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‌CHAPTER 17

20 June 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A visitor says that before he came here he found it difficult to cry. Over the past few days he has been crying a lot.]

Mm mm, something has broken inside and you should be happy about it. Some ice has broken, some coldness has broken, some dead layer has broken. Whenever it happens, one starts crying because one again becomes a child. The cry is the first thing that the child does. That is his first entry into the world. Everybody enters the world crying.

So if you can really cry deeply, it can become a rebirth. That’s why you are feeling so full of change. Your old self will dissolve into crying. So don’t stop it – allow it, and on the contrary, enjoy it. It has a tremendous beauty in it.

Tears are one of the most beautiful things in the world; sometimes even better than laughter because laughter can never go so deep. At the most it remains on the surface, or even if it goes a little deeper, it never touches the very core. But crying can touch the very core because it is an unlearned thing. The child learns laughter afterwards, but he comes ready for crying.

Crying is more natural than laughter. If you are brought up by people who never laugh, you will not laugh because you will not know that laughter exists. It is a certain learning. That’s why animals cannot laugh. Or even if sometimes human children are brought up by animals – wolves or monkeys – they don’t laugh. They can cry but they don’t laugh. Laughter is social. Crying is natural, very deep, unlearned, original.

So it is even more meaningful and significant than laughter, but it can disturb because it is deep. Because it is deep, that’s why it disturbs you. It can disturb you tremendously. It can make you almost chaotic inside. You will start feeling that you are a mess because your identity and the fixed

attitude, and the shell that surrounded you, will not be there. You will become more and more vulnerable and open and you will not know who you are. The old identity will drop.

Before the new arises there will be an interval of time when you will feel completely lost and the mind will say, ‘Stop crying!’ because the mind has been taught that there is something wrong in crying. People cry and weep only when something goes wrong, so crying is like a complaint against existence. Somebody dies and you cry. Crying seems to be helplessness, so everybody has been taught not to cry because that shows weakness.

Man particularly has been taught not to cry because that is womanish, feminine – ‘Don’t be a sissy! Don’t cry. Keep control. Be a man.’ These are all foolish teachings but they have been conditioned into the mind. You have been fed on them – everybody has – so crying becomes more and more difficult. One immediately controls oneself. Whenever there is something within you that wants to cry, you repress it.

So the layer that surrounds your being becomes more and more dead, dry. It has no tears in it. And tears are the very shape of being... the very juice of life. Crying has nothing to do with sadness, depression. It has something to do with aliveness.

So whenever you are tremendously alive, you will feel a volcanic eruption within you and you will want to cry. That crying will be beautiful, blissful. You would like to weep and to allow the tears to drop in torrents. They will unburden you and the whole rubbish of your mind will go out through your tears. You will become more fragile, more delicate. You will lose that egoistic attitude of always remaining in control. You will become more free, spontaneous, more childlike. That is the first thing to happen. If meditation goes deep, it happens.

Only afterwards laughter is possible. A man who really knows how to cry and weep will become able to laugh one day. He has earned it. Laughter that has no tears is very. superficial, imposed, painted. If you can cry and allow your total being to go into it and dissolve into it, you will have a totally different quality of laughter arising in you.

Allow it... it is beautiful.

[A sannyasin said that through meditating she was feeling more and more like being alone, which was very unusual for her as she had always been outgoing.

Osho said that a balance between moving out to others and retiring into oneself is needed, and that one should be fluid enough to be in this rhythm. One should not remain in a fixed mode because then either pole becomes an imprisonment. An extrovert becomes so dependent on others that he loses contact with his own centre, while an introvert who wants only to be alone and is scared of making contact with others, misses much because you come to know yourself only through others. Relationships act as mirrors which reflect the multi-faceted nature of each person’s being.]

So, to me, the total man is the only way to be. And by a total man, I mean a man who has no fixed mode of life. He is fluid. He is not like stone but like water, and he can take any shape. Whatsoever the circumstance demands, the situation demands, he can take that shape with no difficulty, no struggle. He is just like water.

You can pour water into a jar and it takes that shape. You can pour it into a glass and it takes that shape, because deep ’down it has no shape of its own. It has simply a fluidity, a flow of energy, that’s all. But if there is a rock, it has a fixed shape, a persistent shape, and it will fight you if you want to try to change its shape. And it will not be easy to change its shape. Hammers will be needed, and then too it may shatter into pieces, but it will not flow. So never be rocklike. Be like water.

That’s what Lao Tzu says, ‘Never be like a rock. Be like a river.’ And he says, ‘Remember, a rock may appear very strong but in the end, water wins over it. The soft wins over the strong, the liquid wins over the solid. The child wins over the old man, and life goes on conquering death.’

One needs to be completely without any mode. In fact to put it absolutely correctly, one needs to be without any character because character is a mode, predictable. Somebody is a sinner and somebody is a saint; they both have characters. You can rely on their characters but they are not total men. A total man is unpredictable. He has no character. He is freedom... just freedom, nothing else. So he is available, that’s all.

If the situation demands him to be a sinner, he becomes a sinner. If the situation demands him to be a saint, he becomes a saint. He has no character. And that is the most beautiful thing in the world – not to have any character, but just to live moment to moment, flow-like. Then you are true to the moment.

A man of character cannot be true to the moment because he has to persist with his own character, irrelevant of the situation. He cannot take note of the situation. He cannot respond to it. He has a past – his character – and he has to live according to that. He is a dead man. A man of character is a dead man.

A total man has no character because he has no mode, no fixed style of life. He simply waits, allows, moves, but all his movements -are herenow. It is not coming out of the past.

So don’t be an extrovert, don’t be an introvert. Both these directions have been tried. The East has tried the direction of introversion and has suffered tremendously. The poverty, the horrible ugliness, the unhygienic life, is because of introversion. Nobody was willing to be scientific, nobody was willing to be technological. Nobody was at all concerned with what was happening in the outside world. All the great people of the East were too much obsessed with introversion. Close your eyes and go into meditation. Forget the world and be unattached to it because it is just a passing dream and it will not be there forever.

The whole teaching has been that you are in life just as if you are in a waiting room on a railway station. So who cares? – someone spits, okay. You don’t bother about it. You are just waiting there for a few minutes and your train will come and you will go. Somebody is throwing banana peels. Who bothers? It is nobody’s house; it is just a waiting room.

That has happened to India, to the whole of the East. It is nobody’s house and nobody cares. Everybody is waiting for his own death, for the train to come. So why bother to make a beautiful world when you will have to leave some day? Pull on somehow, somehow tolerate things.…

The whole aesthetic sense of life was destroyed. People became spiritual and then they became non-aesthetic. Beauty was lost, sacrificed, at the altar of truth.

Just the opposite has happened in the West. People are so extroverted that they are wasting their whole life in preparing a house, in planning a garden, in purchasing a car – and then they are gone. They leave the world a little more beautiful than they found it but their whole life has been wasted on doing such things. They miss.

So technologically the West has become affluent, rich, but the inside has become very poor. Everything is available on the outside, but inside man is completely forgotten. They have learned to live only on the outside, and they have forgotten how to make any contact with their own vital centre of being.

East and West are both lopsided. My whole vision is of a whole earth, neither eastern nor western... of the whole of humanity undivided, and of a whole man without any modes.

So you start moving and make a balance. Sometimes when you are aone, close the door and forget all about the world. Just go deep inside, with no excitement and no thought of the outside. And sometimes go outside – enjoy dance, sing, have fun. Just keep it fifty-fifty. And report to me about how you feel in three weeks.

[A sannyasin asked about his experience in the Nadabrahma meditation:... when I lay down during it, I got really scared and I felt that I just had to get up and move, and that I would die if I lay there.]

Mm mm, that’s very significant. That means that that meditation will be helpful...

Wherever you find death, there is the door. Death is the door. The mind becomes afraid obviously. Seeing that there is some danger, the mind makes you alert to escape from there, so you start avoiding that door. But in fact that is where one should put all effort. It usually happens later on to people. It has happened to you very early, and it is beautiful.

After years of meditation it happens that people become aware of which meditation can give them death. Once you know that this meditation can give you death, then that is your meditation. Then nothing else is needed for you. Others you enjoy – good. Do them; they will be helpful. But the real thing is going to happen through Nadabrahma, the humming meditation.

At home, start doing Nadabrahma alone. And I will help.

[A sannyasin said he couldn’t attend the meditations because he had stomach pains after eating a chinese meal.]

That can be, but ordinarily it will not happen if you are not doing meditations; it will not affect you. When you are meditating and there are subtle changes happening inside the stomach, then any food that doesn’t suit with the meditations will create a little trouble, because then your body energy starts moving into two diametrically opposite directions.

So for the remaining time that you will be here, be very choosey about food. Depend more on fruits, vegetables – simple things. Once the stomach has settled into the new way – and it will settle with the meditations.…

The stomach has to change continuously with the mind. If you “are angry, you have a certain type of stomach. If you are loving, you have a different type of stomach. When you are angry you can immediately feel a great tension in the stomach, hot, boiling. When you are loving, you can feel a certain relaxation in the stomach. When you are happy, you have a certain stomach, and when you are unhappy, you have a different stomach.

That’s how people who are continuously in stress and tension, start having ulcers in the stomach. That simply says that a continuous strain in the mind creates wounds in the stomach. There is no other way for them unless they change their minds.

We have an expression – ‘I cannot stomach it.’ That’s exactly the right expression.. There are things you cannot stomach. Everything has to go into the stomach. Somebody insults you and you say, ‘I cannot stomach it. I cannot swallow it.’ But whatsoever you swallow goes into the stomach, and it will have its reactions.

When the mind starts changing, parallel to it, the stomach starts changing. This is my observation, that people who are doing meditation will have to come to a moment where their stomachs will have to be readjusted.

That’s why great meditators came to believe in vegetarianism. That was not a philosophy. It had nothing to do with any philosophical attitude. Just through deep meditation they came to understand that they could not stomach many things. It was impossible.

Vegetarianism is nothing but a by-product of deep meditation. If a person goes on meditating, by and by he will see that it has become impossible to eat meat. Not that somebody says not to; at least I don’t. Whatsoever you feel like eating, eat. But if you go deep in meditation one day you will simply not to be able to stomach it. It will be nauseating. The very idea to eat meat will be vomit-inducing and will not be tolerated by your stomach. Now you are feeling that you are in such a smooth world, so subtle and refined that you cannot believe how you used to eat meat before. It looks impossible – and for what?

We can stomach meat and things like that because many animal instincts are there in the mind: anger, greed, hatred, violence. Once those things disappear from the mind, then the parallel will disappear also from the stomach.

Your stomach has given you indications. Don’t rationalise that it was just the food. It was not just the food. Ordinarily it would not have affected you at all. Because you were meditating it was not in tune. It was disharmonious.

[A sannyasin said she was not sure whether she wanted to continue her nurse training or not...

Osho checked her energy. He said he thought it would be good for her to continue nursing as it is creative work and one of the best occupations one could choose.

He said nursing was not an ordinary job, but one in which one could share one’s love and compassion and that it would be a help to meditation. He added that once she had completed her training she could return and become a nurse here because we would need a hospital one day for the ashram.]

[A sannyasin said: I got very scared in Kundalini. I felt that something was happening – I just can’t say what it was – so I stopped.]

You shouldn’t have done that.

That’s what we are trying to do really, and when it happens, we stop! You should not do that again. Continue Kundalini.

Whenever something great is going to happen, fear arises, because it has never happened before and the mind cannot comprehend it. The mind feels impotent before it and that’s why fear arises. Fear is just because of the impotence of the mind encountering something vast, wild, something infinite. The mind recoils and wants to escape. That’s what fear is. But we have to choose the unknown and not choose the mind.

The mind means the known, and the whole search is for the unknown, for that which we have not known yet. And when we come to it, we escape. We run away from it.

There is a poem of Rabindranath Tagore – one of the greatest poets of India – in which he says he was searching for God for many lifetimes. Sometimes he was able to find His footprints on the sands of time, and then he was overjoyed, thrilled, and he followed those footprints, but they were always far away and distant. Sometimes he had even glimpsed Him somewhere near a star but it was so far away that by the time he had reached the star, it had gone. That went on for many lives.

Then one day suddenly he found himself standing at His door. He was overjoyed and was just going to knock when a sudden fear came to him... the fear of the unknown... the fear of facing God. He escaped, not even looking backwards to see if He had opened the door.

Now, he said, he still goes on searching, but he searches on other paths where he knows God is not. He avoids that path particularly ’where he knows Him to be, because if he goes there again, he may not be able to escape.

It’s really so. We come close many times. Just a little more courage, a little more stamina, and it would have happened. But we miss and then the wheel moves on, and it takes much effort to come to the point again. The problem is that we may unconsciously start avoiding. We may not even go in that direction.

So you have to continue Kundalini – that’s where your satori is waiting for you. And I am here, so don’t be afraid. That’s my whole functioning in being here. Otherwise how will you do it alone?

I am here... leave it to me. Just go headlong, and whatsoever happens – if fear arises – just remember me and go on. Just call my name deep inside and say, ‘Now you look after me Osho, I am going’ – and just go.

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