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Chapter title: Vagabonds of the Soul
3 March 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive
code:
7903030
ShortTitle:
WISDOM21
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Yes Video: No Length:
98
mins
TRAIN IMPARTIALLY IN EVERY AREA; IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE TRAINED
DEEPLY AND PERVASIVELY IN EVERYTHING. ALWAYS MEDITATE ON SPECIFIC OBJECTS.
YOU SHOULD HAVE NO CONCERN FOR OTHER FACTORS. THEREFORE, APPLY YOURSELF TO IMPORTANT MATTERS. DON'T DO THINGS BACKWARDS.
DON'T VACILLATE.
TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.
Once a jaina monk came to see me. He asked, "Is hell real? Is there really a hell?" Instead of answering him, I asked him, "And where do you think you are living?" Man lives in hell, because man is upside down. You need not go to some stupid yoga teacher to learn the headstand posture, because you are already doing it. Everything is in the wrong order.
For centuries you have been messed up; a chaos has been created in you instead of a cosmos. You are just a kind of madness. Whatever you think is normal is not normal at all. It appears normal, because you have lived with these people from your very childhood and you have started thinking that these are the only people, so they must be normal.
It is as if one was born in a madhouse and from the very beginning was acquainted only with mad people; he will think them normal. In fact, if he ever comes across somebody who is sane, he will be very puzzled, he will not be able to believe his own eyes. He will think this man has gone crazy.
Man is a chaos. Let this idea sink deep into your heart, because only then the desire to create a cosmos out of this chaos arises. The moment you realize that you are standing on your head, a great moment has arrived. Now you cannot go on standing on your head any more: you have to do something, it is inevitable. You have to act -- and that very act becomes religion.
Religion is against society, because society lives on this so-called normal madness of people. Society wants people to be abnormal; only then can they be exploited, only then can they be reduced into machines, only then can they be reduced to slaves -- and happily, and without any revolt.
For thousands of years, man has lived in an imprisoned state. Those prisons have been given beautiful names: you call them churches, religions, ideologies. Somebody lives in a Catholic prison and somebody lives in a communist prison, and both go on bragging about their prison, that their prison is far better. But any person who lives through some ideology is a prisoner, because every ideology narrows down your consciousness, becomes chains on your being. Anybody who belongs to any crowd out of fear, out of conditioning, out of a kind of hypnosis, is not truly a man, is not yet born. The opportunity has been given to him, but he is wasting it.
You have been taught values which are not really values; you have been taught things which are basically poisonous. For example, you have been told not to love yourself, and you have been told so many times that it looks like a simple fact, truth. But a man who is incapable of loving himself will be incapable of loving anybody else. The man who cannot love himself cannot love at all.
You have been told to be altruistic and never selfish. And it looks so beautiful -- but it only looks beautiful; it is destroying your very roots. Only a really selfish person can be altruistic, because one who is not rooted in his self, is not selfish, will not bother about anybody else. If he cannot care for himself, how can he care for anybody else? He is suicidal; naturally he will become murderous.
Your whole society up to now has been a society of murderers. A few people commit suicide; they become saints. A few more go on committing murder; they become great politicians, great leaders -- Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah, Tamerlane, Alexander, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mao. But both are neurotic, both are unhealthy.
You have to be taught new values. Atisha's sutras will help you immensely. He is really a revolutionary, a really religious man -- a man who knows, not through scriptures but by his own experience; a man who has looked deep into the misery of man, a man who is really so full of compassion that he wants to help, to be of some help to the suffering humanity. And the suffering humanity is not helped by creating more hospitals or by making more people educated. The suffering humanity can be helped only by giving it a new soul.
People like Mother Teresa of Calcutta are simply serving the status quo. That's why they are respected by the status quo. They are given gold medals, prizes, awards, and the society thinks Mother Teresa is the symbol of real saintlihoodness. It is not so; she is simply in the service of a rotten society. Of course the rotten society respects her. She is not a revolutionary, she is not a religious person.
And this is something to be understood: society respects only those saints who are not really sages but are agents -- agents who help the society to continue as it is, agents of the establishment.
Atisha is not for the establishment. He wants to create a new man, a new humanity, as always buddhas have dreamed about. Their dreams remain yet
unfulfilled.
Here I am, again dreaming a great dream of giving birth to a new man. You are my hope, in the same way Atisha had hoped with his own disciples. These sutras were not written as a book, these sutras were given to his disciples to meditate on.
The first sutra:
TRAIN IMPARTIALLY IN EVERY AREA; IT IS IMPORTANTTO HAVE TRAINED
DEEPLY AND PERVASIVELY IN EVERYTHING.
The first thing is impartiality: one should be unprejudiced, and nobody is unprejudiced.
And that is a basic requirement to grow into a greater vision. To come out of the prisons, the first thing is to drop prejudices -- prejudices called Hinduism, prejudices called Mohammedanism, prejudices called Christianity. One has to drop all prejudices. How can you ever know truth if you have already decided what it is? If you are already functioning from a conclusion, you will never arrive to truth -- never! It is impossible.
Don't start by a priori assumptions, don't start by any belief. Then only are you a true seeker. But everybody starts by belief -- somebody believes in The Bible, somebody else in the Koran; somebody believes in the Gita, and somebody in Dhammapada. And they start by belief.
Belief means you don't know, still you have taken something for granted. Now your whole effort will be to prove it right, it will become your ego trip. Each belief becomes an ego trip, you have to prove it right. If it is wrong, then you are wrong; if it is right, then you are right. And every person is nothing but a bagful of beliefs.
Remember, all beliefs are stupid. I am not saying that those beliefs are basically untrue --
they may not be, they may be -- but to believe is stupid. To know is intelligent. It may be that when you come to know, it may be the same thing that you were told
by others to believe; but still to believe in it is wrong, and to know it, right -- because once you believe in something that you have not known, you have already started gathering around yourself a darkness which will not help you to know, to see. You are already becoming knowledgeable. And knowing happens to those who are not knowledgeable, but innocent.
Knowing happens to those eyes which are absolutely without the dust of knowledge.
The first thing Atisha says: Be impartial, start without any conclusion, start without any a priori belief. Start existentially, not intellectually; these are two different dimensions, not only different but diametrically opposite.
Somebody can start his journey into love by studying about love, by going to the library, by looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica to learn what love is. This is an intellectual inquiry. He may gather much information, he may write a treatise, and some foolish university may give him a Ph.D. but he knows nothing of love. Whatsoever he is writing is only intellectual, it is not experiential. And if it is not experiential, it is not true.
Truth is an experience, not a belief. Truth never comes by studying about it: truth has to be encountered, truth has to be faced. The person who studies about love is like the person who studies about the Himalayas by looking at the map of the mountains. The map is not the mountain! And if you start believing in the map, you will go on missing the mountain. If you become too much obsessed with the map, the mountain may be there just in front of you, but still you will not be able to see it.
And that's how it is. The mountain is in front of you, but your eyes are full of maps --
maps of the same mountain, maps about the same mountain, made by different explorers.
Somebody has climbed the mountain from the north side, somebody from the east. They have made different maps: Koran, Bible, Gita -- different maps of the same truth. But you are too full of the maps, too burdened by their weight; you cannot move even an inch.
You cannot see the mountain just standing in front of you, its virgin snow peaks
shining like gold in the morning sun. You don't have the eyes to see it.
The prejudiced eye is blind, the heart full of conclusions is dead. Too many a priori assumptions and your intelligence starts losing its sharpness, its beauty, its intensity. It becomes dull. Dull intelligence is what is called intellect. Your so- called intelligentsia is not really intelligent, it is just intellectual. Intellect is a corpse. You can decorate it, you can decorate it with great pearls, diamonds, emeralds, but still a corpse is a corpse.
To be alive is a totally different matter. Intelligence is aliveness; it is spontaneity, it is openness, it is vulnerability, it is impartiality, it is the courage to function without conclusions. And why do I say it is a courage? It is a courage because when you function out of a conclusion the conclusion protects you, the conclusion gives you security, safety.
You know it well, you know how to come to it, you are very efficient with it. To function without a conclusion is to function in innocence. There is no security, you may go wrong, you may go astray.
One who is ready to go on the exploration called truth has to be ready also to commit many errors, mistakes, has to be able to risk. One may go astray, but that is how one arrives. Going many many times astray, one learns how not to go astray. Committing many mistakes one learns what is a mistake, and how not to commit it. Knowing what is error, one comes closer and closer to what is truth. It is an individual exploration; you cannot depend on others' conclusions.
Hence Atisha says:
TRAIN IMPARTIALLY IN EVERY AREA; IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE TRAINED
DEEPLY AND PERVASIVELY IN EVERYTHING.
The second thing he says: Let your life be as multidimensional as possible, don't live one-dimensionally. Monks, nuns and the so-called priests have all lived, down the ages, one-dimensionally. They live a very narrow life; they move as trains move, on fixed rails.
They go on doing the same ritual, the same prayer, day in, day out, year in, year out, life in, life out; they go on repeating. Their whole life moves in circles. And
they are not rich, they cannot be -- richness comes by living life in all its dimensions.
A religious person should explore in every possible way, should try to experience life in all its tastes, sweet and bitter, good and bad. The really religious person will be very experimental. He will experiment with music, he will experiment with dance, he will experiment with poetry, with painting, with sculpture, with architecture. He will go on experimenting with everything, everything that becomes available; he will be a child exploring everything. And that makes your inner life rich.
Do you know, all great discoveries are made by people who are not one- dimensional.
One-dimensional people can never make discoveries; it is impossible, because a discovery happens only like crossbreeding. A mathematician starts writing poetry: now you can be certain something is on the way. His whole training is that of a mathematician, his approach is that of mathematics, and he starts writing poetry. Now, no poet can write poetry like this; this is going to be something new, because something of the mathematics is bound to filter in. And mathematics and poetry having a meeting is a crossbreeding.
Scientists say children that are born out of crossbreeding are stronger, more beautiful, more intelligent. But man is so stupid that he never learns. Now everybody knows that it is good to bring an English bull for an Indian cow; that is perfectly beautiful and that is being done. But as far as man is concerned we remain stupid. It would be beautiful if people marry different races, different backgrounds, different cultures. A Siberian marrying someone in Africa -- then something is really going to happen, some miracle.
My own suggestion is -- because within a few years we are going to find out other planets where evolution has almost reached to the point that it has reached on the earth, or a few planets where it has even reached higher -- my own suggestion is for interplanetary marriages. Then miracles will start happening. A Martian marrying a Poonaite: then something is going to happen, something really new which has never happened before!
Atisha says: Experiment, experience as many dimensions as are available to you. Become a gardener, become a shoemaker, become a carpenter -- that's what is
going to happen in my commune. All dimensions have to be made available, and people have to experiment and enjoy and explore. It is not that when you do some scientific work, something happens only in the outside world. When you are doing some scientific work, something happens inside your consciousness: your consciousness starts taking a form, a scientific form. If this person starts painting, then the painting will have something of the science in it. And if the painter starts becoming a physicist, certainly his vision is going to give birth to new things.
All great discoveries up to now have been made by people who were trained for something else, but were courageous enough to enter into arenas where they were amateurs. Less courageous people remain clinging with the thing that they know best.
Then they go on doing it their whole life. And the more they do it, the more efficient they become; the more efficient they become, the less capable of trying anything new.
A country remains alive only if people are multidimensional. America is now the most alive country in the world for the simple reason that people are trying every kind of thing.
From mathematics to meditation, everything is being tried. America is just on the verge of a great step; if a new step is going to happen anywhere, it is going to happen in America. It can't happen in India. It can't happen because Morarji Desai and people like that won't allow it to happen in India -- rigid, stale minds, having no vision of the future, having no vision of what is going to happen tomorrow, having no idea of what is really happening today.
In America, people go on changing their jobs -- three years is the average limit when people change their jobs. Three years also is the average limit when people change their towns. Three years is also the average limit when people change their spouses. The number three is very esoteric.
When a man has lived with many women, has done many kinds of work -- has been a cobbler, has been a carpenter, has been an engineer, has been a painter and a musician --
naturally he is very rich. Each woman that he has lived with has imparted some color to him, and each work that he has done has opened a new door into his
being. Slowly slowly, many doors of his being are opening; his consciousness expands, he becomes huge, enormous.
You are your experience. Hence, experience more. Before settling, experience as much as possible. The real person never settles; the real person always remains homeless, a wanderer, a vagabond, a vagabond of the soul. He remains continually in search, he remains an inquirer, a learner -- he never becomes learned. Don't be in a hurry to become learned, remain a learner. To become learned is ugly, to remain a learner has tremendous beauty and grace in it, because it is life itself.
TRAIN IMPARTIALLY IN EVERY AREA; IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE TRAINED
DEEPLY AND PERVASIVELY IN EVERYTHING.
Whatsoever you are learning, learn it in its totality. Don't let it be just a hit-and- run affair, go into it as if it is your whole life. Stake everything! Be total, whatsoever you do, because it is only out of totality that one learns. It is only when you are totally into something that mysteries are revealed to you. If you are totally in love, then love reveals its mysteries; if you are totally in poetry, then the world of poetry opens its heart.
If you are totally in love with anything, that is the only possible way to have a rapport with that certain dimension. So be total, and go to the very depth of it. Don't just go on swimming in many rivers; become a diver, go to the rock bottom of everything -- because the deeper you go into anything, the more and more deep you will become. Depth calls the depth, height provokes the height. Whatsoever we are doing outside simultaneously goes on happening inside. This is a fundamental law of life.
Atisha says: Discipline in many many things, be total, go into depth, to the very roots of everything -- because the secrets are in the roots, they are not in the flowers. Flowers are only expressions of joy, but the secrets are not there. Secrets are hidden in the roots, secrets are always hidden in darkness. You will have to go into dark depths, then only you will know the secrets. And the more you experience life in its multidimensionality, the richer will be your soul. It depends on you, how rich you make your soul, or how poor you live.
Millions of people are living a life of poverty -- and I don't necessarily mean the
outer poverty. I know rich people, and so poor that sometimes even beggars are richer than they are. I know rich people who can afford everything but have never experimented with anything, who are simply vegetating comfortably, who are simply dying, slowly slowly...
existing comfortably, but not living -- no intensity, no flair, no flame, no fire, just a cold life. Comfortably they will live and comfortably they will die -- but in fact they will never have lived.
And one who has never lived, how can he die?
Death is the ultimate mystery. That gift is given only to those who have lived really intensely, who have burned their torch of life from both the ends together. Only then it happens sometimes that in a single moment of intensity the whole life is revealed. In a single moment of total intensity, the whole eternity opens its doors to you, you are welcomed by God.
God is not found by praying on your knees; God is not found in the temples and churches. God is found in intense living -- a life of depth, depth and totality, and a death also of depth and totality. Live totally and die totally, and God is yours and truth is yours.
The second sutra:
ALWAYS MEDITATE ON SPECIFIC OBJECTS.
First thing: by meditation Atisha never means concentration, remember. Concentration and meditation are polar opposites. Concentration narrows down your mind; it is focusing on one point. It includes only something and excludes everything else. Meditation is all-inclusive, it excludes nothing. It is not a narrowing down of the mind, it is an expansion of consciousness. Concentration is of the mind, meditation is of consciousness.
Concentration is mind, meditation is no-mind. Concentration is a tension: you will be tired of it sooner or later. You cannot concentrate for a long time, it is effort. But one can be meditative twenty-four hours, because it is relaxation.
So remember, Atisha says:
ALWAYS MEDITATE -- he means always relax -- ON SPECIFIC OBJECTS.
What does he mean by "specific objects"? Sadness, anger, greed, lust -- the negatives; love, beauty, joy, freedom -- the positives.
Begin with the negative, because you are living in the negative. When sad, meditate on it.
Don't be in a hurry to get rid of it, don't be in a hurry to get occupied somewhere else so that you can forget it. That will be missing an opportunity, because sadness has its own depth, sadness has its own beauty, sadness has its own taste. Live it, relax into it, be it --
and without any effort to escape, without any effort to get occupied somewhere else. Let it be there -- enjoy! It is a flowering of your being. Sadness too is a flowering of your being.
And you will be surprised: if you can meditate on sadness, sadness will reveal its secrets to you -- and they are of tremendous value. And sadness, once it has revealed its secrets to you, will disappear. Its work is done, its message delivered. And when sadness disappears, joy arises.
Joy arises only when sadness disappears out of meditation; there is no other way. Joy wells up when you have broken the ice of sadness that surrounds it. In fact, sadness is like the shell that surrounds the seed; it is protective, it is not the enemy. Once the seed has dropped its protection, is surrendered into the soil, the shell has died, only then the sprout is born.
It happens inside exactly like that. Meditate on anything negative, and slowly slowly you will be simply taken by surprise -- that sadness turns into joy, that anger turns into compassion, that greed turns into sharing, and so on, so forth. This is the science of inner alchemy: how to change the negative into the positive, how to change the base metal into gold.
But remember, never start with the positive because you don't know anything of the positive. And that's what is being taught by many people in the world -- the "positive thinkers" they are called. They don't know anything about the inner alchemy. You don't begin with gold. If you already have gold, then what is the point of beginning at all? You don't need alchemy. You have to begin with base metal, the base metal has to be changed into gold. And the base metal is what you have, is what you ARE. Hell is what you are; it has to be transformed into heaven. Poison is available; it has to be transformed into nectar. Start with the
negative.
All the buddhas have insisted: Go VIA NEGATIVA, because the negative brings the positive, and the negative brings the positive so easily. You don't drag it, you don't impose it upon yourself. If you start with the positive, as the so-called positive thinkers are teaching, you will become phony. What will you do? How will you start with joy?
You may start smiling, but that smile will be painted: it will be just on the lips, not even skin-deep.
Start with the negative and you don't need to think about the positive at all. If you meditate on the negative, if you go deeply into it, to the deepest root of it, suddenly an explosion happens: the negative disappears and the positive has arrived. In fact it has always been there, hidden behind the negative. The negative was a shelter. The negative was needed because you were not yet worthy enough; the negative was needed so that you could become worthy enough to receive the positive.
The world is the negative pole of God. You need not renounce it, you have simply to be meditative in it. And one day you will see the world has disappeared and there is God and only God.
Bayazid of Bistam, a Sufi mystic, used to say in his later years, "First I used to ask people, 'Where is God?' And then one day it happened, I started asking people where God is NOT. One day there was no God and I was asking where he is; the next day there was only God, and I was asking 'Is there a place where he is not?'" The same world, but your eyes are different now; you are not the same.
ALWAYS MEDITATE ON SPECIFIC OBJECTS.
Start with the negative and you will find the positive. Dig a well. First you find only earth, rocks, garbage. Slowly slowly you come to the water. First it is very dirty, then it becomes purer and purer and purer. Exactly the same way one has to dig a well within one's own being. The beginning has to be negative, and the end is of itself positive. Your work has to be with the negative; the positive is the reward.
The third sutra:
YOU SHOULD HAVE NO CONCERN FOR OTHER FACTORS.
Atisha says: While you are meditating on any specific subject -- for example, sadness --
then be it and forget everything else, as if nothing else exists. Just be totally sad. Savor it, taste it, let it sink in you, soak in it; just be a sponge.
That's what meditation is all about: just be a sponge. And when this mood is there, soak in it to your total capacity, to the optimum. Meditating on sadness, be it. Meditating simply means dropping the distinction between the observer and the observed; let the observer become the observed. Drop that old dichotomy of object and subject; disappear into the object of your meditation. Don't stand aloof, don't be a spectator. Secrets are not revealed to the spectators; secrets are revealed only to those who take a jump, who dive deep into something, people who don't hold themselves back.
And if you are totally sad, you are just on the verge of a discovery: sadness will evaporate. At a certain intensity, at a certain point, it simply evaporates as dewdrops evaporate in the morning sun. Once the heat has reached a certain intensity, the dewdrops disappear. Exactly like that the sadness will disappear, and suddenly, out of nowhere, joy has arrived, the guest has arrived. Now be a host to it. Now meditate on it, again be one with it. Now be joy. Don't stand aloof again. Don't start thinking, "Such a beautiful experience is happening, I am having the experience of joy." Don't start creating a distance between you and the joy. Be the joy. Dance it, sing it. Manifest it, be it!
THEREFORE, APPLY YOURSELF TO IMPORTANT MATTERS.
Life is short, energy limited, very limited. And with this limited energy we have to find the unlimited; with this short life we have to find the eternal. A great task, a great challenge! So please, don't be concerned with unimportant matters.
What is important and what is unimportant? In Atisha's definition, or in the definition of all the buddhas, that which can be taken by death is unimportant and that which cannot be taken by death is important. Remember this definition, let this be a touchstone. You can judge anything immediately on this touchstone.
Have you seen the touchstone on which gold is judged? Let this be a touchstone for what is important: Is death going to take it away from you? Then it is not
important. Money then is not important -- useful, but not important, has no import. Power, prestige, respectability -- death will come and efface them all, so why make so much fuss about them for the few days you are here? This is a caravanserai, an overnight stay, and by the morning we go.
Remember, only that which you can take with you when you leave the body is important.
That means, except meditation, nothing is important. Except awareness, nothing is important, because only awareness cannot be taken away by death. Everything else will be snatched away, because everything else comes from without. Only awareness wells up within; that cannot be taken away. And the shadows of awareness -- compassion, love --
they cannot be taken away; they are intrinsic parts of awareness.
You will be taking with you only whatsoever awareness you have attained; that is your only real wealth. All else is "illth," not wealth.
DON'T DO THINGS BACKWARDS.
This is a very significant sutra. I said to you in the beginning, people are upside down, in a permanent headstand posture. People are living backwards. Life moves forward, people live backwards in many many ways.
The first meaning is: the heart has to be the master and the head the servant. But people are upside down: the head has become the master and the heart has become the servant.
Logic rules, love is not even heeded. Personality has become more important than individuality. Personality is that which is conferred on you by others, individuality is that which is given to you by God. Personality is just a mask, persona; individuality is your uniqueness.
The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society -- in fact he is very inconvenient.
Jesus must have been very inconvenient; otherwise people don't kill, don't murder, don't crucify. If Jesus were really a personality, there would have been no trouble. He would have been a well-respected rabbi; the masses would have worshipped him, Jews would have remembered him as a great saint. But he was an individual. Individuals don't fit easily with others, individuals fit only with other individuals -- and then too, the harmony is not imposed, enforced, the harmony is natural. But individuals don't fit with personalities. Light cannot be adjusted with darkness, that is the trouble.
Jesus may have been too much of a troublemaker, because he only worked for three years, and in only three years he created so much offense that people had to kill him. And Jews are not dangerous people, Jews are business-minded people. In fact for these two thousand years Jews have been crying and weeping deep down, because they killed Jesus and missed the opportunity of the greatest business possible. Christianity is the greatest firm on the earth! Jews must have been very jealous.
This time when it was going to happen they didn't miss. Sigmund Freud was a Jew; he started another business, psychoanalysis. This time they did not miss -- all the important psychoanalysts are Jews. Now psychoanalysis is big business.
Jesus must have offended terribly; they could not tolerate him even for a single day. So too Socrates, Buddha and Mahavira -- all individuals have suffered because of the phony society. The truth becomes intolerable. But though they may have suffered from the outside, from the inside they lived a blissful life, they lived an orgasmic life. Each moment of their life was an orgasm, a deep love affair with existence.
Unless you start living right-side-up, you will go on missing being an individual, you will never become authentic. The head is good, but only as a servant, not as a master. The heart has to be the master; feelings should dominate thoughts. And once this has happened then another step can be taken: being should dominate feelings.
These are the three layers: thoughts, the outermost; and being, the innermost; and feeling, in between, the bridge. Move from thoughts to feelings and from feelings to being, and start living from being. That does not mean that you don't have any feelings -- you will have feelings, but those feelings will follow being; they will have the flavor of being, the heartbeat of being. It does not mean that
you will not be able to think -- you will be able to think far more intelligently, but now your thinking will have the juiciness of your feelings and the light of your being; your thoughts will be luminous.
Right now it is just the other way: thoughts are dominating feelings. And because of this domination, everything has gone topsy-turvy; because of this domination you cannot reach to the being, because thought is impotent to reach to the being. The inner is capable of reaching the outer, not vice versa. The center can touch the circumference, but not vice versa.
Future has become more important to you than the present. Present should be the central and everything should go round it. "That" has become more important than "this," "then"
has become more important than "now." Change these values. Unless you change these values you are not sannyasins. Let "now" be more important, let "here" be more important, let "this" be more important.
Upanishads say, "Thou art that." I say to you: "Thou art this" -- because "that" means far away, as if God is far away. "Thou art that" -- no. "Thou art THIS": this very moment, this air that surrounds you, these chirping birds, this railway train passing by, these trees, this sun, these people, I and you, this silence where neither I am, nor you are. Thou art this. Let "this" become more important than "that" and your life will have a totally different quality to it.
Because life goes ahead and your mind is past-oriented, mind and life never meet. Mind goes backwards, lives backwards. Mind is a rear-view mirror. Use it when the occasion arises. Yes, the rear-view mirror in the car has some important function to fulfill. But if you become obsessed with the rear-view mirror, and you only look into the rear-view mirror and drive the car looking always into the rear-view mirror, then there is going to be danger. Then there are going to be accidents and accidents and nothing else.
And that's what has been happening to humanity. Look: three thousand years of history and you will find only accidents and accidents and accidents. In three thousand years we have fought five thousand wars. What more accidents do you want? And in these three thousand years, what have we done to the earth, to nature? We have destroyed the ecology. Now if something is not done immediately, the earth may become uninhabitable.
The earth has been poisoned by us, we are killing it. And we have to live on it, and we are turning it into a corpse! It has started stinking in many places. We have given nature and earth a cancer: nature has given us life, and we are giving death to nature in return.
And the basic reason, the basic cause, is that we have been listening to the mind which moves backwards.
Mind means past. Mind has no idea of the present, cannot have any idea of the present.
Mind only means that which has been lived, known, experienced -- the accumulated past.
It cannot have any contact with the present; it will have that contact only when the present is no more present and has become past. And life moves ahead. We live in the present and we move in the future, and mind never lives in the present and always clings to the past. This is the dichotomy, the greatest calamity. This is the knot that has to be cut.
Atisha says: DON'T DO THINGS BACKWARDS.
Another meaning of this sutra is: remember life can be really lived only if you live it naturally. If you impose artificial commandments over it, you will destroy it.
For example, I told you: unless you love yourself you cannot love anybody else. Hence I say to you, be selfish, because only out of selfishness is altruism born. But you have been told again and again that you are worthless. You have been told that you have no value --
that as you are, you are only worth condemnation; that as you are, you are bound to hell.
You have to be worthy, you have to change, you have to become a saint, this and that.
One thing is certain: that as you are, you are not of any worth. How can you love yourself?
And when a person cannot love himself and hates himself, he hates everybody else, he hates the whole world. By hating himself he becomes life-negative, and the person who is life-negative is life-destructive.
Your monks and nuns have all been life-negative; they have not affirmed life, they have not nourished life, they have not beautified life, they have not been a blessing to the world. They have been a curse! Your monasteries should disappear; we don't need monasteries. We certainly need sannyasins, but they should live in the world, part of the world, transforming the world. But the basic transformation that has to happen is that they should be lovers of themselves.
The person who does not love himself becomes a masochist, he starts torturing himself.
And these masochists have been worshipped as saints down the ages. And a person who is a masochist cannot be anything else than a sadist too, because he who tortures himself would like everybody to be tortured. Torturing becomes his sacrifice to God.
So there have been masochists, there have been sadists. And because in life you cannot find any quality purely, so you will not find masochists and sadists separate. It is almost always the case that the same person is both: masosadist -- everybody is like that. You have been conditioned by your religions in such a way that you are against yourself and against others. On the one hand you torture yourself with beautiful rationalizations, and on the other hand you torture others, again with beautiful rationalizations.
Life has become a torture chamber, a concentration camp; it is no more a celebration. It should be a celebration. If nature is allowed to take its own course, it is bound to be a celebration.
So the last thing to be remembered:
DON'T DO THINGS BACKWARDS.
Go with nature, don't try to go upstream. Go with the stream of life. Go with the river, don't push the river. Don't try to conquer nature -- you cannot; you can only destroy it, and destroy yourself in the effort. The very idea of conquering nature is violent, ugly.
Victory is not going to be against nature, victory is possible only with nature. DON'T VACILLATE.
Your mind will vacillate. Mind is vacillation, mind is either/or, mind is always in that space of "to be or not to be." If you really want to grow, mature, if you really want to know what this life is all about, don't vacillate. Commit, involve! Involve yourself with life, get committed to life, don't remain a spectator. Don't go on thinking whether to do or not -- "Should I do this or that?" You can go on vacillating your whole life, and the more you vacillate, the more trained you become in vacillation.
Life is for those who know how to commit -- how to say yes to something, how to say no to something decisively, categorically. Once you have categorically said yes or no to something, then you can take a jump, then you can dive deep into the ocean.
People are just sitting on the fence. Millions of people are fence-sitters -- this way or that, just waiting for the opportunity to come. And the opportunity will never come, because it has already come, it is there!
My own suggestion is that even if sometimes it happens that you commit to the wrong thing, even then it is good to commit, because the day you will know it is wrong you can get out of it. At least you would have learned one thing: that it is wrong, and never to get into anything like that again. It is a great experience; it brings you closer to truth.
Why do people vacillate so much? -- because from the very childhood you have been told not to commit any mistakes. That is one of the greatest teachings of all the societies all over the world -- and very dangerous, very harmful. Teach children to commit as many mistakes as possible, with only one condition: don't commit the same mistake again, that's all. And they will grow, and they will experience more and more, and they will not vacillate. Otherwise a trembling... and time is passing by, out of your hands, and you are vacillating.
I see many people standing on the shore vacillating, whether to take the jump or not. Here it happens every day.
Just a few days ago, one young man came to me. For three years he has been vacillating whether to take sannyas or not. I said, "Decide either yes or no, and
be finished with it!
And I am not saying decide yes, I am only saying DECIDE. No is as good as yes. But wasting three years? If you had taken sannyas three years ago," I told him, "by this time you would have known whether it is worth it or not; at least one thing would have been decided. Vacillating three years, nothing has been decided. You are in the same space, and three years have gone by."
Atisha says: DON'T VACILLATE. TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.
This is the secret of meditation, the last sutra today. TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.
Mind is vacillation. The discipline of a meditator is to become so watchful of the mind, so alert to the mind and its stupidities -- its hesitations, its tremblings, its vacillations -- to become so watchful that you are cut off.
That is the whole purpose of watching: watching cuts you off.
Watch anything in the mind, and you are cut off. Watching is a sword.
If a thought is moving in your mind, just watch it -- and suddenly you will see the thought is there, you are here, and there is no bridge left. Don't watch, and you become identified with the thought, you become it; watch, and you are not it. Mind possesses you because you have forgotten how to watch. Learn it.
Just looking at a roseflower, watch it; or at the stars, or the people passing on the road, sit by the side and watch. And then slowly slowly close your eyes and see the inner traffic moving -- thousands of thoughts, desires, dreams, passing by. It is always rush hour there.
Just watch as somebody watches a river flowing by, sitting on the bank. Just watch -- and watching, you will become aware that you are not it.
Mind is being identified with it. No-mind is being disidentified with it. Don't be a mind, because in fact you are not a mind. Then who are you? You are consciousness. You are that watchfulness, you are witnessing, you are that pure observation, that mirrorlike quality that reflects everything but never becomes
identified with anything.
Remember, I am not saying that you are conscious. I am saying you are consciousness: that is your true identity. The day one knows, "I am consciousness," one has come to know the ultimate, because the moment you know, "I am consciousness," you also know all is consciousness, on different planes. The rock is conscious in its own way, and the tree is conscious in its own way, and the animals and the people. Everybody is conscious in his own way, and consciousness is a multifaceted diamond.
The day you know, "I am consciousness," you have known the universal truth, you have come to the goal.
Socrates says, "Man, know thyself." That is the teaching of all the buddhas: Know thyself. How are you going to know yourself? If mind remains too much and goes on clamoring around you, goes on making great noise, you will never hear the still small voice within. You have to become disidentified with the mind.
George Gurdjieff used to say, "My whole teaching can be condensed into one word, and that is disidentification." He is right. Not only his teaching can be condensed into one word, all the teaching of all the masters can be condensed into one word: disidentification. Don't be identified with the mind.
That is the meaning of Atisha. He says:
TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.
Discipline yourself into deep awareness, so that you are cut off from the mind. If you can have only a single moment of this cut-offness, the first satori has happened. In the second satori you become capable of cutting off from the mind whenever you want. In the first satori it happens accidentally: meditating, watching, one day it happens almost like an accident. You were groping in the dark and you have stumbled upon the door. The first satori is a stumbling on the door.
The second satori is becoming perfectly aware where the door is, and whenever you want to, you can go to the door -- whenever you want to go. Even in the marketplace, surrounded by all the clamor of the market, you can go to the door. Suddenly you can become cut off.
And the third satori is when you are absolutely cut off, so that even if you want to join with the mind, you cannot. You can use it like a machine, separate from you, but even in your deep sleep you are not identified with it.
These are the three satoris, three samadhis. First, accidental stumbling; second, becoming more deliberate, conscious in reaching to the door; and third, becoming attuned so deeply with the door that you never lose track of it, that it is always there, always open. This is the state called satori in Japan, samadhi in India. In English it is translated as ecstasy.
That word is beautiful; literally it means "standing out." Ecstasy means standing out, standing out of the mind.
Atisha's last sutra: TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF, is exactly the same as the meaning of the word ecstasy -- so cut off from the mind that you are standing out, that mind is there but you are not it. Some people have also started translating samadhi not as ecstasy but as instasy. That too is beautiful, because it is not standing out; it is standing out of the mind if you think of the mind, but if you think of consciousness then it is standing in.
As far as mind is concerned ecstasy is the right word, but as far as consciousness is concerned instasy is far better. But both are aspects of the same thing: standing out of the mind is standing in consciousness, knowing that "I am not mind" is knowing "I am consciousness, AHAM BRAHMASMI." That is the meaning of the Upanishadic saying, I am God, I am consciousness.
Enough for today. The Book of Wisdom Chapter #22
Chapter title: The greatest Joke there is 4 March 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive
code:
7903040
ShortTitle:
WISDOM22
Audio:
Yes Video: No Length:
100
mins
The first question:
Question 1
BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS INNOCENCE, WHAT IS BEAUTY?
Ram Fakeer, to live in the moment is innocence, to live without the past is innocence, to live without conclusions is innocence, to function out of the state of not knowing is innocence. And the moment you function out of such tremendous silence which is not burdened by any past, out of such tremendous stillness which knows nothing, the experience that happens is beauty.
Whenever you feel beauty -- in the rising sun, in the stars, in the flowers, or in the face of a woman or a man -- wherever and whenever you feel beauty, watch. And one thing will always be found: you had functioned without mind, you had functioned without any conclusion, you had simply functioned spontaneously. The moment gripped you, and the moment gripped you so deeply that you were cut off from the past.
And when you are cut off from the past you are cut off from the future automatically, because past and future are two aspects of the same coin; they are not separate, and they are not separable either. You can toss a coin: sometimes it
is heads, sometimes it is tails, but the other part is always there, hiding behind.
Past and future are two aspects of the same coin. The name of the coin is mind. When the whole coin is dropped, that dropping is innocence. Then you don't know who you are, then you don't know what is; there is no knowledge.
But you are, existence is, and the meeting of these two is-nesses -- the small is- ness of you, meeting with the infinite is-ness of existence -- that meeting, that merger, is the experience of beauty.
Innocence is the door; through innocence you enter into beauty. The more innocent you become, the more existence becomes beautiful. The more knowledgeable you are, the more and more existence is ugly, because you start functioning from conclusions, you start functioning from knowledge.
The moment you know, you destroy all poetry. The moment you know, and think that you know, you have created a barrier between yourself and that which is. Then everything is distorted. Then you don't hear with your ears, you translate. Then you don't see with your eyes, you interpret. Then you don't experience with your heart, you think that you experience. Then all possibility of meeting with existence in immediacy, in intimacy, is lost. You have fallen apart.
This is the original sin. And this is the whole story, the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once they have eaten the fruit of knowledge they are driven out of paradise. Not that somebody drove them out, not that God ordered them to get out of paradise, they themselves fell. Knowing they were no more innocent, knowing they were separate from existence, knowing they were egos... knowing created such a barrier, an iron barrier.
You ask me, Ram Fakeer, "What is innocence?"
Vomit knowledge! The fruit of the tree of knowledge has to be vomited. That's what meditation is all about. Throw it out of your system: it is poison, pure poison. Live without knowledge, knowing that "I don't know." Function out of this state of not knowing and you will know what beauty is.
Socrates knows what beauty is, because he functions out of this state of not knowing.
There is a knowledge that does not know, and there is an ignorance that knows. Become ignorant like Socrates and then a totally different quality enters your being: you become a child again, it is a rebirth. Your eyes are full of wonder again, each and everything that surrounds surprises. The bird on the wing, and you are thrilled! The sheer joy of seeing the bird on the wing -- and it is as if you are on the wing.
The dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf and the morning sun shining on it and creating a small rainbow around it, and the moment is so overwhelming... the dewdrop slipping off the leaf, just on the verge of meeting with the infinite, disappearing into the lake -- and it is as if you start slipping, as if your drop starts slipping into the ocean of God.
In the moment of innocence, not knowing, the difference between the observer and the observed evaporates. You are no more separate from that which you are seeing, you are no more separate from that which you are hearing.
Listening to me, right now, you can function in two ways. One is the way of knowledge: chattering inside yourself, judging, evaluating, constantly thinking whether what I am saying is right or wrong, whether it fits with your theories or not, whether it is logical or illogical, scientific or unscientific, Christian or Hindu, whether you can go with it or not, whether you can swallow it or not, a thousand and one thoughts clamoring inside your mind, the inner talk, the inner traffic -- this is one way of listening. But then you are listening from so far away that I will not be able to reach you.
I go on trying but I will not be able to reach you. You are really on some other planet: you are not here, you are not now. You are a Hindu, you are a Christian, you are a Mohammedan, you are a communist, but you are not here now. The Bible is there between me and you, or the Koran or the Gita. And I grope for you but I come across the barrier of the Koran, I grope for you but there is a queue of priests between me and you.
This is the way of knowledge, this is the way of remaining deaf, of remaining blind, of remaining heart-less.
There is another way of listening too: just listening, nothing between me and you. Then there is immediacy, contact, meeting, communion. Then you don't interpret, because you are not worried whether it is right or wrong. Nothing is
right, nothing is wrong. In that moment of innocence one does not evaluate. There is nothing to evaluate with, no criterion, no a priori knowledge, no already-arrived conclusion, nothing to compare with.
You can only listen, just as one listens to the running sound of water in the hills, or a solo flute player in the forest, or somebody playing on the guitar. You listen.
But the person who has come to listen as a critic will not listen. The person who has come simply to listen, not as a critic but to enjoy the moment, will be able to listen to the music. What is there to understand in music? There is nothing to understand. There is something to taste, certainly; there is something to drink and be drunk with, certainly, but what is there to understand?
But the critic, he is not there to taste, he is not there to drink -- he is there to understand.
He is not listening to the music because he is so full of mathematics. He is continuously criticizing, thinking. He is not innocent; he knows too much, hence he will miss the beauty of it. He may arrive at some stupid conclusions, but he will miss the whole moment. And the moment is momentous!
If you can listen, just listen, if you can see, just see, then this very moment you will know what innocence is.
And I am not here only to explain to you what innocence is, I am here to give a taste of it.
Have a cup of tea! I offer it to you, each moment it is being offered. Sip it -- feel the warmth of the moment and the music of it and the silence and the love that overflows. Be encompassed with it. Disappear for a moment with your mind -- watching, judging, criticizing, believing, disbelieving, for, against. For a moment be just an openness, and you will know what innocence is. And in that you will know what beauty is.
Beauty is an experience that happens in innocence, the flower that blooms in innocence.
Jesus says, "Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God."
The second question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 2
SOMETIMES I BELIEVE YOU AND SOMETIMES I DISBELIEVE YOU. HOW
LONG AM I TO LIVE IN THIS DUALITY? HOW AM I TO DROP THIS DUALITY
AND UNITE? PLEASE EXPLAIN.
Mohan Bharti, who has told you to believe in me? If you believe you will disbelieve too.
Nobody can believe without disbelieving. Let it be settled once for all: nobody can believe without disbelieving. Every belief is a cover-up for disbelief.
Belief is only the circumference of the center called doubt; because the doubt is there you create belief. The doubt hurts, it is like a wound, it is painful. Because the doubt is a wound it hurts; it makes you feel your inner emptiness, your inner ignorance. You want to cover it up. But hiding your wound behind a roseflower -
- do you think it is going to help? Do you think the roseflower will be able to help the wound disappear? Just the contrary! Sooner or later the roseflower will start stinking of the wound. The wound will not disappear because of the roseflower; in fact the roseflower will disappear because of the wound.
And you may be able to deceive somebody else who is looking from the outside
-- your neighbors may think that there is no wound, but a roseflower -- but how can you deceive yourself? That is impossible. Nobody can deceive himself; deep down somewhere you will know, you are bound to know, that the wound exists and you are hiding it behind a roseflower. And you know the roseflower is arbitrary: it has not grown in you, you have plucked it from the outside, while the wound has grown inside you; you have not plucked it from the outside.
The child brings the doubt in him -- an inner doubt, that is natural. It is because of the doubt he inquires, it is because of the doubt he questions. Go with a child for a morning walk in the woods, and he brings so many questions that you feel
bored, that you want to tell him to shut up. But he goes on asking.
From where are these questions coming? They are natural to the child. Doubt is an inner potential; it is the only way the child will be able to inquire and search and seek. Nothing is wrong about it. Your priests have been telling you a lie, that there is something wrong about doubt. There is nothing wrong about it. It is natural, and it has to be accepted and respected. When you respect your doubt, it is no longer a wound; when you reject it, it becomes a wound.
Let it be very clear: doubt itself is not a wound. It is a tremendous help, because it will make you an adventurer, explorer. It will take you to the farthest star in search of truth, it will make you a pilgrim. It is not unhealthy to have doubt. Doubt is beautiful, doubt is innocent, doubt is natural. But the priests have condemned it down the ages. Because of their condemnation, the doubt which could have become a flowering of trust has become just a stinking wound. Condemn anything and it becomes a wound, reject anything and it becomes a wound.
My teaching is: the first thing to be done, Mohan Bharti, is not to try to believe. Why? If doubt is there, doubt is there! There is no need to hide it. In fact, allow it, help it, let it become a great quest. Let it become a thousand and one questions -- and ultimately you will see it is not the questions that are relevant, it is the question mark! Doubt is not a search for belief; doubt simply is groping for the mystery, making every effort to understand the un-understandable, to comprehend the incomprehensible -- a groping effort.
And if you go on searching, seeking, without stuffing yourself with borrowed beliefs, two things will happen. One: you will never have any disbelief. Remember, doubt and disbelief are not synonymous. Disbelief happens only when you have already believed, when you have already deceived yourself and others. Disbelief comes only when belief has entered in; it is a shadow of belief.
All believers are disbelievers -- they may be Hindus, they may be Christians, they may be Jainas. I know all of them: all believers are disbelievers, because belief brings disbelief, it is the shadow of belief. Can you believe without disbelieving? It is impossible; it cannot be done in the nature of things. If you want to disbelieve, the first requirement is to believe. Can you believe without any disbelief entering from the back door? Or can you disbelieve without having any belief in the first place? Believe in God, and immediately the disbelief
comes in. Believe in afterlife and disbelief arises. Disbelief is secondary, belief is primary.
And, Mohan Bharti, what you want to do is what millions of people in the world want to do: they don't want the disbelief, they want only the belief. I cannot help, nobody can help. If you only are interested in belief, you will have to suffer the disbelief also. You will remain divided, you will remain split, you will remain schizophrenic. You cannot have the feel of organic unity; you yourself have barred it from happening.
What's my suggestion? First, drop believing. Let beliefs be dropped, they are all rubbish!
Trust in doubt, that's my suggestion; don't try to hide it. Trust in doubt. That is the first thing to bring in your being: trust in your doubt. And see the beauty of it, how beautifully trust has come in.
I am not saying believe, I am saying TRUST. The doubt is a natural gift; it must be from God -- from where else can it be? You bring doubt with you: trust in it, trust in your questioning. And don't be in a hurry to stuff and hide it with borrowed beliefs from the outside -- from the parents, from the priests, from the politicians, from the society, the church. Your doubt is something beautiful because it is yours; it is something beautiful because it is authentic. Out of this authentic doubt some day will grow the flower of authentic trust. It will be an inner growth, it will not be an imposition from the outside.
That is the difference between belief and trust: trust grows inside you, in your interiority, in your subjectivity. Just as doubt is inner, so is trust. And only the inner can transform the inner. Belief is from the outside; it can't help because it can't reach to the innermost core of your being, and it is there that the doubt is.
From where to start? Trust your doubt. That's my way of bringing trust in. Don't believe in God, don't believe in the soul, don't believe in the afterlife. Trust in your doubt, and immediately a conversion has started. Trust is such a powerful force that even if you trust in your doubt you have brought light in. And doubt is like darkness. That small trust in doubt will start changing your inner world, the inner scene.
And question! Why be afraid? Why be so cowardly? Question -- question all the buddhas, question me, because if there is truth, truth is not afraid of your
questioning. If buddhas are true, they are true; you need not believe in them. Go on doubting them... and still one day you will see trust has arisen.
When you doubt, and you go on in doubting to the very end, to the very logical end, sooner or later you will stumble upon a truth. Doubt is groping in darkness, but the door exists. If Buddha could get to the door, if Jesus could get to it, if Atisha could get to it, if I can get to it, why can't you? Everybody is capable of getting to the door -- but you are afraid of groping, so you sit in your dark corner believing in somebody who has found the door. You have not seen that somebody, you have heard about him from others who have heard it from others, and so on, so forth.
How do you believe in Jesus? Why? You have not seen Jesus! And even if you had seen him you would have missed. The day he was crucified, thousands had gathered to see him, and do you know what they were doing? They were spitting on his face! You may have been in that crowd, because that crowd was not different at all. Man has not changed.
Darwin says man has evolved out of the monkey. Maybe, but since then evolution seems to have stopped. It must have been an accident, some monkey must have fallen from the tree and could not get back. Maybe he was fractured or became afraid of falling again, so he started living on the earth. When you live in the trees you can live with all your four hands or four legs, but when you live on the earth you have to stand on two legs.
Because the monkey was able to look all over the place from the trees... he had always lived that way, looking all over the place; there was no danger, he could see far away.
Once he was on the ground, living on all fours was dangerous. He could not see all around, he could see only just two, three feet in front of himself, and he was afraid -- that was not his way of living. He had lived always in a kind of security in the trees, looking all over the place. Wherever the enemy was, he was aware; he could protect himself. Out of sheer fear he had to stand on two legs on the ground. Just think of that hilarious situation: a monkey trying to stand on two legs! All the monkeys must have laughed uproariously, "Look at that fool, what he is trying to do!"
Since then evolution seems to have stopped. Nothing has happened since then.
Man has lived almost the same way, his mind has not changed. Yes, things have changed: we live in better houses with better plumbing... I am not talking about India!
Some sannyasin has just asked me, "Osho, You say life is beautiful. I could have believed you -- but two things, women and Indian plumbing, they don't allow me to believe in it."
Women can be changed -- but Indian plumbing? No!
We have better roads and better vehicles to carry you from one place to another, great technology -- man has landed on the moon -- but man has not changed. That's why I say many of you must have been in the crowd that was spitting on Jesus, and many of you must have been in the crowd that was witnessing Mansoor's murder, who were throwing stones at the murdered mystic. You have not changed.
How can you believe in Jesus? You were spitting on his face when he was alive, and now you believe in him, after two thousand years? It is just a desperate effort to hide your doubt. Why do you believe in Jesus?
If one thing can be dropped from the Jesus story, the whole of Christianity will disappear.
If one thing, only one thing, the phenomenon of resurrection -- that after being crucified and remaining dead three days, Jesus came back again -- if this part can be dropped, the whole of Christianity will disappear. You believe in Jesus because you are afraid of death, and he seems to be the only man who has come back again, who has defeated death.
Christianity became the greatest religion in the world. Buddhism could not become that great, for the simple reason that the fear of death helps people to believe in Christ more than in Buddha. In fact to believe in Buddha needs guts, because Buddha says, "I teach you total death." This small death -- he is not satisfied with it. He says: This small death won't do, you will be coming back again. I teach you the total death, the ultimate death.
Annihilation I teach, so that you will never come back again, so that you will disappear, you will be diffused in existence, you won't be any more, any longer; not even a trace will be left behind.
In India Buddhism disappeared, completely disappeared. Such a great, so-called religious country, and Buddhism completely disappeared. Why? People believe in religions which teach that you will live after death, that the soul is immortal. Buddha was saying that the only thing worth realizing is that you are not. Buddhism could not survive in India, because it didn't give you a cover-up for your fear.
Buddha did not say to people, "Believe in me." Hence his teaching disappeared from this country, because people want to believe. People don't want truth, they want belief. Belief is cheap. Truth is dangerous, arduous, difficult; one has to pay for it. One has to seek and search, and there is no guarantee that you will find it, there is no guarantee that there is any truth anywhere. It may not be at all; the goal may not exist.
People want belief, and Buddha said... his last message to the world was "appo dipo bhava; be a light unto yourself." He had said this because his disciples were crying. Ten thousand sannyasins surrounding him... of course they were sad, and tears were falling; their master was leaving. And Buddha said to them, "Don't cry. Why are you crying?"
One of the disciples, Ananda, said, "Because you are leaving us, because you were our only hope, because we had hoped and hoped long that it is through you we will attain to truth."
It was to answer Ananda that Buddha said, "Don't be worried about that. I cannot give you truth; nobody else can give it to you, it is not transferable. But you can attain it on your own. Be a light unto yourself."
Mohan Bharti, the same is my attitude. You need not believe in me. I don't want believers here, I want seekers, and the seeker is a totally different phenomenon. The believer is not a seeker. The believer does not want to seek, that's why he believes. The believer wants to avoid seeking, that's why he believes. The believer wants to be delivered, saved, he needs a savior. He is always in search of a messiah -- somebody who can eat for him, chew for him, digest for him. But if I eat, your hunger is not going to be satisfied.
Nobody can save you except yourself.
I need seekers here, inquirers, not believers. Believers are the most mediocre people in the world, the least intelligent people in the world. So forget about
belief, you are creating trouble for yourself. You start believing in me, then disbelief arises -- it is bound to arise, because I am not here to fit with your expectations.
Mohan Bharti comes from a Jaina family. It took great courage for him to become a sannyasin of mine. But the traditional mind is there; you cannot so easily get rid of it. So very deep down in the unconscious there are lurking expectations of how I should be.
Then disbelief is bound to arise.
I live in my own way, I don't consider you. I don't consider anybody at all -- because if you start considering others you can't live your life authentically. Consider and you will become phony. I know if I can live in a grass hut, thousands and thousands of Indians will come to worship me. If I can live naked, millions will think of me as a saint, a great saint. If I can eat only once a day, and that too by begging, the whole country will be happy with me. But I can't do these things, they are not natural to me.
It may have been natural for Mahavira to be naked; hence he was naked. And remember, people were not happy, because the people who were surrounding Mahavira had believed in Krishna and Rama, and they were not naked. So they were expecting Mahavira to behave like Krishna; they were expecting a flute, and he had none. They must have searched -- in fact there was nowhere to search, he was standing naked! He was not fulfilling their expectations. Where is the crown of peacock feathers? They had known Krishna; he was a totally different individual, a totally different expression of existence.
Very colorful he was, a rainbow, with peacock feathers as a crown, with beautiful flowers as garlands, the dress, the garments made of the best silk possible.
And he had ornaments on his body, diamonds, gold, ornaments like women. In those days, men used to have ornaments. That seems to be more natural, because in nature the male animal is more ornamental than the female. The male peacock has those beautiful feathers, the female peacock has no beautiful feathers at all. It is enough for her to be the female; that is enough. The male has to substitute something because he is not female: he has to look beautiful, he has to be ornamental. The male peacock dances, remember, not the female. That dance is a
substitute. He wants to look as beautiful as possible -- he is afraid he may not be chosen!
It is the male cuckoo that gives the call; that beautiful sound, that song, comes from the male cuckoo. The female simply sits, waits; just to be female is enough. Look in nature and you will be surprised: female animals are not ornamental at all. In the ancient days it was so with men too. The female is beautiful as she is, nature has made her beautiful.
So in those days of Krishna, five thousand years back, the male used to have beautiful garments, flowers, ornaments, and Hindus were accustomed to that idea. And then came Mahavira, standing naked, with no ornaments, no garments, nothing to beautify his body, just utterly naked. Not only that, he used to pull out his own hair. He must have looked a little crazy. Only crazy people pull out their hair; when madness possesses you, you pull out your hair. He was pulling it for a certain different reason -- because hair gives a certain beauty.
And the people who don't have hair, the bald people like me, have to create beautiful theories! They say that bald people are the most sexual. The whole theory is that people go bald in three ways. A few people start from the front: they are the most sexual. A few people start from the back: they are not sexual, they only think they are sexual. And a few people start in the middle: it is better not to say anything about them! Hair gives beauty.
Bald people must feel something has to be substituted, and they have created the rumor all over the world that bald people are very sexual.
Krishna and Rama were very aesthetic people, and Mahavira was totally different, very austere. But that was natural to him; he was beautiful in his nakedness, as beautiful as Krishna was with all his garments and ornaments. In fact, ancient scriptures say that Mahavira may have been the most beautiful man in the world. That may have been one of the reasons why he went naked. If you have a well-proportioned body, if your body is really beautiful, who cares about clothes?
Ugly people are very much worried about clothes, because that's how somehow they manage. Now, a woman who has an ugly body will not be ready to go naked on the beach. She will be very much against beaches; she will be very much against going naked, nude people and nudist camps. The only thing she is
really against is that she knows that if she goes naked it will be a really horrible scene!
Whenever a country becomes beautiful, people start becoming nude. Whenever it has happened that a race has become beautiful, people start going nude. There is no need to hide. We hide only the ugly part. But clothes are helpful to people who don't have beautiful bodies. You may not have a beautiful chest, manly chest, but you can wear stuffed coats and they can give a feel -- at least to the outsiders.
A man was searching on a nude beach... he was searching for his wife. A policeman was looking at him. He became suspicious and asked him, "What are you searching for? And for hours you have been searching... searching for some hidden treasure?"
He said, "No, just a sunken chest."
You can have stuffed clothes which can give a shape to your body.
Mahavira must have been beautiful -- that's my feeling too -- must have been a rare, beautiful man. But it was not expected, hence people were against him. No village, no town, was hospitable to him. He was driven away from villages and towns, stones were thrown at him, wild dogs were released behind him so that they could chase him out of the town -- just because he was nude! He was not doing any harm to anybody; the most harmless person you can think of, he would not even do harm to the ants. In the night he used to sleep only on one side. He would not change from one side to the other, because who knows, an ant may have crawled behind him in the night and if he turns over the ant may be killed. He would not walk in the night, because some insect may be killed. He would not walk on grass, on lawns; he would not walk in the rainy season, because so many insects are born in the rainy season. Such a harmless man, but yet people misbehaved with him. And the only reason? -- he was not fulfilling their expectations.
No buddha has ever fulfilled anybody's expectations. In fact that's why he becomes a buddha: he never compromises. Mohan Bharti, if you have any expectations about me you will again and again be in trouble, because I don't consider your expectations.
George Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples one of the most fundamental things:
"Don't consider others, otherwise you will never grow." And that's what is happening in the whole world, everybody is considering others: "What will my mother think? What will my father think? What will the society think? What will my wife, my husband...?" What to say of the parents -- even parents are afraid of children! They think, "What will our children think?"
One man came to me and he said, "Since I have become a sannyasin, my children think that I have gone crazy, they laugh at me. Nothing hurts me more than this, that my own children... they look at me from the window, they don't come inside the room! They whisper to each other -- I don't know what, but they talk about me. They think something has gone wrong."
People are considering each other -- and then there are millions of people to consider. If you go on considering each and everybody, you will never be an individual, you will be just a hodgepodge. So many compromises made, you would have committed suicide long ago.
It is said people die at the age of thirty and are buried at the age of seventy. Death happens very early -- I think thirty is also not right, death happens even earlier.
Somewhere near twenty-one, when the law and the state recognize you as a citizen, that is the moment when a person dies. In fact, that's why they recognize you as a citizen: now you are no more dangerous, now you are no more wild, now you are no more raw. Now everything has been put right in you, fixed right in you; now you have been adjusted to the society. That's what it means when the nation gives you the right to vote: the nation can trust now that your intelligence has been destroyed -- you can vote. There is no fear about you; you are a citizen, you are a civilized man. You are no more a man then, you are a citizen.
My own observation is, people die nearabout twenty-one. Then whatsoever is, is a posthumous existence. On the graves we should start writing three dates: birth, death, and posthumous death.
Mohan Bharti, first you believe in me -- that's where you go wrong, don't believe in me --
and then you disbelieve. Then you get caught up in the conflict, and the problem arises, What to do? How to get out of this duality? You create the duality and then you want to get out of it. I will not tell you how to get out of it, I will tell
you how not to get into it.
Why in the first place should you get into it?
They define a witty person as one who knows how to get out of difficulties, and the wise one as one who knows how never to get into them. Be wise. Why not cut the very root?
Don't believe in me, be a fellow traveler with me. That's what my sannyasins are: they are not believers, they are fellow travelers. They are walking with me into the unknown; they are walking with their own feet, on their own. I don't carry you on my shoulders, I don't want you to be cripples your whole life; I don't give you any crutches, you have to walk on your own.
Yes, I know the way, I have walked on it, I know all the pitfalls on the way. I will go on shouting loudly at you, "Beware, there is a pitfall!" But still it is up to you to decide whether to fall into it or not. If you fall into it I don't condemn you, I respect your freedom. If you don't fall into it I don't reward you, I take it for granted this is how an intelligent person behaves. So there is no reward with me and no punishment with me, there is no hell and no heaven, there is no sin, no virtue. This is my joy -- to share. If it is your joy to share it with me, good; we can go along as far as you decide to come along with me. The moment you want to have a separate way, it's perfectly good, we will depart with a goodbye.
There is no need to believe in me, there is no need to cling onto me. And then there is no question of disbelief, and the duality never arises, and you need not find a way to get out of it. Please don't get into it.
The third question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 3
WHAT IS EXACTLY YOUR ATTITUDE ABOUT DEATH?
Kamalesh, a mystic who was being led to the gallows saw a big crowd running on before him. "Don't be in such a hurry," he said to them. "I can assure you, nothing will happen without me."
That's my attitude towards death: it is the greatest joke there is. Death has never happened, cannot happen in the very nature of things, because life is eternal. Life cannot end; it is not a thing, it is a process. It is not something that begins and ends; it has no beginning and no end. You have always been here in different forms, and you will be here in different forms, or, ultimately, formless. That's how a buddha lives in existence: he becomes formlessness. He disappears from the gross forms totally.
Death is not there, it is a lie -- but it appears very real. It only appears very real, it is not.
It appears so because you believe too much in your separate existence. It is in believing that you are separate from existence that you give reality to death. Drop this idea of being separate from existence, and death disappears.
If I am one with existence, how can I die? Existence was there before me and will be there after me. I am just a ripple in the ocean, and the ripple comes and goes, the ocean remains, abides. Yes, you will not be there -- as you are you will not be there. This form will disappear, but the one who is abiding in this form will go on abiding, either in other forms or ultimately in formlessness.
Start feeling one with existence, because that's how it is. That's why my insistence again and again to let the distinction between the observer and the observed disappear, as many times during the day as possible. Find a few moments -- whenever you can find, wherever you can find -- and just let this distinction and difference between the observer and the observed disappear. Become the tree you are seeing and become the cloud you are looking at, and slowly slowly you will start laughing at death.
This mystic who was being led to the gallows must have seen the utter lie of death, he could joke about his own death. He was being led to the gallows, he saw a big crowd running on before him; they were going to see the crucifixion.…
People are very much interested in such things. If they hear that somebody is being murdered publicly, thousands of people will gather to see it. Why this attraction? Deep down you are all murderers, and this is a vicarious way to enjoy it. That's why films about murder and violence, detective novels, are so much in vogue, popular. Unless a film has murder in it and suicide in it and obscene sex in it, it never becomes a box office hit. It never succeeds, it fails. Why? --
because nobody is interested in anything else.
These are deep desires in your being. Seeing them on the screen, there is a vicarious enjoyment as if you are doing it; you become identified with the characters in the film or in the novel.
Now this mystic was being led to the gallows. He saw a big crowd running on before him. "Don't be in such a hurry," he said to them. "I can assure you nothing will happen without me. You can walk easily, slowly, there is no hurry. I am the person they are going to kill, and nothing is going to happen without me."
This is my attitude about death. Laugh! Let laughter be your attitude about death. It is a cosmic lie created by man himself, created by the ego, by selfconsciousness.
That's why in nature no other animal, bird, tree is afraid of death. Only man, and he makes so much fuss out of it... his whole life trembling. Death is coming closer, and because of death he cannot allow himself to live totally. How can you live if you are so afraid? Life is possible only without fear. Life is possible only with love, not with fear.
And death creates fear.
And who is the culprit? God has not created death, it is man's own invention. Create the ego, and you have created the other side of it -- death.
The fourth question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 4
I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT I AM. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
Naresh, it is impossible. It is impossible to say that "I am not" -- because even to say that you have to be. One of the great philosophers of the West, the modern father of philosophy in the West, was Descartes. His whole life was an inquiry for something indubitable, which cannot be doubted. He wanted a foundation, and a foundation which cannot be doubted; only then the right edifice can be built upon it. He searched, very sincerely he searched.
God can be doubted, the other life can be doubted, even the existence of the other can be doubted. I am here, you can see me; but who knows, you may be dreaming, because in dream also you see the other, and in dream the other seems as real as in the so-called real life. You never doubt in your dream. In fact, in the real life you may doubt sometimes, but in the dream it is indubitable.
Chuang Tzu is reported to have said, "My greatest problem is one which I am unable to solve. The problem is that one night I dreamed that I am a butterfly. Since that night I am confused."
A friend asked, "What is your confusion? Everybody dreams, there is nothing special about it. Why be so worried about it, that you are a butterfly in a dream? So what?"
He said, "Since that day I am puzzled, I cannot decide who I am. If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in the dream, who knows -- when the butterfly goes to sleep, she may dream that she is Chuang Tzu. Then am I really Chuang Tzu or just a butterfly dreaming?
If this is possible, that Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly, then that too is possible. A butterfly resting in the afternoon sun underneath the shadow of a tree may be dreaming that she has become a Chuang Tzu. Now who am I? -- a butterfly dreaming, or Chuang Tzu dreaming?"
It is difficult. Even to decide the other is, is difficult, very difficult.
Descartes searched long. Then he stumbled upon only one fact, and that fact is "I am."
That cannot be doubted, that's impossible, because even to say, "I am not," you are required.
Wife: "I think I hear burglars. Are you awake?" Husband: "No!"
Now, if you are not awake, how can you say "No"? That "No" presupposes that you are awake.
You ask me: "I cannot believe that I am."
It is not a question of belief; you ARE. Who is this who cannot believe? Who is this who is full of doubt? Can doubt exist without a doubter? Can dream exist without a dreamer?
If the dream is there, one thing is absolutely certain: the dreamer is there. If the doubt is there, then one thing is absolutely certain: the doubter is there.
This is the foundation of all religions: "I am." It need not be believed -- there is no question of belief, it is a simple fact. Close your eyes and try to deny it. You cannot deny it, because in the very denial you will be proving it.
But this age is the age of doubt. And remember, any age that is the age of doubt is a great age. When great doubts arise in the human heart, great things are bound to happen. When great doubts arise, great challenges arise.
Now this is the greatest challenge for you, Naresh -- to go deeper into this doubter who doubts even the existence of his own being. Go into this doubt, go into this doubter. Let this become your meditation, and reaching deeper into it you will see that this is the only indubitable fact in existence, the only truth which cannot be doubted.
And once you have felt it, trust arises. The last question:
Question 5
BELOVED OSHO, ARE ALL MINDS JEWISH?
Abhiyana, there is some truth in it, it is so. To be a Jew has nothing to do with any race.
Jewishness is really a quality -- the quality that calculates, the quality that thinks always in terms of business. That's why the other day I said to you that it is really unbelievable how the Italians could snatch the greatest business from the Jews. It is really unbelievable, it is a miracle, because the Vatican is the greatest business on the earth. All the Rockefellers and all the Morgans and all the Fords put together still fall short.
Jewishness is a quality; it can be found in a Hindu, it can be found in a Jaina, it
can be found in a Christian, in a Buddhist. It is the quality of calculation. It can become great intelligence, it can also become great cunningness -- both alternatives are there.
Jews have given the greatest minds to the world; the people who have dominated this century were all Jews. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, the three great minds who have dominated, who have left their immense impact on modern humanity, were all Jews. Jews snatch more Nobel prizes than anybody else. That is one part: the mind can become very intelligent. But the other part is, it can become very cunning, mean, calculative.
On his way home from the market, where he bought a beautiful horse at a very good price, Moses is surprised by a storm -- and the Siberian storms are really frightening!
"My God, if you grant me safety," he prays, "I promise to sell my horse and give the money to the poor."
As soon as he uttered these words, the snow stopped and the sky cleared up. So Moses arrived home safely.
The following week, with a heavy heart, he went to the market to sell his horse. But he took a goose with him.
"How much for the horse?" Old Isaac asked him.
"The horse is sold with the goose," answered Moses. "Two rubles for the horse, and a hundred rubles for the goose! "
That calculativeness, that cunningness -- now he is even deceiving God!
One small boy -- must have been Jewish -- was going to the synagogue. His mother had given him two small coins, one for himself and one to be offered to God in the synagogue. On the way he was playing with the coins, and one coin slipped from his hand, went into a hole. The boy stood there, looked at the sky and said, "So take your coin! Here goes your coin, God! You are omnipotent, so you can find it anywhere. It will be a little difficult for me."
Just a small boy -- but he finds a way out of the problem. This quality is Jewishness.
Ibrahim Silberstein, a rich merchant, invites all his friends to a party to celebrate his twenty-five years of marriage.
On his invitation card is written: "The presents of the guests who cannot visit us on this occasion will be returned."
One of his clients, Zacharia, after receiving the invitation, borrows a magnificent silver chandelier from the jewelry shop and tells his wife, Esther, "I have got a great idea, dear!
We will send this chandelier as a present to the Silbersteins, but we won't visit them, so it won't cost us anything as they will return it to us!"
Zacharia sends the chandelier and patiently waits for the return of the present. One week goes by, then two, then three: no sign of the chandelier. Very nervous, Zacharia finally decides to go and see the Silbersteins. Silberstein warmly greets his generous friend: "Ah, finally, there you are! I knew you were coming. Just this morning I was saying to my dear wife, Rebecca, 'If my old friend Zacharia does not come today, ah well, too bad, tomorrow we will have to send the chandelier back to him!"'
This quality, wherever it is found, is Jewishness.
If you try to watch your own mind you will find a Jew hidden there. Whenever you calculate and whenever you start living mathematically, whenever your life becomes just a business, just a logic; whenever you lose love, whenever you lose the quality to share, to risk, to gamble; whenever you lose the quality of giving wholeheartedly for the sheer joy of giving, beware of the Jew within.
But the Jew is very difficult to destroy, because it pays you. It helps you to succeed in the world, it helps you to become famous in the world, it offers you the whole world. If you are really calculative, the whole world is yours. The temptation is great. If you are tempted by the world and all that it can offer, you cannot get rid of the inner Jew.
And unless you get rid of the inner Jew you will never be religious, you will never have innocence -- and without innocence there is no beauty, no benediction.
Enough for today.
The Book of Wisdom Chapter #23
Chapter title: Behind the Master's Hands 5 March 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive
code:
7903050
ShortTitle:
WISDOM23
Audio:
Yes Video: No Length:
105
mins
The first question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 1
WHERE IS THE WITNESS WHEN THE OBSERVER AND THE OBSERVED BECOME ONE?
Anand Pravesh, the observer and the observed are two aspects of the witness.
When they disappear into each other, when they melt into each other, when they are one, the witness for the first time arises in its totality.
But this question arises in many people; the reason is that they think the witness is the observer. In their minds, the observer and the witness are synonymous. It is fallacious; the observer is not the witness, but only a part of it. And whenever the part thinks of itself as the whole, error arises.
The observer means the subjective, and the observed means the objective. The observer means that which is outside the observed, and the observer also means that which is inside.
The inside and the outside can't be separate; they are together, they can only be together.
When this togetherness, or rather oneness, is experienced, the witness arises. You cannot practice the witness. If you practice the witness you will be practicing only the observer, and the observer is not the witness.
Then what has to be done? Melting has to be done, merging has to be done. Seeing a roseflower, forget completely that there is an object seen and a subject as a seer. Let the beauty of the moment, the benediction of the moment, overwhelm you both, so the rose and you are no more separate, but you become one rhythm, one song, one ecstasy.
Loving, experiencing music, looking at the sunset, let it happen again and again. The more it happens the better, because it is not an art but a knack. You have to get the knack of it; once you have got it, you can trigger it anywhere, any moment.
When the witness arises, there is nobody who is witnessing and there is nothing to be witnessed. It is a pure mirror, mirroring nothing. Even to say it is a mirror is not right; it will be better to say it is a mirroring. It is more a dynamic process of melting and merging; it is not a static phenomenon, it is a flow. The rose reaching you, you reaching into the rose: it is a sharing of being.
Forget that idea that the witness is the observer; it is not. The observer can be practiced, the witness happens. The observer is a kind of concentration, and the observer keeps you separate. The observer will enhance, strengthen your ego. The more you become an observer, the more you will feel like an island --
separate, aloof, distant.
Down the ages, the monks all over the world have been practicing the observer. They may have called it the witness, but it is not the witness. The witness is something totally different, qualitatively different. The observer can be practiced, cultivated; you can become a better observer through practicing it.
The scientist observes, the mystic witnesses. The whole process of science is that of observation; very keen, acute, sharp observation, so nothing is missed. But the scientist does not come to know God. Although his observation is very very expert, yet he remains unaware of God. He never comes across God; on the contrary, he denies that God is, because the more he observes -- and his whole process is that of observation -- the more he becomes separate from existence. The bridges are broken and walls arise; he becomes imprisoned in his own ego.
The mystic witnesses. But remember, witnessing is a happening, a by-product -- a by-product of being total in any moment, in any situation, in any experience. Totality is the key: out of totality arises the benediction of witnessing. Forget all about observing. It will give you more accurate information about the observed object, but you will remain absolutely oblivious of your own consciousness.
Science is objective, art is subjective, religion is neither -- neti neti, neither this nor that.
Then what is religion? Religion is the meeting of the object and the subject, religion is the meeting of the lover and the beloved. Religion is the disappearance of the separation, of the duality. And in that separation energy is released; energy that was confined by the dual, that was kept separate, simply dances in utter unity.
That unity is witnessing. It happens only once in a while to you, and even then you don't take much note of it, because it comes like a flash and it is gone. And because you don't understand it, you don't preserve the experience. In fact you neglect it, you ignore it; it seems to be dangerous.
It happens when you are in a deep orgasmic state, when the woman and man meet and merge and disappear into each other. It happens only for a single moment at the highest peak. When their energies are no more two, when the energies have penetrated into each other so deeply that you cannot call them two at all... that orgasmic peak is the moment where witnessing arises. This is the
whole secret of Tantra. Tantra discovered that in orgasmic ecstasy witnessing arises on its own accord. It is a gift from God, a natural gift to enter into samadhi.
But it happens in all creative experiences, because all creative experiences are orgasmic; in a subtle sense, there is something of the sexual and the sensuous in them. When a painter looks at the trees, then the green and the red and the gold of the trees is not the same as when you look at the trees. His experience is orgasmic, he is utterly lost in it. He is not there as an observer, he falls in deep rapport. He becomes one with the green and the red and the gold of the trees.
The painter knows that looking at the beautiful existence is an orgasmic experience.
Hence, while the painter is painting, he becomes absolutely nonsexual; he becomes celibate. He is already experiencing orgasmic joy, he need not go into sex at all. Celibacy comes naturally to him.
Thousands of poets and painters and musicians have remained celibate, and with no effort. Monks remain celibate with great effort. Why? The monk is uncreative; in his life there is no orgasmic experience, his mind hankers for the sexual experience. The poet, the musician, the artist, the dancer who is capable of being lost into whatsoever he is doing, is having orgasmic experiences on a higher plane; sex is not a necessity. If once in a while such a person moves into sex, it is not out of need, it is just playfulness, it is simple playfulness. And when sex has the quality of playfulness it is sacred. When it is out of need it is a little bit ugly, because out of need you exploit the other, and out of need it can never take you to the highest orgasmic peak. You remain always discontented somewhere or other, because out of need means there is a motive, there is goal- orientation. There is manipulation, exploitation, an effort to use the other as a means.
When you are simply playful, it is totally different.
D.H. Lawrence is right when he says that he experienced God in sexual orgasm. But his sexuality is totally different from the sexuality of the monks. They will not be able to understand Lawrence.
Lawrence was one of the most misunderstood men of this century -- one of the most beautiful, one of the most creative, one of the most precious, but the most
misunderstood.
And the reason is that his experience has a totally different quality. When he is talking about sexual orgasm, he is not talking about your sexual orgasm, he is talking about his sexual orgasm. Only very rare people will be able to understand him. He is a natural tantrika -- unaware of the science of Tantra, but he stumbled upon it. Somehow a window has opened in his life; his sensuality is spiritual.
It is not a question of what you do, it is a question of how you do it. And ultimately it is a question whether you do it or you allow it to happen. If you allow it to happen, then whenever there is a creative meeting you will suddenly become a witness. The observer and the observed become one in it -- in fact it happens only when they become one.
The second question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 2
PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP OF CONSCIOUSNESS
AND ENERGY.
Prem Naren, modern physics has discovered one of the greatest things ever discovered, and that is: matter is energy. That is the greatest contribution of Albert Einstein to humanity: e is equal to mc2, matter is energy. Matter only appears... otherwise there is no such thing as matter, nothing is solid. Even the solid rock is a pulsating energy, even the solid rock is as much energy as the roaring ocean. The waves that are arising in the solid rock cannot be seen because they are very subtle, but the rock is waving, pulsating, breathing; it is alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche has declared that God is dead. God is not dead -- on the contrary, what has happened is that matter is dead. Matter has been found not to exist at all. This insight into matter brings modern physics very close to mysticism, very close. For the first time the scientist and the mystic are coming very close, almost holding hands.
Eddington, one of the greatest scientists of this age, has said, "We used to think that matter is a thing; now it is no more so. Matter is more like a thought than like a thing."
Existence is energy. Science has discovered that the observed is energy, the object is energy. Down the ages, at least for five thousand years, it has been known that the other polarity -- the subject, the observer, consciousness -- is energy.
Your body is energy, your mind is energy, your soul is energy. Then what is the difference between these three? The difference is only of a different rhythm, different wavelengths, that's all. The body is gross -- energy functioning in a gross way, in a visible way.
Mind is a little more subtle, but still not too subtle, because you can close your eyes and you can see the thoughts moving; they can be seen. They are not as visible as your body; your body is visible to everybody else, it is publicly visible. Your thoughts are privately visible. Nobody else can see your thoughts; only you can see them -- or people who have worked very deeply into seeing thoughts. But ordinarily they are not visible to others.
And the third, the ultimate layer inside you, is that of consciousness. It is not even visible to you. It cannot be reduced into an object, it remains subject.
If all these three energies function in harmony, you are healthy and whole. If these energies don't function in harmony and accord you are ill, unhealthy; you are no more whole. And to be whole is to be holy.
The effort that we are making here is how to help you so that your body, your mind, your consciousness, can all dance in one rhythm, in a togetherness, in a deep harmony -- not in conflict at all, but in cooperation. The moment your body, mind and consciousness function together, you have become the trinity, and in that experience is God.
Your question is significant, Naren. You ask, "Please say something about the relationship of consciousness and energy."
There is no relationship of consciousness and energy. Consciousness is energy, purest energy; mind is not so pure, body is still less pure. Body is much too mixed, and mind is also not totally pure. Consciousness is total pure energy. But
you can know this consciousness only if you make a cosmos out of the three, and not a chaos. People are living in chaos: their bodies say one thing, their bodies want to go in one direction; their minds are completely oblivious of the body -- because for centuries you have been taught that you are not the body, for centuries you have been told that the body is your enemy, that you have to fight with it, that you have to destroy it, that the body is sin.
Because of all these ideas -- silly and stupid they are, harmful and poisonous they are, but they have been taught for so long that they have become part of your collective mind, they are there -- you don't experience your body in a rhythmic dance with yourself.
Hence my insistence on dancing and music, because it is only in dance that you will feel that your body, your mind and you are functioning together. And the joy is infinite when all these function together; the richness is great.
Consciousness is the highest form of energy. And when all these three energies function together, the fourth arrives. The fourth is always present when these three function together. When these three function in an organic unity, the fourth is always there; the fourth is nothing but that organic unity.
In the East, we have called that fourth simply "the fourth" -- turiya; we have not given it any name. The three have names, the fourth is nameless. To know the fourth is to know God. Let us say it in this way: God is when you are an organic orgasmic unity. God is not when you are a chaos, a disunity, a conflict. When you are a house divided against yourself there is no God.
When you are tremendously happy with yourself, happy as you are, blissful as you are, grateful as you are, and all your energies are dancing together, when you are an orchestra of all your energies, God is. That feeling of total unity is what God is. God is not a person somewhere, God is the experience of the three falling in such unity that the fourth arises.
And the fourth is more than the sum total of the parts.
If you dissect a painting, you will find the canvas and the colors, but the painting is not simply the sum total of the canvas and the colors; it is something more. That "something more" is expressed through the painting, color, canvas, the artist, but that "something more" is the beauty. Dissect the roseflower, and you will find all the chemicals and things it is constituted of, but the beauty will
disappear. It was not just the sum total of the parts, it was more.
The whole is more than the sum total of the parts; it expresses through the parts, but it is more. To understand that it is more is to understand God. God is that more, that plus. It is not a question of theology, it cannot be decided by logical argumentation. You have to feel beauty, you have to feel music, you have to feel dance. And ultimately you have to feel the dance in your body, mind, soul.
You have to learn how to play on these three energies so that they all become an orchestra. Then God is -- not that you see God, there is nothing to be seen; God is the ultimate seer, it is witnessing. Learn to melt your body, mind, soul; find out ways when you can function as a unity.
It happens many times that runners.… You will not think of running as a meditation, but runners sometimes have felt a tremendous experience of meditation. They were surprised, because they were not looking for it -- who thinks that a runner is going to experience God? -- but it has happened, and now running is becoming more and more a new kind of meditation. It can happen in running. If you have ever been a runner, if you have enjoyed running in the early morning when the air is fresh and young and the whole world is coming back out of sleep, awakening, and you were running and your body was functioning beautifully, and the fresh air, and the new world again born out of the darkness of the night, and everything singing all around, and you were feeling so alive.…
A moment comes when the runner disappears, there is only running. The body, mind and soul start functioning together; suddenly an inner orgasm is released.
Runners have sometimes come accidentally on the experience of the fourth, turiya, although they will miss it because they will think it was just because of running that they enjoyed the moment; that it was a beautiful day, that the body was healthy and the world was beautiful, and it was just a certain mood. They will not take note of it. But if they take note of it, my own observation is that a runner can more easily come close to meditation than anybody else. Jogging can be of immense help, swimming can be of immense help. All these things have to be transformed into meditations.
Drop old ideas of meditations, that just sitting underneath a tree with a yoga posture is meditation. That is only one of the ways, and may be suitable for a few people but is not suitable for all. For a small child it is not meditation, it is
torture. For a young man who is alive, vibrant, it is repression, it is not meditation. Maybe for an old man who has lived, whose energies are declining, it may be meditation.
People differ, there are many types of people. To someone who has a low kind of energy, sitting underneath a tree in a yoga posture may be the best meditation, because the yoga posture is the least energy-expensive -- the least. When the spine is erect, making a ninety-degree angle with the earth, your body expends the least energy possible. If you are leaning towards the left or towards the front, then your body starts spending more energy, because the gravitation starts pulling you downwards and you have to keep yourself, you have to hold yourself so that you don't fall. This is expenditure. An erect spine was found to need the least spending of energy.
Then sitting with your hands together in the lap is also very very useful for low- energy people, because when both the hands are touching each other, your body electricity starts moving in a circle. It does not go out of your body; it becomes an inner circle, the energy moves inside you.
You must know that energy is always released through the fingers, energy is never released from round-shaped things. For example, your head cannot release energy, it contains it. Energy is released through the fingers, the toes of the feet and the hands. In a certain yoga posture the feet are together, so one foot releases energy and it enters into the other foot; one hand releases energy and it enters into the other hand. You go on taking your own energy, you become an inner circle of energy. It is very resting, it is very relaxing.
The yoga posture is the most relaxed posture possible. It is more relaxing than even sleep, because when you are asleep your whole body is being pulled by gravitation. When you are horizontal it is relaxing in a totally different way. It is relaxing because it brings you back to the ancient days when man was an animal, horizontal. It is relaxing because it is regressive; it helps you to become an animal again.
That's why in a lying posture you cannot think clearly, it becomes difficult to think. Try it. You can dream easily but you cannot think easily; for thinking you have to sit. The more erect you sit, the better is the possibility to think. Thinking is a late arrival; when man became vertical, thinking arrived. When man used to be horizontal, dreaming was there but thinking was not there. So when you lie
down you start dreaming, thinking disappears. It is a kind of relaxation, because thinking stops; you regress.
The yoga posture is a good meditation for those who have low energy, for those who are ill, for those who are old, for those who have lived the whole life and now are coming closer and closer to death.
Thousands of Buddhist monks have died in the sitting lotus posture, because the best way to receive death is in the lotus posture -- because in the lotus posture you will be fully alert, and because energies will be disappearing, they will be becoming less and less every moment. Death is coming. In a lotus posture you can keep alertness to the very end.
And to be alert while you are dying is one of the greatest experiences, the ultimate in orgasm.
And if you are awake while you are dying you will have a totally different kind of birth: you will be born awake. One who dies awake is born awake. One who dies unconscious is born unconscious. One who dies with awareness can choose the right womb for himself; he has a choice, he has earned it. The man who dies unconsciously has no right to choose the womb; the womb happens unconsciously, accidentally.
The man who dies perfectly alert in this life will be coming only once more, because next time there will be no need to come. Just a little work is left: the other life will do that work. For one who is dying with awareness, only one thing is left now: he has had no time to radiate his awareness into compassion. Next time he can radiate his awareness into compassion. And unless awareness becomes compassion, something remains incomplete, something remains imperfect.
Running can be a meditation -- jogging, dancing, swimming, anything can be a meditation. My definition of meditation is: whenever your body, mind, soul are functioning together in rhythm it is meditation, because it will bring the fourth in. And if you are alert that you are doing it as a meditation -- not to take part in the Olympics, but doing it as a meditation -- then it is tremendously beautiful.
In the new commune we are going to introduce all kinds of meditations. Those who enjoy swimming, they will have opportunities to go for a swimming meditation. Those who enjoy running, they will have their group to run for
miles. Each according to his need --
only then this world can be full of meditation; otherwise not.
If we give only a fixed pattern of meditation, then it will be applicable only to a few people. That has been one of the problems in the past: fixed patterns of meditation, not fluid -- fixed, so they fit certain types and all others are left in the darkness.
My effort is to make meditation available to each and everybody; whosoever wants to meditate, meditation should be made available according to his type. If he needs rest, then rest should be his meditation. Then "sitting silently doing nothing, and the spring comes and the grass grows by itself" -- that will be his meditation. We have to find as many dimensions to meditation as there are people in the world. And the pattern has not to be very rigid, because no two individuals are alike. The pattern has to be very liquid so that it can fit with the individual. In the past, the practice was that the individual had to fit with the pattern.
I bring a revolution. The individual has not to fit with the pattern, the pattern has to fit with the individual. My respect for the individual is absolute. I am not much concerned with means; means can be changed, arranged in different ways.
That's why you find so many meditations going on here. We don't have enough opportunities here, otherwise you would be surprised how many doors God's temple has.
And you would be surprised also that there is a special door only for you and for nobody else. That's God's love for you, his respect for you. You will be received through a special door, not through the public gate; you will be received as a special guest.
But the basic fundamental is, whatsoever the meditation, it has to fill this requirement: that the body, mind, consciousness, all three should function in unity. Then suddenly one day the fourth has arrived: the witnessing. Or if you want to, call it God; call it God or nirvana or Tao or whatsoever you will.
The third question: Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
IN A DEEP EMBRACE WITH YOU,
IN ORGASMIC PLAY WITH EXISTENCE, LITTLE MORE OF YOU,
LITTLE LESS OF ME.
Darshan, that's what is already happening to you. Every day you are disappearing -- and it is so obvious. Every day something of you is evaporating: more and more, I am becoming your being. Soon Darshan will not be found there at all.
And that is the moment of great blessings -- when the disciple disappears, when the disciple is only a vehicle of the master. And the master is nobody except the whole. The master is one who is not, the master is one who has already disappeared into God. The master is already a hollow bamboo and God is using him as a flute.
When the disappearance also has happened to the disciple, the first experience is that of meeting and merger with the master -- because the disciple does not know what God is, he knows only the master. The master is his or her God. Once the disciple disappears into the master and allows the master to enter into the innermost core of his being, the second experience is that the master has never been there.
Hidden behind the master's hands were God's hands, hidden behind the master's words were God's messages. The master was only a singer, singing the songs of the infinite and the eternal.
Darshan, it is happening to you. I am utterly happy with you, all my blessings are for you.
You say: "In a deep embrace with you, in orgasmic play with existence, little more of you, little less of me."
This is happening, this will go on happening. Your prayer is going to be fulfilled in this life. I can guarantee only for a very few people; it is very difficult to
guarantee, but for Darshan I can guarantee: in this very life it is going to be fulfilled.
The fifth question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 4
WHAT IS THIS LONGING IN ME THAT NO RELATIONSHIP CAN SATISFY, THAT NO TEARS RELIEVE, THAT IS NOT CHANGED BY MANY AND
BEAUTIFUL DREAMS AND ADVENTURES?
Prem Kavita, it is so, not only with you but with everybody who has a little intelligence.
It is not detected by the stupid people, but the intelligent person is bound to stumble upon the fact sooner or later -- and the more intelligent you are, the sooner it will be -- that no relationship can satisfy.
Why? -- because every relationship is only an arrow towards the ultimate relationship; it is a milestone, it is not a goal. Every love affair is just an indication of a bigger love affair ahead -- just a little taste, but that little taste is not going to quench your thirst or satisfy your hunger. On the contrary, that little taste will make you more thirsty, will make you more hungry.
That's what happens in every relationship. Rather than giving you contentment, it gives you a tremendous discontentment. Each relationship fails in this world -- and it is good that it fails; it would have been a curse if it was not so. It is a blessing that it fails.
Because each relationship fails, that's why you start searching for the ultimate relationship with God, with existence, with the cosmos. You see the futility again and again, that it is not going to be satisfied by any man, by any woman; that each experience ends in tremendous frustration, begins in great hope and leaves you in great hopelessness.
It is always so, it comes with great romance and ends in a bitter taste. When it
happens again and again, one has to learn something -- that each relationship is only an experimentation to prepare you for the ultimate relationship, for the ultimate love affair.
That's what religion is all about.
You say: "What is this longing in me that no relationship can satisfy?"
That is the longing for God. You may know it, you may not know it. You may not be able yet to articulate it, exactly what it is, because in the beginning it is very vague, cloudy, surrounded by great mist. But it is the longing for God, it is the longing to merge with the whole, so there is no separation any longer.
You cannot merge with a man or a woman forever, the separation is bound to happen.
The merger can only be momentary, and after that moment is gone you will be left in great darkness. After that flash, that lightning, is gone, the darkness is going to be even more than it was before. That's why millions of people decide not to go into any love relationship -- because at least one is accustomed to one's darkness, one has not known anything else. There is a kind of satisfaction: one knows that this is what life is, that there is no more to it, so there is no discontent.
Once you have tasted love, once you have seen a few moments of joy, of that tremendous throbbing when two persons are no longer two.… But you fall again and again from that peak; and each time you fall the darkness is far darker than before, because now you know that light is. Now you know that there are peaks, now you know that life has much more to offer to you, that this mundane existence of going to the office every day and coming home and eating and sleeping -- that this mundane existence is not all, that this mundane existence is only the porch of the palace.
If you have never been invited in and you have lived always in the porch, then you think this is what life is, this is your home. Once a window opens and you can see inside the palace -- the beauty of it, the grandeur of it, the splendor of it -
- or once you are invited in for a moment and then thrown out again, now the porch can never satisfy you. Now this porch is going to be a heavy burden on your heart. Now you are going to suffer, your agony is going to be great.
This is my observation, that the people who are very uncreative are more satisfied than the people who are creative. The creative person is very much unsatisfied, because he knows much more is possible and it is not happening. Why is it not happening?
The creative person is constantly searching; he cannot rest, because he has seen a few glimpses. Once in a while a window has opened and he has seen beyond. How can he rest? How can he feel comfortable and cozy in that stupid porch? He knows about the palace, he has seen the king too, and he knows, "That palace belongs to me; it is my birthright." All that is needed is how to enter into the palace, how to become a permanent resident in it. Yes, momentarily he has been inside, and he has been thrown out again and again.
The more sensitive a person is, the more you will find him in discontent. The more intelligent, the more discontent will be found there. It has always been so.
You come from the West to the East; you see the beggar on the road, the laborer carrying mud on his head, and you feel a little bit surprised: their faces don't show discontentment.
They have nothing to be contented with, but somehow they are satisfied. And the so-called Indian religious people think it is because of religion that they are satisfied. And the so-called Indian saints go on bragging about it: "Look! the West has everything, science and technology has provided the West with every possible comfort, and yet nobody is contented. And in our country people are so religious that they have nothing, yet they are contented." The saints of this country go on bragging about it, but their whole bragging is based on a fallacy. The people of this country -- the poor people, the uneducated people, the starving people -- are not contented because they are religious, they are contented because they have no sensitiveness. They are contented because they are not creative, they are contented because they have never seen any glimpse.
The West is becoming discontented because the comfort, the convenience, all that science has provided for them, has given them so much time to explore, to meditate, to pray, to play music, to dance, that a few glimpses have started happening. They are becoming aware that there is much more to life than appears on the surface; one has to dive deep.
The East is simply poor -- and poverty makes people insensitive, remember. A
poor person has to be insensitive, otherwise he will not be able to survive at all. If he is very sensitive, the poverty will be too much. He has to grow a thick skin around himself as a protection, otherwise how will he survive? He has to become very blind, only then can he live in a poor country. Otherwise the beggar is there, the ill people are there on the street, dying: if he is not insensitive, how is he going to work at all? Those beggars will haunt him. He has to close his doors.
You can see it happening on the Indian streets. The Western visitor for the first time becomes very puzzled: a man is dying on the street and no Indian takes any note of it, people go on passing. This happens every day.
If they start taking note of it, they will not be able to live at all; they have not any time for such luxuries. This is a luxury! They cannot take the person to the hospital, they have no time. If they start being so compassionate they will start dying themselves, because who is going to earn for their family? They have to become utterly blind and deaf. They go on moving like zombies, seeing nothing. Whatsoever is happening by the side is nothing to do with them, it is none of their business; everybody is suffering his own karma.
The beggar dying on the street is suffering from his own karma -- maybe he was a murderer in the past life. You need not worry about him, in fact you should be happy that he is suffering from his karma; now his karma is finished. Next birth he will be born a king, or something like that -- beautiful rationalizations to keep yourself blind, insensitive.
It is very difficult for the poor person to have some aesthetic sense, he cannot afford it. If he has aesthetic sense then he will feel his poverty too much, it will become unbearable.
He cannot have a sense for cleanliness, he cannot have a sense for beauty. He cannot afford these things -- what is the point of having the sensitivity for them? It will be a torture, constant torture. He will not be able to sleep in his ugly house with all kinds of dirt, with all kind of rotten things -- they are his only possessions! He seems to be very satisfied -- he has to be; he cannot afford dissatisfaction.
It has nothing to do with religion, remember. All poor people are satisfied, without any exception. You can go to Africa and you will find the poor people satisfied; they are even poorer than Indians and their satisfaction is far deeper.
You can go to Indian aboriginal tribes, which are the poorest in the world, but you will see on their faces a kind of satisfaction, as if nothing is wrong, all is right. They have to believe that all is right, they have to constantly autohypnotize themselves that all is right; otherwise how will they be able to sleep and how will they be able to eat?
Once a country becomes rich, it becomes sensitive. Once a country becomes rich, affluent, it becomes aware of many, many dimensions of life that have always been there but one had no time to look at. The rich country starts thinking of music, painting, poetry, and ultimately meditation -- because meditation is the last luxury. There is no greater luxury than meditation. Meditation is the last luxury, because it is the ultimate love affair.
It is good, Kavita, that you are not satisfied with your relationships. Indians are very satisfied, because in fact there is no relationship at all. It is marriage, it has nothing to do with relationship. Parents decide it, and astrologers and palmists. It has nothing to do with the persons who are going to get married; they are not even asked, they are simply put into a certain situation where they start living together. It is not a relationship. They may produce children, but it is not love; there is nothing of romance in it. But one thing is good about it: it is very stable. When there is no relationship there is no possibility of divorce. Divorce is possible only if there is love. Try to understand me. Love means great hope, love means "I have arrived." Love means "I have found the woman or the man."
Love means the feeling that "We are made for each other." Love means now there is no need to search any more.
If you start with such great hope, by the time the honeymoon is over the relationship will be over. These great hopes cannot be fulfilled by human beings. You are hoping that the woman is a goddess; she is not. She is hoping the man is a god; he is not. Now, how long can they go on deceiving each other? Sooner or later they will start seeing the actual.
They will see the fact, and the fiction will start evaporating.
No relationship can satisfy, because every relationship begins with great hope, and that is not possible to be fulfilled. Yes, that hope can be fulfilled, but it can be fulfilled only when you have fallen in love with the whole. No part can fulfill it. When you have fallen in love with the total, when the merger happens with
the total, only then will there be contentment. There will be nobody who is contented, there will be simply contentment.
And then there is no end to it.
I am all for love, because love fails. You will be surprised -- I have my own logic. I am all for love, because love fails. I am not for marriage, because marriage succeeds; it gives you a permanent settlement. And that is the danger: you become satisfied with a toy, you become satisfied with something plastic, artificial, manmade.
That's why in the East, particularly in India.… It is a very ancient country, and ancient countries become cunning just as old people become cunning. Out of cunningness this country decided for child marriage, because once somebody is adolescent hope starts arising -- longing, romance, poetry; now it will be difficult. The best way that India found was child marriage, marriage of children. They don't know what marriage is, they don't know what relationship is, they don't know what love is -- they are not even hungry for it
-- sex has not yet become a mature thing in them. Let them get married.
Just think -- a three-year-old girl being married to a five-year-old boy. Now they will grow together, just as brothers and sisters grow together. Have you ever felt any desire to divorce your sister? I don't think anybody ever divorces one's own sister, there is no need.
You take it for granted. Everybody thinks his mother is good, beautiful; his sister is beautiful, his brother is beautiful. You take these things for granted.
There was only one relationship which was available for you to choose out of your own freedom: your spouse, your woman, your man. In India we destroyed even that freedom.
Husbands and wives were as much given as brothers and sisters. And when you have grown together for years a certain kind of friendship, a certain kind of association, arises.
You become accustomed to each other.
This is not relationship, this is not love. But India had decided for stability -- and
an ancient country knows perfectly well love can never be stable. Choose love and you choose trouble.
In the West love has become more and more important, and with it all kinds of troubles have arisen. The family is falling apart, disappearing really. People are changing their wives and husbands so many times that everything seems to be just in a chaos.
I have heard about one Hollywood actress, that she married for the thirty-first time. After three days she became aware that this man had once also been her husband before. Now even to remember for so many times.… People change, their faces change. Now, this cannot happen in India. Even after lives your wife will remember you; even after lives you cannot escape, there is no escape.
But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? -- love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas.
Kavita, it is good that no longing for ordinary love affairs is ever going to be satisfied.
The longing will be intensified more; no relationship is going to fulfill you. They will make you more frustrated, and no tears will relieve it, they cannot. They may help for the moment, but again you will be full of pain and agony. Nothing is changed by many and beautiful dreams and adventures, nothing is changed. Yet I say go through them. Nothing is changed, but you are changed by going through all those dreams and beautiful adventures. Nothing is changed in the world.
Just think, Kavita, this question has arisen in you. This is a change. How many people are there who ask this type of question? This question is not an ordinary question; it is not out of curiosity. I can feel the pain, the agony; I can feel your tears, I can see your frustrations in it, I can see all that misery and suffering you must have gone through. It is almost tangible.
Nothing changes in the world. But, falling again and again, something changes
in you --
and that is revolution. Even to ask such a question means you are on the verge of a revolution. Then a new adventure is needed. Old adventures failed, and a new one -- not in the sense that you have to search for a new man or a new woman -- a new one in the sense that you have to search in a new dimension is needed.
That dimension is the dimension of the divine.
I say to you: I am fulfilled and contented. Atisha is fulfilled and contented, not by any relationship of the world, not by any love affair of the world, but having a love affair with the whole existence is utterly fulfilling.
And when one is fulfilled, one starts overflowing. He cannot contain his own contentment. He is blessed, and so much is he blessed that he starts blessing others. He is so much blessed that he becomes a blessing to the world.
The sixth question:
Question 5
BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS A CONTEMPORARY MIND?
Contemporary mind is a contradiction in terms. Mind is never contemporary, it is always old. Mind is past -- past and past and nothing else; mind means memory. There can be no contemporary mind; to be contemporary is to be without mind.
If you are herenow, then you are contemporary with me. But then, don't you see, your mind disappears; no thought moves, no desire arises: you become disconnected with the past and disconnected with the future.
Mind is never original, cannot be. No-mind is original, fresh, young; mind is always old, rotten, stale.
But those words are used -- they are used in a totally different sense. I can understand your question -- in that sense, those words are meaningful. The mind of the nineteenth century was a different mind; the questions they were asking, you are not asking. The questions that were very important in the eighteenth century are now stupid questions.
"How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?" was one of the greatest theological questions in the middle ages. Now can you find such a stupid person who will think that this is an important question? And this was discussed by the greatest theologians; not small people, great professors were writing treatises on it, conferences were arranged. How many angels? Now who cares? It is simply irrelevant.
In Buddha's time, a great question was: "Who created the world?" It has persisted for centuries, but now fewer and fewer people are worried about who created the world. Yes, there are some old-fashioned people, but very rarely such questions are asked of me. But Buddha was encountered every day. Not a single day must have passed when somebody did not ask the question, "Who created the world?" Buddha had to say again and again that the world has always been there, nobody has created it; but people were not satisfied.
Now nobody cares. Very rarely somebody asks me the question, "Who created the world?" In that sense, the mind goes on changing as time goes on changing. In that sense, the contemporary mind is a reality.
Husband to wife: "I said we are not going out tonight, and that is semi-final."
Now this is a contemporary mind. No husband in the past would have said that. It was always final; the last word was his.
Two high-class English ladies met each other by accident while out shopping in London.
One noticed the other was pregnant and asked, "Why, darling, what a surprise! You obviously got married since I last saw you! "
The second said, "Yes. He's a wonderful man; he's an officer in the Ghurka rifles."
The questioner was horrified. "A Ghurka! Darling, are not they all black?" "Oh no," she said. "Only the privates."
The questioner exclaimed, "Darling, how contemporary!" In that sense, there is a contemporary mind.…
Have you heard about the latest family game? It is called incest.
Little sister to brother in bed: "Hey, you are better at this than Daddy." "Yes, Mummy says so too!"
Otherwise, there is no contemporary mind. Fashions come and go; if you think of fashions then there are changes. But basically all mind is old. Mind as such is old, and there can be no modern mind; the most modern mind is still of the past.
The really alive person is a herenow person. He does not live out of the past, he does not live for the future; he lives only in the moment, for the moment. The moment is all. He is spontaneous; that spontaneity is the fragrance of no-mind. Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again.
No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.
And the last question:
Question 6
BELOVED OSHO, WHY ARE POLITICIANS SO MEAN?
Prem Christo, they are mean because they are stupid. Stupidity has always the shadow of meanness. The more intelligent you are, the less mean you are. The utterly intelligent person cannot have any meanness; it is impossible. He can have only love and compassion.
The stupid person has to be mean because that is the only way he thinks he can win. The intelligent person has no desire to win, the intelligent person is already victorious in his intelligence. The intelligent person is already superior in his intelligence, he has not to compete for it. The stupid person has to continuously compete. And because he is stupid, he cannot rely on his intelligence, he has to rely on something else: he becomes mean, cunning, deceptive, a hypocrite.
To me, stupidity is the only sin, and everything else is just a by-product of it. And intelligence is the only virtue; everything else that we have known as virtue
follows it like a shadow.
Two politicians are returning home from the bar, late at night, drunk as usual. As they are making their way down the sidewalk one of them spots a heap of dung in front of them just as they are walking into it.
"Stop!" he yells.
"What is it?" asks the other. "Look!" says the first. "Shit!"
Getting nearer to take a good look at it, the second drunkard examines the dung carefully and says, "No, it isn't, it's mud."
"I tell you, it's shit," repeats the first. "No, it isn't," says the other.
"It's shit!"
"No!"
So finally the first angrily sticks his finger in the dung and puts it to his mouth. After having tasted it, he says, "I tell you, it is shit."
So the second politician does the same, and slowly savoring it, says, "Maybe you are right. Hmm."
The first politician takes another try to prove his point. "It's shit!" he declares. "Hmm, yes, maybe it is," answers the second, after his second try.
Finally, after having had enough of the dung to be sure that it is, they both happily hug each other in friendship, and exclaim, "Wow, I'm certainly glad we didn't step on it!"
Enough for today. The Book of Wisdom
Chapter #24
Chapter title: Bring in the New Man 6 March 1979 am in Buddha Hall Archive
code:
7903060
ShortTitle:
WISDOM24
Audio:
Yes Video: No Length:
92
mins
The first question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 1
WHAT IS THIS URGE TO DO SOMETHING, TO CREATE? TO FREE YOUR
MESSAGE, YOUR WORD, UNTO THE WORLD? I FEEL LIKE I AM IN A HURRY
AND THAT ALL THE PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNE HAVE THE SAME FEELING.
IT IS AS IF THERE IS NO TIME LEFT, AS IF ANY DAY, THIS VERY MOMENT, CAN BE THE LAST MOMENT.
AM I DYING? I AM EXPLODING EACH AND EVERY MOMENT. WHAT IS
THAT? WHAT IS THIS URGE? PLEASE SAY SOMETHING FOR THIS THIRST.
Sarjano, man is dying, mankind is dying. And in fact there is not much time left. And this is felt not only here around the commune, it is felt everywhere by sensitive, intelligent, creative people. Only the mediocre are unaware of it; only the politicians go on rushing into the danger, the calamity, that awaits, totally unaware where they are going and where they are leading the world.
But people of sensitivity, awareness, meditativeness, people of the heart, are everywhere feeling that the danger is very close, that mankind can commit suicide any moment, that the future was never so uncertain as it is today, that the tomorrow may really never come.
These are moments of great turmoil, but they can become of great creativity too. When one is encountering death, one can bring one's total potential into manifestation. When there is no time left you cannot postpone. Hence the hurry.
When death is very imminent, life flares up to the optimum. And that is what is happening to all creative people around the world, and more so around this commune, because my whole approach is such that only the very creative ones will be attracted to it.
I teach sensitivity. Down the ages, religions have been teaching just the opposite
-- how to become insensitive -- because the more insensitive you are the more you can remain aloof, distant, detached. Because it was thought that to attain to God one has to renounce the world, it was a natural consequence, a logical consequence, that one should learn how to be more and more insensitive to beauty, to music, to love, to people, to life itself. In the past, religion has been teaching people how to be unintelligent, because sensitivity and intelligence go together, insensitivity and stupidity go together.
Your so-called saints are not intelligent people at all, but you have worshipped them. And you have worshipped them for the wrong reason -- because they were
insensitive, because they had dulled their consciousness, because they had grown thick skin around themselves. The spring will come but they will remain unaffected, the clouds will gather and they will remain unaffected. The peacock will dance but they will remain unaffected, the night sky will be full of stars but they will be completely unaware of it. That was the whole discipline in the past: how to become like a rock, so that the world cannot overpower you. It was a kind of paranoia, it was based in fear.
I teach you just the opposite: be sensitive, be alert, be loving, be sensuous -- because God is not against the roseflower, God is in it. If you can sensuously feel the velvetyness of the rose you have touched God himself. God is not against the stars and the sun and the moon, he is in them. If you can allow them to enter into your being, if you allow them to stir your heart, if you can allow them to drive you crazy in a dance of joy and celebration, you will be coming closer and closer to home. I teach sensitivity, I teach love.
The people who have gathered around me have a totally different quality to them. This is not an ordinary ashram, it is a commune of creators -- artists, painters, singers, musicians.
All kinds of talented people have come to me; only they can understand what I am saying. People understand according to their own inner capabilities. I may say one thing, you may understand something else. Communication is not easy, language is not adequate, and you will understand only that for which you have come.
I have gathered around me a special kind of people. Hence this urge will be felt by almost everybody, that something has to be done. First, it will be a very very vague kind of feeling, just a silent voice within your being, heard yet not heard, understood yet not understood... a whisper, not very clear, a little muddy, not very transparent. In the beginning this is bound to be so. You will hear it like a song: it will be more poetry than prose, it will come to you like dreams, visions. Slowly slowly the unconscious will be able to communicate to the conscious.
And that's what meditation is all about: learning the way to bridge the unconscious with the conscious, so that your own being can give you indications where to move, where to go, so that you don't need a leader, so that you become a guide to yourself, so that you can become a light unto yourself.
Sarjano, you are not dying, but this will be felt like that because you are part of humanity and humanity is dying. All that is human is disappearing, and all that is inhuman is becoming more and more dominating and powerful.
Man is being reduced to a machine, and mechanical values are becoming dominant. The artist is not respected, but the technician is. Poetry is not loved, but plumbing is. The dancer is no more in the center of life, but the businessman, the bureaucrat, the politician are. All that is beautiful is becoming irrelevant to man, because that which is beautiful cannot be used as a means to anything. That which is beautiful is an end unto itself. You cannot use poetry in war; you will need the scientist, not the poet. And you cannot use musicians in the marketplace; there you will need economists.
This whole life is geared around wrong things. Money is more important than meditation.
This is a very topsy-turvy situation: man is standing on his head. Man is dying, and the death is very slow. And remember, when death is very fast you can avoid it, because you become intensely aware of it. When it comes very very slow, a slow poisoning.…
For example, a person goes on smoking every day. All the experts go on saying that this is dangerous to you, that this will kill you, but he smokes every day and it doesn't kill him! So you may write it on every packet of cigarettes -- nobody bothers about your warnings that "This is harmful to health," that "This is harmful to life." Who cares? --
because experience says something else! You smoke every day, dozens of cigarettes, and you don't die and you have not died yet.
You believe in your experience. The poison is very very slow: if a person goes on smoking one dozen cigarettes every day, then it will take twenty years to poison the whole system. Now, twenty years is a long time, and man has a very very short vision, he is shortsighted.
The world is being poisoned very slowly. The rivers are being polluted, the oceans are being polluted, the lakes are dying. Nature is being destroyed. We are exploiting the earth so much that sooner or later we will not be able to live on it. We are not behaving well with nature.
Our whole approach is wrong, it is destructive. We only take from the earth, and we never give anything back. We only exploit nature. The ecology is broken, the circulation is broken; we are not living in a perfect circle, and nature is a perfect circle: if you take from one hand and you give from another, you don't destroy it. But we are doing it: we only go on taking, and all the resources are being spent. But this poisoning is happening slowly, slowly. You don't see it happening because it takes a long time. And then there are politicians who go on gathering more and more atomic weapons -- more atom bombs, more hydrogen bombs, super-hydrogen bombs -- as if man has decided to commit suicide.
This is what is being felt by you, Sarjano. You have the heart of a poet or the heart of a painter, the heart of a lover. You have immense potential for creativity. You are sensitive, hence you are feeling it. But the feeling is as if "I am dying." No, not you -- something far more important is happening, something far more dangerous too.
Individuals have always died, it is not a problem. It is, in fact, part of recycling. Your body goes back to the sources to be renewed, your being moves back into the eternal to be rested, and then you come back again, fresh, young. Life tires, life exhausts, death is a rest. For the individual, death is a blessing -- but not for humanity itself; then it is a curse.
Individuals go on dying and they go on coming back. But humanity is needed for them to come back. This earth is a beautiful planet and it is in the wrong hands. Hence you are feeling that something is to be done very urgently. Yes, it is urgent, because death is coming closer.
This century's end is going to see either the total destruction of humanity, and with it the total destruction of life on this earth, or a new man being born -- a new man who will not hate life, as in the past it has been done; a new man who will love life; a new man who will not be negative in any way, but will be affirmative; a new man who will not desire life after death, but will live moment to moment in sheer joy -- who will think of this life as a gift and not as a punishment; who will not be antagonistic to the body, who will respect the body as the temple of the soul; who will love, and who will not be afraid of love; who will move in all kinds of relationships and yet be able to remain himself.
To be in relationship and become dependent is the sign of weakness. And to escape to the Himalayas or to some Catholic monastery because of the fear of
becoming dependent is again the sign of weakness; it is cowardly.
To live in relationship and yet remain independent, that is what courage is. The new man will be courageous. In the past, only two kinds of cowards have existed on the earth, the worldly kind and the otherworldly kind -- but both are cowards. The really brave man will live in the world and yet not be of it. Either this is going to happen, or a total destruction. Now there is no third alternative. Man cannot survive as he is. Either he has to change himself, transmute himself, or he has to die and vacate the earth.
This is what is felt, this is why you are in such a hurry. That's why I am in such a hurry.
My sannyasins can be the new man, my sannyasins can herald the new age. Hence my sannyasins are going to be opposed by all past-oriented people: by Hindus, by Christians, by Mohammedans, by Jainas, by Buddhists -- by almost everybody. They are going to be opposed, and that is natural because we are trying to bring a new future in. To bring that new future we will have to destroy the past, because unless the past ceases to exist, the future cannot come into existence.
The past has to die. We have to drop our clinging with the past. What does it mean when you say that "I am a Hindu"? It means you cling to a certain past tradition. What do you mean when you say that "I am a Mohammedan"? You cling to something past.
But when you say, "I am a sannyasin, a neo-sannyasin," you don't cling to any past. Your eyes are focused on the future. Your roots are in the present and your branches are moving towards the future. Then the past is irrelevant. I want you to remember it again and again that the past has to be made irrelevant. You have to cut yourself off from the past.
You say, Sarjano, "What is this urge to do something?"
Yes, something has to be done. You have to give birth to yourself, and you have to prepare the way for the new man.
"What is this urge to do something, to create? to free your message, your word, unto the world?"
Yes, it has to be shouted from the housetops, it has to be hammered -- because people are deaf, people are blind, they will not hear what is being said to them.
Just the other day, Neeraj sent me a beautiful parable from Pierre Delattre's Tales of a Dalai Lama. In this beautiful book comes this parable:
All the monks had seen the spirit come out of the wall long enough to utter just one word.
But each monk had heard a different word. The event is immortalized in this poem: The one who wanted to die heard LIVE.
The one who wanted to live heard DIE. The one who wanted to take heard GIVE. The one who wanted to give heard KEEP.
The one who was always alert heard SLEEP. The one who was always asleep heard WAKE. The one who wanted to leave heard STAY. The one who wanted to stay, DEPART.
The one who never spoke heard PREACH. The one who always preached heard PRAY.
Each one learned how he had been in someone else's way.
What I am saying has to be conveyed to as many people as possible, and as fast as possible. Use all modern media to reach as many people as possible. Still, be aware that it is very difficult to communicate. It is almost an impossibility to communicate; still it has to be done. Even if fragments of what I am saying are understood, it will be enough to create the field, the energy field, in which the new man can be conceived.
Even if people misunderstand it... it is better to understand the truth, but even if the truth is misunderstood it is better than a lie. Something of the truth will
remain in the misunderstanding too. And truth is a potential power, a great power. Even if a fragment, just a seed of truth, falls into your heart, sooner or later you will become the garden of Eden. It cannot be avoided. Just a drop, and the whole ocean will find its way towards you.
Sarjano, it has to be done. You have to create my message in as many forms as possible.
Compose music, play on the guitar or on the flute, because it is easier to stir the heart of the people, to wake it up through music than through words. Dance, but dance in a new way so your dance becomes a teaching of meditation. Dance in such a way that the one who looks at you starts feeling that it is not only a dance but something more, something plus; so that he starts feeling the vibe of meditation that is happening inside you.
Paint: paint pictures which can become objects of meditation, paint pictures of the inner sky of buddhas. The modern painting is pathological. If you look at Picasso's paintings you cannot look long, you will start feeling uneasy. You cannot have Picasso paintings in your bedroom, because then you will have nightmares. If you meditate on a Picasso painting long enough you will go mad, because those paintings are out of Picasso's madness.
Go to Ajanta, Ellora, Khajuraho, Konarak, and you will see a totally different world of creativity. Looking at the statue of a buddha, something in you starts falling in tune.
Sitting silently with a buddha statue, you start becoming silent. The very posture, the very shape, the face, the closed eyes, the silence that surrounds a marble statue will help you to get connected with your own inner sources of silence.
Gurdjieff used to say that there are two kinds of art. One he used to call objective art, and the other he used to call subjective art. Subjective art is absolutely private, personal.
Picasso's art is subjective art; he is simply painting something without any vision for the person who will see it, without any idea of the person who will look at it. He is simply pouring out his own inner illness; it is helpful for himself, it is therapeutic.
I am not saying that Picasso should stop painting, because if he stops painting he
is bound to go mad. It is painting that is keeping him sane; his painting is like vomiting. When you have eaten something wrong, when you have a food poisoning, vomiting is the most healthy way to throw the toxins, the poisons, outside the system; it will help. Picasso's paintings are like vomiting. He is suffering from many illnesses, all the illness that humanity is suffering from. He simply represents humanity, he is very representative.
He represents the whole madness that is happening in millions of people. He is a sensitive soul; he has become so attuned with the pathology of mankind that it has become his own pathology. Hence the appeal of his paintings, otherwise they are ugly. Hence his great name -- because he deserves it, he represents the age. This is Picasso's age: what you cannot say about yourself, he has said it. What you cannot pour out of yourself, he has poured it on the canvas. But it is a subjective phenomenon. It is therapeutic to him, but it is dangerous to everybody else.
The ancient art was not only art; it was, deep down, mysticism. Deep down, it was out of meditation. It was objective, in Gurdjieff's terminology. It was made so that if somebody meditates over it, he starts falling into those depths where God lives.
Khajuraho or Konarak -- if you meditate there, you will know what the Tantra masters were doing. They were creating in stone something that is felt in the ultimate orgasmic joy. It was the most difficult thing to do, to bring ecstasy into the stone. And if the stone can show the ecstasy, then everybody can move into that ecstasy easily.
But people who go to Khajuraho are foolish people. They look either at Khajuraho sculpture as obscene -- then they miss the whole point, then they are seeing something which is within their own unconscious; or they are too moralistic -- then they don't meditate on any statues, they are in a hurry to get out of the temple somehow, they just throw glances.
Khajuraho sculpture is not just to see, it is for meditation. Sit silently and meditate for hours. If one goes to Khajuraho, one should live at least for three months there, so he can meditate on each possible inner posture of orgasmic joy. And then, slowly slowly, the at-onement, slowly slowly, the harmony; then suddenly you are transported into another world -- the world of those mystics who created this temple. This is objective art.
So too is the Taj Mahal. On a fullmoon night, if you sit silently by the side of it, not being bothered about the history of the Taj Mahal and who created it and why -- those are all nonsense, irrelevant facts, they don't matter: Shah Jahan and his beloved, and his memory of his beloved, he created it Don't be bothered by
the guides; tip them before they start torturing you, and get rid of them!
Shah Jahan has nothing to do with the Taj Mahal, in fact. Yes, he created it, he created it as a memorial for his wife, but he is not the essential source of it. The essential source is in the Sufi way of life, it is in Sufism. Basically it was created by Sufi masters; Shah Jahan was just instrumental. The Sufi masters have created something of immense value.
If you silently sit in the full moon night just looking at the Taj Mahal, sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with closed eyes, slowly slowly you will feel something that you have never felt before. Sufis called it zikr, remembrance of God.
The beauty of the Taj Mahal will remind you of those realms from where all beauty, all benediction comes. You will become attuned with the Sufi way of remembering God: beauty is God.
Sarjano, don't try to repress this urge. Create in any way that suits you. My message has to be delivered in all possible mediums.
In the new commune we are going to have many guilds. The sculptors will have their own guild and they will sculpt, and the poets will have their own guild, and the painters and the carpenters and the dancers and the musicians and the novelists and the filmmakers. All possible media have to be used to approach as many people as possible, to approach as many different kinds of people as possible -- because one who can understand poetry may not understand prose, and one who can understand music may not understand painting, and one who can understand sculpture may not understand poetry.
And the message is so important because the whole future of humanity depends on it.
Nowhere else is the experiment being done on such a great scale. There is no other community on the whole earth which is working in such a way as this commune. This is the greatest therapeutic center in the world now.
We need a great therapeutic center so that the modern mind can be helped to vomit, cathart all that has gone wrong in it. Then we will need creators. And once somebody has catharted and thrown out all that is wrong, a great urge will arise in him to create.
Once pathology disappears, everybody becomes a creator. Let it be understood as deeply as possible: only ill people are destructive. The people who are healthy are creative.
Creativity is a kind of fragrance of real health. When a person is really healthy and whole, creativity comes naturally to him, the urge to create arises.
This urge is being felt by many just like you, Sarjano. Do something for it -- and whatsoever you do is good. Follow your own urge, don't distort it. In the beginning it will remain vague, but if you follow it, soon it will become clear, more and more clear. And if you start doing something about it, things will become very clear very soon.
There are many things which become clear only when you do something about them. For example, the poet is never really aware of the poetry unless he has written it. It remains a very vague cloudy phenomenon. Once he writes it down it starts taking shape, form; it becomes crystallized into words. No painter is ever able to say anything about what he wants to paint, unless he has painted it.
It is said that the best way to learn is to teach. And I agree with it, because what you want to learn you will not be really clearly aware of unless you start teaching it.
In the future, education will have that dimension. My own vision is that each student should be given an opportunity to teach too. The students who are reading and studying for their master's degree should be allowed to go to lower classes to teach; those who are working for their bachelor's degree, they should be allowed to teach the lower classes.
Every student should be a teacher also, and vice versa. Every teacher once in a while should sit with the students and start learning again. Each teacher once in a while should be a student, and each student once in a while should be a teacher too. This difference between the teacher and the taught has to be dissolved; the teacher and the taught are part of one process.
And the same is true about other phenomena. The therapist and the patient -- the therapist should not remain always a therapist, once in a while he should lie down on the couch and let the patient be the therapist and he becomes the patient. And immense will be the benefit out of it. The patient will learn many things that he was not able to learn while he was functioning as a patient: by becoming the therapist, by trying to solve the problem of the therapist -- because now the therapist is the patient -- he will be able to see many things more clearly. And the therapist as a patient will be able to see more clearly the problem, the anxiety, the anguish of the patient, because he will be standing in the shoes of the patient; now he will know where it pinches.
The therapist and the patient should not be divided, they should become part of one team.
It is a therapy team, and sometimes the therapist plays the role of the patient and sometimes the patient plays the role of the therapist -- the roles are interchangeable and so on and so forth. A couple making love... the man should not always remain the man, and the woman should not always remain the woman. Sometimes the man should be the wife, passive, and the woman should be the husband, active; they should change roles.
The husband and wife should not remain frozen, they should be more melting: once in a while the wife should play the active role, take initiative making love, and the husband should be just passive, receptive. Love will have a greater richness that way than it has today. In fact all frozen roles have to be by and by dissolved. Life has to become more liquid.
So do whatsoever you can do, and by doing it, you will know what was the urge. Be articulate, try to convey the message, and don't be afraid.
A great fear arises when you are trying to deliver something immensely valuable; great fear arises, one starts feeling nervous. There is no need to feel nervous, because it is nothing to do with you. The urge is coming from the innermost sources of your being, it is divine. You are in the hands of God; be instrumental, you need not be worried.
You need not be proud if something good happens, you need not be ashamed if something goes wrong. Surrender both right and wrong unto the feet of God, and be free of your self-consciousness -- because if you are not free of your self-
consciousness you will never really be a creator in my sense of the word.
The real creator has no self. The real creation comes out of no-self, the real creation comes out of inner emptiness. When one is utterly empty, one is full of God. Not to be is the way for God to enter you. If you are too much, he is not there. If you are not, only he is there. And creativity is part of the creator.
No man ever creates; it is always God who creates. Hence the poet while he is creating is divine, and the painter while he is painting is divine. The only thing: if he is selfconscious then God is not there, then whatsoever he will do will be subjective art.
But if he is not there, if he is drowned in painting, completely lost, has forgotten himself and there is no self-consciousness, there is no ego, then God is there. When you find a painter painting, utterly lost, linger around. God is very close by -- far more close than you will find him in the temples, in the mosques, in the churches.
When a singer is singing, sit by the side. Feel, God is very close by. When somebody is playing on the flute, hide behind a tree and listen, and you will be able to see something, something that is not of this world, something that is of the beyond. Creativity is always from the beyond.
The second question:
Question 2
BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS LIFE?
Devadatta, life is not something that can be defined. And life is not one thing, either; there are as many lives as there are people. Life is not a singular phenomenon. My life has a taste of its own, your life has its own individuality. The life of a tree certainly is not your life, and the life of a river is not the life of the tree.
Life is a multiplicity, life has millions of forms. How can it be defined? No definition will do justice to it. Yes, it can be lived, it can be tasted, but it cannot be defined. And your definition will simply show your experience. It will not say anything about life, it will only say something about how you have understood your life. It will not be relevant to anybody else's life. Remember this, then life is
felt as a tremendous mystery.
Sol Greenberg was the only Jewish man in a small Texas town. He had given freely of his wealth and was particularly kind to the black population. And then Greenberg died.
Since he had no relatives, Greenberg bequeathed all his worldly goods to the townspeople. In order to show their respect and appreciation they decided to bury Greenberg in grand style.
They dressed him up in a cowboy outfit, complete with ten gallon hat and gold spurs.
They had a solid gold Cadillac built, placed Greenberg behind the wheel and then dug a hole large enough to accommodate the car and its deceased occupant.
As they were lowering the Caddy into the ground, two blacks stood nearby and one commented to the other, "Ah tell ya, man, them Jewish folks sure knows how to live!"
The definition depends on you. The definition is always going to be your definition, how you conceive life, it will not be the definition of life. For the money mad, life will have the sound of money, of solid gold. For the power mad, the power maniac, life will have a different taste. For the poet, of course, life will have something of poetry in it.
It differs individual to individual, it depends. But one thing is central, essential, and that I would like to tell you. One thing is very essential: anybody who is really alive will be herenow. Whatsoever the form and whatsoever the expression of his individual life, one thing will be essentially there: the quality of being herenow.
Past is no more, future is not yet, so those who live in the past don't live, they only think they live. And those who live in the future can't live, because how can you make anything out of the future which has not come yet?
But that's how people are living. Millions live in the past, and the remaining millions live in the future, and it is very rare to find a person who lives herenow. But that is the real person, that is the person who is really alive. Life needs only one thing: to be rooted in the present. There is nowhere else for it to be rooted.
Past is memory, future is imagination; both are unreal. The real is this moment -- thisness.
You ask me, "What is life?" This is it!
You will have to learn how to unburden yourself from past and future, then you will be able to live like a roseflower or like a bird or like an animal, like a tree. Then you will have the same greenness, then you will have the same life juice flowing in you.
As I see it, millions of people on the road are not alive but walking zombies, they are dead people. In their eyes you will not find life flowing, life juices flowing. Their life is utterly meaningless -- it is meaningless because it is not life.
In the old days, a minister had a negro named Ezra in his household. Ezra was smart and ambitious, but he couldn't read or write.
One Sunday the minister saw Ezra in church, scribbling away industriously through the sermon. Afterwards the minister asked him, "Ezra, what were you doing in church?"
"Takin' notes, suh. Ah's eagah to l'arn."
"Let me see," said the minister, and he glanced over Ezra's notes, which looked more like Chinese than English.
"Why, Ezra," he chided, "this is all nonsense!"
"Ah thought so," said Ezra, "all the time you was preaching it."
Life is not there readymade, available. You get the life that you create, you get out of life that which you put into it. First you have to pour meaning into it. You have to give color and music and poetry, you have to be creative. Only then will you be alive.
The second essential thing: that only those few people who are creative know
what life is.
The uncreative never know, because life is in creativity, life is creativity. Can't you see how life goes on creating? It is a continuum of creativity, constant creativity, every moment creativity.
In fact God is not a creator. It is better to call him "creativity," because verbs are truer than nouns. Nouns look like things, verbs are processes -- alive, flowing, dynamic. God is more creativity than a creator. Whenever you are creating, you will have the taste of life, and it will depend on your intensity, on your totality. Life is not a philosophical problem, it is a religious mystery. Then anything can become the door -- even cleaning the floor. If you can do it creatively, lovingly, totally, you will have some taste of life.
Here in the ashram you will see people cleaning the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, structuring rooms, making furniture. But you will see a totally different quality: whatsoever their work is, they are doing it out of immense love. And you will see joy.
That joy is not coming out of the work, that joy is coming out of their totality in the world, out of their surrender to the work. No work in itself can give you joy unless you pour joy into it.
So don't ask what life is, ask how to enter into life. The door is now, here -- and you have to be creative, only then will you be able to enter the door; otherwise you will go on standing in the doorway without entering the palace.
So the second essential is: be creative. If these two things are fulfilled, you will know what life is.
The third question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 3
IS THERE SUCH A THING AS RIGHT OR WRONG?
Akam, there is no such thing as right or wrong, because something may be right this moment and it may not be right the next moment. Something may be wrong
today and may not be wrong tomorrow.
Right and wrong are not fixed entities, they are not labels that you can put on things,
"This is right" and "This is wrong." But this has been done up to now. Right and wrong have been decided by people. And because people have decided right and wrong, they have misguided the whole humanity.
Manu decides in one way: what he thinks is right becomes right for millions and millions of Hindus for thousands of years. It is so stupid, it is unbelievable! How can people go on following Manu for five thousand years? Everything else has changed. If Manu comes back he will not be able to recognize the world at all; everything has changed. But the Hindu mind goes on following the categories that Manu has fixed.
Still, after five thousand years, there are millions of people in India who are not treated like people. What to say, that they are not treated like people -- they are not even treated like cattle. Even cows are far more important than alive people. Cows are worshipped, cows are holy, and the untouchables, the sudras, the rejected people -- rejected by Manu, five thousand years ago -- are burned.
And even a man like Vinoba Bhave is ready to go on fasting if cow slaughter is not completely stopped in the country, totally stopped. But he is completely silent, he does not say a single word, that the untouchables are being killed, burned alive, their women raped, their children murdered, butchered. Villages of untouchables, whole villages are being effaced from the earth, and Vinoba Bhave is not thinking of going on a fast. Who bothers about these untouchables? They are not part of humanity, they are not human beings. Cows have to be saved, because Manu worships the cow.
It may have been right at that moment; I am not against Manu, I am against the foolish followers of Manu. It may have been right at that time, because the cow was very very important, it was the center of the whole economy; particularly the Indian economy was based on the cow. It was an agricultural society, and the cow was the source of many things: of the bulls, the bullocks, the manure, the milk -- it was immensely important, it was perfectly right to save it. But now the world is living in a totally different way. Manu had a very small world; now we have the whole earth to think of, it is not only a question of a small sect. But
once right has been fixed, people go on following blindly; it has been like that up to now.
For example, in the ten commandments Moses says, "Do not worship any other god than the true God. Don't make idols of the true God and don't worship any other gods." It was a totally different world; three thousand years have passed. In fact, in those ten commandments there is not a single commandment which says anything about atheists. It says, "Don't worship any other god." It does not say, "Don't disbelieve in God," because there was no disbeliever. Atheism was not at all in the air.
Now the most fundamental thing will be to teach people how not to be atheists, because atheism is very prevalent. Almost half of the earth has gone communist, it is atheist, and the remaining half is only formally theist. Now the most fundamental commandment should be, "Don't be atheists, don't be disbelievers, don't be doubters." Now trust should be the most fundamental teaching to be given to people.
As time changes, rights change, wrongs change. And you can see it in your own life --
every day things are different, and you go on clinging to your fixed ideas. The man who lives with fixed ideas lives a dead life. He is never spontaneous and he is never in a right relationship with the situation that exists. He is never response-able; he functions out of his old conclusions which are no longer relevant, he does not look at the situation itself.
So, Akam, according to me there is no such thing as right and no such thing as wrong.
Then what do I teach? I teach awareness -- not labeling, not categorizing. I teach awareness. I teach you to be fully aware in every situation, and act out of your awareness.
Or, in different words I can say: Any action that happens through awareness is right; any action that happens through unawareness is wrong.
But see the emphasis. The emphasis is not on the action itself, the emphasis is on the source -- awareness or unawareness. If you act fully aware, then whatsoever you do is right. If you move mechanically and do things unconsciously as if you
are a sleepwalker, a somnambulist, then whatsoever you do is wrong. Awareness is right, unawareness is wrong.
But if you go to the priests, they will teach you what is right and what is wrong. They will not give you insight, they will give you dead categories. They will not give you light, so that you can see in every situation what to do and what not to do; they want you to depend on them. They don't give you insight into things, so you have to remain dependent forever. They give you crutches, but they don't make you stand on your own feet.
Avoid the priests. Whenever you go to any kind of experts, their whole effort in fact is how to make you dependent on them.
The star of a Broadway hit was visiting friends when talk got around, as usual, to psychiatry. "I must say," said the hostess, "I think my analyst is the best in the world!
You can't imagine what he has done for me. You ought to try him."
"But I don't need analysis," said the star. "I could not be more normal -- there is nothing wrong with me."
"But he is absolutely great," insisted her friend. "He will find something wrong."
There are people who live on finding something wrong with you. Their whole trade secret is to find something wrong with you. They cannot accept you as you are; they will give you ideals, ideas, ideologies, and they will make you feel guilty and they will make you feel worthless, dirt. In your own eyes, they will make you feel so condemned that you will forget all about freedom.
In fact you will become afraid of freedom, because you will see how bad you are, how wrong you are -- and if you are free, you are going to do something wrong, so follow somebody. The priest depends on it, the politician depends on it. They give you right and wrong, fixed ideas, and then you will remain guilty forever.
I say to you: There is nothing right and nothing wrong. I don't want you to depend on me, and I don't give you any fixed ideas. I simply give you indications, hints, which have to be worked out by you. And the hint that I give
to you is awareness. Become more aware, and it is a miracle.…
If you are angry, the priest will say anger is wrong, don't be angry. What will you do?
You can repress anger, you can sit upon it, you can swallow it, literally, but it will go into you, into your system. Swallow anger and you will have ulcers in the stomach, swallow anger and sooner or later you will have cancer. Swallow anger and you will have a thousand and one problems arising out of it, because anger is poison. But what will you do? If anger is wrong, you have to swallow it.
I don't say anger is wrong, I say anger is energy -- pure energy, beautiful energy. When anger arises, be aware of it, and see the miracle happen. When anger arises, be aware of it, and if you are aware you will be surprised; you are in for a surprise -- maybe the greatest surprise of your life -- that as you become aware, anger disappears. Anger is transformed. Anger becomes pure energy; anger becomes compassion, anger becomes forgiveness, anger becomes love. And you need not repress, so you are not burdened by some poison. And you are not being angry, so you are not hurting anybody. Both are saved: the other, the object of your anger, is saved, and you are saved. In the past, either the object was to suffer, or you were to suffer.
What I am saying is that there is no need for anybody to suffer. Just be aware, let awareness be there. Anger will arise and will be consumed by awareness. One cannot be angry with awareness and one cannot be greedy with awareness and one cannot be jealous with awareness. Awareness is the golden key.
The last question:
BELOVED OSHO,
Question 4
THE ORANGE TRICKED ME, CAUGHT HOLD OF ME AND BROUGHT ME
HERE.
EVERYBODY SEEMS TO KNOW BUT NOBODY TELLS ME ALL OF IT. I THINK
AND MEDITATE ON THE ORANGE -- FOR DAYS -- BUT THERE STILL REMAINS A SECRET IN IT.
MY NAME IS FIRE AND THERE IS FIRE BURNING IN ME. IS THAT NOT ENOUGH?
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AFRAID TO WEAR UNIFORMS AND UNDERSTAND
THAT THIS IS IN MY WAY OF WEARING THE ORANGE.
I DON'T KNOW WHY. DO I HAVE TO WEAR IT AS A MESSAGE, OR IS IT SIMPLY A MEDITATION ON ITS OWN, ON THE PATH TO THE LIGHT?
Sybrand, there is no secret in it, it is just a way to recognize my people. I have poor eyesight, my eyes have gone all inwards. I will tell you one story: I know of a tragic case where a minister made just one little transgression. For weeks, this preacherly pious man had admired and coveted a flashy sport coat in a clothing store window. It was colorful, too colorful for a preacher; for a preacher it was almost blasphemous. But finally one afternoon he cracked and went in and bought that blasphemous coat. It was a bright sunny day as he stepped out of the clothing store in his gaudy garb. Yet, lo and behold, right there in the bright sunlight he was struck dead by a lightning bolt.
Up in heaven he was dumbfounded as he faced the Lord. "Lord, oh Lord!" he said. "Why me? And why so suddenly after all my years of faithful service?"
"Why, Reverend Smith!" said the Lord. "What a dreadful mistake! We had no idea it was you."
So, I just have poor eyesight to recognize my people. If you want to become one of my people you will have to wear orange. There is no secret about it, all those secrets that I have been telling you are all just bullshit.
Enough for today. The Book of Wisdom
Chapter #25
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