

being replaced. But if you become one with the whole, you will live forever: you will go beyond birth and death.

That's the search for nirvana, enlightenment, moksha, the kingdom of God -- the state of deathlessness. But the condition that has to be fulfilled is very frightening. The condition is: first you have to die as a separate entity. That's what surrender is all about: dying as a separate entity, dying as an ego. And in fact it is nothing to be worried about, because you are not separate, it is only a belief. So only the belief dies, not you. It is only a notion, an idea.

It is as if you have seen a rope in the darkness of the night, and you have got the notion that it is a snake, and you are escaping from the snake in tremendous fear, trembling, perspiring. And then somebody comes along and says, "Don't be worried. I have seen it in daylight, and I know perfectly well that it is only a rope. If you don't trust me, ihi passiko, come with me! I will show you that it is only a rope!"

And that's what the buddhas have been doing down the ages: "Ihi passiko, come with me!

Come and see!" They take the rope in their hand and they show you that this is only a rope, the snake was never there in the first place. All fear disappears, you start laughing.

You start laughing at yourself, at how foolish you have been. You have been escaping from something which never existed in the first place! But whether it existed or not, those drops of perspiration were real; the fear, the trembling, the heartbeat going faster, the blood pressure -- all those things were real.

Unreal things can trigger real things, remember it. If you think they are real, they function for you as reality -- only for you. It is a dream reality, but it can affect you, it can affect your whole life, your whole lifestyle.

The ego is not there. The moment you become a little alert, aware, conscious, you will not find the ego at all. It will be a rope that you had misconceived as a snake; you will not find the snake anywhere.

Death does not exist, death is unreal. But you create it: you create it by creating separation. Surrender means dropping the idea of separation: death disappears automatically, fear is found no more, and your whole flavor of life changes.

Then each moment is such crystal purity, a purity of delight, joy, bliss. Then each moment is eternity. And to live that way is poetry, to live moment-to- moment without the ego is poetry. To live without the ego is grace, is music; to live without the ego is to live, to really live. That life I call poetry: the life of one who is surrendered to existence.

And remember, let me repeat it again: when you surrender to existence you are not surrendering anything real. You are simply surrendering a false notion, you are simply surrendering an illusion, you are surrendering maya. You are surrendering something that you never had with you in the first place. And by surrendering that which you don't have, you attain to that which you have.

And to know that "I am at home, I always have been and I always will be," is a great moment of relaxation. Knowing that "I am not an outsider, I am not alienated, I am not uprooted," that "I belong to existence and the existence belongs to me," all becomes calm and quiet and still. This stillness is surrender.

The word surrender gives you a very very wrong idea, as if you are surrendering something. You are not surrendering anything; you are simply dropping a dream, you are simply dropping something arbitrary that the society had created.

The ego is needed, it has certain functions to fulfill in the society. Even when one is surrendered to God, one goes on using the word 'I' -- but now it is only something utilitarian, nothing existential. He knows he is not; he uses the word because not using it will be unnecessarily creating trouble for others, it will make communication impossible.

It is already impossible! It will be more difficult to communicate with people. So it is just an arbitrary device. If you know it is a device, arbitrary, utilitarian, useful, but nothing existential, then it never creates any problem for you.

Richa, your dream has given you a glimpse, your dream has allowed you to see something, something you may not be allowing while you are awake. It sometimes happens. The conscious mind is more egoistic, obviously; the ego never penetrates into the unconscious. The society can only teach the conscious; the society cannot teach the unconscious, at least not yet -- they are trying hard.

In Soviet Russia particularly, they are trying hard to teach the unconscious. And unfortunately they are succeeding. They are teaching people while they are asleep. When you are asleep your conscious is no longer functioning; your

unconscious functions.

Now, in Russia particularly, they are doing great experiments in teaching people while they are asleep. It can be done, it is being done.

This is one of the great dangers that the future generations will have to face. If the politicians have gadgets with them which can teach people while they are asleep, then there will never be any possibility of rebellion.

While he is asleep, you can make a person a communist, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Mohammedan, and because it will be in his unconscious he will be absolutely unable to go beyond it. He will not be able to get rid of it, because the unconscious is nine times more powerful than the conscious. The conscious is only the tip of the iceberg: one tenth of your mind in conscious, nine tenths is unconscious. If the politician can reach the unconscious, then humanity is doomed. Then children will be taught while they are asleep. Even sleep will not be your own and private; even sleep will not be a personal thing, it will be owned by the state. You will not even be allowed to dream private dreams; the state will decide what dreams you can dream -- because you may be dreaming some anti-state dreams, and the state cannot afford them. Your dreams can be manipulated, your unconscious can be manipulated, but fortunately it has not happened yet.

You may be the last generation which has the possibility to rebel. And if you don't rebel, there may be no more chances: humanity can be reduced to a robotlike existence. So rebel while there is still time! I don't think there is much time left, maybe just this last part of the century, these coming twenty or twenty- five years. If humanity can rebel in these next twenty-five years, this is the last opportunity; otherwise people will be utterly unable to, their unconscious will dominate them. Up to now, the society has only been able to pollute your conscious mind -- through education, through the church, through propaganda -- but only your conscious mind; your unconscious is still free.

It happens more often that you are closer to the truth, closer to reality, when you are deeply asleep. It is very strange, it should not be so; you should be closer to reality while you are awake. But your wakefulness is no longer yours; it is Hindu, it is Christian, it is Mohammedan, it is no longer yours; society has already impinged upon it, interfered with it, distorted it. But the unconscious is still yours.

Hence psychoanalysis became so interested in your dreams, because in your dreams you are truer. In your dreams you are less false, in your dreams all the censors of the society disappear. In your dreams you are saying things as they are, seeing things as they are, seeing yourself as you are. The moment you are awake, you start pretending. Your wakefulness is a long long pretension.

Hence sleep is so relaxing, because to be continuously on guard and say the things which are supposed to be said, and do the things which the society requires to be done, is tiring, very tiring. One needs to fall into deep sleep every day for eight hours to get rid of all this, to be natural again, to forget the society and the nightmare and the hell that it has created.

The more alert you become, the more watchful you are, the more free from the bondage of the society and its clutches, then only your body will need sleep, and even in your sleep there will continue an undercurrent of awareness. Your mind will not need any sleep; there is no intrinsic necessity for it to go to sleep, it is a created necessity.

When your mind is clear, untethered, free, you will have less and less need for the mind to go to sleep. And then a miracle happens: if you can remain alert even while the body is asleep, you will know for the first time that you are separate from the body. The body is asleep and you are awake: how can you both be identical, how can you both be one? You will see the difference; the difference is so vast.

The body belongs to the earth, you belong to the sky. The body belongs to matter, you belong to God. The body is gross, you are not. The body has limits, is born and will die; you are never born and you will never die. This becomes your own experience, not a belief.

Belief is fear-oriented. You would like to believe that you are immortal, but belief is just a belief, something pseudo, painted from the outside. Experience is totally different: it wells up within you, it is your own. And the moment you know, nothing can ever shake your knowing, nothing can destroy your knowing. The whole world may be against it, but you will still know that you are separate. The whole world may say there is no soul, but you will know there is. The whole world may say there is no God, but you will smile --

because the experience is self-validating, it is self-evident.

Richa, your dream may be very significant. What you have not allowed in your waking consciousness has sprung up in your dreaming consciousness. A ray of light has entered you.

In the West, before Freud, waking consciousness was thought to be the only consciousness; not so in the East -- even after Freud, although dreaming consciousness has been accepted as valuable, one thing has still not yet happened: dreamless sleep is still ignored. This is not so in the East. The East has always accepted waking consciousness as the most superficial, dreaming consciousness as far deeper and more significant, and sleeping consciousness as even deeper, even more significant than dreaming consciousness. The West needs yet another Freud to introduce sleep as the most significant part.

But the East knows something still more. There is a point, the fourth state of consciousness. It is called turiya, simply "the fourth"; it has no other name. Turiya means the fourth. When waking, dreaming and sleep all disappear, one is simply a witness. You cannot call it waking, because this witness never sleeps; you cannot call it dreaming, because for this witness no dream ever appears; you cannot call it sleep, because this witness never sleeps. It is eternal awareness. This is the bodhichitta of Atisha, this is Christ-consciousness, this is buddhahood, enlightenment.

So always be careful. Be more careful of your dreams than your waking, be more careful again of your dreamless sleep than of dreaming. And remember that you have to search for the fourth, because only the fourth is the ultimate. With the fourth you have arrived home. Now there is nowhere to go.

Richa, you say you have forgotten all about the dream, but only remembered one phrase,

"Poetry is surrender." That is the very essence of my teaching. The most fundamental thing about my message to the world is, poetry is surrender -- and vice versa, surrender is poetry.

I would like my sannyasins, all of my sannyasins, to be creative -- poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, and so on and so forth. In the past, the sannyasins of all the religions have lived a very uncreative life. They were respected for their uncreativity, and because of this uncreativity they have not added any beauty to the world. They have been a burden; they have not brought something

of paradise to the earth. In fact they have been destructive -- because you can either be creative, or you are bound to be destructive. You cannot remain neutral; either you have to affirm life with all its joys, or you start condemning life.

The past has been a long long drawn-out nightmare of destructive attitudes, life- negative approaches. I teach you life-affirmation! I teach you reverence for life. I teach you not renunciation but rejoicing. Become poets! And when I say become poets, I don't mean that you all have to become Shakespeares, Miltons and Tennysons. If I come across Shakespeare and Milton and Tennyson, then too I will say please become poets --

because they are only dreaming about poetry.

Real poetry happens in the fourth state of consciousness. All the great so-called poets have only been dreamers; they were confined to the second state of consciousness. Prose remains confined to the first -- waking consciousness, and your poetry is confined to the second.

The poetry I am talking about is possible only in the fourth. When you have become fully alert, clear, when there is no mind any more, then whatsoever you do will be poetry, whatsoever you do will be music. And even if you don't do a thing, poetry will surround you, it will be your fragrance, it will be your very presence.

Richa, you ask me: "Since then I have been wondering what poetry has to do with surrender, and vice versa, and how poetry can be a path like love, prayer and meditation."

Love is a path, prayer is a path, meditation is a path, because they are ways to poetry.

Anything that leads you to God is bound to lead you to poetry. The man of God can be nothing but a poet. He will sing a song, not his own any more of course: he will sing God's song. He will give utterance to the silence of God, he will be a mouthpiece to the whole.

I teach you meditation, prayer, love, only because they all take you to the center. And the center is poetry. They are all ways to poetry. To dissolve yourself in poetry is to dissolve yourself in God -- and certainly without surrender it is not possible. If you remain too much, God cannot happen. You have to be absent for

him to become a presence in you. Die, so that you can be.

The second question:

BELOVED OSHO,

Question 2

UTTER CONFUSION IS MY PART. GOOD AND BAD HAVE CEASED TO EXIST. I AM NEITHER PROUD NOR ASHAMED AND YET I AM BOTH. WHATEVER I HAVE ACHIEVED SEEMS LOST IN A FOG, RESOLVED TOGETHER WITH MY

FAILURES. LIKE SMOKE I FEEL, BUT THROUGH THE SMOKE A

TREMENDOUS SADNESS ARISES LIKE A SHARP ROCK WITH A VELVET

COVERING. OSHO, I CAN'T PERCEIVE THE END OF IT -- OR IS THERE NO

END? IS IT ECSTASY CARRYING THE WEIGHT OF IMPURITY? PLEASE, OSHO, GIVE ME SANNYAS.

Ronald Salomonson, confusion is a great opportunity. The problem with people who are not confused is great -- they think they know, and they know not. The people who believe that they have clarity are really in great trouble; their clarity is very superficial. In fact they know nothing of clarity; what they call clarity is just stupidity.

Idiots are very very clear -- clear in the sense that they do not have the intelligence to feel confusion. To feel confusion needs great intelligence. Only the intelligent ones feel confusion; otherwise the mediocres go on moving in life, smiling, laughing, accumulating money, struggling for more power and fame. If you see them you will feel a little jealous; they look so confident, they even look happy.

If they are succeeding, if their money is increasing and their power is increasing

and their fame is growing, you will feel a little jealous. You are so confused and they are so clear about their life; they have a direction, they have a goal, they know how to attain it, and they are managing, they are already achieving, they are climbing the ladder. And you are just standing there, confused about what to do, what not to do, what is right and what is wrong. But this has always been so; the mediocre remains certain. It is only for the more intelligent to feel confusion, chaos.

Confusion is a great opportunity. It simply says that through the mind there is no way. If you are really confused -- as you say, "I am utterly confused" -- if you are really confused, you are blessed. Now something is possible, something immensely valuable; you are on the verge. If you are utterly confused, that means the mind has failed; now the mind can no longer supply any certainty to you. You are coming closer and closer to the death of the mind.

And that is the greatest thing that can happen to any man in life, the greatest blessing --

because once you see that the mind is confusion and there is no way out through the mind, how long can you go on clinging to the mind? Sooner or later you will have to drop it; even if you don't drop it, it will drop of its own accord. Confusion will become so much, so heavy, that out of sheer heaviness it will drop. And when the mind drops, confusion disappears.

I cannot say that you attain to certainty, no, because that too is a word applicable only to the mind and the world of the mind. When there is confusion, there can be certainty; when confusion disappears, certainty also disappears. You simply are -- clear, neither confused nor certain, just a clarity, a transparency. And that transparency has beauty, that transparency is grace, it is exquisite.

It is the most beautiful moment in one's life when there is neither confusion nor certainty.

One simply is, a mirror reflecting that which is, with no direction, going nowhere, with no idea of doing something, with no future, just utterly in the moment, tremendously in the moment.

When there is no mind there can be no future, there can be no program for the future.

Then this moment is all, all in all; this moment is your whole existence. The whole existence starts converging on this moment, and the moment becomes tremendously significant. It has depth, it has height, it has mystery, it has intensity, it has fire, it has immediacy, it grips you, it possesses you, it transforms you.

But I cannot give you certainty; certainty is given by ideology. Certainty is nothing but patching up your confusion. You are confused. Somebody says, "Don't be worried," and says it very authoritatively, convinces you with arguments, with scriptures, and patches up your confusion, covers it with a beautiful blanket -- with The Bible, with the Koran, with the Gita. And you feel good; but it is temporary, because the confusion is boiling within. You have not got rid of it, it has only been repressed.

That's why people cling to beliefs, churches, scriptures, doctrines, systems of thought.

Why do people invest so much in systems of thought? Why should somebody be a Christian or a Hindu? Why should somebody be a communist -- for what? There is a reason, a great reason too. Everybody is confused, and so somebody is needed to supply you with certainty. He can be the pope or he can be Mao Zedong, he can be Karl Marx or he can be Manu or Moses -- anybody will do. And whenever there are great times of crisis, any stupid person who has the stubbornness to shout, to argue, who can pretend certainty, will become your leader. That's how Adolf Hitlers, Josef Stalins and Mussolinis became important people.

People have always been wondering why Adolf Hitler was able to dominate a great intelligent race like the Germans. Why? It appears a paradox that a man like Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest thinkers of this age, was a supporter of Adolf Hitler. The great professors of the great German universities supported Adolf Hitler. Why? How was it possible?

And Adolf Hitler is just a stupid person, uneducated, unsophisticated. But he has something in him that the professors were lacking, that intelligent people were lacking, that the Martin Heideggers were lacking. He has something in him which no intelligent person can have: he has absolute certainty. He is idiotic -- but he can say things with no ifs and no buts; he can make statements as if he knows. He is a madman, but his madness had great impact. It changed the whole

course of human history.

It is not a surprise that the Germans became so interested and impressed by him. They were intelligent people, some of the most intelligent people on the earth, and intelligence always brings confusion. That is the secret of Adolf Hitler's success. Intelligence brings confusion and confusion brings trembling, fear; one knows not where to go, what to do, and one starts looking for a leader. One starts searching for somebody who can say things with absoluteness, who can assert categorically.

The same has happened in India; it has happened just now. This is one of the most ancient countries of the world, with the longest tradition of thinking and contemplation, the longest tradition of philosophizing. No other country has philosophized so much. And then this country chooses a man like Morarji Desai as the prime minister -- a cabbage!

But he has something in him -- the stubbornness of a mediocre mind, the absoluteness of stupidity. He has something important to supply.

Whenever people are in confusion they fall prey to third-rate minds. The first- rate minds fall prey to third-rate minds because the third-rate mind has no confusion. The third-rate mind knows that just by drinking your own urine all diseases can be cured -- even cancer is curable by drinking your own urine. It is only possible to assert this if you really are utterly unintelligent.

The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers. The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates. Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops.

Lao Tzu says, "I may be the only muddle-headed man in the world. Everybody seems to be so certain, except me." He is right; he has such tremendous intelligence that he cannot be certain about anything.

I cannot promise you certainty if you drop the mind. I can promise you only one thing, that you will be clear. There will be clarity, transparency, you will be able to see things as they are. You will be neither confused nor certain. Certainty and confusion are two sides of the same coin.

But you are in a beautiful moment, and the world too is in a beautiful moment. Whenever there is a crisis of identity, whenever people don't know who they are,

whenever the past loses its grip, whenever people are uprooted from the traditional, whenever the past no more seems relevant, this crisis arises, a great crisis of identity -- who are we? what are we supposed to do?

This opportunity can turn into a curse too, if you fall victim to some Adolf Hitler; but this curse can become a great opening into the unknown if you are fortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a buddha. If you are fortunate enough to be in love with a buddha, your life can be transformed.

People who are still rooted in tradition, and who think they know what is right and what is wrong, will never come to a buddha. They will continue to live their life -- the routine life, the dull, the dead life. They will go on fulfilling their duties as their forefathers used to do. For centuries they have been following a track and they will go on following that trodden track. Of course, when you follow a trodden track, you feel certain -- so many people have walked on it. But when you come to a buddha and you start moving into the unknown, there is no highway, no trodden path. You will have to make your own path by walking; the path will not be found readymade.

That's what I want each of my sannyasins to understand. You are not here to depend on me, you are not here to follow me, you are not here to simply accept me and believe in me. You are here to experiment; you have to move on your own. I can give you encouragement to move on your own, I can trigger a process of inquiry in you; but I will not give you a system of thought, I will not give you any certainty. I will only give you a pilgrimage -- a pilgrimage which is hazardous, a pilgrimage which has millions and millions of pitfalls, a pilgrimage in which you will have to face more and more dangers every day, a pilgrimage that will take you to the top of human consciousness, to the fourth state. But the higher you go, the more is the danger of falling.

I can only promise you a great adventure, risky, dangerous, with no promise that you will attain it -- because the unknown cannot be guaranteed.

So, Ronald, if you have come to me to find some remedy for your confusion, then you have come to the wrong person, I am not the right person to be with. But if you have come to drop confusion and certainty, and be free of the mind that can either give you confusion or certainty, if you have come to me to go on the ultimate adventure in search of God, if you have come to me to dare, to accept the challenge of the uncharted sea, the roaring waves, with no possibility

of seeing the other shore, then you have come to the right person. Then much is possible. I only say "possible" -- I cannot say it is absolutely certain. It is always a possibility; you may be able to make it, you may not be able to make it, there is no guarantee. It is not a commodity which can be guaranteed; it is a gamble.

And if you are ready to gamble, enter into this buddhafield. No need to wait any longer --

you have already waited enough, for many many lives.

You ask me: "Please, Osho, give me sannyas." It is not a question of my giving you sannyas; it is a question of you taking it. Open your heart! I am always giving it. The question is of your receiving it, welcoming it.

You say: "Good and bad have ceased to exist." That is good, that's beautiful. Good and bad are all manmade, sinners and saints are all manmade. And they are not different at all; the difference is only superficial, very superficial, not even skin-deep. Scratch a little, and in your saint you will find the sinner.

This guy went to the pope and he said, "Hey pope, fuck you!"

The pope could not believe it. He said, "Me? The head of the Catholic Church? Me, the spiritual head of millions and millions? Me, the direct descendant of Jesus Christ? Me, the only representative of God on earth? Fuck me? Fuck YOU!"

There is not much difference. Just scratch a little, and you will find sinners in the saints and you will find saints in the sinners. All good, all bad, is just arbitrary, man-made.

It's a beautiful space you are entering. If good and bad have ceased to exist, so far, so GOOD! Now enter another dimension, not man-made, where distinctions are of no relevance, where nothing is good and nothing is bad, where whatsoever is is, and whatever ain't ain't. There is no question of good and bad; either something is or something is not. Good and bad are nothing but alternatives to be chosen -- either choose this, or choose that. They keep you in the division of either/or.

The moment you start seeing the hocus-pocusness of all good and bad, when you start seeing that they are socially manufactured things.… Of course they are

utilitarian, and I am not saying to go into the marketplace and behave as if there is nothing good and nothing wrong. I am not saying to walk in the middle of the road, saying what does it matter whether one walks on the right or the left.

When you are with people, remember, for them good and bad still exist. Be respectful to them and their dreams. It is not for you to disturb anybody's dream. Who are you? It is not for you to interfere. Be polite to people and their stupidities, be polite to them and their games. But all the time remember, deep down nothing is good, nothing is bad.

Existence is simply there; there is nothing to choose between. And remember, when there is nothing to choose between, you will become undivided. When there is something to choose between, it divides you too. Division is a double- edged sword: it divides reality outside, it divides you inside. If you choose, you choose division, you choose to be split, you choose schizophrenia. If you don't choose, if you know there is nothing good, nothing bad, you choose sanity.

Not choosing anything is choosing sanity, not choosing is to be sane, because now there is no division outside, how can you be divided inside? The inside and the outside go together. You become indivisible, you become an individual. This is the process of individuation. Nothing is good, nothing is bad. When this dawns in your consciousness, suddenly you are together, all fragments have disappeared into one unity. You are crystallized, you are centered.

This is one of the greatest contributions of Eastern consciousness to the world. The Western religions still go on hanging around the idea of good and bad. That's why it is so difficult for the Christian to understand the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu; it is impossible for them to understand. They are always looking with the Christian mind,

"Where are the commandments?" And there are none! The Upanishads never say what is good and what is wrong, they never say what to do and what not to do, they don't command. They are poetic assertions, they are poetry. They exult in existence, they are ecstatic, overflowing; they are just ecstatic ejaculations.

The Upanishads say, "God is, and you are that: tat tvam asi." The Upanishads say, "God is, and I am God." These are assertions arising out of ecstasy. They have no ethics, no morality, no reference even. The Christian mind, the Mohammedan mind, the Jewish mind, cannot understand why these books are

thought to be religious. They may be good literature, but why are they thought to be religious?

And if you ask one who has reached the same ecstasy as the Upanishadic seers, he will say The Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, they are ethical, moral, but what do they have to do with religion? They are good, because they make a society move smoothly, but they have nothing religious in them -- or maybe only a few statements here and there. The major part is ethical; the religious part seems to be so small that it can be neglected, ignored. And it has been ignored.

To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama; you can participate in it, but then you don't take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But don't take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.

The ultimate is the inner; the indivisible soul knows it. And, to come to that soul, this is a good turning-point.

You say: "Good and bad have ceased to exist." This is the right moment to take sannyas, this is what sannyas is all about. Now there is no need to wait, now there is no need even to ask my permission. Sannyas is already happening. Enter into this buddhafield. Long you have waited -- too long, really.

I have heard: An old couple reached the divorce court. They were really ancient, ninety-five years old, and they had been married for seventy-five years. The judge could not believe his eyes. He said, "So you are thinking of divorce now, after seventy-five years of married life? Why NOW?"

They looked at each other, and then the old man said, "Well, we waited till all the children were dead."

People go on waiting and waiting and waiting.… Now, what a hope! There is no need to wait any more. You are welcome, you are ready. Even people who are not ready, I welcome them -- because those who are not ready today may be ready tomorrow. Those who are not ready when they take sannyas, may be ready after they have taken sannyas.

And who am I to refuse you if God accepts you? I am nobody to refuse you.

That's why nobody is refused, no condition is made, nobody is thought to be unworthy. If God thinks you worthy of being alive, that's enough proof that you are also worthy of becoming a sannyasin.

You say: "I am neither proud nor ashamed and yet I am both." That's the state of confusion. You will find everything like that -- neither this nor that, yet both.

"Whatever I have achieved seems lost in a fog" -- you are really blessed -- "resolved together with my failures."

Many should feel jealous of you. To know that all has failed is the beginning of a new journey. To know that "All that I have achieved is lost" is the beginning of a new search for something that cannot be lost. When one is utterly disillusioned with the world and all its successes, only then does one become spiritual.

"Like smoke I feel, but through the smoke a tremendous sadness arises like a sharp rock with a velvet covering." It is bound to be so. When life has been lived through illusions and one day one suddenly feels all has been meaningless, useless -- "I was chasing shadows" -- a great sadness arises.

But I can see your perceptiveness. Sadness is there, but "with a velvet covering." Yes, sadness is there because of the past, and the velvet covering is what is possible; it only becomes possible now. Out of all this confusion is sadness; but because of this confusion and its utterness, deep down a new stirring is happening. You may not yet be aware of it, but something is stirring, a new joy is arising behind the curtain of sadness -- a joy of a new search, of a new adventure, of a new life, of a new way to be.

"Osho, I can't perceive the end of it -- or is there no end?" There is a beginning of the mind and there is an end of the mind, there is a beginning of the ego and there is an end of the ego, but there is no beginning to you and no end to you. And there is no beginning to the mystery of existence and no end to you. It is an ongoing process. Mysteries upon mysteries are waiting for you, hence the thrill and the ecstasy.

Feel ecstatic that there is no end to life, that when you have reached one peak, suddenly another peak starts giving you challenges -- a higher one, a more arduous climb, a more dangerous reach. And when you have reached the other peak, there will be another peak; peaks upon peaks. It is an eternal Himalayas of life.

Just think of a point where you arrive, and now there is nothing else left. You will be utterly bored then; boredom will be your only fate then! And life is not boredom, it is a dance. Life is not boredom, it is exultation, exuberance.

Many many things are going to happen, and many many things will always remain to happen. The mystery never ends, it cannot end. That's why it is called a mystery, it cannot even be known. It will never become knowledge, that's why it is called a mystery; something in it is eternally elusive. And that's the whole joy of life. The great splendor of life is that it keeps you eternally engaged, searching, exploring. Life is exploration, life is adventure.

You ask: "Osho, I can't perceive the end of it or is there no end?" There is an end to you, but there is no end to the real you.

"Is it ecstasy carrying the weight of impurity?" There is no impurity anywhere. All is pure. Impurity is just a shadow of the confusion that you are feeling right now. When the confusion and the confusing mind are dropped, the shadows will disappear of their own accord.

Your innermost core has always been pure; purity is intrinsic to you, it cannot be taken away. Your virginity is eternal; you cannot lose it, there is no way to lose it. You can only forget about it or remember it. If you forget about it, you live in confusion; if you remember it, all is clear. Again, I will not say "certain," but just "clear." All is transparent. That transparency is freedom, that transparency is wisdom. This transparency is your birthright; if you are not claiming it, nobody else is responsible except you. Claim it! It is yours. It is yours just for the asking.

Sannyas is an effort to reclaim that which is yours and to drop that which is not yours.

Sannyas is an effort to drop that which you really don't have, and to claim that which you always had with you all along.

Ecstasy is our very nature; not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable.

That's why you look so tired, because misery is really hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against nature. You are going upstream --

that's what misery is.

And what is bliss? Going with the river -- so much so that the distinction between you and the river is simply lost. You are the river. How can it be difficult? To go with the river no swimming is needed; you simply float with the river and the river takes you to the ocean. The river is already going to the ocean.

Life is a river. Don't push it and you will not be miserable. The art of not pushing the river of life is sannyas.

Ronald, you are ready. This moment of confusion, this moment of chaos in your life, can open a new door, can turn a new leaf. Don't wait any more.

Enough for today. The Book of Wisdom Chapter #5

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