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CHAPTER 21
Celebrate as if you are already a buddha
21 January 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Prem means love, anshujal means a net of rays, light rays. the whole name will mean a net of love and light rays, a synthesis of love and light. And in fact, that’s how reality is.
If you go through the scientific approach you will find nothing but light, a network of light and rays. If you go through religion you will find a network of love energy.
Life is one – it can be interpreted in two ways: either as light or as love. It depends on the method of your approach. If the approach is scientific you will come to the ultimate stratum of reality, as light. If the approach is of the heart – not of logic, but of intuition, not of reason, but irrational... if the approach is that of prayer and not calculation – you will stumble upon the same reality, because the reality is one, but now your interpretation will that of love. and it is better to understand it in both ways – then a person has a total concept... the vision is perfect.…
Anshu means light rays and jal means a net. Try to understand from both sides. Sometimes approach your inner reality as a light phenomenon... just think of yourself as nothing but light. And sometimes approach your innermost door as love. When you are alone, think of yourself as light; when you are with somebody, think of yourself as love. When you are alone, enter your reality with this meditation – that you are light.
Jesus uses two maxims: in one he says that god is light, in another he says that god is love. When you are alone, become light – that is the way of meditation. When you relate with people become love – that is the way of prayer. And try to catch hold of your reality from both ways. Any one way is lopsided. And there is no need to miss the other, because the other is also tremendously
beautiful. Just to feel oneself as light – as infinite criss-crossing waves of light, rays of light; just a net, a beautiful net of nothing but light is so incredibly beautiful. It’s fantastic.
Many people come to reality through this experience, but this is half – one aspect of the truth. And if one remains confined to it, something is missing. This type of man will become very much detached. He will not relate. He will become an escapist... he will avoid relationship. In fact he will become afraid of relationship, because whenever he is in relationship that incredible experience of light will disappear.
It happens only when you are alone... tremendously alone, unrelated – only then it happens. It is a non-relationship experience. Because of this experience, buddhists, the jainas, all became escapists... renounced the world. Love became a dangerous word. The same happened in christianity too. It should not have happened there, because jesus goes on saying that God is love – still it happened!
The human mind tends to choose. It is very difficult to choose the whole, because to choose the whole means to be choiceless, and the human mind tends to choose one aspect of it. Once you choose one aspect, the other is denied. And then you become afraid of the other, because if the other happens, your first experience will be disturbed, so you become protective.
Sufis, bhaktas, devotees, have experienced the other aspect of reality through love, prayer, feeling, heart, but they become afraid of the light, because light disturbs their love, their relationship. And my whole effort here is to create the ultimate synthesis, so a man is capable of knowing reality in as many ways as it is.
Don’t become obsessed with any partial view – remain available. Even to the opposite remain available, even to the contradictory remain available. If one is available to contradictions and can easily float from one to the other, the mind disappears utterly, because the mind cannot exist with a choiceless awareness. So don’t choose between these two.
When you relate with people, become love – when you are alone, become light. Go on playing with both the ideas, and soon you will see a synthesis arising. And that synthesis is what life is – a synthesis of light and love.
These three l’s are the most important: love, light, life. Just as there are three r’s in the world of learning, these are three l’s in the world of unlearning.
Prem means love, atandra means alertness, no sleepiness, no unconsciousness, awareness.
Love can be unconscious and can be conscious. When it is unconscious it becomes lust. When it is conscious it has a sacred quality to it: When it is unconscious you fall in love. When it is conscious you rise in love; then there is no fall in it.
And the most difficult thing in life is to make love conscious. Everything else is very easy, because love is the most basic thing in life and to transform it means a radical change.
You can change anything else – that won’t matter much unless you change your quality of love. You can change your character – nothing will happen out of that. From bad, you can become good; from a sinner, you can become a saint – and nothing will happen.
The so-called saints and sinners all sail in the same boat. The saint has repressed his sinner, that’s all, and the sinner has repressed his saint, that’s all. They are the same people. One is standing on his feet, the other is standing on his head – that is the only difference. But their totality is the same. The sinner goes on fighting with his saint – continuously there is fight – and the saint goes on fighting with his sinner. The fight is continuous – and fight is destructive.
One can change one’s character. One can become moral, respectable... one can fulfill all the rituals of the religion one belongs to, but that religion remains superficial. Unless your love is changed nothing is changed. Then all else is just befooling others and oneself.
Love is your innermost core... it is your centre. There is no point in changing the periphery – the periphery is irrelevant. It goes on changing on its own. A bad person becomes tired of his badness and one day starts becoming good. The good man becomes tired of his goodness and starts becoming bad. It is a wheel that moves. Just like day and night and summer and winter, it is a wheel that goes on moving. You are not needed to do anything really. It changes on its own, like the climate.
So there is no need to become obsessed too much with the periphery. The whole energy should be focussed in the centre, and the centre is love.
If love remains unconscious, you fall. Then love remains more a part of the animal world. Then it is a mechanical habit, a biological habit, a chemical habit. And then it brings misery, nothing else. It may promise you much – it brings only misery, anxiety, anguish.
But if love can have consciousness in it, it becomes luminous. Then the house is no more dark. You have wings – you can fly! Then you are not crawling on the earth.
Consciousness gives you wings – and that is the meaning of your name, prem atandra: alert love, love alert. Let that be your secret key which has to be used every moment. Become alert in other things too, but become very very alert in your love. What do I mean when I say become alert in your love?
When you are unconscious, love is just a name. Just on the container’love’ is written, but inside the container there is no love. There are some things – many things – but they are not love. Jealousy is there, possessiveness is there, anger is there, ambition is there, lust is there, a great need to be needed is there – but these are not really love. These are all pseudo-coins.
When you become aware, you suddenly become aware that love cannot exist with jealousy – it is not possible. When love is there jealousy cannot exist. If jealousy exists then love cannot exist – they never go together. But whatsoever is called love is ninety-nine percent jealousy, possessiveness... more of an effort to dominate or sometimes even to be dominated – an effort to be dominated – but that’s not much difference. That too is a subtle trick of the same game. When love is there, there is no question of domination. Then it is not politics, and one is not ambitious.
When love is there, one respects the other so tremendously, so totally – how can one possess? Only things can be possessed, not persons. How can you possess a person? A person is basically a freedom. How can you possess a person? If you possess you kill the person – he becomes a thing. That’s why husbands turn into things, wives turn into things – they are no more persons.
So become very alert. Your alertness will destroy many things in you. All that is destructive will be destroyed: jealousy, possessiveness, anger – they will be destroyed. And when all these negative qualities are no more there, something blooms in you that you are not yet alert about... a totally new flower.
That flower is love. It is uncontaminated by your mind. It is incorruptible and it is unconditional. You simply love. It becomes your very climate... it surrounds you like a perfume. Wherever you go, wherever you move, you move with your love climate around you. And whomsoever comes close to you, shares your love energy.
[A sannyasin’s father has died after a long illness and she says: I have to go somehow more to be with my mother, to finish something there. There is something there that feels so... unfinished emotionally with her, and now seems the time.]
It is always so with parents... very difficult to finish. The relationship is such that to finish it needs great awareness – only then can it be finished. Even the idea to finish it may not allow it to finish. So don’t carry that idea – that you have to finish it. Just be there... naturally there, lovingly there.
Do whatsoever you can do – because parents have done much, and in the West they are not even thanked for it. Nobody feels any gratitude.
In the East it has been totally different. In the East it is never an unfinished situation. It is always complete, because parents have given so much and children have always been giving as much reverence as possible, as much respect as possible. Mm? that has become so natural in the East, and it has to be so for a very deep reason.
If you are not in rapport with your patents you will not be in rapport with yourself, because parents are not just an accidental phenomenon – they are deeply in your roots... you come from them. Half of your being comes from your mother, half of your being comes from your father. They both will carry on in you. All their conflict will continue in you... all their anxieties will deep down continue. It is for your sake that you have to come to a rapport. And the easiest way is not to make any effort for it.
Effort will never help – it is very artificial. So drop this idea, otherwise you will come back feeling again that something has remained incomplete. Simply drop that idea. Go there.…
In fact in the east it has been always said that there is no way to repay... no way. Whatsoever we owe to our parents, there is no way to repay it – it is not possible. This has been accepted. With this acceptance, repayment becomes easy, because then there is no problem. If it cannot be done, there is no problem. So we love, we respect.
Just go there, be there. And she will need you in this moment. When your father is gone she will be in a great sorrow – she will need you. So don’t make any effort deliberately, mm? Just be with her, caress her, care about her... sometimes meditate with her, help her to meditate if she can. Otherwise just tell her that you will meditate in her room. She can simply rest in her bed – you will meditate. And that very vibration will help her.
Be happy. It will be difficult in a situation, in this situation, but still be happy. Take cheerfulness for her... make the burden light. Help her to accept the situation.
And don’t bother about your relationship, mm? simply don’t bother about it, and suddenly you will see that it is healed. It is indirect – you cannot work directly. And if for two, three weeks you can be very loving and helping and she feels happy that you have come – she feels happy that you have some totally different kind of energy that she needed... that you have been a nourishment to her – that’s enough. You will feel a rapport coming.
If we can be loving, no relationship remains hanging. Each moment it has a completion.
And I don’t like the word’finished’, because that seems like a dead end, a full stop, as if something has been closed, filled in, and closed... no need to bother about it – finished.
The connotation of that word is not very good – that it was something which had to be done. One is happy that it was finished – that one is out of it, that one need not look back again, that one is able to forget all about it now. That is implied in the word’finished’.
I like the word ‘completion’. Completion is never finished in a way and yet it is complete. Each moment of it is a complete moment.
If I die right now, my relationship with you all is complete. If I live, the relationship continues. Completion is not against continuity. Finishing is against continuity. Completion is each moment but with an opening into the future – it is not a closed thing.
In fact the more complete a relationship is, the more it becomes open – open-ended – and you can look forward; there is no need to look back. Not that it is finished so there is no need to look back – there is no need to look back because now you can look forward. There is future, there is hope, there is thrill. The next moment will bring another completion. We go from completion to completion, from perfection to another perfection.
And nothing should be finished while you are alive – how and why should it be finished? Everything should continue – that’s what your life is. The more rich it is, the more it is related. If you have thousands of relationships of course you have a richer life, because they all pour their love energy in you and they all share your love energy. You live tremendously enriched in that give and take, in that sharing, in that meeting of energies.
In the West that too is happening – people are becoming very very poor in their relationships. It is becoming a very very small circle every day. First the joint family disappeared – otherwise it was a wider circle. Uncles and aunts were all living together, and children of the uncles and the aunts and the cousins and faraway cousins – they were all living together. It was a big family. One had a better possibility of communion, of relationship. One was richer because of it.
Then the joint family dropped, disappeared. The family became a very small unit wife, husband, children. Now even that is dropping! Even wives and husbands are not living together. Even children are like a burden – servants are taking care of them. The wife has her own life, the husband has his own life. They meet like strangers. The home is no more a home – it is more like a hotel.
At the most a house, but not a home. There is no communion left. Yes, people stay overnight, meet and talk and even make love – but the communion is not there. And people are becoming very very poor.
That’s why these growth groups have become so important in the west. A great need to commune, to relate, to touch people, to be touched by people, exists – and that is fulfilled nowhere. Hence so much impact of encounter, gestalt, psychodrama. They will spread because the family has disappeared and they have become now a temporary sort of family. For ten days you meet in a group – twenty people. At least for ten days twenty people become a family. One wants to relate and belong.
In the East it will be difficult. Unless the family disappears these groups cannot function. People ask me why I am not allowing indians in the groups. I am not allowing because it is pointless! They still live in big groups... the family still survives. Maybe it has disappeared in Bombay and Calcutta – then I will allow Bombay, Calcutta people by and by but in the greater india it is not a problem at all.
In small villages the whole village exists like a family – everybody is related to everybody; nobody is unrelated. Everybody is taken care of by the community. So it is impossible for indians to conceive of any need to be touched, hugged, and they cannot see... they will think, ‘These people are crazy! What are they doing?’
There is no need to finish any relationship, but there is a need to make every relationship so complete each moment That if you drop dead suddenly there is nothing left which is incomplete. You will not hang... your spirit will not haunt people. You will simply disappear on your path. There will be no need to look backward – everything is complete.
[A visitor says: I came here to be close to you and to feel who you are... I think I have a lot of hesistancy because of my life in California, and I feel torn between the two.]
It is natural. You have a life there and now a new life is starting, but soon a synthesis arises. In the beginning you feel torn apart, because you have lived in a certain way with certain ideas – you have a certain pattern of life – and then you come to me and a totally new thing starts taking root.
You will be tom apart in the beginning, but once you have come to me there is no way to go back. Even if you go to california – that doesn’t make any difference; you will be tom apart. And it is better to be here and tom apart than there and tom apart! Because here there is the possibility of achieving a higher synthesis in which california and poona can become one.
And hesistancy is natural – everybody hesitates, because one is moving into the unknown. The mind never hesitates if you are moving in the same old rut. You know the ways... you are acquainted with the territory; the geography is known so you can go on moving. You can go on moving and remain in your sleep, because there is no need to be awake – the territory is so well-known. You can move like a sleep walker.
The problem arises and then the mind hesitates with something new. Then you cannot move like a sleepwalker – you have to become awake. The new is challenging, and the mind is always for the old. That’s why it is for the old – because the old is comfortable, convenient. The new is dangerous. Who knows? There is no guarantee – it may prove worse than the old!
So the mind says,‘Keep to the safe side. Move with the old – never go to the new unless the new fits with the old.’ But when the new fits with the old it is no more new. It is not new at all – it is just another modified form of the old... maybe a little decorated here and there, but it is still the same thing.
So everybody who comes to me hesitates. The more intelligent a person the more hesitation there will be. But if the person is really intelligent he will accept the challenge in spite of the hesitation. He will say,‘Okay, there is hesitation, but I have to go and see. I have to investigate, explore.’
You cannot be back in your state now – there is no way! Once some desire to grow has arisen, once an enquiry has entered your being, once you have started dreaming about the unknown, about future possibilities – call it religion or whatsoever – once a dream has arisen in you, there is no way to go back. You have to follow the dream.
You can delay. The more you delay, the more you will suffer. But these dreams are such that they haunt.. Blessed are the ignorant – because they don’t have any dreams... they don’t try to reach into the unknown. But they are not really alive.
Life is always when there is challenge. Life is always between the old and the new. When you take the step, when you take the jump, you are alive. Sooner or later the new will become old again – then you have to jump again. And this goes on.
Once you have learned that life exists only between the old and the new – just in the middle, in the gap, in the interval – then you move every moment. Because you know that is the only way to be alive – to be really alive! Otherwise people live dead lives. They are already in their graves. They were not really ever born... they are still in the wombs.
So don’t be a coward – be courageous, and take the jump in. If you have really come to feel me, then the only way to feel me is by trusting me; otherwise you cannot feel me. If you remain far away, standing like a spectator, you will not be able to feel me. You have to become an insider... you have to become part of my family, then you will be able to feel me. By becoming a part of my family you will become open and vulnerable. You will allow me to enter your heart – otherwise you won’t allow. You will just remain on the periphery.
So become a sannyasin – don’t be afraid! Mm? Take the jump right now – there is no need to wait. Or would you like to think about it?
[She answers: What do you mean when you say surrender?]
You don’t surrender anything – you simply surrender; your ego, that’s all. Nothing else is surrendered.
[She asks: How do I know what that is?]
By surrendering because that is the only way to know it. If you ask me how the tea tastes, I will say... taste it! What else can I say? There is no way to define the taste of tea – such a simple thing, but you have to taste it. Let surrender be your cup of tea – taste it!
By surrendering one knows what surrender is. By loving one knows what love is. There is no other way! Intellectually there is no possibility to understand – only existentially. If you have not loved and you ask somebody,‘Before I love I would like to know what love is’ How can it be explained?
Surrender is a lovethe greatest love there is. Surrender in fact is not the right word – in english
there is no right word for it. In sanskrit we have the right word – it is’samarpan’. It means offering oneself in deep love and trust. The english word ‘surrender’ is ugly. It is used in reference to war. Adolf Hitler surrendered, Germany surrendered, Japan surrendered. It is a sort of defeat.
In sanskrit, samarpan is not a defeat. It’s a great moment of rejoicing – that one has offered oneself. It is a dedication. If you have had a small glimpse of somebody further ahead than you, you offer yourself – you say, ‘Hold my hand,’ – that’s all. And all else will come by and by.
And it is not just by Lying down under a tree and not doing anything – no! You will remain the same – only one thing will be missing. That one thing is the ego concept. And by dropping the ego your individuality is not effaced. In fact by dropping it you will become more of a individual.
You can see my sannyasinsBy surrendering themselves they have not become zombies. They
have become more authentically individual. They were not individuals before – they were zombies! They were drugged with their ego! They dropped the ego – now they can celebratethat fetter is
broken.
And I am here to give you freedom, so by surrender I don’t mean that you are going to become a follower – no! Even that word is not good. With me, anyone who falls in love becomes a companion – he is not a follower. Because I don’t say to imitate me and I don’t say to be like me. I don’t give you any ideal to follow and I don’t give you any ideology. I simply make you free of all ideologies and free of all idealsfree of all conditionings.
You surrender the ego, and I give you back your freedom. [Osho gives her sannyas.]
Deva means divine, vilas means play; divine play. And that is one of the most fundamental secrets of the eastern teachings – that life should not be taken as work but as play. God has not created the world... because the word’creation’ seems to be too serious – he is playing. It is his leela, his play. The eastern concept is very simple, non-serious, more joyouscloser to the great beauty that
surrounds – the flowers, the birds, the rivers, the ocean. Everything seems to be in tremendous play.
And god is not doing something – it is a gameit is hide and seek. Once you take life as a play the
total concept changes. Then the anxiety, the tension of reaching somewhere, is dropped.There
is nowhere to arrive.
Life is not going anywhere – it is simply here. There is no goal. It is not goal-oriented – each moment is the goal. The journey is the goal, and each moment is of tremendous celebration. There is no need to wait for tomorrow – that tomorrow we will celebratewhen we have become buddhas
or christs then we will celebrate – no! Then you will never celebrate. Each moment we have to celebrateas if we are buddhas already. In the beginning it is’as if, but soon you realise that it is
not an’as if – it is a reality. We have not recognised ourselves as we are.
‘Deva vilas’ means to take life as fun... divine fun, a beautiful joke! Theologians are very serious people, and seriousness is an illness – it is a sort of neurosis. More laughter is needed, more humour is needed.
And I am trying to create here a totally new kind of religion – where laughter is not against prayer. You can laugh and pray together. Your laughter can become prayer – your prayer can because laughter. Then – only then – does each moment become luminous, glorious. Then a splendour enters your life... from very small things.
Eating can become a sacrament and taking a bath can be meditation. Just going for a morning walk is incredibly holy! And there is no need to go to the church or to the temple, because the whole existence is his temple. and there is no need to be against your body, or anti-life in any way, because your body is his temple – he is hiding here. A great life-affirmation arises.
Serious people become negative. Serious people become so much obsessed with god that they are ready to sacrifice life for it – but god is in life! He is as much immanent as he is transcendent. He is in life – of course he is more than life, too, but the way goes through life. He is in love – he is more than love too, but the way goes through love. It does not go against life, it does not go against love. So a great affirmation is needed.
.… Make yourself less serious. Think less, feel more. Do less, dance more. Act less, play more. Acting will do, but to act is not good. and once this is understood, things start changing.
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