The First Principle

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Osho

The First Principle Talks on Zen

Talks given from 11/04/77 am to 20/04/77 am English Discourse series

10 Chapters

Year published: 1979

Catching the First Principle 2

Greed Behind Greed Behind Greed 18

The Only One Who Has Not Talked 37

Go with the River 54

Beyond the Prism of the Mind

The Irrational Rationalist 92

The Song of Sound and Silence 109

The Profound and the Trivial 125

You: the Greatest Lie There Is 144

10 All Going Is Going Astray 162

Chapter 1 - Catching the First Principle 1

Catching the First Principle

11 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall

ONCE A TYRO ASKED A ZEN MASTER, "MASTER, WHAT IS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE?"

WITHOUT HESITATION THE MASTER REPLIED, "IF I WERE TO TELL YOU, IT

WOULD BECOME THE SECOND PRINCIPLE."

Yes. The first principle cannot be said. The most important thing cannot be said, and that which can be said will not be the first principle. The moment truth is uttered it becomes a lie; the very utterance is a falsification. So the Vedas, the Bible, and the Koran, they contain the second principle, not the first principle. They contain lies, not the truth, because the truth cannot be contained by any word whatsoever. The truth can only be experienced -- the truth can be lived -- but there is no way to say it.

The word is a far, faraway echo of the real experience; and it is so far away from the real that it is even worse than the unreal because it can give you a false confidence. It can give you a false promise. You can believe it, and that is the problem. If you start believing in some dogma, you will go on missing the truth. Truth has to be known by experience. No belief can help you on the way; all beliefs are barriers. All religions are against religion -- it has to be so by the very nature of things. All churches are against God. Churches exist because they fulfill a certain need. The need is: man does not want to make any efforts; he wants easy shortcuts.

Belief is an easy shortcut.

The way to truth is hard; it is an uphill task. One has to go through total death -- one has to destroy oneself utterly-only then is the new born. The resurrection is only after the crucifixion.

To avoid the crucifixion we have created beliefs. Beliefs are very cheap. You can believe and you remain the same. You can go on believing, and it doesn't require any basic change in your life pattern. It does not require any change in your consciousness, and unless your consciousness changes, the belief is just a toy. You can play with it, you can deceive yourself with it, but it is not going to nourish you.

Visualize that a child is playing in the garden of his house, playing with imaginary lions, and then suddenly he has to face a real lion who has escaped from the zoo. Now he does not know what to do. He is simply scared out of his wits. He is paralyzed; he cannot even run. He was perfectly at ease with the

imaginary, but with the real he does not know what to do.

That is the situation of all those people who go on playing with beliefs, concepts, philosophies, theologies. They ask questions just to ask questions. The answer is the last thing they are interested in. They don't want the answer. They go on playing with questions, and each answer helps them to create more questions. Each answer is nothing but a jumping board for more questions.

The truth is not a question. It is a quest! It is not intellectual; it is existential. The inquiry is a gamble, a gamble with your life. It needs tremendous courage. Belief needs no courage.

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Belief is the way of the coward. If you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan you are a coward. You are avoiding the real lion, you are escaping from the real lion. If you want to face the real, then there is no need to go to any church, there is no need to go to any priest, because the real surrounds you within and without. You can face it -- it is already there.

I have heard:

A Zen Master, Shou-shan, was asked by a disciple, "According to the scriptures, all beings possess the Buddha-nature; why is it that they do not know it?"

Shou-shan replied, "They know!"

This is a rare answer, very rare, a great answer. Shou-shan said, "They know! But they are avoiding it." It is not a question of how to know the truth. The truth is here, you are part of it.

The truth is now, there is no need to go anywhere. And it has been there since the beginning, if there was any beginning, and it will be there until the end, if there is going to be any end.

And you have been avoiding it. You find ways to avoid it. When somebody asks,

"What is the way to truth?" in fact he is asking, "What is the way to avoid the truth?" He is asking, "How can I escape?"

You may not have heard:

Says that old rascal Bodhidharma: "All know the way, few walk it, and the ones who don't walk cry regularly, 'Show me the way! Where is the way? Give me a map! Which way is it?' "

Those who don't walk, they go on regularly crying and shouting, "Where is the way?" And all know the way because life is the way, experience is the way. To be alive is the way, to be conscious is the way. You are alive, you are conscious. This is the first principle.

But it cannot be said, and I am not saying it! And you are not hearing it.

The truth, by its very nature, is a dumb experience. All experiences are dumb because they happen only in deep silence. If you love a woman the love happens in deep silence. If you create poetry it descends in you in deep silence. If you paint a picture you disappear. The painter is NOT, when the painting is born, there is not even a witness to it. It happens in utter silence and utter aloneness. If you are there then the painting cannot be of any value. If the poet is there then the poetry will be nothing but a technical thing. It will have all the rules fulfilled, it will follow the grammar, the rules of melody, but there will be no poetry. It will be a dead corpse. It will not be a real woman; it will be a nun.

I have heard:

At an isolated part of the beach of Cannes a beautiful French girl threw herself into the sea. A young man off at a distance noticed it and dashed into the water to save her, but it was too late. He dragged the seminude body ashore and left it on the sand while he went in search of some official. When he returned he was horrified to see a man making love to the corpse.

Osho - The First Principle 3

Chapter 1 - Catching the First Principle "Monsieur!" he exclaimed, "that woman is dead!"

"Sacre bleu!" muttered the man, jumping up. "I thought she was a nun."

To be a monk or to be a nun is to be dead. And there are millions of ways of how to die and not live.

Truth surrounds you. It is in the air, it is in the fragrance of the flowers, it is in the flow of the river, it is in the green leaves, it is in the stars, it is in the dust, it is in you. Only truth is!

But you go on avoiding it and you go on asking questions -- How to attain to truth? Where is the map? Which way is it? And even if the map is given to you, the map does not help you in any way. In the first place the map cannot be given, because the truth goes on changing. It is not a stagnant phenomenon; it is continuously changing. It is alive, it is breathing. It is never the same; it is never the same for two consecutive moments.

Says old Heraclitus, "You cannot step in the same river twice." In fact, you cannot even step once; the river is flowing, the river is flowing so fast. And not only is the river flowing, you are flowing. You cannot step in the same river twice: the river changes. You cannot step in the same river twice: because YOU change.

Truth is dynamic. Truth is not something dead. That's why it cannot be contained in words.

The moment you utter it, it has passed, it has gone beyond, it is no more the same. The moment you say it is so, it is no more so. Words lag behind.

To be with truth there is only one possibility: drop words. Language lags behind. Language is lame. Only silence can go with truth, hand in hand. Only silence can move with truth. Only silence can be so fast, because silence has no weight to carry. Words are loaded; they carry weight. So when you are carrying words, great theologies in your head, great abstractions, then you cannot walk with truth. To walk with truth one has to be weightless. Silence is weightless; it has nothing to carry. Silence has wings. So only in silence is the truth known, and only in silence is the truth transferred, transmitted.

The tyro asked the Master:

"MASTER, WHAT IS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE?"

He must have been a tyro, a beginner; otherwise the question is foolish, the question is stupid. Either a stupid person can ask it or a philosopher. The question is meaningless because

"first" means the most fundamental. The mind cannot contain it, because it contains the mind!

The "first" means the basic; it was before the mind, so how can the mind comprehend it?

Mind came out of it, mind is a by-product of it. The child cannot know the father; the father can know child. The reality can know you, but you cannot know the reality. The part cannot know the whole; the whole can know the part. And the part cannot contain the whole. Now the mind is a very tiny part. It cannot contain the vastness of reality. Yes, the person who asked must have been a beginner.

"What is the first principle, Master?" Osho - The First Principle

Chapter 1 - Catching the First Principle And the Master said:

"IF I WERE TO TELL YOU, IT WOULD BECOME THE SECOND PRINCIPLE. "

Then it will be an echo, it will be a reflection, it will be a mirror image.

Do you know who you are? You don't know, but you know a mirror image. You know your name, you know your address, you know the name of your family, the country, the religion, the political party you belong to. You know your face reflected in the mirror. You don't know your real face. You have not encountered

your original face yet. The Zen Masters continuously persist, they go on hammering on the heads of their disciples, "Look into your original face -- the face that you had before even your father was born, the face that you will have when you are dead, the face that is yours, originally yours." All that we know about our face is not really about our face. It is the mask of the body, the mask of the mind. We don't know who lives in the body. We know truth as secondhand, borrowed.

Whenever something is borrowed it becomes ugly. Only the firsthand experience is beautiful, because it liberates. The secondhand thing is ugly because it becomes a bondage. If you become religious you will be liberated. If you become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan you will be in a bondage. Mohammed was liberated because for him Islam was a firsthand experience. So was Jesus liberated because for him his experience was HIS

experience -- authentically his. Buddha was liberated; he came upon the experience. It was not handed to him by somebody else -- it was not borrowed, it was not thought out, it was not a logical syllogism, it was not an inference. It was an experience!

Beware of inference. You have been taught inference to avoid experience. There are people who say, "God exists because if God is not there, who will create the world? God must exist because the world exists."

Just the other day I was reading a story about a rabbi. Must have been utterly unenlightened. Rabbis are like that -- priests. A man came to the rabbi. The man was an atheist, and he said, "I don't believe in God, and you talk about God. What is the proof?" And the rabbi said, "You come after seven days, and come wearing a new suit." The man said, "But what does that have to do with my question?" The rabbi said, "It has something to do with it.

You just go to the tailor, prepare a new suit, and come after seven days."

The man came, reluctantly, because he could not see any relationship between his question and the answer that had been given. But he still came; he was wearing a new suit. The rabbi said, "Who has made this suit?" And the man said, "Have you gone mad? What type of a question are you asking? Of course the tailor." The rabbi said, "The suit is here; it proves that the tailor exists. Without the tailor the suit would not be here. And so is the case with the world. The

world is here: there must be a tailor to it, a creator." This is inference.

Change the scene. In a small Indian village a mystic is sitting with his disciples. Silently they are sitting; there is tremendous silence. It is a SATSANG -- the disciples are drinking the presence of the Master. And there comes an atheist, a scholar, a well-known logician, and he says, "I have come to ask one question. What is the proof of God?" The mystic opens his eyes, Osho - The First Principle

Chapter 1 - Catching the First Principle

and he says, "If you want the proof of God, look into the eyes of the devotees. There is no other proof."

God exists in the eyes of the devotees. God exists in the vision of the lovers. It is an experience of the deepest core of your being, the heart. There is no other proof. God is not a concept. God is a reality, an experience, a deep subjective experience, the deepest there is. All else is peripheral. God is the experience of your innermost center. When you are centered you know.

But you have been taught to believe in the God of the philosophers. That is a way to avoid the real God! The real God is very wild! The real God is very crazy! The real God is very unknown and unknowable. And the real God cannot be controlled. The real God can possess you; you cannot possess the real. That is the fear: the mind is always afraid of anything that can possess it. The mind goes on playing games with words, ideas, philosophies. It can remain the master there. With the false, the mind is the master; with the real, the mind becomes a slave, and the mind does not want to become a slave. So the mind is completely contented with the secondhand.

Your God is secondhand. Your love too is secondhand. Your poetry is secondhand. Your dance is secondhand. Your singing is secondhand. And of course all these secondhand things make YOU secondhand; then you lose all originality.

Religion has nothing to do with logic. Religion has something to do with the first

principle. Logic deals with the secondhand. Logic deals with the junkyard, the used -- used by many people. Logic deals with inference. And remember, it is good as far as the human world of intellectual garbage is concerned; the moment you go beyond that boundary logic fails utterly, it falls flat on the ground.

I have heard a very beautiful anecdote:

The safari had struck camp in dangerous territory and to protect themselves from wild animals they built a high fence around the camp. To be really sure, they dug a deep ditch around the fence. One evening a member of the group, who was a professor of philosophy and a world-known logician, carelessly went out for an evening stroll without his gun and got attacked by a lion. He ran back to the camp with the lion after him and fell down into the ditch. His friends inside heard a terrible yelling and screaming from outside, and when they ran out to look they saw the poor man -- the poor philosopher -- running round and round in the ditch closely followed by the lion. "Watch out, he is right behind you," they yelled down to him.

"That's all right," the philosopher yelled back. "I am one round ahead of him."

Logic is meaningless as far as life is concerned. Life is not logical at all; life is illogical.

Logic is man-made, manufactured by the human mind. Life is absurd.

So if you go through inference you will reach the secondhand. If you go through experience you will reach the firsthand.

And religion is radical. Churches are not radical. The word "radical" means "belonging to the roots". Religious is radical, religion is rebellion. And churches are not rebellious; they are orthodox. Hence, I will repeat again, all churches are against religion. All so-called religious Osho - The First Principle

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people are against religion. They deal in a false entity; they deal in pseudo coins, counterfeit coins. That's why so many people look religious and there is not even a trace of religion on the earth. So many people talk about God, but it remains an

empty talk.

Have you ever felt God? You have heard the word again and again and again. You are bored with the word. It has almost become a dirty word. From the very childhood people have been conditioning you for the word. Have you ever had any glimpse of God?

This is something very strange. How can we miss him? If he is the totality, if he is all over the place, how can we miss him? How did it ever become possible for us to miss him? We must have been doing great work to miss him. We must be doing much work to miss him. We must be really avoiding him. We must be creating many barriers and hindrances and obstacles so that he cannot reach us.

And then these empty words: God, love, peace, prayer. All beautiful words have become empty. All ugly things are very real. War is very real; love is very unreal. Madness is very real; meditation is very unreal. Beauty is not there at all; ugliness, everywhere. You can come across the ugly any moment. And God is beauty, God is truth, God is love.

So what has happened? We have been trained for empty words, and we have become contented with these empty words.

Drop this contentment! If you really want to know what is, become discontented with all that you have been taught, become discontented with all that you have been educated for!

Become discontented with your education, with your society, with the power structures around you, the churches, the priests. Become discontented! Become discontented with your own mind. Only in that discontent comes a moment when you become capable of dropping all this mind and all this nonsense with it

... and suddenly God is there, the first principle is there.

A naive young man who had lived a sheltered life finally decided he could not take any more. He arranged an appointment with his doctor and poured out the whole story.

"It is this girl I have been going with," he said. "I suspected she was fast, but I never dreamed she was a sex maniac. Every night now for weeks and weeks on end, I keep trying to break off the romance, but I haven't got the will power. What can I do? My health just can't stand the pace."

"I see," said the doctor grimly. "Tell me just what happens; you can trust me."

"Well, every night I take her driving in my car. We park in some secluded street. Then she asks me to put my arms around her. And then, every night, she reaches over and holds my hand."

"And then?"

"What do you mean 'and then'?" gasped the youth. "Is there more?"

That's what has happened to religion. The moment the word "religion" is uttered you remember the serious long faces in the churches, the very sad-looking priests, the very serious theologians, trying to split hairs, chopping abstract words, nobody knows why, for what.

Religion is broke. The religion of the philosophers is bankrupt. The religion of the intellectuals is relevant no more; it has lost all relevance.

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The old religion is dead! And it is good that it is dead. The old God is dead! And it is good that it is dead because now the door opens and we can search for a new God, a God more real, not conceptual, more existential, not philosophical, a God who can be seen, loved, lived, a God who can transform your life, a God who is really life and nothing else.

A totally different kind of religion is needed in the world, a gut-level religion, a religion which has blood, life, a religion whose heart still beats. The old religion is simply dead, and people are worshiping the corpse. And people carrying the corpse, by and by, become just like the corpse they are carrying.

The first principle means a gut-level religion, a religion that you can experience in your innermost core, in the interiority of your being. You are the shrine for the first principle. No Bible, no Koran, no Veda. You are the shrine for the first principle. So the only way to reach to the real is to go within, is to go in. Turn in.

That's what meditation is all about. That's why Zen is not interested in any dogmas. It is interested in helping you to contract your own being.

When the fifth patriarch of Zen, Hung-jen, was asked why he had chosen Hui- neng as his successor out of the five hundred monks in his monastery, he replied: "Four hundred and ninety-nine of my disciples understood Buddhism very well, and only Hui-neng had no understanding of it whatsoever. He is not a man to be measured by any ordinary standard.

Hence, the robe of authentic transmission was given to him."

Because he has "no understanding of it whatsoever". An intellectual understanding is not an understanding. It is a deception, it is an illusion, it is a dream, it is a substitute. Because you are missing the real and because you are not courageous enough to accept the fact that you are missing the real, you substitute it. It is a plastic flower. You substitute it with a false thing and then you feel very good. You start thinking that you have it. And you don't have it! Your hands are empty.

Those four hundred ninety-nine disciples of Hung-jen were all scholars. For years they had studied, they had studied all the scriptures. They had all the scriptures on their tongue. And he had chosen a man who has no understanding whatsoever. The man he had chosen, Hui-neng, was not known at all in the monastery. Nobody even was aware that he existed there.

When Hui-neng had come to the Master, the Master had asked him one thing: "Do you really want to know? Do you? Do you want to know about truth, or do you want to know truth itself?" And Hui-neng said, "What will I do by knowing ABOUT the truth? Give me the real thing." And the Master said, "Then go to the kitchen and clean the rice for the mess -- and never come again to me. Whenever the right moment has come I will call you."

Twelve years passed, and Hui-neng was simply working in the kitchen, at the back. People did not even know about him. Nobody knew his name. Who bothers to think about a man who simply goes on working in the kitchen from the morning till late in the night? The monastery was not aware. There were great scholars, famous people; all over China their names were known -- there were celebrities in the ashram. Who bothered about Hui-neng?

Twelve years passed, and then one day the Master declared, "My time has come

and I will be leaving this world, so I have to choose a disciple as my successor. Anybody who thinks Osho - The First Principle

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himself ready, capable of becoming my successor, should write four lines in front of my door to show his understanding. The greatest scholar went there in the night and wrote four lines, beautiful lines, really beautiful the very essence of the SECOND principle. You cannot reach higher through the mind than that. He wrote: "The mind is like a mirror. Dust gathers on it.

Clean the dust, and you know what is." Perfectly true, absolutely okay. What more can there be?

The whole monastery was agog. People were discussing, debating whether the Master would choose this man as the successor or not. And everybody was trying to improve upon it, but nobody could find anything wrong in it. There was nothing wrong ...

That is one of the most difficult things about the intellect. What is wrong in a plastic flower? Nothing is wrong. In a way -- in many ways -- it may be better than a real flower. A real flower is born in the morning and by the evening it is gone. A plastic flower is more stable, more permanent -- gives the idea of the eternal! The real flower is momentary. The real flower is born and dies, and the plastic flower knows no death. It is the closest that you come to the eternal. And what is wrong in it? It can have as much color as the real -- can have more color because it is in your hands to make it so. And you can make it perfumed too; there is no problem about it. But something basic is missing; it is dead.

Nobody could find anything wrong. And people were trying to improve it, but they were all intellectuals. You cannot improve more than that; this is the last point the mind can reach.

And it seems logical: "The mind is like a mirror. Dust gathers on the mirror, and then it cannot reflect" -- that's what has happened to the mind.

Then two, four monks were discussing it, and they passed Hui-neng, who was doing his work in the kitchen. He heard it -- they were talking about these

beautiful lines, the essential of all the scriptures -- and he laughed. For twelve years nobody had even seen him laughing.

He laughed. Those monks looked at him, and they said, "What? Why are you laughing?" And he said, "It is all nonsense. It is not true." They could not believe their ears. This man, the rice cleaner, for twelve years just cleaning rice ... Nobody had ever seen him even meditating.

How can you see Deeksha meditating? Impossible.

And one never knows ... This man, has he become enlightened or something? But they could not believe it. And they were scholars, so they laughed at the absurdity of it, and they said, "All the great scholars are there, and you, a rice cleaner, for twelve years nobody has seen you reading scripture, studying -- nobody has ever seen you sitting by the side of the Master, inquiring about anything -- can you improve upon it?" He said, "I can, but there is one problem. I cannot write. I knew twelve years ago, I used to write a little bit, but I have forgotten."

This happens, this unlearning happens. Unlearning is the process of becoming enlightened.

Because you have learned wrong ways, and those wrong ways are the barriers, they have to be unlearned. You are born enlightened, and then you are forced into unenlightenment. Then you are conditioned for an insane society. Then you are forced to adjust to an insane society. If you remain miserable there is no wonder in it. You will remain miserable because this is not your real nature. This is not the flowering of your being.

So he said, "I cannot write. I have completely forgotten. If you can write, I can say something; you go and write it." And he didn't go there; he simply said, "The mind is not a mirror at all. Where can the dust gather? One who knows it knows it."

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The mind is not a mirror. Where can the dust gather? One who comes to know this has known, has become enlightened, has looked into the deepest core of his being.

And when these words were written on the door of the Master, the Master became very angry. Listen carefully. The Master became very angry. He said, "Bring this Hui-neng immediately, and I am going to beat him." And the scholars were very happy; they said,

"That's how it should be. Bring that fellow."

The guy was brought, and the Master took him inside and told him, "So you have got it!

Now you escape from this monastery. This is my robe, you are my successor. But if I tell it to people, they will kill you. It will be too much against their egos to accept a rice cleaner as the head of the monastery. You simply escape. That's why I was angry, excuse me. I had to be.

You simply escape from this monastery as far away as possible. You are my successor, but these people will kill you."

Scholars are very, very ambitious and political. You can go to any university and you can see. You can go to any academy and you can see. You will never see men anywhere else backbiting so much as in a university. Each professor against all, and each trying to pull everybody else down, and each thinks he is the only one capable of being the vice-chancellor or the chancellor. And all are fools.

This Hui-neng escaped. Within two, three days people got the idea that something has happened. Hui-neng is missing, and the Master's robe is missing. They started searching for him. The greatest scholar, who had written the first lines, went in search. Hui-neng was caught in a forest, and Hui-neng when caught said, "You can take this robe. I am not interested in this robe at all; this is absolutely unnecessary. I was happy cleaning rice. Now I am trying to escape and hide for no reason. You take this robe."

He dropped the robe on the ground, and the scholar tried to pick it up, but it was to heavy.

He could not pick it up. He fell on the ground perspiring, and he said to Hui-

neng, "Excuse me. I had come for the robe, but even the robe is not ready to go with me. I am incapable. And I know it that I am incapable because all that I know are words and words and words. Excuse me ... and teach me something."

And Hui-neng said, "Teaching is your problem; you have taught yourself too much. Now unteach, unlearn. Now drop all that you know. Knowledge is your barrier in knowing."

That's why the Master says "... and only Hui-neng had no understanding of it whatsoever."

When you don't have any intellectual understanding there arises a great understanding which is not of the mind, which is of your total being. That understanding gives you the first principle, the first taste of tao.

I have heard:

A wealthy horse-owner died and left a large fortune to a university. A provision in the will, however, was that the school must confer a degree of Doctor of Divinity upon his favorite horse. Since the university was anxious to receive the money -- it was a really big sum -- the Dean set a date for the animal to receive a degree of D.D.

This unusual occasion was attended by the press, and one of the reporters asked the Dean,

"What is your reaction to this strange arrangement?" Osho - The First Principle

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"Well," replied the Dean, "in my experience I have awarded many degrees. However, I must admit that this is the first time I have awarded a degree to a WHOLE horse."

All others were donkeys, not whole horses.

The mind cannot have any contact with reality. To live in the mind is to live like an idiot.

To live with the mind, in the mind, as the mind, is to live a stupid life. The moment you become a little loosened from the mind: celebration. The moment you become a little loosened from the mind: joy. A little you become loosened from the mind: and God. And suddenly the doors are open. They have never been closed; only your mind was blocking the way.

The mind can give you the second principle. The first principle is possible only through no-mind. Meditation means a state of no-mind. Meditation does not mean "to think about".

Meditation means not to think at all. It does not mean, of course, to fall asleep. It means to fall AWAKE. It means thoughts should disappear and only pure consciousness should be there, a presence, a luminous presence: you see; there is clarity, transparency.

Thoughts don't allow you to see. Or, even if they allow, they distort. Or they interpret.

They never allow the reality to come to you raw. They decorate it, they change it, they color it.

They make it digestible to you. They make it according to you. And you are false, you are a mask, so when reality is cut according to you it becomes unreal.

That's why the Master said, "If I tell you the first Principle it will become the second principle. You are asking the question from the head." The disciple was asking the question from the head. It was an intellectual question: "What is the first principle? " If the Master answers it, the head will take the answer -- and the head will spin philosophy around it and it will become the second principle.

The real, the true cannot be conveyed through words. It can be conveyed -- yes, it can be conveyed -- but the way to convey it is totally different. It is like measles: you catch them.

Nobody can give them to you, but you can catch them. Truth cannot be taught but can be caught.

Look at me. I have the measles. Now, if you don't resist, you will catch it, so lower your resistance. If you resist, you may not catch it. If you are really stubborn and hard and you close your being utterly, totally, if you are not vulnerable at all, you will not catch it. But I cannot give it to you. You can catch it, or you can not catch it, but I cannot give it to you.

It cannot be given, but it can be taken, and that is the whole art of being with a Master: to learn how to take. Because he will not give. He cannot give. He makes it available. A Master is a catalytic agent, he is a presence. Something is possible around him. You have to be vulnerable, you have to be in an attitude of surrender, you have to be in an attitude of receptivity: you have to be feminine.

Hui-k'o, another Zen Master, made his way northward to H'sin-yeh, where he began teaching, and among those who came to hear him was Tao-ho, a noted teacher, a very well-known author, a famous scholar on Buddhist philosophy.

But Hui-k'o's teaching was not like that of any other Buddhist school's, and Tao- ho was very much disturbed ...

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The teaching was absurd, almost sacrilegious, because Hui-k'o used to say, "Kill your parents." A beautiful saying -- but don't take it literally. The parents are within you. You can ask the T.A. people -- Transactional Analysis people. The parents are within you. The mother, the father -- their conditioning is within you. They go on controlling you from within you. So when Hui-k'o said, "Kill your parents; only then come to me," he was uttering a great insight.

That's what Jesus says. Christians have not yet been able to explain it. He says, "Unless you hate your mother, unless you hate your father, you cannot come to me." Hate? And the utterance is coming from the man who says, "God is love"?

And Hui-k'o used to say, "If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately!"

Because when you start meditating you will meet your parents, you will meet all

the people who have been related to you. You will have to kill them, you will have to disassociate yourself from them; you will have to learn aloneness. And finally you will meet the Buddha, your Master, and you have to kill the Master too.

But these are dangerous things to say. And the way he used to say them. This scholar Tao-ho became very angry. He said, "This man will destroy all religion." That's what people say about me.

... He determined to destroy this unholy doctrine and to that end dispatched several of his best students to dispute with Hui-k'o ...

Hui-k'o is the successor of Bodhidharma, and of course he was a worthy successor, of a great Master. He was a great disciple. Hui-k'o was attacked by this man Tao-ho in many ways, and he used to send his disciples to dispute with and to defeat this man.

... Tao-ho awaited their return with high expectations of hearing that they had won a notable victory over the hated interloper, but they did not come back ...

Not a single person ever came back. Whosoever went to Hui-k'o simply disappeared.

These people are dangerous people. One should avoid them if one really wants to avoid them.

Sometimes you may go as an antagonist, and you may fall in love with them. And these people are like dragons; once you are close to them they will suck you in.

... He sent out other emissaries, and still others, but none came back to report the expected victory. It was only after some time had passed that he met some of his messengers and said to them: "I had opened your eyes to the Tao; why were you such faithless emissaries?"

One of them spoke up for the rest: "The original eye is perfect in itself, but your teaching has rendered us half blind."

"The original eye is perfect in itself." Each child is born with that original eye -- it is perfect -- that innocent eye. It is perfect! It needs no improvement! And the

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the Masters down through the ages has been one; whatsoever the society has done, they have to undo. Whatsoever the society has put into your mind, they have to take it away. They have to dehypnotize you, they have to uncondition you. They have to make your childhood again available to you.

But remember, religion is not a teaching, is not a learning. You can catch it. Yes, it is like measles. And you have to be in a mood to catch it. That mood is what is meant by being a disciple. A disciple simply shows a gesture, a great gesture, a MAHAMUDRA, that "I am ready, Master," that "I am open," that "I will not resist. If you are going to kill me, I am ready.

Whatsoever you are going to do to me, I am available -- my availability is total." That's all a disciple has to do. And the Master has to do nothing; he has just to be there.

The Master there -- the one who has become enlightened, the one who has come to know his real nature -- his presence, and the availability of the disciple, and something catches fire, something simply happens. And that is the first principle. It cannot be asked, it cannot be answered. That which can be asked and that which can be answered will be the second principle; it will be a carbon copy, an echo.

Of course, the priests won't like such a rebellious meaning to be given to religion. They will not like people to become awake. Neither will the politicians like it. The politician and the priest is the very, very ancient conspiracy against the innocence of man. They corrupt.

Their whole business depends on this: that man remains unconscious, that man does not become aware. Because the moment a man is aware, he is freedom -- freedom from all politics and freedom from all religions. He is religious, but free from all religions. You cannot say that he is a Mohammedan, you cannot say that he is a Hindu.

To call Zen people Buddhist is wrong. It is as wrong as to call Sufis

Mohammedans. It is as wrong as to call Hassidim Jews. The real people are simply real people. Zen, Sufi, or Hassid, there is neither Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Jew.

But the priest will not like it. It will be destroying his whole business. It will be dismantling his whole shop, his whole market.

Two waiters were standing at a table over which a loaded customer had fallen asleep. Said one, "I have already awakened him twice. Now I am going to awaken him for the third time."

"Why don't you chuck him out?" asked the other waiter.

"The devil I will," said the first waiter. "I got a good thing going for me. Every time I wake him up he pays his bill."

If humanity remains asleep, if humanity remains unconscious and hypnotized, then the politician can remain in power and the priest can go on exploiting you. If humanity becomes awake, then there will be no need for these priests and politicians. There will not be any need for any country, state, and there will not be any need for any church, any Vatican, any pope.

The need will disappear. There will be a totally different quality to human consciousness.

That quality needs to be born. We have come to that point in the evolution of human consciousness where this new consciousness is tremendously needed, desperately needed --

this new consciousness which makes man free from politics and free from religion.

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And let me remind you again and again, that will be the only religious world: free from religions, but not free from religion; free from churches, dogmas, but

not free from the first principle; free from all the second principles.

A girl told her friend she had just become engaged to a traveling salesman. "Is he good looking?" asked the friend.

"Look, he would never stand out in a crowd." "Does he have money?" continued the friend. "If he does, he won't spend it."

"What about his bad habits. Does he have any?" "Well, he drinks an awful lot," said the future bride.

"I don't understand you," said the friend. "If you can't say anything nice about him, then why are you marrying him? "

"He is on the road all the time," she replied, "and I will never see him."

That's the only good thing about it -- and that is the good thing about the god of the priests: you will never see him. That's why you go on following the priest. To avoid God you follow the priest. To avoid God you read the Bible. To avoid God you chant Vedas. To avoid God you become scholars, thinkers. To avoid God you are doing everything that is possible.

But why do you want to avoid God? Why in the first place do you want to avoid God?

There are reasons. The very idea of God creates tremendous fear because God will mean death to your ego. You will not exist if God is there.

The great Indian mystic Kabir has said, "Look at the irony of it. When I was, God was not; now God is, I am not. Anyway the meeting has not happened." Because for the meeting, two are needed. "When I was, God was not; now God is, I am not."

The fear is that you will have to lose yourself. You are afraid of death; that's why you are afraid of God. And that's why you are afraid of love, and that's why you

are afraid of all that is great.

You are too attached to this false ego -- which never gives anything but misery, but pain, but at least gives you a feeling that you are. Just watch. Meditate over it.

If you want to be, then you will always fall into the trap of the priest. In fact you are not.

The whole idea is a false notion. How can you be? The waves exist, but not separate from the ocean. So exist we: not separate from the ocean of consciousness. That's what God is. The leaves exist, but not separate from the tree. Everything exists, but nothing exists separately.

No man is an island, and no part can exist independently. We exist in deep interdependence.

We are members of one another, of each other. We penetrate each other. This whole existence is a great penetration. Trees penetrate you; you penetrate the trees. Stars penetrate you; you penetrate the stars. You penetrate the earth; the earth penetrates you. Everything is penetrated.

God is this totality. You cannot exist separately. If you want to exist separately, then you are a politician. All politics is nothing but the shadow of the ego. Then you will live in misery and in madness.

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But if you look, if you watch deeply, you will be surprised. You are not! Not that you have to dissolve! Simply you are not. It is just a false notion that you have been carrying, the notion that you are. Any moment of silence and you will suddenly see there is emptiness within you, nothingness within you. Buddha has called this nothingness ANATTA, nonbeing, SHUNYA, nothingness. If you look within, you will not find yourself. That's why people don't look within; they are afraid.

Once it happened I was travelling with Mulla Nasrudin in a train. Came the ticket collector and Nasrudin became very hectic. He looked in his suitcase, he turned over all the things, he looked in the bed, turned over everything, he looked in his many pockets, and he started perspiring and he could not find the ticket. I saw that he had not looked in one pocket, so I told him, "Nasrudin, you have not looked in that pocket." He said, "Don't mention that." I said, "But why? The ticket may be there." He said, "Don't mention it at all. If I look in it and the ticket is not found, I will fall dead. I will drop dead! I cannot look in that! If the ticket is not there, then finished. There is a hope that it may be there."

That's why people don't look inside: a hope one may be there. The day you look in, you are not. The day you look in, suddenly there is vast emptiness ... and it is tremendously blissful, beautiful, peaceful. You are not there; then there is no noise.

That's what Hui-neng means when he says, "There is no mirror of the mind. Where can the dust gather? To know this is to know all."

Look within. People think "We are bad" but you are not, so how can badness gather?

People think "We are good," but how is it possible? You are not there; how can you be good?

People think "We are moral and immoral and this and that," but everything hangs on the idea of "I". To be good the "I" is needed first, to be virtuous the "I" is needed first. To be a sinner or to be a saint the "I" is needed first. Without the "I" you will not have anything to hang anything upon. Where will you hang your goodness, your sin or your saintliness?

That's why Zen goes on insisting there is nobody who is a sinner and there is nobody who is a saint, nothing is good and nothing is bad. All distinctions are ego created. Distinctions are created so that the ego can exist through the distinctions. When you look within there is neither saint nor sinner, neither good nor bad -- neither life nor death. All distinctions disappear.

In that nothingness one becomes one with God. One IS one with God -- one has been from the very beginning.

So the fear is that if you want to know God you will have to disappear; so you

don't look into your own being. The fear is that if you look within yourself you may become happy ...

People go on saying that they want to become happy, but I rarely come across a person who really wants to be happy. People cling to their misery. Again the same game. With the misery you have something to do. With the misery, some occupation. With the misery you can avoid yourself, you are engaged. With joy there is nothing with which to be engaged, there is nowhere to go. In joy you again disperse and disappear. In misery you are there -- you are very much there. Misery gives you a very solid experience that you are. When you are happy, you start disappearing. When you are really happy, you are not, again you are not. In a state of bliss, again you disappear.

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You talk about heaven, but you go on creating hell because only in hell can you exist. You cannot exist in heaven. George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said, "If I am not going to be the first in heaven, then I would not like to go to heaven. I would like to be in hell, but I would like to be first; I don't want to be second." Hell is okay, but the ego says, "Be first, be a leader." Hell is okay if the ego remains; heaven is not okay if the ego has to be dropped.

You would like to be in heaven with your ego. You are asking the impossible. That cannot happen.

The religion that exists on the earth is false, it is a make-believe, it is just for the name's sake, but it fulfills your demand. It fulfills a certain demand, that you want to pretend that you are religious. You don't want to become religious but you want to pretend. And you want to pretend in such a way that not even you yourself can catch yourself pretending. You want to pretend in such a way that you don't ever come across your pretensions, so a great structure is created. And that great structure is the church. Avoid that structure if you really want to become religious. And unless you are religious you are not!

Now let me tell you this paradox; You are only when you are not, because you are only when the ego has disappeared and you are God. That is the first

principle. I am not telling it to you, and you are not hearing it from me. It happened:

The car suddenly broke down in the middle of nowhere. He crawled underneath to see what the trouble was. She crawled underneath to hold the torch for him. It was quite cozy under there and, after a while, they forgot about car repairs. Suddenly a voice said, "And just what do you two think you are doing?"

Looking up they saw the local village constable.

"Why we are -- er -- repairing the back axle," the young man stammered.

"Well, while you are down there, you had better look at the brakes as well," replied the law. "Your car has been at the bottom of the hill for the past half hour."

That's what has happened to churches. Jesus is not there, the Buddha is not there. People are doing something else in the name of Jesus, in the name of Buddha, and they are thinking Buddha is there. Church is the last place where you can meet Jesus, and the temple, the Buddhist temple, is the last place where you can meet a Buddha. But you go to the church, you go to the temple ... and you think you are going to Buddha and to Jesus.

You are great pretenders. You want to pretend. You want to be respectable. You want to show to everybody that "We are religious people." So we have created a Sunday religion; every Sunday you go. Six days for the world; one day -- not the whole day -- one or two hours

-- for God. Just in case something goes wrong or maybe really God is or maybe one survives death. These are all perhapses. And a perhaps never changes anybody's life; only a certainty changes somebody's life.

Hence my insistence, if you cannot find an alive Master, go on searching and searching.

There are always alive Masters somewhere or other; the earth is never empty of them. But never go to the places where conventionally you expect them. There they are not. Jesus was not in the synagogue. Buddha was not in any Hindu temple; he was born a Hindu, but he was Osho - The First Principle

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not in any Hindu temple. Jesus was a Jew, but he was not in the synagogue. And so has been the case always. Don't go on worshiping ideas. Find a living reality.

And the moment you find a living reality, become vulnerable, become open. And you will have the first principle, which cannot be said, but you can get it.

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Greed Behind Greed Behind Greed 12 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall Question

IS GOD REALLY DEAD?

If not dead, then seriously ill, on his deathbed. Which is far worse. I have heard:

There was a small synagogue somewhere in some obscure village in central Poland. One night when making his rounds, the rabbi entered and saw God sitting in a dark corner. He fell upon his face and cried out, "Lord God, what art thou doing here?"

God answered him with a small voice, "I am tired, Rabbi. I am tired to death."

God is tired of man's inhumanity to man. God is tired of man's immense stupidity. God is tired of man's unawareness. Only man seems somehow to be a misfit. The whole existence goes on harmoniously; the whole existence is a dance. Man is out of step. And the reason is that only man is free to be out of

step. The glory of man is that he is free? totally free. Nobody else has that freedom. Because of the freedom, man can choose. He can choose either to be with God or he can choose to be against -- and man has chosen to be against. There is a reason for it.

Each child has to choose to be against his parents. That is the only way for the child to attain his ego. If the child goes on saying yes to the father, yes to the mother, and says always yes and never says no, then the child will not have any backbone. Then the child will not have any soul. Then the child will be just an extension of the parent. That hurts, that humiliates.

And it is not just accidental that we have called God the father. It is the same drama played on a more cosmic scale.

Man is still childish. To be, he still needs to say no. A man is mature when he can be and can say yes too. Try to understand it. A child has to say no to the parents, a thousand and one times he has to say no, because that is the only way he can feel "I am." Sometimes he has to say no against his own welfare; sometimes he has to say no in spite of himself. Sometimes he wants to say yes, but he cannot say it, because to say yes means not to be. And each moment the struggle: to be or not to be. The moment he says yes, he is not; parents are. The moment he says no, he is. So the child has to say no. He has to rebel, he has to go against, he has to go astray to be.

But one need not be a child forever. Adam was a child; Jesus was a mature man: Adam went out of paradise. In fact, he was not expelled, he expelled himself. That was the only way Osho - The First Principle

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to have individuality. That is the childish way to have individuality. Now, Jesus was so certain about his integrity he could say yes and yet remain himself.

Do you follow it? When you can say yes and yet remain individual, you are mature. Then there is no necessity of saying no, because if you say no and then you become individual, your individuality has a negative taste to it. It is not real individuality; it is not yet positive. It is just a no deep down, a wound, a hole. And through the no you can become an individual, but your individuality will

never be satisfying. There will be no contentment in it, there will be no bliss, because bliss flows only out of yes. When you can say yes to existence, you start flowing blissfully. No cripples, paralyzes. No makes you an enemy of the existence; no gives resistance. Yes makes you nonresistant; yes makes you vulnerable.

God is dead or dying because man has not yet grown. There have been millions of Adams and Eves, and only very rarely Christs -- a Buddha here, a Christ there, a Lao Tzu -- only few and far between. The people who have really said yes, they give life to God. By saying no, you give life to yourself. By saying yes, you give life to the total, to the whole; you pour your life into the whole. So if you really want God to be alive, you have to say yes.

Man has killed God -- almost killed him -- by saying no, continuously saying no.

I love this story. The rabbi asked, "Lord God, what art thou doing here?" God answered him with a small voice, "I am tired, Rabbi. I am tired to death." Yes. God is tired. In fact, God cannot die. God can die in YOUR life. There are millions of people in whose lives God is dead, in whose lives God has disappeared. That is the meaning when I say God is dead. Look into people's eyes and you will not find God alive there. And where else can God be alive?

Millions and millions of hearts are completely empty of God. That's what I mean when I say God is dead.

God lives in a Jesus, in a Buddha, in a Krishna. Is God living in you? The question is not basically about God, whether God is dead or alive. The question is whether God is alive in YOU! If he is not alive in you, then what difference does it make if he is alive somewhere in heaven? It does not make any difference. For you it is practically the same: God is dead.

Nietzsche is right about modern humanity when he says God is dead. Not that God is dead! How can God be dead? God means the eternal element, the first principle. God cannot be dead. But you can be so against God, you can be so empty of God, that for you he is dead.

You have to pour your life into him, you have to make God alive in you, so he can beat through your heart, he can pulsate in you, he can love through you, he can BE through you.

That's what sannyas is all about: an effort to allow God to live in you, an effort to become a shrine of the divine.

Look into your own being and search there. You will be fortunate if you can find in a dark corner of your being somewhere God sitting, tired -- tired to death. You will have to revive him. You will have to breathe for him, live for him. You will have to surrender your life for the whole. A religious person is one in whom God has come alive again.

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HOW CAN I BE NOTHING AND UNIQUE?

You can be unique only when you are nothing. If you are something, you are comparable.

If you are somebody you can be compared with others, and that which can be compared cannot be unique. Unique means incomparable. Unique means you are alone, there is nobody like you. So if you are somebody ... If you are a man there are millions of men; you are comparable. If you are rich, then there are millions of rich people; you are comparable. If you are good you are comparable. If you are bad you are comparable. If you are a painter you are comparable. If you are a singer you are comparable. If you are somebody you are comparable, and by being comparable you cease to be unique.

The moment you attain to a nothingness, when the "I" disappears ... The "I" is comparable; the "no-I" is incomparable. That's why I say if you become nothing you become unique. If you become nothing you become uncorruptible; the nothing cannot be corrupted.

You have heard Lord Acton's saying, "Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Why does power corrupt? Because power makes you somebody. It gives you a definition. It says who you are -- you are a prime minister of a country or a president of a country. Power gives you a definition; it

demarks who you are. If you have money, it demarks you. If you don't have money, it demarks you. If you are a musician or a poet or a singer, it shows who you are. The moment you know who you are, you are limited, you are finite -- and you are comparable.

But if you are nobody -- just a pure nothingness, pure sky with not even a particle of dust

-- then how can you be compared.?

God is unique because God is nothing. You cannot find God anywhere. Either you can find him everywhere or nowhere, but you cannot find him somewhere. Either he is the whole or he is nothing.

When you are nothing you also become the whole. When you are nothing you also become divine. By being somebody you remain human. By being nobody you attain to divinity, you become divine. Hence I have said that the moment nothingness arises in you, you have become unique.

Buddha is unique not because he is the great saint, because there are millions of saints.

Jesus is unique not because he is the most virtuous man. That's all nonsense. He is unique because he is nothing. He is unique because he is ready to crucify his ego. And the moment his ego is crucified, he resurrects -- he resurrects as the whole. He dies as the part and resurrects as the whole. He dies in time and is resurrected in eternity.

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I BELONG TO THE INTELLIGENTSIA; I BELIEVE IN INTELLECT AND REASON.

IS THERE A WAY OUT FOR ME?

It is going to be difficult. The intellect has no why out; the intellect is a cul-de- sac. The intellect moves in a vicious circle. It creates its own world of concepts, words, theories, and lives there. There is no way out from the head. The way out is from the heart, because the heart opens -- so the way out is possible. Intellect lives in a closed way. Intellect has no doors to go out from; it is a closed existence, encapsulated.

It is very difficult to communicate with an intellectual, almost impossible. You say something; he hears something else. You show something; he sees something else. His intellect is a constant interference. It is very difficult to communicate; there is no bridge.

Communication is possible only between two hearts, not between two heads. Two heads simply collide with each other, conflict -- confusion, but no meeting, no communion. Only hearts meet.

But the intellect has been praised down the centuries because intellect is very useful. The intellect is capable of exploitation. The intellect is capable of domination. The intellect is capable of cheating nature, of oppression. The intellect is very, very useful as far as the world of things is concerned. So man has cultivated his intellect and has denied his heart, because the heart is dangerous. You cannot exploit if you are a heart man. You cannot use somebody's life as a means if you are heart-oriented. The other becomes an end unto himself. You cannot become a politician and you cannot become a scientist. The politician exploits other human beings, and the scientist exploits nature. Both are destructive. The politician has destroyed humanity, and the scientist has destroyed nature.

Now the whole of existence on this earth is collapsing -- because of the politician and the scientist. And they both are together. The atom bomb became possible because Albert Einstein and Roosevelt joined together. It would not have been possible if Roosevelt had wanted it alone. It would not have been possible if Albert Einstein had wanted it alone. It becomes possible only when politics and science meet. Then there is a Hiroshima and a Nagasaki, and then there is destruction. And the politician and the scientist have been in cooperation down the ages. They have been helping each other.

The heart-oriented man can become a poet, but of what use is a poet? Of what use is poetry? A heart-oriented man can become a musician, but of what use is

music? A heart-oriented person can become a lover, but the world does not need lovers. It needs soldiers; it needs people to kill and to be killed. It needs butchers. It needs mad people. It does not need sane people, who love, who live -

- who live peacefully and who help others to live peacefully. The world does not believe in rose flowers. It believes in swords, in rifles in atom bombs.

Intellect has been very destructive. I am not saying that intellect has to be dropped completely. That will be foolish. Intellect has to be used -- but not as a master, rather as a slave. The mind is very beautiful as a slave, but it is a very lousy master. Never make the intellect your master. Use it. It is a beautiful instrument, a biocomputer. No computer yet made by man is so delicate, so evolved as the human mind. The human mind is such a beautiful, delicate mechanism. It can be of much use, but it should be in the service of love.

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The head should be in the service of the heart; then you are really intelligent. Remember the difference. I don't call an intellectual an intelligent person. An intelligent person is one whose intellect is in the service of the heart, whose logic is in the service of love, whose reason is in the service of life, which is more than reason. Otherwise your so-called intellectuals are just stupid people.

One story:

Five men are on a military plane crossing the North Atlantic -- President Jimmy Carter, former President Ford, Kissinger, a Catholic priest, and a hippie ...

Maybe the hippie was my sannyasin.

... The plane is suddenly buffeted by a thunderstorm and the pilot rushes into the passenger section. "We have just been hit by a lightning bolt. The co-pilot is dead. Our power is gone.

Here are four parachutes. Decide among yourselves who will use them." ... There are five persons and four parachutes.

... With that, the pilot bails out.

President Carter speaks first: "I have the burden of the whole free world on my shoulder. I am sure you will agree I must carry on." He dons a parachute and bails out.

Ford speaks up: "I have never done any harm to anyone. Besides, I have a golf date." And he bails out.

Henry Kissinger declares: "I am sure you will agree that I am the smartest man in the world. Obviously I must be spared." And he jumps.

The priest turns to the hippie, "I have led a full life. I am not afraid to meet my maker. Go ahead, my son, and take the last parachute."

"But Father," says the hippie, "there are two parachutes left. The 'smartest man in the world' just bailed out wearing my knapsack."

Please don't be the smartest man in the world. Intellectuals are not very intelligent people.

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WHAT IS THE REASON THAT I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO ENFORCE RULES? PART

OF ME GETS ANGRY AND INSISTS THAT SANNYASINS FOLLOW SIMPLE RULES

LIKE NO SMOKING OR EATING IN THE GARDENS. TEERTHA HAS CALLED ME

"THE COMMANDANT OF THE GARDEN," BUT DEEP DOWN I HATE THE WHOLE

AUTHORITY TRIP; IT IS THE ONLY PART OF MY WORK THAT IS NOT

ENJOYABLE. HOW CAN ONE BE A NOBODY WHEN PUT IN A POSITION OF

HAVING TO ENFORCE RULES?

COULD CHUANG TZU LAY DOWN HIS FISHING POLE AND COME TO POONA TO PLAY LAXMI'S ROLE?

The question is asked by Nirgun.

Who do you think is playing Laxmi's role? It is Chuang Tzu.

A few things to be understood about the question. It's certainly difficult to play an authoritative role, but the difficulty arises not because of the role but because of the unconscious desire to dominate. You can repress the desire, you can avoid any authoritative role; the desire will remain there. Whenever the authoritative role is given to you, the desire hidden in the unconscious, the repressed desire, becomes alive, jumps on the role.

It is beautiful to watch it and get rid of it; rather than getting rid of the role, rather than trying to avoid the role itself, it is better to get rid of the desire to be authoritative. So Nirgun, it is good that you are placed in a role where again and again you will have to say to people,

"Don't do this."

But this can be said in a very nonauthoritative way. There is no need to be authoritative about it. Don't make it a trip. And then the situation will be a great opportunity to grow. I have put many people in authoritative roles. That is the only way to get rid of any repressed desire.

When the situation is there and the opportunity is there, the desire comes up, surfaces.

And Nirgun has that desire deep down; hence the fear. She would like to escape from the situation. She would like some work where there is no need to say to anybody, "Don't do this."

But how will you get rid of the desire? It is easy to avoid children, but it is very difficult to get rid of the parent role. It is very easy never to be in a position where you have to say to people,

"Do this. Don't do this." Very easy. But how will you get rid of the subtle aggressive energy in you?

I would like you to use these situations. And this ashram has to be a constantly ongoing group. Every situation has to be used in such a way that it helps your spiritual growth.

She refers to Chuang Tzu, the famous story that Chuang Tzu was asked by the Emperor to come to the palace and to become his prime minister. I have commented on the story. I love Chuang Tzu.

Two messengers came from the Emperor. Chuang Tzu was fishing, and they came and they said, "The Emperor wants you to become the prime minister of the country." Chuang Tzu said, "Do you see that turtle there, wagging its tail in the mud?" They said, "Yes, we see."

"And do you see how happy he is?" They said, "Certainly. He looks tremendously happy."

And then Chuang Tzu said, "I have heard that in the king's palace there is a turtle, three thousand years old, dead, encaged in gold, decorated with diamonds, and he is worshiped. If Osho - The First Principle

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you ask this turtle who is wagging his tail in the mud to change his role, to become that turtle in the palace -- dead, but encaged in gold, decorated with diamonds, and worshiped by the emperor himself -- will this turtle be ready to accept that?"

The messengers said, "Certainly not. This turtle will not be ready."

So Chuang Tzu said, "Why should I be ready? Then be gone! I am happy in my mud, wagging my tail, and I don't want to come to the emperor's palace."

Now, this is a beautiful story, but if I meet Chuang Tzu I will say that he is still afraid, he still has a certain fear. If I had been in Chuang Tzu's place, I would have gone to the palace.

You can wag your tail in the palace too, and it will be fun. But Chuang Tzu must have been a little afraid, a little fear that maybe he will become imprisoned there, maybe he will have to lose his freedom, life, aliveness, maybe he will start going on a power trip, ego trip. But that fear simply shows that something in the unconscious is still lingering on.

A man should be so free that if the situation demands him to be in a power role, he can be in a power role -- without being powerful. If the situation demands it of him, he can easily accommodate himself to the new situation without any trouble. A man should not have a fixed role in life. He should be fluid. And the question is not of roles; the question is of consciousness.

So Nirgun, be more conscious, be more loving. Don't allow that urge to dominate to become an unconscious trip, that's all. Become conscious of it. Through consciousness, it will be dropped.

Because of this fear, millions of people down the ages became monks and nuns. What was their fear? Why were they afraid of the world? They were afraid not of the world, they were afraid of their unconscious desires. They knew well that if opportunity is given to them they will fall from their pedestals. But what type of awareness is this? If you can be happy only in the forest and cannot be happy in the marketplace, your happiness is not worth much. If you can be celibate only when there is no woman available, your celibacy is not of any worth, not worth much. If you can be nonpossessive when there is nothing to possess, then what is the point of your being nonpossessive? When you have the whole world to possess and you remain non-possessive, this is attainment, this I call SIDDHI, this I call real achievement.

So my sannyasins are not to become escapists. They have to live in the world, and they have to live above the world -- in the world and yet above it, in and yet not in it. My sannyasin has to face more than Mahavir's sannyasin or Buddha's sannyasin. My sannyasin has to remain liquid, flowing -- and yet uncontaminated.

Question

I AM NO POLITICIAN, NO DIPLOMAT, AND I FEEL LIKE A CLOWN. I WANT TO

DANCE ON THE DESK AND SING ON THE PHONE "HELLO-LUJAH" RATHER THAN

"HELLO". MAY I SIGN UP FOR THE ASHRAM FOOL?

The question is from Vani.

Vani, it is too early. To be really a fool one needs to be very wise. To be a fool one needs to be TRULY wise. That's why all wise people have something of foolishness in them. Jesus was known as a fool, so was Buddha, so was Francis of Assisi. They were known as fools.

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There is a certain quality of foolishness in a real wise man. Why? Because a real wise man contains the opposite. He is both together. He is more comprehensive. A wise man who has no foolishness in him will be dry, dead. His juice will not be flowing. He will not be green. He will not be able to laugh; he will be serious; he will be a long face. A wise man who is just wise and in whose being the fool has not been integrated will be very heavy. It will be difficult to live with such a wise man. He will be very boring. He will be boring to you and he will be boring to himself. He will not have any fun; his life will not know any joy. He will be completely unacquainted with laughter. And when laughter is missed, much is missed.

And one can never know God without laughter. One can never know God without joy.

One can never know reality just by being wise.

The fool has something to contribute too -- the laughter, the joy, the nonseriousness, the quality of fun, delight. The fool can dance, and the fool can dance for any reason whatsoever

-- any excuse will do. The fool can laugh. And the fool can laugh not only at others, he can laugh at himself.

When the wise man and the fool meet together in a consciousness, then something of tremendous value happens. There are foolish people and there are wise people. The fool is shallow; the wise man is serious. The fool does not know what truth is, and the wise man does not know what joy is. And a truth without joy is worse than a lie. And a joy without truth is not reliable. A joy without truth is momentary, cannot be of the eternal.

My approach is that of great balance. You have to be very, very balanced. Delicate is the balance, difficult to achieve, but once achieved you will know that there is a quality of consciousness which can absorb wisdom and foolishness together, and there is no contradiction. They both become two aspects of your energy.

Then you are sincere, but not serious. Then you are truthful, but not joyless. Then you have joy, but the joy is not of the momentary, it is of the eternal. It is not within time; it is beyond time.

So Vani, it is too early. To really become the ashram fool, you will have to become almost enlightened. Don't think that it is easy to become a fool.

I am not talking about the common variety of fools. Gurdjieff used to talk about eighteen varieties of idiots; they come in all sizes and all shapes. But I am talking about the ultimate.

Gurdjieff used to say God is the ultimate idiot. Looks very profane. The ultimate idiot, God?

And Gurdjieff used to say if he was not an idiot, why should he have created you all? Some idiocy, some trait of foolishness must exist in him; otherwise why man? And not only you.

Men like Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah; men like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tsetung. Why in the first place? God must have some trait of foolishness. He must be fooling around; he must be trying trial and error. Yes, sometimes he turns up with a Buddha too, that's okay -- but rarely, very rarely.

God must be a fool. Otherwise there cannot be so much joy in existence. Just

think: a mahatma ruling the world. All joy will be simply prohibited. Can you laugh in a Christian heaven.? Have you asked this question to your ministers, priests? Can you laugh in a Christian heaven.? Can you have a belly laugh, standing in front of God? No, that doesn't seem proper.

But I tell you, you can have. And if you don't have, God will have, looking at your seriousness.

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Look at trees, the birds, the animals, the stars. There seems to be tremendous joy. Life is not serious. Life is very, very playful.

So when I say become a fool and wise together, I mean don't think of life as a duty, but as a play. Always remember, if your prayer is without laughter, you are missing something. If your laughter is without prayer, you are again missing something. A prayer without laughter is dead, and a laughter without prayer has no depth. Can you pray and laugh together? Can you be prayerful and dance too? Can you meditate and love together?

That is the synthesis I am trying. That is the highest possibility a man can arrive at, the greatest symphony, when you can love and meditate together. There have been meditators, but they were against love, and there have been lovers who were against meditation. There have been people who say eat, drink, be merry, but they are against God. The Charvakas, the Epicureans -- they say eat, drink, be merry, there is no God. They help you to be joyful, but that joy cannot be very deep. Without God your joy cannot go very deep.

Your joy -- on your own -- cannot be real joy. It will be very shallow and superficial. It will not have the quality of the ultimate in it. It will not throb with eternity. And you will get fed up with it sooner or later.

That's what is happening in the West. The West has followed the Epicurean tradition --

eat, drink, be merry. Now people are fed up, really fed up; nothing seems to

satisfy. The superficial cannot satisfy long. One day or other it is exposed; you come to know that it is not much and it is a repetition. The West is fed up with the Epicurean ideology, the ideology that says, "Just enjoy. There is no need to seek and search."

And the East is fed up with the opposite ideology, the other polarity that says, "Don't enjoy," that says, "'Eat, drink, be merry' is the ideology of the sinners. Wear long faces, be ascetics, mahatmas. Do yoga. Fast. Destroy the body and the senses. And be seriously after God: the only thing that is worth achieving is God-realization; everything else has to be sacrificed."

The East is fed up, tired. The West is fed up and tired. It is natural because both have chosen one aspect. God is all the aspects together. God means totality.

My approach towards God is Epicurus plus Buddha. Be as Epicurean as possible, and be a meditator, a seeker, as authentic as possible. And I don't see that there is any conflict. There is no conflict in meditation and love. In fact, the more you meditate, the more you become capable of love; the more you love, the more you become capable of meditation.

And there is no conflict between being a fool and being wise. If you can have both, that is the best. And don't settle for one; otherwise one day you will repent. The missing one will take its revenge, and with vengeance.

But to Vani I would like to say it is too early. Get a little ready. I have heard:

Once there was a fellow who was too forward. He would meet a girl and within two seconds say, "Honey, let us make love." His buddy took him aside and explained that he should act suave and carry on a friendly conversation for a while before he suggested such things. On his next date he remembered the words of wisdom. He started the conversation by saying, "Honey, have you ever been to Africa?" just to create a conversation.

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She said, "No." So he said, "Well, let us make love."

Vani, it is too early. Wait a little more. The hello has to become hello-lujah, but wait a little more.

Question

ONE BEAUTIFUL DAY WHEN LOVE WAS HUMMING IN THE AIR, EVEN

WINNIE THE POOH FORGOT HIS CONSTANT FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR A POT OF

HONEY AND JUST SAT DOWN. WHEN HIS EYES OPENED HE WAS BOWLED OVER

TO SEE ALL AROUND HIM HUGE POTS OVERFLOWING WITH MORE HONEY

THAN HE COULD EVER EAT.

WHEN HE ROLLED INTO EEYORE'S LATER THAT NIGHT, ALL STICKY AND

CONTENT AND FULL OF HIS DISCOVERY, EEYORE LOOKED WISE AND SAID,

"HONEY IS ALWAYS THERE -- BUT YOU CAN ONLY FIND IT WHEN YOU ARE

NOT LOOKING. "

POOH BEAR THOUGHT HE UNDERSTOOD, BUT FOR DAYS AFTER WHEN HE

MADE SUDDEN SURREPTITIOUS GLANCES OUT OF THE CORNER OF HIS EYE --

NO HONEY! HE EVEN TRIED SITTING DOWN AGAIN AND SAYING VERY

LOUDLY, "I AM NOT LOOKING FOR HONEY!" BUT WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES, THE HONEY STILL WAS NOT THERE.

DEAR EEYORE, HOW CAN I DROP MY GREED AND MY EXPECTATIONS, AND

JUST BE?

The question is from Deva Anando.

Yes, it is one of the most fundamental questions. When you are not looking, the honey is everywhere. When you start looking for it, suddenly it disappears. This is a great truth. The moment you start looking for it, you become tense. The moment you start looking for it, you become very, very concentrated, you become closed and narrow. And the honey is possible only when you are open, not closed, not narrow. The honey overflows all around you when you are also overflowing, in every direction.

To look means to be directed in one direction. Not to look, not to seek, then you are available to all directions -- you are available to every direction possible, you are available to the whole existence.

But the difficulty is that if I tell you not to look you say, "Okay, we will not try," but an unconscious effort goes on. You even try not to look, but that too becomes just an effort to look.

The question is very fundamental. Buddha says, "If you are desireless, all desires will be fulfilled." Now, one monk asked one day, "Since you have said that all desires will be fulfilled if you become desireless, I have got only one desire: to be desireless. Now what to do about it?" But the desire to be desireless is still a desire; it is on the same plane. Whether you desire money or you desire power, prestige, or you desire desirelessness, it makes no difference at Osho - The First Principle

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all: only the object of desire changes; the desire remains the same. And the desire is the problem, not the object.

If you desire money, people will call you very worldly, materialistic. If you desire God, people will call you spiritual, other worldly, religious. But those who know, for them, there is no difference at all: you are still worldly. It is not that a few desires are worldly and a few desires are otherworldly! Desire, as such, is worldly. There can be no otherworldly desire.

So God cannot be desired. If you desire, you miss. If you seek, you will not find. The more you seek, the more miserable you will become. Don't seek, and find. Just be -- in an attitude of nonseeking. Not that deep down you still go on thinking "Now he must be coming because I am not seeking"; then you are in the same trap again.

The question is what should be done: "How can I drop my greed ...?" But why do you want to drop you greed? Why in the first place do you want to drop your greed? There must be some greed behind it -- to attain to God, to nirvana, to enlightenment, to this and that, all sorts of rubbish things, all nonsense.

Enlightenment HAPPENS. You cannot desire it. When one day suddenly you find all desires have disappeared, enlightenment is there. It has always been there; just because of desires you could not see it. The desire becomes a curtain on your eyes. You lose clarity, you cannot see what is. How can you see what is when you want something to be there? When you expect something, the expectation does not allow you to see that which is. With the expectation you have already moved into the future.

You want a beautiful woman, and you have a fantasy. Because of that fantasy, you will miss your woman, who is just in front of you, but because of the fantasy you cannot see her.

The fantasy goes on driving you away.

You ask, "How can I drop my greed?" I would like to ask why in the first place you want to drop greed. And suddenly you will find some greed hidden behind. Greed behind greed behind greed. This is not going to help.

So I will not tell you how to drop it. I will tell you how to understand it. In understanding, it drops on its own accord. Not that you drop it. You cannot. You are greed; how can you drop greed? You are desire; how can you drop desire? You are the search; how can you drop seeking and searching? This YOU is the center of all your madnesses. You ask how to drop greed. Who is asking? The

"I". Now the "I" wants even God to be possessed. The "I" wants enlightenment to be possessed. The "I" does not only want the world, it wants the other world too. The "I" is getting more insane.

Just understand. There is no need to drop anything. Man cannot drop anything. Just try to understand. Try to understand the ways of greed. Try to understand how greed functions. Try to understand how greed brings more and more misery, more and more frustration, how greed goes on creating new hells for you, ahead of you, goes on creating new hells so when you are there, they are ready. Just look into the very phenomenon of greed -- with no idea of dropping it, because if you want to drop it, a part of greed will remain unobserved. The part that wants to drop greed will remain unobserved, will remain in the dark.

There is no need to think in these terms. Simply try to understand. That is what Socrates means when he ways, "Know thyself." It does not mean that you sit silently and repeat "I am soul,'? "I am God"; it doesn't mean that. "Know thyself" means whatsoever is the case, go into Osho - The First Principle

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it deeply, layer by layer. Expose it to your understanding. Go to the very bottom of it, to the very root of it. Look through and through.

And the day you have looked through all the layers ... The layers are just like an onion.

You go on peeling an onion. So peel your being like an onion, go on peeling. Fresher layers you will find; go on peeling, go on peeling ... One day suddenly you have peeled through and through and nothing but emptiness is left in your hand. In that emptiness greed has disappeared, and in that emptiness enlightenment has happened. In that emptiness God is.

That emptiness is God.

So rather than asking how to drop greed, ask how to understand greed. The whole thing hangs on one thing: understanding. When the understanding of anything is perfect, it liberates.

That's what Jesus means when he says, "Truth liberates." When you know the truth of greed you are liberated. When you know the truth of sexuality you are liberated. When you know the truth of anything whatsoever you are liberated from it. To know is to be free; not to know is to be in bondage.

So don't ask how to drop. There is no hurry. In fact, go deep into it, watch it deeply before it drops; otherwise you will always miss that understanding. If it drops before understanding, something will remain missing. That's why it never drops, it clings to you. It clings up to the last moment, when you understand it, when you have looked into it so deeply that nothing is unrevealed, you have seen the ways of greed, the subtle ways of greed.

Now, this question is a subtle way of greed: how to drop it? That was the problem of Pooh; he thought he understood: "... but for days after when he made sudden surreptitious glances out of the corner of his eye -- no honey!" You will also make surreptitious glances from the corner -- unless you understand greed totally.

"He even tried sitting down again and saying very loudly, 'I am not looking for honey!"'

And you will say the same too. You have said it already many times, that "I am not looking for God and I am not looking for enlightenment. Osho says nirvana is the last nightmare. I am not looking for it" -- and then surreptitiously, from the corner of the eye, you are looking for it.

You are waiting and you say, "What is the matter? And Osho has said, 'When you drop all desire it happens,' and it has not happened yet." You have not dropped the desire yet.

But you CANNOT drop the desire! I insist on it! My emphasis is absolute on it. There have been other teachers who say, "Drop it!" I don't say drop it, because I know you cannot drop it. Nobody has ever dropped it. Not even a Buddha was able to drop it. It dropped on its own accord one day -- when Buddha understood it.

If you drop something, the ego now feels very enhanced "I have dropped it" -- and the ego is the root cause. It will create a new greed; it will find new ways. It is very inventive. Because of this inventive ego, you cannot discover that which is. Because of too much inventiveness, the reality is being missed. It will find

some other way; from the back door it will come back.

So don't ask how to drop it. I am not here to help you to drop it. I am here to help you to understand it. If it is still there, it simply shows one thing: that you have not understood it.

You have not done your homework yet. Do the homework. Don't be in a hurry to drop it. Just look, watch.

Watch in small things of life. You are walking on the road; a car passes by. Just look into yourself: some greed has arisen. The moment you say the car is beautiful, a subtle greed has arisen to possess it. A beautiful woman passes by, or a man, and suddenly a desire to possess.

Osho - The First Principle 29

Chapter 2 - Greed Behind Greed Behind Greed I have heard:

A woman sat in her doctor's waiting room alongside of a mother and her child of five. The child sat very quietly while the woman and his mother exchanged pleasantries. The woman was very much impressed by the child's good behavior

...

He was really graceful, sitting silently like a small Buddha.

... "I wish," she said, "I had a little boy like you."

"Well," countered the child -- the little Buddha, "why don't you get pregnant?"

The moment you see something -- a beautiful child -- and a deep desire arises: you should have a child like this. And the child is saying, "Why don't you get pregnant?" And he is right.

In fact, if you look deeply in your desire, you will find that the desire to become pregnant has arisen in you. On the deepest layer it is there. On the surface you simply say, "How beautiful a child. I wish I had a little boy like this." On the

surface it is very simple, as if you have simply complimented the child, but deep down many things have happened.

In small things of life ... You are eating, you know your appetite is gone, and you continue to eat. Watch. Greed is there. Now you are not eating out of hunger; you are eating out of greed. One day in meditation something beautiful happens -

- a breeze comes into your being, suddenly there is light, suddenly there is fragrance, and you sway with that fragrance -- and then it is gone. Now you want every day in every meditation that that has to happen now. Now you are frustrated; and the more you are frustrated, the less is the possibility. Now that window will never open again. And when it doesn't open, you hanker for it too much; then you become very miserable -- "Why is it not happening?"

I have been observing so many meditators, thousands. When for the first time meditation really goes deep, immediately, for months, that glimpse disappears. And then they come to me, saying, "What is happening? I had seen something, and it was tremendously beautiful.

Why has it disappeared? What wrong have I done?" You have not done anything wrong: you became greedy. When it happened for the first time, you were not greedy, because you had not ever known it. How could you have been greedy about it? It was unknown; it came from out of the blue. It simply came; you were caught unaware. Now watch. It came when you were not asking for it -- you had not known it, so you could not have asked for it. It came on its own.

Now you are asking for it. Now you are asking for something which had come without your asking. You are creating the whole trouble -- the greed has entered.

Sometimes it has happened that a man has come very close to satori, very close, and then he went astray because of the greed.

So watch. Eating, watch. In the morning, you know that the sleep is over, but you still want to turn over and have a little nap. Now it is greed. If your body is fresh and you are feeling good and the tiredness is gone, then watch. It is everywhere. Eating, sleeping, meditating -- it is everywhere.

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One day you make love to your woman or to your man, and it is ecstatic. Now you hanker, now you start repeating, but that ecstasy never happens again. You are miserable. You don't know what has happened, what has gone wrong, "Why am I not attaining that peak?" You will never attain it again, because you are looking for it. The first time it happened, you were not looking for it.

This is a fundamental law. Things happen and they happen on their own accord; you cannot manage them to happen. Great things cannot be managed by you; they are beyond you.

You can, at the most, allow them to happen. At the most, you can keep your doors open so that they can happen, but you cannot force them to happen.

If you force, then nothing happens. Then you can go on making love to the woman and nothing will happen; in fact, you will start feeling nauseous about the whole thing. You will start hating the woman, you will start hating the man; you will think that the other is cheating you. And you will start looking for another woman, for another man, somewhere else to go --

"It is not happening here anymore." And you will become suspicious as to whether it had ever happened or you had imagined. How can it happen with this woman? It is not happening now.

So you will become doubtful even about the experience that had happened.

People come to me and they say, "Now for months nothing is happening in the meditation," and they say they have become doubtful. Had they imagined the first time? They had not imagined; it had happened. Now they want it to happen and they are imagining and they are creating an idea around themselves.

So what is to be done? You have to watch all the ways of the mind. Greed, desire, ambition, jealousy, possessiveness, domination -- you have to watch everything. And they are all interconnected, remember. If greed disappears, then anger will disappear. If anger disappears, jealousy will disappear. If jealousy disappears, violence will disappear. If violence disappears, possessiveness will disappear. They are all intertwined. In fact, they are spokes of the same wheel, and the hub that supports them all is the ego. So watch the ways of the ego.

Watching, watching, watching ... one day suddenly it is not there. Only the watcher is left.

That moment of pure watching is the moment of transformation. Question

MY PARENTS DECEIVED ME WITH FATHER CHRISTMAS. ARE YOU REAL, OR

WILL I BE DISILLUSIONED AGAIN?

The question is from Anand Nitya. Why she has asked has to be understood.

Since she has been here in this ashram, she has not been able to become part of the family.

She has been resisting in many ways. I tolerate these things for a time, but I cannot tolerate them forever; otherwise I will not be able to help you at all. A day is bound to come when I will start hammering. The day I start hammering, you start feeling negative, you start feeling against me. If I go according to you, then everything is beautiful, then Osho is beautiful. The moment I start going in some other direction when it is not easy for you to go with me, then negativity arises.

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And I have to go against all of you! Because I love you. I have to go against all of you; otherwise I will not be of any help to you. If I simply go on consoling you and simply go on patting your heads and simply go on saying, "You are good, everything is good" ...

I say that for a time. In the beginning I say that. If you are not yet a sannyasin, I will continue saying, "Very good!" The moment you are a sannyasin things change. Then I have to be more truthful to you, even if it hurts. It hurts, truth hurts, because you have become so untrue.

So the day I started hammering on Nitya, she must have started thinking, "Where have I come to? Is this man really a Osho or not?"

Hence the question: "My parents deceived me with Father Christmas. Are you real, or will I be disillusioned again?"

First thing: Father Christmas is far more real than I. I am absolutely unreal, because I don't exist as an ego. I am not solid at all. If you go through me, you can pass through me without coming across anybody. I am empty.

The second thing: Because of this emptiness, I can function as a screen for any sort of projection. You can project anything on me. There are people who think I am a saint, and there are people who think I am a rascal. There are people who think I am the greatest sinner there is, and there are people who think I am the greatest Master there is. And both are right and both are wrong, because I am neither. You project. There are some people who come and they say, "Osho, you have such beautiful eyes." And just the other day I was reading an article by Rahul Singh in THE ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY OF INDIA, and he says, "This man has hypnotic and sinister eyes." Good!

It is difficult for you not to project, that I know. But I have to help to destroy all your projections. Once your projections are destroyed, you will be freed.

Father Christmas is far more real. If you look into him, you will find a real person there. If you look into me, there is no person. In the East we call God the imperson. There is no personality. I am just a window; you can look through me. There is not even a glass; there is nothing. But you can project. So it is very easy for you to project because, whatsoever you project, there is nobody to deny it. There is nobody to say, "No, your projection is wrong."

You are playing the game alone.

You will know my reality only when you have stopped all projections, when you have become empty, when you have attained to meditative energy. The meditative energy is a nonprojective energy. It does not project anything; it simply looks at things as they are.

If a meditator comes across a flower, he will not even say it is a rose flower, because the word "rose" becomes a projection. With the word "rose" all the roses that you have known before come between you and this rose. With the word

"rose" all that you have heard about roses, all the poetry that you have read about roses -- all that arises between you and the reality. A real meditator will simply look at the rose without even saying the word "rose"

inside his being; there will be no language. There will be no idea what it is. He will simply see that which is, the nameless. And that is the only way to see the real rose.

If you want to see me, my reality -- I am not a person, but if you want to see my nothingness -- you will have to come to me without any ideas. And that's how, if you come closer and closer, more and more projections will fall.

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"Are you real, or will I be disillusioned again?" You will be disillusioned, and this time disillusioned forever. That's my hope. If you cooperate with me, you will be disillusioned forever. Then you will never project again. And that's all a Master can do: to help you not to project again.

I have heard:

Two Martians were walking along Piccadilly. One of them nudged the other and pointing to a traffic light said, "How would you like her for a girlfriend?" ...

A traffic light! But you can think about Martians -- they can project ... "Wow!" said his friend. "What a beauty! I think I will go over and chat her up."

After about ten minutes he rejoined his companion, who asked, "Well, how did you get on?"

"Not bad," replied the second Martian. "She did not actually say anything, but she keeps winking at me."

A traffic light, but you can project.

All your projections are yours, Nitya, and they have to disappear. You have to be

disillusioned. Only in that moment of disillusionment does reality explode. Question

THE ZEN MASTERS SAY, "KILL YOUR PARENTS, " AND EVEN, "IF YOU MEET

THE BUDDHA ON THE WAY, KILL HIM IMMEDIATELY." IS IT NOT SHOCKING? IS

IT NOT IRREVERENT?

It is shocking, but precisely, that is the purpose. A Master has to shock you to awake you.

A Master is not a lullaby. A Master is not a tranquilizer. A Master has to be like a sharp knife in your heart. To be with a Master is painful. And the Master has to destroy all possibilities of projections.

First the child learns to project on the mother and the father. Then for the whole life one goes on projecting. Have you watched it in your own being? Whenever you are attracted by a woman, you may be again looking for your mother. Whenever you are attracted by a man, just watch. Are you again looking for your father? Because the first man the child has known was the father and the first woman was the mother. The child is imprinted with the first form of the woman and the first form of the man. That imprint is very deep.

You all know that suddenly one day you see a woman and something clicks. What clicks?

The mother in you. When you see a woman and something reminds you deeply of your mother ... It may not be conscious, you may not be aware of it, you may not be able to figure out what it is, you may not be able to put your finger on it, but if you go deep into your unconscious you will find that the way the woman walks, the long nose of the woman, or the black eyes of the woman or the style of her hair, or her voice, or something, suddenly has Osho - The First Principle

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clicked your unconscious and the unconscious knows, "This is the woman." People fall in love so suddenly, without knowing the woman, who she is -- love at first sight. How is it possible?

What psychological mechanism is functioning there? Your mother. And so it is true about the father.

When Zen Masters say, "Kill your parents," they are saying, "Destroy the imprint of your mother and father from your unconscious." Once that imprint is destroyed you will be free.

Christianity, Islam, or Judaism or Hinduism are not as perfect religions as Zen, because they still talk of the Father God or the Mother Goddess. The imprint continues. Not only in this world, it goes on being projected in the sky too -- God the Father or Kali the Mother. You are still looking for your parents. Now, even in the ultimate reality you are looking for your parents. When will you become adult? When will you become mature? Zen is a process of maturity: so kill the parents.

There is a saying among Zen people that a man becomes really mature when his father and mother are dead. Have you not watched? If your father and mother have died, you are shocked. You have never thought that they would ever die. Although many times you have wished that they should die -- an unconscious wish -- because they are heavy on you, because their very presence is a restriction.

Have you watched, whenever you go to talk to your father you start stuttering, perspiring, you become nervous? Because he reminds you again that you are helpless, a small child, and he is a powerful man. Have you watched, when you go to your mother it is so difficult to communicate? It is so difficult to say anything. It becomes so difficult to talk to a mother, to sit and chitchat is almost impossible. What to say? She is puzzled and you are also puzzled.

Both are embarrassed.

So deep down sometimes you have thought, "They should die, so I should be free of them." And when the father and mother die, suddenly you feel you are a child no more.

But when Zen people say it, they mean something else. They are not talking

about the father and mother on the outside. They are talking about the inside. When the father and mother in the inside die, you become mature, you become free.

And remember, if you are free from your father and mother in the unconscious, you will be capable of communing with your father and mother for the first time, because then there will be no barrier. In fact, you will be able to love them for the first time. You will be able to forgive them for the first time. You will be able to feel compassion for them, how much they have done for you. When you are mature, when you are free of them, when their presence is no more a heavy weight on your heart, you can feel them for the first time. You can be with them in a loving space.

So it is shocking, but it is not irreverent, one thing.

The second thing: they say, "If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately."

And these people who have said these things, they were worshiping Buddha every day in the temple. They may have said it sitting at the feet of the statue of Buddha.

The man who said this was a priest in a temple. He lived in the temple, worshiped in the morning, evening, would bring flowers and incense, and he said one day to his disciples, "If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him immediately!" One disciple asked, naturally, "What do you mean? And you have been worshiping Buddha." And the man said, "Yes, I have been worshiping him because he has helped me. Even to kill him he has been helpful! It is he who Osho - The First Principle

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has helped me to kill him. It is he who has helped me to be free of him." The ultimate work of the Master is to make you free of himself.

Zarathustra is leaving his disciples and they ask him, "What is your last message?" And he says, "Beware of Zarathustra." Without any comment he escaped into the forest. "Beware of Zarathustra" -- the last message. Beautiful.

Tremendously Zen. "Beware of me; otherwise you may become a slave to me" -- that's what he means.

The same I say to you. Forget about Buddha. because you can kill Buddha very easily. Kill me. That will be far more difficult. With Buddha you have no relationship at all, so you can take it, "Okay, if he comes on the way, we can kill him." But I say to you, kill me when I come on your way. And I will come.

At the last moment, when everything has been cut off, the Master remains, because that is the deepest relationship. You can cut your relationship even with your mother because that is only biological, physical. You can cut your relationship even with your beloved because that is psychological. But to cut your relationship with the Master is the most difficult thing. You will need a really sharp sword, a really, really sharp sword, and you will need great courage, because the disciple-and-Master relationship is a spiritual relationship. It goes deepest in your being. You will start trembling.

When I will stand on your way ... And that is going to be the last barrier: the Master is the passage to God and the last barrier too. You will have to leave the Master also. And these things are of the inward journey, remember again and again. At the last moment when you are disappearing into emptiness, the last hand that you will have to leave will be the Master's hand.

So it is not irreverent. It is with great respect that it has been said.

One thing more. The Zen people are totally different from Christians. You cannot think of a Christian saying to another Christian, "Kill Jesus when he comes on your way. Kill him immediately!'? That will look very sacrilegious because Christians have not yet been able to be nonserious about their religion. Their religion is very serious. Hence it misses much. Zen has the quality of laughter, it can laugh. And Zen has the quality of rebelliousness, nonauthoritativeness. And Zen goes on keeping a balance: surrender to the Master, and yet remain independent. Very difficult, almost impossible. But when you do the impossible, only then does the ultimate happen to you. Surrender to the Master, and yet remain independent. Be sincere in your search, but don't lose your laughter. Become wise, but let foolishness also flower. And Zen people are very, very absurd in that way. They can say things which will shock you.

A Zen Master is weighing flax, and a man comes, a seeker, and he asks, "What is

Buddha?

What is Buddhahood? What is Buddha-nature?" The Master is weighing the flax, and he says,

"Three pounds of flax. That is what Buddha is."

Three pounds of flax! -- and he is talking about Buddha? Looks very sacrilegious.

A Zen Master, on a cold night, burned a Buddha statue, a wooden statue, because he was feeling cold. No Christian can do that. No Hindu can do that. No Mohammedan can do that.

Hence they lag behind. In the night he burned the Buddha statue because it was too cold, and in the morning he was worshiping again.

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This playfulness, this nonseriousness, is of tremendous value. With me also, remember that: you have to surrender and yet you have to remain independent. In fact, your surrender is needed so that I can make you independent. Paradoxical of course, but this is how one grows.

I have heard one beautiful story -- very shocking, but tremendously beautiful. The story is from Sheldon Kopp:

One Sunday afternoon after church, God and St. Peter went to play golf. God teed up on the first hole, swung his driver mightily, and sliced the ball off into the rough beside the fairway. Just as the ball hit the ground, a rabbit came running out from beneath a bush, picked up God's golf ball in his mouth, and ran with it out onto the fairway. Down from the sky swooped a hawk and pounced on the rabbit. The hawk picked up the rabbit in its claws and flew with it over the green. A hunter spotted the hawk, took aim with his rifle, and shot the bird in midflight. The hawk dropped the rabbit onto the green. The golf ball fell from the rabbit's mouth and rolled into the cup for a hole in one.

St. Peter turned to God with exasperation, saying, "Come on now! Do you want to play golf, or do you want to fuck around?"

This is perfect Zen.

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The Only One Who Has Not Talked 13 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall

THE PUPILS OF THE TENDAI SCHOOL USED TO STUDY MEDITATION BEFORE

ZEN ENTERED JAPAN. FOUR OF THEM, WHO WERE INTIMATE FRIENDS, PROMISED ONE ANOTHER TO OBSERVE SEVEN DAYS OF SILENCE.

ON THE FIRST DAY ALL WERE SILENT, BUT WHEN THE NIGHT CAME AND

THE OIL LAMPS WERE GROWING DIM, ONE OF THE PUPILS COULD NOT HELP

EXCLAIMING TO A SERVANT: "FIX THOSE LAMPS. "

THE SECOND PUPIL WAS SURPRISED TO HEAR THE FIRST ONE TALK. "WE

ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY A WORD, " HE REMARKED.

"YOU TWO ARE STUPID. WHY DID YOU TALK?" ASKED THE THIRD.

"I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS NOT TALKED -- THANK GOD!" CONCLUDED

THE FOURTH.

In the search for the first principle silence is the door -- the only door. And except it there is no way to approach the first principle. The first principle can be known only when you move to the primordial state of your being. Thinking is secondary. Existence precedes thinking, existence comes first. First you are, and then you start thinking. Thinking is secondary. Thinking is a shadow activity; it follows you. It cannot exist without you, but you can exist without it. Through thinking you can know secondary things, not the primary things.

The most fundamental is not available to thinking; the most fundamental is available to silence.

Silence means a state of consciousness where no thought interferes.

The first principle is not far away, it is not distant. Never think for a single moment that you are missing it because it is very far away. No, not at all. It is the closest thing to you. It is the obvious thing. It surrounds you. It surrounds you just like the ocean surrounds a fish. You are in it. You are born in it and born out of it. You live in it, you breathe in it, and one day you disappear in it. It is not far away, not that you have to travel to it. It is there. It is already there around you, within and without. It is your very existence, that first principle.

Zen people call it the first principle; other religions call it God. There is no difference. The Zen approach is far better because with the word "God," trouble starts. The first principle becomes personified; then you can create an image. You cannot make an image of the first principle, but that's what all the religions do. They say, "God is the first cause, the uncaused cause, the most fundamental, the substantial, the substratum." Zen people call it the first principle. It is beautiful to call it the first principle because nothing preceded it. Everything has followed it.

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So if you want to have a communion with the first principle, you will have to seek and search for a reality within yourself which is original, which has not

been preceded by anything else.

Silence is primordial. Sound exists in silence. Sound comes and goes, silence remains.

Sound is like light, and silence is like darkness. Darkness remains; light comes and goes.

Light needs some cause to be. Darkness needs no cause. No fuel is needed for darkness; it simply exists without any fuel. It exists as primordial existence. Darkness is eternal; light is momentary. In the morning the sun rises and there is light. By the evening the sun is gone, the light is gone. Don't think that the darkness comes. Darkness never comes; it is always there.

Light comes and goes. You burn a lamp and there is light. You blow out the lamp and light is gone. Not that darkness comes; darkness is there. Light is accidental; darkness is existential.

Silence is there. You can create sound; you cannot create silence. The moment sound is no more created there is silence. Thinking is sound; meditation is silence. So all the religions of the world have been searching for and seeking in one way or another that silence which has not been preceded by anything else, which is the first.

Now a few things before we analyze this state of silence.

First thing. Man is missing this first principle not because he is not a skilled thinker but because he is, not because he is not a trained logician but because he is. Thinking creates a screen around you, a screen of smoke, and because of that smoke the obvious is lost. To see the obvious, you need clarity, not thinking, not logic. You simply need clarity, you need transparency. Your eyes should be completely empty, naked -- naked of all clothes, naked of all concepts, empty, empty of all thoughts. When the eyes are just empty, you can see the first principle, and not only can you see it as an object outside you, you see it as your own interiority, as your own subjectivity.

In fact, it is thinking that creates the distinction between the subject and the object. It is thinking that creates division. It is thinking that creates a split. It is thinking that makes things separate. Once thinking is dropped, existence is one, it is one unity, it is one orgasmic experience where duality is totally lost. All

boundaries lose themselves into each other, merge into each other. Everything is joined to everything else. The smallest leaf of grass is joined to the greatest star. And then there is nothing high, nothing low, nothing good, nothing bad, because all is joined together. The greatest saint is joined to the greatest sinner; they are not separate.

Nothing is separate. With the disappearance of thinking, schizophrenia disappears, this existential schizophrenia of dividing everything: this is man, this is woman, this is good, this is bad, this is beautiful, this is ugly, this is mine, this is thine. All distinctions create neuroses.

Man is mad because he thinks too much, and he goes on missing the obvious. God is very obvious.

I have heard about a great philosopher:

He married a beautiful girl many years his junior. After a while he began to be torn by doubts as to her faithfulness ...

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Natural for a philosopher to be torn by doubts. A philosopher lives in doubts; doubt is his trade. He doubts, and he goes on doubting. Through doubt he creates questions and then answers, and through doubt he makes more questions out of the answers. His whole life is a procession of doubts. Naturally, "he began to be torn by doubts as to her faithfulness."

... so he hired a private detective to watch her while he left on a trip. On his return he called the detective.

"Out with it, out with it!" shouted the philosopher. "I can take it. It is the element of doubt that is driving me crazy."

"It looks bad," said the detective. "As soon as you left the house a handsome fellow called for your wife. I followed them to a night dub. They had four or five

drinks and then danced --

and very close. Then they went back to their table and held hands. Finally they took a cab back to your house. The lights were on, and I saw them walk into the bedroom and embrace. Then the light went out and I could not see any more."

"What did I tell you?" shouted the philosopher. "That damned element of doubt!"

Now, even the obvious -- "That damned element of doubt! " Even the obvious is not obvious to a philosopher. The greater the philosopher, the more doubts he has. He has doubts about everything. He doubts even his own existence -- which in fact cannot be doubted. How can you doubt your own existence? Even to doubt, you are needed to be there. The doubt cannot exist in the air. The doubt cannot exist without you. The doubt can exist only if YOU

are there, but philosophers have been doubting even their own existence: Who knows whether we are or we are not?

Doubt is the only outcome of thinking. Nonthinking gives you trust, nonthinking gives you faith, nonthinking brings you closer to reality, face to face with reality. So the first thing to be understood: thinking is not a way to the first principle. Not through philosophizing will you arrive at the first principle, because philosophy is secondary. You can know secondary things through the secondary. To know the primary, you will have to achieve the primary within yourself. You can know only that which you are.

If you live in thinking, you will be able to know only secondary things. You will be able to know the shadow world, what Hindus call the world of maya. Through the mind you can know only the world of maya, the shadow world, the world of illusions. You will be surprised.

In Sanskrit we have two terms. One is VIDYA; VIDYA means "knowledge". Another is AVIDYA; AVIDYA means "nonknowledge". And you will be surprised, in Sanskrit "science"

is called AVIDYA -- "nonknowledge". Science is called AVIDYA. Why? Science knows more than anything else, but in Sanskrit they call science AVIDYA. Why? Because science knows only the shadow world -- knows the secondary, the nonessential; knows the object, misses the subject; knows the body, misses the soul; knows the world, misses God; knows the secondary.

To know the primary, you will have to become primary. You will have to fall into that wavelength where the primary pulsates, that silence. That is the state of no- mind. No-mind preceded your mind.

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A child is born. He comes without any mind whatsoever; he simply exists. His existence is pure, unhampered by any thought, unhindered by any cloud. Look into the eyes of a child.

They are so innocent, they are so transparent, so crystal clear. From where comes this clarity?

This clarity comes from no-thought. The child still has not learned how to think, how to accumulate thoughts. He looks, but he cannot classify. If he looks at the trees he cannot say they are trees, he cannot say they are green, he cannot say they are beautiful. He sees the trees, but no classification, no category. He has no language yet to be clouded with. He simply sees.

Color is there, but he cannot say is color; green is there, but he cannot say it is green.

Everything is purely clear, but he cannot label it. Hence the innocence of the eyes.

A man of understanding again attains the same eyes. He again becomes a child, as far as the clarity is concerned. Jesus is right when he says, "Become like small children; only then will you be able to enter into my kingdom of God." He is not saying become foolish like children; he is not saying become childish; he is not saying learn tantrum again; he is not saying that a child is the last stage. No, he is saying simply one thing. He is not saying become a child; he is saying become like a child. How can you become a child again? But you can become like a child. If you can drop thinking, if this cloak of thinking is dropped and you become nude, again you will have the same clarity.

It happens sometimes through drugs. Not a very good way to attain it -- very

dangerous, very costly, and illusory -- but it happens. Hence the appeal of the drugs down the ages. Drugs are not new in the world; even in the Vedas they talk about SOMA. SOMA seems to be one of the most powerful drugs ever discovered by man. It must be something like LSD. Aldous Huxley has said that in the future, when the ultimate drug will be known, we will call it SOMA. From the Vedas, the ancientmost book in the world, to Timothy Leary, man has always been attracted by drugs -- alcohol, marijuana, opium. Why this attraction? And all the moralists have been against it, and all the puritans have been against it, and all the governments have tried to curb and control, but it seems beyond any government to control it.

What has been the cause of it? It gives something ... it gives a glimpse into the innocent mind of the child again.

Through chemical impact, the mind becomes loosened for a few moments or a few hours.

Under the impact of the drug your thinking slips. You start looking into reality without thinking; again the world is colorful, as it is for the child; again in a small pebble you can see the greatest diamond; ordinary grass looks so extraordinary; an ordinary flower looks so tremendously beautiful; an ordinary human face looks so divine. Not that anything has changed. The whole world is the same. Something has changed in you -- and that too only temporarily. Through the forceful drug your mind has slipped down. You don't have the mask; you can see into things with clarity. That is the appeal of the drugs down the ages.

And unless meditation becomes available to millions of people, drugs cannot be prevented.

Drugs are dangerous because they can destroy your body's equilibrium, they can destroy your nature, they can destroy your inner chemistry. You have a very delicate chemistry. Those strong drugs can destroy your rhythm. And more and more drugs will be needed and you will become addicted -- and less and less will be the experience. By and by, the mind will learn how to cope with the drugs, and then, even under the drug, you will not attain to the state of innocence. Then you will need even stronger drugs.

So this is not a way.

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The mind can be put aside very easily. There is no need to depend on anything chemical, on anything artificial. There is a natural possibility to get out of the mind, because we were born without minds. Deep down we are still no-minds. The mind is only on the periphery.

That's why I say it is just a cloak, a dress that you are wearing. You can slip out of it.

And one moment of slipping out of it will reveal to you a totally different world: the world of the first principle.

So the real fight in the future is going to be between meditation and drugs. In fact, that has always been the case: the real fight is between drugs and meditation, either drugs or meditation.

So it is not coincidental that when you start meditating by and by the pull of the drug becomes less and less. If it is not becoming less and less, then know well you are not meditating yet, because when you know the higher, the lower is dropped automatically.

But one thing has to be understood. Drugs do something; they UNDO something in you.

They help you to get out of the mind. They give you courage to look into reality without thinking. For a moment the curtain slips, and suddenly you are aware that the world has a splendor. It had never had it before. You had passed through the same street and you had looked through the same trees and at the same stars and the same people, and today now everything suddenly is so luminous and everybody is so beautiful and everybody is afire with life, with love. A saint -- one who has attained -- lives in that state continuously, without any effort.

You were born as a no-mind. Let this sink into your heart as deeply as possible because through that a door opens. If you were born as a no-mind, then the mind is just a social product. It is nothing natural; it is cultivated. It has been put

together on top of you. Deep down you are still free; you can get out of it. One can never get out of nature, but one can get out of the artificial any moment one decides to.

Existence precedes thinking. So existence is not a state of mind; it is a state beyond. To be is the way to know the fundamental, not to think. Science means thinking, philosophy means thinking, theology means thinking. Religion does not mean thinking. The religious approach is a nonthinking approach. It is more intimate, it brings you closer to reality. It drops all that hinders, it unblocks you; you start flowing into life. You don't think that you are separate, looking. You don't think that you are a watcher, aloof, distant. You meet, mingle, and merge into reality.

And there is a different kind of knowing. It cannot be called "knowledge". It is more like love, less like knowledge. It is so intimate that the word "knowledge" is not sufficient to express it. The word "love" is more adequate, more expressive.

In the history of human consciousness, the first thing that evolved was magic. Magic was a combination of science and religion. Magic had something of the mind and something of the no-mind. Then out of magic grew philosophy. Then out of philosophy grew science. Magic was both no-mind and mind; philosophy was only mind; and then mind plus experimentation became science. Religion is a state of no-mind.

Religion and science are the two approaches to reality. Science approaches through the secondary; religion goes direct. Science is an indirect approach; religion is an immediate approach. Science goes round and round; religion simply penetrates to the heart of reality.

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A few more things. Thinking can only think about the known -- it can chew the already chewed. Thinking can never be original. How can you think about the unknown? Whatsoever you CAN manage to think will belong to the known. You can think only because you know.

At the most, thinking can create new combinations. You can think about a horse who flies in the sky, who is made of gold; but nothing is new. You know birds who fly in the sky, you know gold, you know horses; you combine the three together. At the most, thinking can imagine new things, but it cannot know the unknown. The unknown remains beyond it. So thinking goes in a circle, goes on knowing the known again and again and again. It goes on chewing the chewed one. Thinking is never original.

And the first principle means to come upon reality originally, radically, to come upon reality without any mediator, to come upon reality as if you are the first person to exist and you come upon reality. That is liberating. That very newness of it liberates.

And when you come to know reality directly, it is never reduced to the known; the mystery remains. In fact, it becomes a deeper mystery than ever. The more you know, the more you feel that you don't know. The more you know, the less you feel you know. The more you know, the more vast is the mystery of it. Religion is mysticism, religion is magic, because religion is a no-mind approach.

Thinking can think only about the known; it is repetitive. Philosophy is repetitive. You can go into the books of philosophy, into the history of philosophy, and you will see the same thing being repeated again and again -- new phraseology, new words; new terms, new definitions, but nothing fundamentally different. From Thales to Bertrand Russell you can go on, but you will find the same thing being repeated again and again. The wheel moving: the same spokes come to the top again and again.

Science can experiment only with the objective; experimentation is possible only with the objective. You cannot experiment with the experimenter himself; there is no way. The subjective reality remains outside science. Einstein may know much about matter, but he does not know anything about himself. Newton may know much about gravitation, but he does not know who he is. One goes on accumulating knowledge about the objective world, and one remains in deep darkness within one's own self. One's own light is not yet there, and one goes on groping, experimenting.

Science can experiment only with the objective, philosophy can think only about the known, and the reality is beyond both. The reality is unknown -- not only unknown, but unknowable -- and the reality contains the subjective element. So

the very methodology of philosophy and science prohibits coming to the fundamental, to the first principle. To come to the fundamental, you will have to find another door, a door other than science and philosophy.

That door is religion.

And religion can be reduced to one word, and that word is "meditation," or call it silence --

to be in such a silence that you are almost not, there is no noise within you, the stillness is absolute. Only in that stillness something stirs, only in that stillness do you start hearing the still, small voice of the first principle -- call it God or call it soul. Only then life calls forth life.

Only then the source calls forth the source. Only then are you close to reality, hand in hand with the fundamental. And that is the search, that is what we are seeking; and without knowing it, without realizing it, there is going to be no fulfillment.

The last thing; then we enter into this small parable. When thinking disappears you are left with the first principle. It has always been there; you were not there just because of your Osho - The First Principle

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thinking. Now you are also there: two presences meet. Ordinarily you are absent, you are somewhere else. In your thoughts you are lost. When there is no thought you are herenow; then there is no way to go from herenow. Thought functions as a bridge to go away from yourself. The moment a thought has come in, you are already far away from yourself. When there is no thought, where can you go, how can you go? When there is no thought you have to be in the present. Thought can take you to the past, thought can take you to the future; no-thought brings you to the present. And only the present is. This moment is all there is.

When you are herenow, absolutely herenow, how can you miss the real, how can you miss God? When thinking disappears you are left with the first principle.

But when I say "when thinking disappears," I am not saying "when you fall

asleep,"

because in deep sleep thinking does disappear. In the East we have divided human consciousness into four phases. The first phase we call "waking",

JAGRAT. Waking means

"consciousness plus thinking"; you are conscious, but your mind is crowded with thoughts.

The second state we have called "dreaming", SWAPNA. The second state means

"unconsciousness plus thinking"; you fall asleep, but the thinking continues so there is dreaming. Dreaming is a way of thinking in sleep, and thinking is a way of dreaming while awake. Thinking and dreaming are not two separate things. Dreaming is only thinking in a very primitive language -- the language of images. Then the third state we call SUSHUPTI: sleep, deep sleep, dreamless deep sleep. The third state is "unconsciousness minus thinking"; you are unconscious -- you don't know where you are, who you are, all consciousness has disappeared, you are at rest -- and with the consciousness has disappeared thinking too, dreaming too.

These three are ordinary states: waking, dreaming, sleeping. We all know these three. The fourth is the state of meditation. The fourth is called SAMADHI,

TURIYA. It means "consciousness minus thinking".

So four stages: consciousness plus thinking is waking, consciousness minus thinking is SAMADHI, unconsciousness plus thinking is dreaming, unconsciousness minus thinking is sleep.

So SAMADHI has something similar to waking and something similar to sleep; hence Patanjali has defined SAMADHI as "waking sleep" -- sleep and yet not sleep. Sleep in the sense that there are no thoughts now, no dreams. And not sleep in the sense that you are perfectly aware, that the light of your awareness is there, that you are conscious, that you know that there is no knowledge now, that you are aware that all thinking has disappeared, that you are aware that now there is no dream lurking in your field of consciousness, that you are absolutely zero, SHUNYAM.

This is the state that the East has been trying to achieve. The West has been too involved with science; hence it has missed religion. The East's involvement is with SAMADHI: hence it has missed science.

These four states can be thought of in some other ways also. Consciousness plus thinking means waking. Science is a waking activity, so is philosophy, so is theology. Second, dreaming: unconsciousness plus thinking. That is what art is, poetry, painting, music. It is a dream activity, so it is not just accidental that we call the poets dreamers, that we call the artists dreamers, that we don't trust them much -- they are not reliable, they cannot be the guides to reality. We enjoy them, it is fun, but we cannot accept them as guides to reality --

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they are not. They live in fantasy. They dream while awake. Their eyes are full of dreams. So waking is science, philosophy, theology, logic; and art, all kinds of art, is dream activity.

Unconsciousness minus thinking means sleep. Of course all activity ceases in sleep, so nothing is born out of sleep -- no science, no art.

Consciousness minus thinking is SAMADHI. SAMADHI gives birth to religion. When Jesus attained to SAMADHI Christianity was born. When Nanak attained to SAMADHI Sikhism was born. When Buddha attained to SAMADHI Buddhism was born. Religion is born out of SAMADHI, the fourth state. What is SAMADHI? If you can stop your thinking and yet remain alert and don't fall asleep. Difficult, arduous, one of the most difficult things, almost impossible. It is easy to be awake and thinking, it is easy not to think and fall asleep, but to remain awake and not think is the most difficult thing, because it is not part of evolution. It is a revolution. It is not given by nature automatically. You have to attain it.

That is the task man has to solve. That is the challenge given to man, and very few have accepted that challenge. And those who have accepted it, only they are man; others are man only for the name's sake. We exist as potential man, not as actual man. It is our potentiality.

We can become a Buddha or a Christ, but it has not happened yet. We are just seeds. That's our misery because a seed can never be satisfied unless it becomes a tree and blooms. A seed will remain miserable because there is a feeling deep down that "I am not yet that which I am meant to be; my destiny is not fulfilled."

Have you not observed this in you? If you had not observed it, you would not be here. You are here only because you feel something is missing. You are here only because you continuously feel that something has to happen and it is not happening, that something is just there by the corner and yet you cannot grasp it, seems to be not very far away, yet seems to be beyond reach. The tree is not very far away from the seed. If the seed finds the right soil, falls into the soil, relaxes, surrenders to the soil, dissolves into the soil, dies into the soil, then the tree is not very far away. In the right season the seed will sprout, a tender plant will be born, and the seed will be able to see the light.

Only when the seed has become a plant will it be able to feel the wind and the ecstasy that the wind is and be able to feel the sunrays and the ecstasy that the sun brings and be able to live and be able to accept the challenges and start growing. Come storm, come wind, come rains, and the small, tender plant will become stronger and stronger. Every challenge will give it strength and integration; and one day there will be a great tree whispering to the skies, it will bloom, and the fragrance will be released to the winds in all directions. Then there will be jubilation.

When Jesus says again and again to his children, to his disciples, "Rejoice!" what he is saying is true because he has become a tree and he has bloomed. But his disciples must have looked here and there, they must have thought, "What does he mean? Why does he go on saying again and again, 'Rejoice'?" They are seeds; how can they rejoice?

When I say to you, "Celebrate!" you start thinking, "For what? Why? What have we got to celebrate?" You cannot celebrate because celebration is possible only when you bloom. I know it! But I go on saying, "Celebrate!" And Jesus knows it and he goes on saying,

"Rejoice!" In fact, he wants to create such a thirst in you to know what this rejoicing is that out of that thirst you start seeking and searching for the right soil.

To find a right Master is to find a right soil because only through the Master will you be able to dissolve, only through the Master will you be able to surrender. A seed needs to Osho - The First Principle

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surrender. A seed has to die; only then is there a new life born out of it. Death makes it possible. Death is tremendously beautiful: it makes it possible that a man can be new, a man can be reborn.

SAMADHI is celebration, SAMADHI is rejoicing. SAMADHI is your gratitude towards God, your thanksgiving.

How can you thank God right now? You have nothing to thank him for. You can complain, you cannot thank him; so your prayers are more of complaints, less of thanks. You cannot say, "Thank you." How can you? For what? In fact, you are very angry with God. Why has he given birth to you? Why has he created so much misery? Why has he put you in such anguish and turmoil? Why in the first place? What wrong have you done? If suddenly you come across God you will jump upon him. That's why he goes on hiding. You will kill him.

You will say, "What have you been doing? For what are we suffering? What wrong have we done? Why did you make us in the first place? Not to be would have been better -- no anxiety, no anguish. Not to be would have been more peaceful. Why did you create us?"

The whole existence seems to be mischievous. It seems as if somebody, a sadistic God, is sitting there, torturing people, creating a thousand and one ways to torture them.

Right now you cannot thank him because right now you are not. When you are, you will be able to thank him. And the way to be goes through death, through surrender. And the way goes through silence. But it is not easy to be silent; it is

the most arduous thing to be silent. Now this small story:

THE PUPILS OF THE TENDAI SCHOOL USED TO STUDY MEDITATION BEFORE

ZEN ENTERED JAPAN. FOUR OF THEM, WHO WERE INTIMATE FRIENDS, PROMISED ONE ANOTHER TO OBSERVE SEVEN DAYS OF SILENCE.

ON THE FIRST DAY ALL WERE SILENT, BUT WHEN THE NIGHT CAME AND

THE OIL LAMPS WERE GROWING DIM, ONE OF THE PUPILS COULD NOT HELP

EXCLAIMING TO A SERVANT: "FIX THOSE LAMPS. "

THE SECOND PUPIL WAS SURPRISED TO BEAR THE FIRST ONE TALK. "WE

ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY A WORD, " HE REMARKED.

YOU TWO ARE STUPID. WHY DID YOU TALK?" ASKED THE THIRD.

I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS NOT TALKED -- THANK GOD!" CONCLUDED

THE FOURTH.

What happened? The Tendai school is a school of meditation. Before Zen entered Japan, Tendai was very much prevalent. But that too was a school of meditation. In fact, because of Tendai and its roots in Japan, Zen could enter Japan. These things don't happen suddenly; you need a climate. A country does not become suddenly interested in meditation. It needs a climate. The climate is born out of long tradition.

In the Tendai school a seven-day silence was ordinarily prescribed to every disciple. Why a seven-day silence? It is very symbolic; the number is symbolic.

Man has seven centers, and each center has to attain silence. You may not have looked at it in that way. When the sex center becomes silence it is BRAHMACHARYA, it is celibacy. When the heart center Osho - The First Principle

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becomes silence it is compassion. If the heart center is in turmoil there is anger. If the sex center is in turmoil, shouting, there is sexuality. All the seven centers of man have to become silent. When all of them are chained in silence, then this whole being of man falls silent. In that silence one knows the first principle -- one IS the first principle.

So these disciples must have been told by some Master to be silent for seven days. But man functions in a mechanical way. If you sit silently that doesn't mean you will Become silent. In fact, just the reverse will happen: if you sit silently you will find a rush of thoughts coming to you. You will be more crowded by thoughts than ever. All sorts of thoughts --

relevant, irrelevant, meaningful, meaningless -- they all will jumble together. It will be rush-hour traffic. And they will all claim your attention. Your attention will become fragmentary; you will almost feel like going mad. You will be torn apart. You will feel you are being pulled and pushed in so many directions ... you will start feeling crazy.

Just to sit does not help. One has to be very aware. These four disciples were not aware at all, so when the one said, "Fix those lamps" to a servant who was passing by, he must have done it in a very unconscious way; otherwise he was to keep silent. It was none of his business whether the lamps were getting dim or not. He had to remember that he was in silence, but he forgot.

The story is not humorous; it is tragic. That's how things are with you, with everybody.

It happened after twenty-four hours. Try it. Just take your wristwatch today and sit silently, put your wristwatch in front of you, look at the second hand. The second hand moves one complete circle in one minute. Just watch the second hand and remember that "I am to remember the second hand moving; I am not to

forget it." And it will be difficult for you even to remember for fifteen seconds; you will forget. After two, three seconds you will start thinking something else; then again you will remember; then again you will forget. In one minute you will forget at least four, five times. You will not be able to remember for one continuous minute that you are to remember the second hand moving, that you are not to go anywhere else.

So please don't laugh at this story. The first reaction is laughter, but it is very tragic. It is how we are.

For twenty-four hours they are sitting silently; then suddenly one servant is passing and one of the pupils says, "Fix those lamps." Not that he is interested in the lamps. Anything would have provoked him; anything would have become the excuse. He wanted to say something! He must have been getting crazy. That's why the second cannot tolerate it; he says,

"What? We are not supposed to say a word!" And the third says, "You two are stupid! Why did you talk?" And the fourth says, "I am the only one, thank God, who has not talked yet."

They all wanted to say something, to release, to get a little relief. It must have been getting too heavy on them.

So one thing, when you sit silently, all doors for your thoughts to be released through are closed, so they hammer within you, they start gathering within you. They become a mob.

Their presence becomes heavy; then you will find any excuse and you will say something.

In many traditions a mantra is given, chanting is given. The Master gives you a mantra.

That is just to help you so you don't go mad, nothing else. It is just a help for the beginners. A mantra is given -- go on repeating, "Ram, Ram, Ram ..." That will help; this will remain a release. Other thoughts will not bother you too much; at least one passage is open so something can flow. You can go on repeating, "Ram, Ram, Ram ..." and this will help you in Osho - The First Principle

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the beginning, but this is not real meditation. It is just a preparation for meditation. What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls "transcendental meditation" is neither meditation nor transcendental. It is just a cleaning; a beginner prepares himself for meditation.

Meditation starts with silence, not with a mantra; but a mantra can be helpful if you are very alert. Otherwise even the mantra can become dangerous; you may get too addicted to it.

Then you remain outside the temple. The mantra is a help if you know that it is just to make you ready by and by to become silent.

Many thoughts are there; then one thought is allowed to you -- "Ram, Ram, Ram

..."

Ninety-nine thoughts are not allowed, one is allowed. If you can attain this, then one day that one has to be dropped too. But if this one becomes very strong -- and there is every possibility it will become strong because your whole attachment that was divided in a hundred thoughts will now fall on one thought -

- it will become a very deep attachment. It will become your very soul. If somebody will say, "Drop it," you will be angry. "This is my mantra," you will say. "How can I drop it?" Even a man like Ramakrishna found it very difficult to drop his Mother Kali, at the last moment.

Difficult. You have cultivated it so much; you have put so much into it. All your desires, all your projections, all your thoughts, you have poured into it. It becomes one of the strongest thoughts in your being. It will be very difficult. So unless you are alert from the very beginning, a mantra can poison you rather than help you.

In the Tendai school there is no mantra, so these four disciples must have been getting very volcanic. They must have been sitting on a volcano; they must have been ready to explode. The passing of the servant and the oil lamps growing dim was just an excuse.

The mind is so habituated to thinking, so habituated to expressing itself that it is almost impossible to get out of it -- unless you put your total energy in getting out of it, unless you make it a life-and-death problem. If you are just trying so-

so, it will not help. If you are just making a lukewarm effort, it will not help. Unless it really becomes a life-and-death problem it is not going to help.

A man came to Sheikh Farid and said, "I would like to know God. Can you give me some method?" Farid said, "I am going to river to take my bath; you come with me. And if I get a chance I will give you the method." They went to the river. The man was very Curious as to what he was going to give him at the river. At the river Farid said, "Now you also unrobe and get down into the river with me. Let us first take a bath." So the man got down into the river, and when he came close to Farid, Farid jumped on top of him, pushed him down into the river. Farid was a very strong man. The seeker could not understand what was happening. He had come to ask how to attain God, and this man was trying to kill him!

But when it is a question of life and death, even the seeker, who was not a very strong man, also tried hard. He threw Farid away, and when he came out of the water he said, "What nonsense! I had always thought that you are a pious man. You have fame as a mystic, and what were you doing? Are you a murderer? And I have not done anything to you; I have just asked a question, how to attain to God." And Farid said, "That's what I was doing -- giving you a method. Just now tell me one thing first, in case you forget. What happened when I was pushing you down into the river? How many thoughts were there in your mind?"

He said, "Thoughts? There was only one thought -- how to get rid of you. And by the end even that disappeared. Then there was only an effort, not a thought -- no thought. My whole life was at stake. It was just an effort to get out of the river somehow. And I had lo put all my Osho - The First Principle

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energies -- known, unknown, conscious, unconscious, whatsoever -- because this seemed to be the last moment."

Farid said, "That is the method. When God become a life-and-death problem -- not a question, not a curiosity, but a life-and-death problem -- when your life and death hang on the very question, on the very quest, only then will you be able to know."

Now these four seekers are sitting there. Lukewarm they must be. They don't know what they are doing. Somebody has told them to sit silently; they are sitting. Mind functions mechanically. To get out of it you will have to use all your energy. The possibility is there; you can get out of it.

Gurdjieff used to say that man is a machine. Then somebody asked, "Then what is the difference between a real machine and man?" And Gurdjieff said, "The difference is if man wants, he can go beyond the machine too. The machine cannot." Otherwise there is no difference. As man exists he is a machine. The only difference is in the future, in the possibility, potentiality. If man wants to get out of the mechanical world he can, but great effort will be needed.

A city fellow bought a place in the country recently and was going to raise livestock, but when he arrived at his farm, all he found was a large, ancient sow. "Hell of a note," he muttered and stamped off to the general store. The storekeeper was sympathetic and volunteered that he should breed his sow with Farmer Jones' boar, and soon he would be in the livestock business. "Great idea," said the slicker.

So he loaded his son in a wheelbarrow and took her to Farmer Jones'. The next morning he rushed out of bed and looked into the pigpen, but no piglets. Disgusted, he went back to the store, and the storekeeper tolerantly recommended Farmer Smith's boar now.

Once again the sow was loaded in the wheelbarrow and taken down the road, and once again the next morning the slicker found no piglets. This routine went on for a week, and finally on the eighth day, the slicker refused to get out of his warm bed in the early morning.

Rolling over to his wife, he said, "Look out the window and see if there are any piglets in the pen."

His wife looked. "There aren't any piglets in the pen," she said, "but the sow is back in the wheelbarrow."

That's how the mind functions -- mechanically. It goes on doing things which it has been doing. It goes on repeating.

If you really want to become a man, get out of your repetitions. There are no bad habits and no good habits. because all habits are bad. To live through habits is to

live a mechanical life. Get beyond, become aware.

Now, all these four men just said things out of habit, not knowing what they were saying.

And it is very easy for you to see others committing mistakes, errors, because you can look at others objectively. It is very difficult to look at yourself. The moment you start looking at yourself, you are becoming nonmechanical. To become aware of your habits is the beginning of a nonmechanical life, is the beginning of life itself. To exist as a machine is not to exist at all.

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Three small stories of how man is. Because of mechanical habits he lives unconsciously.

You do a thousand and one things, but you simply go on doing them because you have been doing them.

First scene:

One of the two drunks standing beside a lamp post asked his companion, "Say, you gotta match?"

"I think so," said his companion. "Let me see." He reached in his pocket, withdrew a stick match and rubbed the unsulphured end on the lamp post several times. No good," he said finally, and threw it away. He pulled out another and tried again to strike the unsulphured end.

"No good," he said again, and threw it away. He reached into his pocket, found another match, and fortunately tried to light the proper end. It blazed up, but immediately he blew it out and thrust it into his pocket. "Ah," he beamed. "That's a good one. Gotta save it."

The second scene:

A cop approached three drunks on a park bench. The one in the middle was snoring peacefully, apparently passed out, but the two on either side were going through the motions of fishing, casting out their lines, jerking them, and reeling them in swiftly. The cop watched for a while and then shook the middle man awake.

"Are these nuts friends of yours, buddy?" The drunk nodded.

"Well, get them out of here and make it snappy."

The drunk agreed, saluted, and began rowing vigorously. The third scene:

Mort and Leo wandered into one of those new fangled bars and sat down in a booth. The sign on the wall of their booth said, "Push button to call the waiter." Mort pushed the button, and sure enough the waiter appeared. "Two beers," ordered Mort and the waiter brought them their beers.

This kept up for a good four hours, and it was hard to say which pleased them more, drinking beer or pushing the button for the waiter. Finally, full of fun and good cheer the two parted and went home. The next morning Leo's wife had him on the carpet. "What the hell did you think you were doing last night?" she demanded. Leo was puzzled. "I don't know. What was I supposed to have done?"

"All night long," remonstrated his wife, "you kept poking your finger into my navel and calling for two beers."

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A mechanical mind is an unconscious mind. You go on doing things, but not knowing what you are doing and why you are doing them. And while doing them there is no awareness.

Walking, you walk, but there is no awareness. Eating, you eat, but there is no awareness.

Talking, you talk, but there is no awareness.

The story is significant. It says the first did it unconsciously -- and the second could see the error -- but the second did something unconsciously himself. The third could see the error of them both, but himself committed the same error! And the fourth could see the error of all three and thanked God that "I am the only one who has not yet broken silence." It is very easy to see the error of somebody else because that is not YOUR mechanical thing. You can be aware of it. When it comes to your own mechanical things you become completely unaware.

Can't you see? Somebody is eating too much and you can say very easily, "Don't eat too much." Somebody is angry and you can say, "What are you doing? Going mad?" Somebody is in love and doing foolish things and you can say, "Are you going mad? What are you doing?"

But the question is, "Can the man who has fallen in love see it?"

Just the other night, one beautiful sannyasin told me that she has fallen in love with a man and things are going really fantastically; the relationship is beautiful. I told her, "Every beginning of a relationship is beautiful. That is not something to brag about. The question is,

'Can the beautiful relationship remain beautiful?' All relationships start in beauty, in sweetness, in harmony. All relationships start as they should be, but sooner or later things start falling. Sooner or later the negative asserts, sooner or later the ugly comes up -- then is the question." But the woman said, "It will not come." All that she said, summarized, will mean that she is an exception; it is not going to happen. And that is the foolishness of all lovers.

That's how all lovers think, that it is not going to happen to them.

And when it has happened, then it is too late. Then you cannot put things right again.

When things start going wrong, there is no way to put them right again. Even if you put them right, they will never be the same. It is as if a cup has broken. You

can put it right; you can glue it together. But it will never be the same again. It is better to handle it carefully from the beginning. And the first thing to know is that every relationship starts good and every relationship ends bad. Yours included, mind you! It is very easy to see that others are just unaware. "But we two who have fallen in love, we are different," -- that is the idea of everybody.

Now, the woman was very confident -- and in that very confidence is the problem. In that very confidence she will miss because when you are so confident you don't take any precautions. When you are so confident you don't try to be aware of what is happening. Then you move unaware, and all that is in you, by and by, will come up -- is bound to come up.

In the beginning when two lovers meet, they show their beautiful faces. Their gracefulness is infinite. Their care about each other is absolute. It has to be so because both are showing their beautiful parts. But when they will be together for twenty-four hours, then it will be impossible. It will be too heavy to keep the ugly parts always hidden; by and by the ugly parts will take revenge. They will start coming up.

When you fall in love, why do we call it "fall"? It is called "fall" because it helps you to be unconscious. It is a fall. You become unconscious. We say somebody has "fallen" asleep, somebody has "fallen" in love. "Fall" means now you are no more conscious; you are behaving very mechanically. Love in itself is mechanical. Then, when the hate starts coming, you will be a victim of that too.

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If you really want to change your life, start immediately. If you have fallen in love, make it an awareness. Do things with full awareness. See that you are showing the positive aspects of you and you are hiding the negative. See well that this cannot last long, so something has to be done. If the relationship has to become really intimate, if it is to go long, then something has to be done. And that something has to be done in you, not in the other! Otherwise the woman thinks the husband has betrayed, the husband thinks the woman has betrayed. That's what these four people thought: the other is doing the wrong.

Whenever you throw the responsibility on the other, you are avoiding awareness. Let this be a very fundamental law. Whenever you throw responsibility on the other, you are saying, "I am doing perfectly well; the other is doing wrong." A man who is trying to be aware will always see that "I am responsible; I am doing something wrong." It is not a question of whether the other is doing wrong or not. That is HIS problem. That is not your problem. Your problem is whether you are doing something unconsciously. If you are doing something unconsciously, then things cannot go on being beautiful forever. Then all that is there is going to be temporary; it cannot have the quality of the eternal; it cannot have the timeless beauty and divinity in it.

So always remember, when you see somebody doing something wrong, somebody committing an error, rather than jumping on him, look into yourself -- what you are doing. If you can watch everybody's error and everybody's error becomes a remembrance of your own errors, your life will be transformed. Then everybody will become a teacher to you. Then the whole of life becomes your Master. Everywhere you will find arrows pointing to you. The whole of life will be arrowed towards you, saying, "This is unconscious ... this is irresponsible."

We have found a very easy trick: we turn the arrows towards others. Others go on throwing the arrows towards us; we go on throwing the arrows towards others. In this game, life is lost. Don't continue playing this game.

Your world is created by your consciousness or your unconsciousness. It has nothing to do with your wife, your husband, your children, your friends, your society. Your world is YOU.

Bring light to your world. Bring more awareness to your world. And start existing less like a machine, more like a man. Otherwise one has been going from one life to another, repeating the same.

You have repeated enough! Are you not yet bored? Are you not yet fed up with it? Start changing a few fundamental things. One, stop looking at others' errors, and each time you see somebody else committing an error, a mistake, start finding out immediately somewhere some mistake in yourself. In fact, to look at the mistake of the other is a way of avoiding your own mistake. One feels very good: "Somebody else is committing the mistake and I am perfectly okay." Start analyzing, observing. Become more critical about your habits, about your ways, about your style of life.

I have heard about one man who married eight times. Each time he thought, "I have found the wrong woman." And he was not wrong. After each marriage there was misery. He divorced the first woman, tried to find another, and again after a few months the same misery.

And he was surprised at how he managed to find the same type of woman again and again!

Eight times he married, and all the times he married the same type of woman. And each time he was trying to be more alert not to fall in the trap again, but he fell -- because when you choose a woman the chooser is the same. How can you change the woman!

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If the chooser is the same, the choice is going to be the same. Again the same thing will appeal to you. Maybe the face is a little different, the hairstyle is a little different, the color of the hair is a little different -- that is not the point. These are irrelevant things. A marriage does not depend on the color of the hair, a marriage does not depend on the color of the eyes, and a marriage does not depend on the length of the nose. These are superficial things. After two days, who looks at the size of the nose? Or who bothers about the color of the hair? In fact, if your wife suddenly goes and changes the color of her hair, the husband will be the last one to note it. Who bothers?

But more essential is why you choose a certain woman, why you choose a certain man.

Why? What fits with your mind? Again you will choose the same type of woman

-- for the same reasons. Those reasons are unconscious. So you can go on changing women and you will not find the woman you are searching for. You can go on changing your job and you will not find the job you are searching for. And you can go on searching among the Masters --

from one to another you can go on moving -- and you will not find the Master you are searching for, unless you become more alert about your mechanical

habits.

Once you become aware of your mechanical habits things start changing. Then the first ray of light has entered. Then you will choose a different kind of woman, because you have become different. Then you will choose a different kind of Master, because you have become different. Then you will choose EVERYTHING in a different way, because you are different.

And if a person chooses out of awareness, he chooses rightly.

People come to me and they ask, "What is right and what is wrong?" I say, "Awareness is right; unawareness is wrong." I don't label actions as wrong and right. I don't say violence is wrong. Sometimes violence can be right. I don't say love is right. Sometimes love can be wrong. Love can be for a wrong person, love can be for a wrong purpose. Somebody loves his country. Now, this is wrong because nationalism is a curse. Somebody loves his religion. He can kill, he can murder, he can burn others' temples. Neither is love always right nor is anger always wrong.

Then what is right and what is wrong? To me, awareness is right. If you are angry with full awareness, even anger is right. And if you are loving with unawareness, even love is not right.

So let the quality of awareness be there in every act that you do, in every thought that you think, in every dream that you dream. Let the quality of awareness enter into your being more and more. Become suffused with the quality of awareness. Then whatsoever you do is virtue.

Then whatsoever you do is good. Then whatsoever you do is a blessing to you and to the world in which you live.

Ponder over this small story. It is a story of four unconscious people who are trying to be silent. But they have not understood the laws of thought, they have not understood the law of being unconscious. They don't know that man is a machine. They don't know that to look at the other is a way of avoiding oneself. They are not yet conscious of what they are doing.

Even though they are sitting in meditation and trying to be silent, they are not aware of the science of silence, of the yoga of meditation. Hence this foolish anecdote became possible.

You will be repeating the same thing. All, the whole of humanity, are repeating. Don't think that you are an exception! Don't think that if you were one of these four people you would not have committed this. Know well you would have committed it! This story is about you. It has nothing to do with the Tendai school. These four can be Osho sannyasins.

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Watch each step that you take -- in action or in thought. The only goal is awareness ... and then your whole life is transformed. Then your whole life attains to a new quality, to a new dimension. And that dimension leads to the first principle.

YOU are the first principle! Osho - The First Principle 53

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Go with the River

14 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall Question

BELOVED OSHO, IT SEEMS TO ME THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING.

That's far out, Vidya. If it is really true, then it is great. If you don't understand anything, then the door is open, then there is nothing to hinder your way, to hinder your vision. It is knowledge that is obstructing. Ignorance is an opening. Ignorance is very blissful. k is knowledge that creates noise. k is knowledge that

does not allow you to see. If your eyes are completely rid of knowledge, then what is there to hinder you from seeing the truth? The truth is obvious. You just need a clarity to see it. Ignorance gives that clarity.

To be consciously ignorant is to be in satori. A child is ignorant, but not conscious of his ignorance. A saint is ignorant, but is conscious of his ignorance. He knows that he knows not.

That's the only difference. The child also knows not, but he does not know it. The saint knows that he knows not. His whole knowledge consists of one single thing: that there is nothing to be known and there is no possibility to know, that the whole effort towards knowledge is futile, that existence is such a mystery that it can never be reduced to knowledge.

All that we know is superficial, arbitrary. All that we know has nothing to do with reality.

The reality remains untouched by our knowledge. The reality remains mysterious.

If it is really true that you have become aware of your ignorance, then there is nothing else to be sought, nothing else to attain. Relax in this ignorance. Accept this ignorance. And feel blissful.

But it may not be true. That's why I say IF it is true. It may again be just a hankering to know. Then you have not understood, then you are not at ease with your nonknowing. The question seems to be because you are worried; otherwise why a question? You are worried.

Something is gnawing at your heart. You are worried that "I don't understand anything, and I have to understand." In fact, when Vidya had come, she must have thought that she knows.

Now by and by I have been hammering on her, and her knowledge has disappeared. Now she is worried.

When you come to me you come full of knowledge. You come with much luggage, and that luggage has to be destroyed, burned utterly, so that you cannot find it again. When you lose your luggage you start feeling as if you are missing something. Naturally so. You have been carrying the load so long; now suddenly

it is gone; you feel you are missing something.

The question has arisen because of your feeling that something is being missed: "I don't know anything?" The knowledge has disappeared and ignorance has not yet been accepted.

If you don't accept ignorance, sooner or later you will attain to knowledge again, you will start gathering and hoarding. And this time you will hoard in a more subtle way so that it cannot be easily taken away from you.

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Beware. These are the moments when you need a Master to say to you, "Accept and relax into this ignorance." I am not here to impart knowledge to you. I am here to take it away from you.

In one of the most ancient books in India, SHIVASUTRA, there is a tremendously significant sutra: "GYANAM BUNDHAM" "Knowledge is bondage". When there is no knowledge, a man is free. It is such a radical statement: all knowledge is bondage. The moment you know that you don't know, the bondage falls, but if you have lived in the bondage for long, you start accepting it as part of you.

If a man has lived in prison for many years with chains on his hands and on his feet and then you suddenly take away the chains -- he will not even be able to sleep in the night. He has become accustomed to them; he needs that weight, that noise. When he used to turn in the night, those chains used to make noise; now suddenly the noise will not be there. He will become awake again and again in the night: something is missing. Walking, he will feel as if he is naked: something is missing. He has become accustomed to that weight, and that's how everybody has become accustomed to the weight of knowledge. Knowledge is a bondage.

The question arises only because the acceptance has not arisen yet. You can miss this great opportunity of being ignorant.

Relax, love it, embrace it, feel one with it, and there will arise a new sort of innocence.

You were innocent when you were a child. This will be a new birth and a new sort of innocence. Again you will become a child, and yet your childlike quality will not be childish; it will have a maturity in it.

Sometimes reading, sometimes listening, and particularly listening to Zen, you may start feeling, "I don't know anything." Because the Zen people are very much against knowledge, you may start clinging to the idea of not knowing. But that idea is not going to help. That idea is again part of knowledge. Listening to the Zen Masters, you may start getting attached to the very idea of not knowing. Then this idea of not knowing becomes your knowledge.

To be really in deep ignorance means you don't even have the idea of nonknowledge. You are simply innocent. The knowledge has disappeared, and nothing has appeared in its place.

Let me tell you this famous anecdote:

Traditionally Zen monasteries will only admit wandering Zen monks if they can show proof of having solved a koan.

And you can solve a koan only when you have fallen into deep ignorance, not before it, because a koan is not a puzzle. Or if it is a puzzle, then it is not an ordinary puzzle. An ordinary puzzle can be solved by the mind; if you put your mind to it you can find a way to solve it; it has a solution. A koan is such a puzzle that it has no mind solution possible; you cannot solve it. It is not a question of what you do, it is insoluble. Mind cannot give any answer to it.

For example, Zen Masters say, "Listen to the sound of one hand clapping." Now, one hand cannot clap, and unless it claps there will not be any sound, so to what are you going to listen?

The mind will work out many solutions, and all will be meaningless, and the Master will send you back again and again. Again listen. Meditate. The solution will happen one day when the Osho - The First Principle

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mind disappears. When you work hard with the mind and the mind finds no way to reach any solution, out of sheer tiredness the mind falls flat on the ground. Suddenly you are in a state of no-mind, and you hear the sound of one hand clapping.

The mind hears only the sound of two hands clapping be cause the mind lives in duality.

The mind can hear only a created sound. When the mind disappears, you hear the soundless sound, what the Hindus call ANAHAT NAD. The word ANAHAT means exactly the same as what Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping. If you clash two things there is a sound that is called AHAT NAD, a sound that comes out of conflict. And there is a sound permeating existence itself -- which is not created, uncreated. When you become so silent that the mind has disappeared, disappeared with all its noise, suddenly that soundless sound is heard, that AUMKAR, that ANAHAT NAD is heard. But that happens only when the mind has gone.

Traditionally Zen monasteries will only admit wandering Zen monks if they can show proof of having solved a koan.

It seems that a monk once knocked on a monastery gate. The monk who opened the gate did not say "Hello" or "Good morning" but "Show me your original face, the face you had before your father and mother were born." ...

This is a koan. And the host is asking the guest to show some sign that he can solve a koan; otherwise he is not worthy of being allowed to stay in the monastery; then he will have to go away.

... The monk who wanted a room for the night smiled, pulled a sandal off his foot and hit his questioner in the face with it. The other monk stepped back, bowed respectfully, and bade the visitor welcome. After dinner, host and guest started a conversation, and the host complimented his guest on his splendid answer.

"Do you yourself know the answer to the koan you gave me?" the guest asked. "No," answered the host, "but I knew that your answer was right. You did not

hesitate for a moment. It came out quite spontaneously. It agreed exactly with everything I have heard or read about Zen."

The guest did not say anything, and sipped his tea. Suddenly the host became suspicious.

There was something in the face of his guest which he did not like. "You DO know the answer, don't you?" he asked.

The guest began to laugh and finally rolled over the mat with mirth.

"No, reverend brother," he said, "but I too have read a lot and heard a lot about Zen."

Hearing me, there are many things you will start imagining, many things you will start believing. Beware, because those things won't help. Hearing Zen, reading Zen is not going to give you Zen. Zen is a quality that you have to attain to. It is a new vision of life and reality. It is a new penetration into the mystery of existence. It is not intellectual; it is existential. You Osho - The First Principle

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have to throb with it, your heart has to beat with it, you have to breathe it in and out. It is not going to be just an intellectual understanding.

Listening to me, the understanding will come to you intellectually very easily because whatsoever I am saying is simple. There is nothing difficult about it. It is not very complex. I am not spinning any philosophical theories here. I am simply stating simple facts.

Now, this fact is simple that a child has an innocent clarity. And one day if you also attain consciously to that childhood -- what Jesus calls. "When you are reborn," that is rebirth -- then you will be able to see what is. But listening to me, you may start thinking, "Yes, that's right. I also don't know anything." But is it your understanding, or just a reflection of my understanding? Is it your experience, or just an imitation?

It happens -- in the presence of every Master it happens -- because man is naturally imitative. Darwin is right. Man comes from the monkeys, and is very imitative. He can imitate anything.

I have heard there was a great Master:

The Master would sit for hours alone in his cave meditating, his only companion being a favorite cat which he tied to a post in his cave during his periods of meditation. As years went by his fame spread and he soon had a number of pupils who came to learn from him and who made him their guru or their Master. He instructed his pupils to meditate as he did. Soon each pupil could be observed meditating with a cat tied to a post by his side.

The Master died, so what did the pupils do? They had known always of one cat being tied to a post by the side of the Master. Naturally they thought the cat must have something to do with meditation. And cats are very esoteric people. The cat must have something to do with meditative energy. Somehow the cat must have been a help; otherwise why? The Master used to do it continuously. For years they had seen it. Whenever he was meditating, the cat was there tied to the post.

He had to tie the cat; otherwise the cat would disturb his meditation! The cat may jump into his lap, might like to play with him. Cats don't bother whether you are meditating or not, so the cat has to be tied to the post. But what about the disciples? They watched. And you can see only the outward; the inner remains invisible. Naturally they also tried to imitate it.

It happens. Beware of that too. Don't be imitative. Just because I am saying something, you need not repeat it. If you repeat it, it will not be helpful for your own growing understanding.

Don't repeat it. Let it sink into your being. Experience it.

If I say something, there is no need to believe in it. There is no need to disbelieve either.

Remain open. If I say something, then try it. Then look at the trees without any ideas whatever. Look at the birds and the sky with no knowledge. Drop language and see whether what I am saying gives you clarity. If you can drop the word "rose" and then see the rose flower, what happens? You will immediately feel a new kind of relationship arising between you and the flower. Don't even call it a

flower; there is no need. Your language is not needed to support it; it exists without language. Why bring language in? Put language aside. Put aside your continuous gibberish that goes on inside the mind. Just look.

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In the beginning it is difficult -- the language will come up again and again, just out of old habit -- but sooner or later it comes easily: you can remain at least for a few moments without language. Listening to the song of the birds or the murmur of the wind passing through the trees, or the river, you can remain without language for a few seconds. And in those seconds will be the proof of what I have been saying to you. Suddenly you will see as if a great darkness has disappeared and everywhere is light. You can see as if the doors of perception have been cleansed.

Ordinarily we are looking through dark curtains. The glass we are looking through is too dusty. Only fragments of reality appear, not the totality.

Experience what I am saying, don't imitate, and then this is going to happen to you: one day you will suddenly see you don't know anything. But this will be a vision, a realization.

Then it is great. If it is truly happening, it is great. Question

MEHER BABA HAS TALKED ABOUT GOD DESCENDING IN MAN (AVATAR, RASOOL, CHRIST) AND MAN RISING TO BE GOD (THE PERFECT MASTER, SADGURU, QUTUB, TEERTHANKARA). WOULD YOU PLEASE TALK TO US

ABOUT THE SAME?

God is. He neither ascends nor descends. Where can he ascend to and where can he descend to? God is all. There is nothing in to which God can ascend or descend. There is nobody else other than God. All that is is divine. So the first

thing: there is no ascendence, no descendence.

But when Meher Baba says it, there must be some meaning in it. The meaning is something quite different. Let me explain it to you.

God is, remember. God is a pure isness, pure existence, and there is nowhere for God to go or come. The whole is full of him. He fills his existence, one thing. Second thing: but Meher Baba must be true. Then there must be some other meaning to it -- not God descending and ascending. What can be the meaning? The meaning is there are two ways of man approaching God.

What do I mean by "man" when God is the only reality? Man is the God who has forgotten that he is God; man is a God who has forgotten himself.

Man can remember his godliness in two ways. One way is that of surrender, devotion, love, prayer; another way is that of will, effort, meditation, yoga. If a man tries to work his way through will, then he will feel he is ascending towards God or he is reaching towards God through his will. Hence Jainas call the man who attains to godliness a TEERTHANKARA.

TEERTHANKARA means consciousness has reached the peak; man has arrived by ascending, as if there has been a ladder, the ladder of the will, the ladder of effort and yoga. So is the concept of the Buddhas; that too is the path of will. Avatar means God descending; that is another approach, when a man surrenders. He cannot ascend. He simply opens his heart and waits, prays and waits, and suddenly he starts feeling a stirring in his heart. Certainly he will see "God has descended in me." Avatar means descendence, God coming down.

Mahavir went up. For Meera, God came down. Osho - The First Principle

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But God never comes down, never goes up. God is where he is. But your experience will be different. If you try hard to achieve God, you will go higher and higher and higher; naturally you will feel the God hidden inside you is arising, rising up, reaching to the zenith.

But if you surrender, nothing is arising in you. You are where you are, you simply wait in deep prayer, in deep love, in deep trust, and one day you find God is descending in you, coming from above. These are the experiences of two types of seekers. It has nothing to do with God.

It has something to do with the seeker and his way: will or surrender, effort or prayer, yoga or BHAKTI.

So the religions which believe in BHAKTI, in devotion ... Christianity says Christ comes from God. That is the meaning of saying that he is God's son -- he comes from above, he has been sent. And that is the meaning of Mohammed -- he is a prophet, a messenger, PAIGAMBAR. PAIGAMBAR means a messenger who comes from above, brings the message. He does not belong to this world; he comes like a ray of light into the darkness. And so is the concept of the Hindus' avatar -- Krishna, Ram -- they come, they come into the world.

The Buddhist, the Jaina concept is just the reverse. They say there is no God to come, and God is not a father and he cannot have a son. These are all very childish concepts for them.

And if you look through their eyes they are; these concepts are childish, very anthropomorphic, man-centered. You create God in your own image, as if God also has a family. He has a family -- the Trinity: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost must be a woman; otherwise the family will not be exactly as it should be.

But why don't Christians call the Holy Ghost a woman? Male chauvinism. They cannot make a woman also part of the Trinity; it is difficult for them, very difficult for them. So to what have they reduced their God? It seems to be a homosexual family. All men, not a single woman there. It looks ugly. But my feeling is that the Holy Ghost must be a woman.

We create God in our own image.

Jainas and Buddhists say that there is no God and there is no God's family and nobody comes from there. Then what has one to do? One has to arise. God is in you like a seed, as a tree arises from the earth and goes higher and higher. God is not like rain falling, but a tree arising. Man has the seed. Man is potentially God. So when you work hard, you start growing.

These are the two concepts. That's why Meher Baba says, "... God descending in man (Avatar, Rasool, Christ) and man rising to be God (the Perfect Master, Sadguru, Qutub, Teerthankara)." But it has nothing to do with God.

Question

WHEN I WAS A CHILD I WAS INOCULATED AGAINST THE MEASLES. CAN I STILL CATCH THEM NOW?

Yes, every child has been inoculated. Every child has been destroyed. Every child has been conditioned in such a way that he cannot get the measles I am talking about.

You have been brought up as a Christian or a Hindu. That very upbringing closes your doors. Even if Christ comes' to you, you will not be able to see him. The idea that Christianity has given to you about Christ is so false, it is so foolish. it is so inhuman, that if Christ comes Osho - The First Principle

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to you, you will not be able to recognize him. You will not be able to get the measles even from Christ! And Buddhists have created the idea of Buddha so abstractly and they have so conditioned their children with that abstract idea, with that inoculation, that even if Buddha comes across you, you will not be able to recognize him. So it is not only that a Christian will not be able to recognize Buddha, Mahavir, Patanjali, he will not even be able to recognize Christ.

There is a beautiful story in one of Dostoevsky's novels, THE BROTHERS

KARAMAZOV. After eighteen hundred years Christ thinks, "Now almost half the world is Christian. If I go again I will be welcomed." The last time, they had treated him very badly, and it was natural because there was not a single Christian, there were only Jews; they tortured Jesus badly and they killed him. He must have still been thinking about the torture that he had met, but now he thinks, "Half of the world is Christian. Half of the world belongs to me; if I go now then people will simply fall at my feet. They will recognize a Christ has come back and he has fulfilled his promise."

So he comes, he comes to the small town of Bethlehem. Must be some old attachment with the town, some nostalgia of those days, where he had played and worked and had been a carpenter, must have loved women, played with friends. And he was a man who knew how to celebrate. He was a man who knew how to give parties, how to dance and sing and how to love people. And he was a man who knew how to drink. He had loved the small joys of life.

He was a real human being.

And he used to call himself son of man more than he used to call himself son of God.

So he comes to Bethlehem. Naturally he descends in front of the church. He stands there under a tree. Naturally he has chosen Sunday -- all the Christians are together and it will be easier for them to recognize him, because Christians believe in the Sunday religion. Six days they don't bother at all. Six days who will look at him? But Sunday they will be free and they will be able to look at him, so he stands under a tree. People come out of the church. They see a young man, looks like a hippie -- long hair. They come around; seems to be a stranger in the town. The closer they come, the more they are surprised -- looks like Jesus Christ. Pretending well. Seems to be an actor. And they laugh and they say, "You did well, but escape before the priest comes out. Otherwise you are bound to get into trouble."

But Jesus says, "What do you mean, did well? I am Jesus Christ."

And they laugh and they say, "It is okay, but you just escape. You seem to be crazy. Jesus Christ, and you? Yes, he has promised to come, but he will come sitting on the clouds, angels dancing and singing around. Where are the angels and where is the cloud? And what proof have you got?" Proof -- a passport, a visa. "Have you got any certificate from your father?"

Jesus had not thought about these practical things. He looks a little uneasy and nervous.

And before he can escape, the high priest comes. People very, very respectfully give way to the high priest. The high priest comes, looks at this young man, and tells him to come down.

He was standing under the tree on a platform. "Come down, you fool. What are

you doing here?"

Jesus says, "Even you cannot recognize me!"

The priest says, "I recognize you very well." And he tells a few people, church attendants,

"Take this man into the church. Seems to be dangerous, this man. Pretending that he is a Jesus Osho - The First Principle

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Christ.? This is sacrilege. This cannot be tolerated. This man has to be punished! You cannot take Jesus so nonseriously."

Jesus cannot believe it. He says, "But I am the real one." The Priest says, "You keep quiet."

Jesus is chained, put into a dark cell in the church. He starts thinking and brooding "There seems to be no difference at all. This is the same way the Jews had acted. But they could have been forgiven because they did not know me. But my people, Christians, they sing to me every day, they think of me every day, they wait for me every day, and I have come, and they can't even recognize me. They think I am a pretender?"

Now he feels even sorrier than he had felt on the cross, because those were alien people. If they had killed him it was understandable, but are these people going to kill him again?

In the middle of the night he cannot sleep. In the middle of the night comes the priest with a candle, opens the door, locks it again, comes close to Jesus, falls at the feet of Jesus. And Jesus feels relieved, "So, nothing to be worried about. A little late, but he has recognized me."

The priest says, "I know who you are, but I cannot recognize you in the marketplace. And mind you, you are not needed at all. We are doing perfectly well. And you are the old disturber. If you come you will destroy everything that

we have done in eighteen hundred years. It has been a long struggle to establish Christianity -- and you have always been against establishment. You are not establishment. We will pray to you, we will sing your name, we will praise you like anything, but please don't come. And if you insist on being recognized in the marketplace, then be ready: tomorrow morning you will be crucified. We cannot tolerate such things."

Now Jesus is even more puzzled. This man recognizes him; he says, "I know that you arc the true one, but I cannot recognize you."

The old priest says, "Listen to me. I am old, older than you, I am more experienced. I know how people live, I know how people behave. Don't try to be foolish again. Simply escape before the morning -- and never come back again."

This is a beautiful parable.

Yes, I know you are inoculated. That's why it is so difficult to catch the measles. I am carrying here. It is so difficult to drop your resistance. You find a thousand and one rationalizations how not to surrender. Surrender does not mean anything else: it simply means a state of no resistance, a state of vulnerability, a state of opening. And let me repeat: God cannot be taught, it can only be caught. God is like measles.

You say, "When I was a child I was inoculated against the measles." Everybody has been inoculated. The society takes every care to make you closed. That's why the work of a Master is so hard. To attain to God is not hard, but because of this inoculation ... First the inoculation has to be undone, and that is the really hard thing. The poison that has been put into you in the name of inoculation has to be driven out of your system. That's why so many techniques are needed, meditations are needed, so that the poison oozes out of your system. The day your system is free of inoculation, suddenly you find the measles have started happening. And blessed are those who can get these measles.

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I WOULD LIKE TO BE A WORLD TEACHER, THE SECOND TEERTHANKARA OF

THE "TRADITION OF THE MOON " IS IT POSSIBLE TO EXPOSE THIS DESIRE TO

THE PUBLIC?

First, if you really want to be a teacher, become a disciple. Unless you are a really deep disciple, you will not be able to become a teacher. If your disciplehood is perfect, one day suddenly you will find the Perfect Master has arisen in you. It comes only out of disciplehood.

But disciplehood is difficult because the ego has to be dropped. Everybody would like to become a world teacher. It seems so beautiful, it seems such a beautiful ego trip. Who will not enjoy being in such a position where he can teach, where he can guide?

But to where are you going to guide people? You are in the ditch. Resist the temptation.

Otherwise it happens that the blind people start leading the blind people, and they all fall into the dark ditch.

Yes, people are in need of guidance, so if you start exposing your desire to the public, you are bound to find disciples. There is no lack of disciples. If you expose yourself, that you are the world teacher, you will find suddenly that disciples have started to come. And their coming will help you to feel that maybe it seems you are really the world's teacher. Otherwise why are people coming? How can people be so foolish? By and by, looking into their eyes, feeling their confidence in you, you will start feeling confident about yourself.

I have heard about a man, of course a Jew, who opened the first bank in the world, and he became very rich and the business was beautiful. When he became very old somebody asked him, "How in the first place did you start a bank?" "Nobody, I wrote the name 'Bank' and put the sign on my door. I had no trust in it that it would work, but I had nothing to do. I was unemployed, so I thought why not try. And within a few hours a man came and deposited his money. I was surprised. I looked at the man; I thought this seems to be the greatest fool in the town. I may escape with his money. Then came another and another, and by the

evening I had deposits of a lot of money. And looking into these people's eyes, I became so confident that I deposited my own money in the bank!"

That's how it works. If you just declare that you are a world teacher, you are bound to find disciples. And when the disciples come, certainly, you have to be truly a world teacher.

And sometimes it will happen that not only will disciples come, but something will start happening to the disciples. Then you will be really surprised. Somebody's KUNDALINI arising. Somebody seeing visions. Just by touching your feet, somebody feeling great silence.

It happened ... Ramkrishna loved this story very much.

There was a Master, his name was Tapobana, and Tapobana had a disciple who served him with irreproachable diligence. It was solely because of this diligence and the services he rendered that Tapobana kept him, for he found the disciple rather stupid.

One day, the rumor spread throughout the whole region that Tapobana's disciple had walked on water -- that he had been seen crossing the river as one crosses the street.

Tapobana called his disciple and questioned him: "Is what people are saying about you possible? Is it really true that you crossed the river walking on the water?"

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"What could be more natural?" answered his follower. "It is thanks to you, Blessed One, that I walked on water. At every step I repeated your saintly name, and that is what upheld me."

And Tapobana thought to himself, "If the disciple can walk on water, what can the Master not do? If it is in my name that the miracle takes place, I must possess power I did not suspect and holiness of which I have not been sufficiently aware.

After all, I have never tried to cross the river as if I were crossing the street."

And without more ado, he ran to the river bank. Without hesitation, he set his foot on the water, and with unshakable faith repeated, "Me, me, me ..." And sank.

So you are carrying a very dangerous desire.

The question is from Premprabhu. I know you. The first thing that you have to do is to learn the secrets of disciplehood; then one day the Master will be born. It is on the way, but don't be in a hurry; otherwise you will miss being a Master. If you try to become a Master, you will miss being a Master. The Mastership arises only when you learn slowly, slowly to dissolve into existence. The day you are not, you will be the Master, not before it. If you are, then still some work has to be done. You cannot be the Master. Only when you are absent does the Master become present in you.

Right now it will be good if you take a bath. To explain this to you, let me tell you this anecdote:

A sweet old lady visited a doctor and surprised him by saying, "Doctor, I think I am pregnant, and want you to verify it."

It was obvious to the doctor, because of her advanced age, that she was imagining things.

But he spoke to her kindly, "What makes you think you are pregnant?"

"I know. I know it because I feel life," she said as she patted her stomach.

To humor her along, the doctor asked her to disrobe. After a brief examination, he advised her to go home and take a bath and forget about the pregnancy.

"But doctor," she insisted, "I tell you I feel life, and you tell me to go home and take a bath? And I am feeling life!" And she again patted her stomach.

"Yes, yes," said the doctor gently, "you have got a bug in your navel." So go and take a bath.

Question

WHY AM I THE WAY I AM? I FEEL LIKE THE LOTUS WHO WANTS TO BE THE

ROSE.

So what is the trouble? So you are the lotus who wants to be the rose -- and be it. Osho - The First Principle

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Whatever you are, you are. And it is to be accepted in absolute humility. Even if you are feeling that you are a lotus and you want to be the rose, so you are the lotus who wants to be the rose. What is is, and what ain't ain't! Relax into it, accept it, welcome it, and suddenly you will see a great peace surrounding you and a great silence arising in you and a great joy overflowing in you. We are missing joy because we are always trying to be something else.

Now, I can understand your question. I have been telling you, "Don't try to be something else," and I had told you, "A lotus is a lotus and a rose is a rose, and the lotus should not try to be a rose and the rose should not try to be a lotus; otherwise they will go neurotic." That's why you have asked the question.

You say, "I feel like the lotus who wants to be the rose." So you are thinking you have asked a very relevant question, and I can understand why you feel that way, but listen to my answer: so you are the lotus who wants to be the rose -- so be it. That's what I mean: don't try to be anything else. If this is you, then this is you. Now, you would like to try to remain the lotus and not to be the rose. But if that is coming naturally to you, you will create a tension in yourself. Whatsoever comes naturally is good, whatsoever comes of its own accord is good.

The question is from Shanti Sagar, and I can see the possibility of his deep acceptance of the fact. Accept it. If this is the way God wants you to be, then be this way. Then this is your destiny.

Once you start accepting things, tensions disappear, anxieties fall, anguish is felt

no more.

And to be in a state of no anguish, no anxiety, no tension is to be religious. Question

NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO BE BORN. NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO DIE.

NO EFFORT IS REQUIRED TO FALL IN LOVE

WHY IS SUCH EFFORT REQUIRED TO KNOW GOD (THROUGH MEDITATION) WHEN THIS SEEMS TO BE THE MOST NATURAL THING?

IS GOD TRYING TO TEST US IN SOME WAY?

First thing: no effort is required in meditation either. Meditation also comes on its own accord. Through effort it never comes. To whom has meditation happened through effort? It will be almost like making an effort to love somebody. How can you make any effort to love somebody? The more effort you make, the more the love will be false, pseudo, just a pretension. Love has to arise naturally. So arises meditation.

But all meditators are not spontaneously in it -- and neither are all lovers spontaneously in it. In fact, psychologists say -- a tremendous discovery -- that if love is not talked about, ninety-nine percent of people will never know anything about it. If love is not talked about, if poets don't go on praising it, and if traditional literature is not available about love, ninety-nine percent of people will never be aware that anything like love exists. They will know about sex, but not about love. But because of the poets and because of the novelists and because of the films and the TV, love is talked so much about that everybody starts thinking that he is in love. That love is also false.

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And the same is the case with meditation. Ninety-nine percent of people start meditating because meditation is talked about. There are times when it becomes fashionable. America is passing through such a phase. Meditation is talked about; everybody is doing meditation. If you are not doing it you must be missing something. You don't feel any need for it, it has not arisen in your being, you have not come to that point of evolution where meditation happens on its own accord; but everybody is doing it and everybody is going to the Masters and everybody is sitting silently. Somebody is doing zazen and somebody is doing TM and somebody is doing Dynamic. You must be missing something. So greed arises; out of greed you start making effort.

That effort is not for meditation. That effort is to gain something which you think will be gained out of meditation.

These phases come and go. These cults arise and disappear. These are just like fashions.

The real meditator has not come to meditate because others are meditating, but a deep need has arisen in him, has become a knocking in his heart, a continuous knocking. The whole world seems to be meaningless; he wants to go in. He wants to know who he is. Not because others have known! If there is nobody propagating meditation and no books are available and all books are destroyed and all Masters go and hide in the caves in the Himalayas, then too there will be a few people who will meditate, who will find out how to meditate on their own accord. Those will be the real meditators. And for them meditation will be just as easy as anything. It will be just like breathing.

When such a man comes, then any technique functions for him. I observe it every day. If somebody whose time has come to meditate ...

It is just like sexual maturity. A boy of three years has no idea about sex, and even if the boy of three years comes to see a man making love to a woman, he will not understand what is happening. At the most, he will think the man is trying to kill the woman; they are fighting or something. He will not have any idea what is happening. By the age of fourteen, suddenly something explodes in his biology. He is not aware of what it is, but something is happening.

He is the same no more.

And then follows a time, a period, of very much embarrassment because the boy

does not know what exactly is happening. But something is happening, something very much unknown, something which is creating trouble, something which is hovering around; and he does not know what it is and how to tackle it and how to figure it out. It is a natural phenomenon; now sex has become mature; the sex gland is secreting.

If life goes naturally, beautifully, if there are no lifenegative teachers, if there are no politicians and priests to distract you -- then near about the age of forty-two, exactly as sex maturity comes, comes meditation maturity, Near about the age of forty-two, one starts feeling to fall withinwards. Near the age of fourteen, one starts falling towards the other, becomes extrovert. Love is extroversion; relationship is to think of the other. Meditation is introversion; meditation is to think of one's own self, of one's own center.

Between the age of fourteen and the age of forty-two there comes a change. By and by one lives life, knows what love is, knows its fulfillment and its frustration, knows its joy and its sadness, knows its beauty and its ugliness, knows that there are moments of great ecstasy and then great valleys of darkness. Then one starts by and by moving towards his own self, because to depend on the other can never be really ecstatic. If your joy depends on the other, Osho - The First Principle

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that joy can never have the quality of freedom in it. And a joy which does not have the quality of freedom is not much joy. If you are dependent on the other, then there is a limitation.

And the joy that comes through love is momentary. You can meet with the other only for moments, and then again you are separate and you fall apart. Just in the middle of it you fall apart. Just for a moment you become joined together. Then one starts thinking, "Is there a way to become one with existence and never to fall apart again?" That's what meditation is. Love is joining with existence through another person for only moments. Meditation is getting joined together with existence eternally. "Yoga" means "to join together".

This has to happen somewhere in the deepest core. And then there is joy and then there is freedom. And then there is bliss and there is no dark valley

following it. Then happiness is eternal, then celebration is eternal. But that moment comes. That too comes, remember.

So you say, "No effort is required to be born. No effort is required to die. No effort is required to fall in love." I would like to tell you, "No effort is required to fall into meditation either."

But if there are hindrances ... For example, in a primitive community, when the child is born there is no effort -- neither on the side of the child nor on the side of the mother. But that is not the case in a civilized society; effort is needed, the doctor's help is needed. Much effort is needed to help the child to be born, and the mother feels so much pain. And you don't know how much pain the child feels. If you want to know you can ask the Primal therapists how much trauma he passes through. That small tube, the small passage, from the mother's womb to the world is very painful. And the child wants to get out of it, and he thrusts hard to get out of it. And the mother feels pain because the passage is small and the child is big. And she wants to hold back, unconsciously. She cannot hold back -- in the nature of things the child has to come out -- but there is a struggle. The mother-and-the-child conflict has started. The child wants to get out and the mother is afraid and she is holding, she is controlling.

This is true about the civilized person, not true about the uncivilized. The uncivilized mother simply goes with it. And the uncivilized person has no need for Primal therapy, because he never passes through any trauma; the mother is helpful. The child simply floats and comes out. In fact, you will be surprised to know that primitive women know such pleasure and ecstasy in childbirth that the ecstasy that comes through sexual orgasm is nothing compared to it.

What is the ecstasy in sexual orgasm? A man is thrusting into the woman and her sexual energies start becoming vibrated, start becoming stirred. That is her sexual orgasm. That pulsation spreads all over the body. But it cannot be compared with the child thrusting and starting to come out. It is the same passage. And the child is far bigger than any male organ.

Naturally the whole being pulsates and the body goes through a great orgasm.

But only a primitive woman knows that, that it is great ecstasy to give birth to a child; it is not painful at all, it is joy. But when it is natural, then it is joy.

You say no effort is required to be born ...? Not for the civilized. The civilized

person needs much effort to be born. Maybe the mother has been given tranquilizers, sedatives, she has been put into unconsciousness so she does not pass through great pain, or even the birth may be a Caesarian, the mother may have to be operated on. The doctor is needed, the nurse is needed, the midwife is needed. Why? To undo the wrong that the society has done.

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You say no effort is required to die? You are wrong again. You can go and look in the American hospitals. Many old people are ready to die, and they want to die; they are not allowed to die. The question of euthanasia has become one of the most important questions for the future because medical science has really evolved and it can help a person to live for two hundred years or even more. He may not have much of a life, but he can hang on; he can hang on in a hospital. He will not be able to move or to talk or to love, but he can be just there vegetating. It will be tremendous misery and hell.

Now, if he wants to die, no society allows him to die. They say, "It is illegal; you cannot commit suicide." A person who has become one hundred thirty or one hundred forty years of age wants to die because his existence is simply torture. The society seems to be very sadistic

... they say, "You are not allowed to die; you will have to live." And the doctors will continue to help you to live because they have much compassion for you. Because of the compassion, you will have to live. Now, his wife is dead, his children are dead, his relations are dead, his friends are gone, and he is hanging on, for no purpose. He does not know what is going to happen tomorrow. Just hanging on and hanging on and hanging on ... Can you think of the misery that he will feel ...? Then there will be the need to commit suicide. He will have to find ways and means. Maybe he will have to bribe the doctor to cut the connection from the oxygen tank, or not to give him any more medicines. He may have to bribe someone; effort will be needed.

Natural death is natural, but man is not natural anymore! So nothing is natural -- not even death. If you die naturally, that will be a totally different thing. But you don't live naturally; how can you die naturally? Death has to be the culmination

of whatsoever you have done in your life. If you have lived unnaturally, you will die unnaturally. A natural death is possible only if the life has been natural.

So the questioner says, "No effort is required to die." You are true. In a very primitive society no effort is required, but because of the compassion of the missionaries, primitives have disappeared. They have all become educated people now. Now effort is needed to die.

Why do so many people commit suicide? And the suicide rate goes on growing every year.

Why? Isn't natural death enough ...? Suicide means death with effort.

And the suicide rate will go higher and higher if the governments are too adamant to relax and they don't allow people to die and they force them into nursing homes and into hospitals and force them to live against their wishes. Then more and more suicides will be there.

Man has disturbed all that is natural.

And you say no effort is required to fall in love? That too is not true. That too is not true.

Looking at the TV continuously, looking at and watching films, reading poetry and novels, they all help you to fall in love. They give you the ideas; they nourish your so-called love. It is not natural.

The natural has disappeared. All that is nature has disappeared; everything is false and plastic. Hence meditation also has to be false and plastic. But real meditation never happens through effort.

Then what does one have to do? You have to do some effort in the beginning; otherwise you will never come close to any meditation technique, close to any meditation school. You will have to go through effort because you have become unnatural beings. Making effort will help you to understand what meditation is. It will not lead you into meditation; it will simply Osho - The First Principle

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help you to understand what meditation is. It will help you to understand whether you can fall into that space called meditation easily or not.

If you feel that it comes very easily to you, that you can fall in that space and you can reach that space, effort will disappear by itself. There will be no need. You can simply sit with closed eyes and it is there. It is so natural. But only once it happens, then it is very natural.

And unless it has happened you will not be able to know whether you are a natural meditator or not; so effort will be needed.

Man has been made so artificial that everything will have to be made through effort. But by making effort you will come to feel and see whether you can easily float into it or not.

And you ask, "Why is such effort required to know God when this seems to be the most natural thing?" If it is the most natural thing, then it must have happened to the questioner. k has not happened; otherwise you would not be here. What is a God-realized man doing here

...? There is no point. Your seeking has stopped if you have known. Yes, once you know, it is very simple and easy, but until you know it, effort will be needed.

And remember, effort is not needed for meditation. Effort is needed to undo what the society has done to you. A dehypnosis is needed. The society has hypnotized you. The society has conditioned you; an unconditioning is needed. The society has made you dirty; a cleansing is needed. A good shower -- that's what your effort is. Once you have started feeling that meditation is your innermost quality, you can go into it anytime. It is so easy, as breathing.

Then all effort disappears.

And you ask, "Is God trying to test us in some way?" No. There is no God in the first place to test you. And even if there is a God, he is not in any way interested in testing and examining you. What is the point? And he is not a sadist to torture you.

Teachers are sadists; examiners are sadists. You can ask the psychologists. They say people who want to torture others, they become teachers. Some tendency to torture. And you cannot find more beautiful opportunities than small children.

Torture them, test them, examine them -- and for their own good! And nobody can prevent you, because you are doing it for their own good.

God is not in any way interested in testing you. The problem is not arising because of God.

The problem is arising because of your society, your politics, your priesthood. They have made you in such a way that you cannot meditate. They have made such simple things impossible.

It is just like in the ancient days in China they used to put small shoes, iron shoes, on women's feet because that was the sign -- a smaller foot was the sign that the woman comes from a royal family. If the woman cannot walk rightly, she is royal! So no rich women were able to walk; they had small feet. And if you encase the feet in iron shoes, what are you doing? Great pain was suffered just to have small feet. Those feet cannot be beautiful. Those feet are ugly because the growth has not happened. How can something retarded be beautiful?

But that was thought of for thousands of years as beautiful, and women suffered it -- and they enjoyed it, that they had small feet.

Now that has disappeared. Now, if a royal woman, a rich woman in ancient China was to learn running, jogging, it would have been very difficult. Much effort would have been needed because she did not have the feet for it. Not that God is testing her -- just because the society is foolish and the society has conditioned her feet in such a way that she cannot run.

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And the same is true about a thousand and one things. Your society conditions you in a certain way; then you cannot do certain things. When you want to do them, much effort is needed to undo what the society has done.

The society has taught you to think, and to think continuously, and to think skillfully and cleverly. It has not allowed you to know that there are spaces of no-thought, because the society is afraid. Those spaces of no-thought are very

dangerous. Those spaces of no-thought are very crazy. Those spaces of no- thought will give you great joy, but will make you so rebellious. Those great spaces will make you very, very happy, but a happy person becomes free. He cannot be easily forced to do foolish things.

You cannot send him to the army. He will say, "Nonsense. I am so happy, why should I go and kill others and be killed?" You cannot send him to the military; he will simply say no.

You cannot force him to do foolish things for his whole life like a machine, He will say,

"Why? I will do things that I like and that I love." An ecstatic person is a rebellion in the world. You cannot tell him to just be a clerk in an office and go on filing things, putting files upon files his whole life. He will say, "I will go and become a farmer because I love trees. If I am not going to be rich, it is okay. My richness will be of the inner." "I am going to become a fisherman. I will be on the open sea. I don't want to become a clerk."

But then things will be difficult for the society. Society needs clerks, society needs soldiers. Society needs very repressed people whose energies are boiling inside and have no way to go anywhere -- so that they can be put into any work. Society arranges things in such a way that you can become slaves.

The society is not here to make you free people, because with freedom politics will disappear, states will disappear. In a free world there will be no nation and there will be no need for nations and there will be no need for armies. Millions of people just wasting their life

-- doing parade. Left turn! Right turn! Turn about! Millions of people -- doing it very happily and thinking they are doing great things, great service to humanity.

Who would like it? Free people would like to become singers or dancers. Good if you dance. But "turn about," "left turn," "right turn"? Have you ever seen any bird doing right turn, left turn? Have you seen any animal? They dance, yes, they dance, but dance is a totally different thing. People will dance and people will sing and people will go into the forest and chop wood, and they will go to the sea and fish and they will go to the mountains, they will do farming, gardening, they will be carpenters, weavers, spinners. But people will do something that they like to do.

Right now you are doing something that the government wants you to do. And subtle is the trick. The university, the school, the college -- subtle is the trick to force you into something which you never wanted to do. Then of course if you remain miserable it is just understandable. How can you be happy?

It is very rare that you come across a celebrating being because it is very difficult to escape from the prisons the society has created around you. In a natural world things will be just the reverse. It will be very difficult to find a miserable man. Why? There seems to be no need to be miserable. Buddhas will be just common. Rarely will you find a man who is not a Buddha, if things go naturally. But things are not natural.

That's why you even have to learn how to meditate, and you have to learn how to love, and you have to learn how to be happy, and you have to learn how to know God.

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WHY ARE ALL THE RELIGIONS AGAINST SEX? AND WHY ARE YOU NOT

AGAINST SEX?

All the religions are against sex because that is the only way to make you miserable. That is the only way to make you feel guilty. That is the only way to reduce you to being sinners.

Sex is one of the most fundamental truths of life, so fundamental that if somebody says it is wrong, he is putting you in trouble. You cannot get rid of it. Unless you become really enlightened you cannot get rid of it. And to become enlightened there is no need to get rid of it. In fact, if you go deeper into it, enlightenment will be easier because a man who has gone deep in love will be capable of going deep in meditation -- because in the deepest moments of love there are a few glimpses of meditation.

That's how meditation has been discovered. That's how SAMADHI, satori have been discovered. Because in a deep love affair, sometimes, suddenly, your mind disappears. There are no thoughts, no time, no space. You become one with the whole. People have carried those glimpses in their memories and they want to attain to those glimpses more naturally, more in their aloneness, because to depend on the other is not very good, and then it happens only for a moment. How to attain to that glimpse permanently, so it remains there, it becomes your nature?

Religions are against sex because down the centuries they have come to know that sex is the most enjoyable thing for man. So poison his joy. Once you poison his joy and you put this idea in his mind that something is wrong in sex -- it is sin -- then he will never be able to enjoy it, and if he cannot enjoy it, then his energies will start moving in other directions. He will become more ambitious.

A really sexual person will not be ambitious. Why? He will not hanker to become the prime minister or the president. Why? The energy that becomes ambition is repressed sex. A sexually free person will not try to become anybody. Whatsoever he is, he is beautifully happy. Why should he bother to hoard money

...? When you cannot love, you hoard money; money is a substitute. You will never find a money hoarder a loving person, and you will never find a loving person a money hoarder. It is very difficult. Money is a substitute; it is a pseudo love affair. You are afraid to make love to a woman or a man, so you make love to dollars, rupees, pounds.

Have you not seen when a miser comes across money? Have you seen the light that comes to his eyes, and how the face becomes luminous, as if he is looking at a beautiful woman or a beautiful man ...? Just give him a hundred-dollar note, a greenback, and see how he touches it, how he feels it. Saliva starts flowing. It is a love affair. Just look when he opens his money box and looks into it. He is facing God. Money is his God, his beloved.

And when an ambitious person is trying to become the prime minister or the president ...

Ambition is sex energy diverted, and the society diverts you. You say, "Why are all the religions against sex?" They are against sex because that is the only way to make you unhappy, guilty, afraid. Once you are afraid, you can be manipulated. Remember this fundamental rule: make a person afraid if you want

to dominate him. First make him afraid. If he is afraid, you can dominate him. If he is not afraid, why and how can you dominate him?

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How will he allow you to be the dominator? He will say, "Be gone. Who are you to dominate me?" First make him afraid.

And there are two things which make people very much afraid. One is death, so religions have exploited that. That you are going to die, that you are going to die, that you are going to die -- they persist, so they, they create a trembling. So you say, "What, what am I to do now?

How should I behave? How should I live?" And then they say there is hell and there is heaven.

Greed and profit, punishment and reward.

So one is death. But death is not yet, so you can postpone it. It is not much of a problem; you say, "Okay, when we will die we will see. And I am not going to die right now. I am going to live fifty years more, at least, so why bother?" And man does not have a very distant

-- seeing vision; he does not have radar. He cannot see fifty years ahead. Yes, if you say to him, "Tomorrow you are going to die," he may become afraid, but fifty years? He will say,

"Wait, there is no hurry. Let me do my things first." He may even start doing them faster because "Only fifty years are left? So let me do whatsoever I want to do. Eat, drink, be merry."

So the second thing, which is more fear-creating, is sex. Sex is already the problem. Death WILL be the problem; it is in the future. Sex has the problem in the present; it is already there.

Religions contaminate your sex energy. They start making you afraid that it is

wrong, it is ugly, it is sin, it will drag you to hell. They want to dominate you; that's why they are against sex.

I have no idea to dominate you I am here to make you absolutely free. And there are only two things needed to make you free. One is that sex is not a sin. k is a God-given gift, it is a grace. And second, there is no death. You will be forever, because whatsoever is remains.

Nothing ever disappears. Forms change, names change, but the reality continues.

So I take away all fear. I don't want to make you in any way feel guilty, afraid. I want to take all fears from you so that you can live naturally, without any domination, so that you can live according to your own spontaneity. And that spontaneity will bring enlightenment. Then sex disappears, and then death disappears.

It has disappeared to me, so I know it will disappear to you also. So why be worried ...?

And it disappears more easily if you have known it rightly. knowledge of anything takes you beyond; you are finished with it. If you have not lived rightly, you will be as other religious people who have not lived rightly: they hanker, they desire, they dream, but they repress, so they remain clinging to their repressions -- they are never free of sex.

A beautiful story. Meditate over it:

The time is the not too distant future. We have finally destroyed ourselves by means of a nuclear holocaust. Everyone is waiting restlessly in a seemingly endless line leading up to the gates of heaven. At the head of the line, Peter is deciding which souls shall enter and which shall be turned away.

Some distance from the gates, an American stands in line wringing his hands in apprehension. Suddenly he hears a murmur beginning at the front of the line, and growing into a joyful rush of sound as it builds in volume moving down the line toward his place. He can make out sounds of celebration in many languages. He hears shouts of "Bravo," "Bravissimo,"

"Bis," "Encore," and "Hip, Hip, Hooray."

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"What is it? What is it all about?" he implores of those up ahead of him in the line. At last someone closer to the gates shouts back to him, "Peter just told us: 'Screwing don't count!' ..."

Get it? Sex has nothing to do with your enlightenment. Love has nothing to do with your enlightenment. It is in fact going to help you because it will make you more natural. Be natural and don't cultivate any abnormalities, and you will be closer to God.

Hence I am not against sex, I am not against anything. I am only against unnatural attitudes, perverted attitudes. Be natural and normal, and allow God to flow though you. He will take you. His river is already moving towards the sea. Don't try to swim upstream, don't try to push the river. Go with the river. That's what surrender is, and that's what sannyas is.

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Beyond the Prism of the Mind

15 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall

HAKUJU SERVED AS A DISTINGUISHED LECTURER AT THE TENDAI- SECT

COLLEGE. AS HE WAS LECTURING WITH HIS CUSTOMARY ZEAL ON THE

CHINESE CLASSICS ONE HOT SUMMER'S AFTERNOON, HE NOTICED

THAT A FEW OF THE STUDENTS WERE DOZING OFF. HE STOPPED HIS LECTURING IN

MIDSENTENCE AND SAID, "IT IS A HOT AFTERNOON, ISN'T IT? CAN'T BLAME

YOU FOR GOING TO SLEEP. MIND IF I JOIN YOU?"

WITH THIS, HAKUJU SHUT HIS TEXTBOOK, AND LEANING WELL BACK IN HIS

CHAIR, FELL ASLEEP.

THE CLASS WAS DUMBFOUNDED, AND THOSE WHO HAD BEEN DOZING

WERE AWAKENED BY HIS SNORES. ALL SAT UP IN THEIR SEATS AND WAITED

FOR THE MASTER TO AWAKEN.

The first principle, the principle that cannot be said -- but we can still try. The first principle is that samsara is nirvana, that the ordinary is the extraordinary, that this world is the other world, that matter is mind, that there is no distinction between the holy and the unholy, that the profane is the sacred. This is the first principle. Yes, it cannot be said, and I am not saying it, but it can be indicated.

The indivisible is the first principle. The moment we divide reality, it becomes the second principle. The second is a shadow; the first is the original.

This is one of the greatest contributions of Zen to the world. Zen says the world is God, there is no other God. The creation is the creator, there is no other creator. The very creativity is divine. It is not like a painter who is different from his painting. It is like a dancer who is one with his dance. God is one with his existence. God is his existence. In fact, to say "God is" is tautological, it is a repetition, because "God" means the same thing that "is" means. God is isness. All that is divine.

It is very difficult for the so-called religious to understand it because his whole trip depends on the distinction: this is good, this is bad, this has to be done and

this has to be avoided. The marketplace has to be condemned, and one has to move into the Himalayas or into the monasteries.

The ordinary religious mind depends on condemnation, it is an ego trip, so when you become ordinarily religious, you start having the feeling of "holier than thou". Because you live in a certain way -- you eat certain things and you don't eat certain things, and you have a certain style to your life -- you start feeling you are holier than others. A Catholic monk or a Jaina monk thinks he is very holy because he is doing certain things and he is avoiding certain things. His holiness consists of doing.

The insistence of Zen is that doing is not important at all, what is important is being. You are not what you do. You are what you are. And by doing, you never change, but if your being Osho - The First Principle

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changes, certainly your doing changes. It becomes totally different; it becomes suffused with a new light. A new quality, a new dimension opens to it. You can do the same thing without your being having gone through any transformation, and then it will be second, secondhand, then it will not be real.

For example, Mahavir became naked. His nudeness comes out of the first principle; it is a flow from his innermost core. It is an innocence that has come to his life. You can become nude -- there are thousands of Jaina monks down the centuries who have become nude -- but it is an action. For Mahavir it was not an action; basically it was a change in his being. He became so childlike that there was no need for any clothes. There was nothing to hide. He became so open, so simple. From the interiormost flowed this nudeness. Then it had a different quality: the quality of innocence, of childlike simplicity. But those who followed him, and became naked as followers, were cunning people, clever people. It was a mathematical conclusion, a logical conclusion. They pondered over it. They thought Mahavir became Mahavir by becoming nude; "If we become nude, we will become Mahavir." Action is first for them.

Mahavir became nonviolent. He became so careful about every kind of life, even the life of the trees. He would not walk on grass; it may hurt the grass. He became so loving, so compassionate, because his being changed. Then his

followers have been trying the same, from the other extreme, from the other end: they have been trying it as a cultivated behavior.

They try not to kill, they try to avoid any violence, but it is just an action.

Action cannot change your being. The periphery cannot change your center. Only when the center changes, the periphery changes. Let this be one of the most fundamental rules.

The Zen people say THIS samsara, THIS world, is the other world too. There is no other world, so don't look for the hereafter; there is none. This moment is all! If you start looking for some other world, you have divided existence in two -- and existence is indivisible. It is not that there comes a boundary to the world and then comes the boundary of God. God is not a neighbor! God is in the world. He is not transcendental; he is immanent. He is one with existence. So don't divide. The moment you divide, you are falling into the shadowy world of the secondhand.

If you can look with an undivided eye you come across the first principle.

You must have heard about the third eye. You have two eyes: two eyes means duality. And all those who have looked inwards, they say there comes a moment when the third eye opens.

The third eye is one, single. There is no third eye physiologically in your body; it is a metaphor. When two eyes disappear and become one, when you don't look into existence with a dividing mind, you look into existence with absolute, undivided consciousness, then you are one.

Jesus says to his disciples, "If you become of one eye, then you will know my kingdom of God. If you attain to one eye, then all bliss will be yours and all benediction." He is talking about the third eye, and the third eye gives you the glimpse into the first principle.

The first principle is that samsara is nirvana, that the ordinary is the extraordinary. So please, don't think that something is spiritual and something is nonspiritual. You can do everything in a spiritual way and you can do everything in an unspiritual way. If you divide, you are unspiritual. If a man says this is good and that is bad, he is unspiritual. If a man says,

"This has to be desired and this has to be not desired," he is spiritual no more. Osho - The First Principle

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Spirituality has no shoulds, no should-nots. Spirituality has a deep acceptance of whatsoever is -- that which is. Buddhists call it TATHATA, suchness -- such is the case.

Whatsoever is the case is the case: one has to accept and relax into it. In that relaxation is the dimension of the spiritual. If you can do ordinary actions in a relaxed way, with no tension in the mind, with no hankering in the mind to be successful or to be winners, then you are doing a spiritual thing. Then it can be anything.

Zen people sip tea, and they call it a tea ceremony. Sipping tea can become spiritual. How does it become spiritual? To those people who have not looked into reality in any way it looks simply absurd. Sipping tea? How can it become religious? Yes, if you are chanting God's name, maybe it is religious. If you are praying, fasting, maybe it is spiritual, but sipping tea?

How can it be religious or spiritual? The Zen people say if you can sip tea with an absolutely undivided mind, so that the tea and the sipper of the tea are no more divided, it becomes one energy, there is so much silence, one is relaxed -- and if you cannot be relaxed while sipping tea, where else can you be relaxed? -- a cup of tea can become a cup of prayer.

Then anything can become spiritual. Digging in the garden, looking after the trees can become spiritual. Anything whatsoever can have the spiritual quality because the whole existence is God. You just have to become aware of it. A relaxed awareness makes everything spiritual.

So this dictum that samsara is nirvana, is one of the greatest dictums ever uttered by any man on this earth. The founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, uttered it. It is a thunderbolt. It is one of the most revolutionary sayings. It destroys all distinction, and it brings to light that all other so-called religions are just philosophies, not really religions, because they go on dividing --

the devil and God, hell and heaven, and they go on dividing. Division is their work, and division is of the mind.

Mind functions like a prism. A ray of light enters into a prism and is divided into seven colors. Entering, it was of one color, it was pure white, it was undivided. Getting out of the prism, it is no more one; it is seven, seven colors, the whole rainbow. The world is divided because of the prism of the mind. That which enters in the mind is one; that which comes out of the mind is seven.

If you want to know the first principle you will have to get beyond the prism. You will have to come to that point where the ray is one.

Now, there are two ways to seek the truth. One is the goal-oriented way, and the second is the source-oriented way. The first is wrong and the second is right. When I say the first is wrong, I am not condemning it. I am not saying it is bad. What I am saying by "wrong" is not a condemnation; it is just an indication that it leads nowhere, that it leads into a cul-de-sac, that you can go into it, but you will never arrive. You can go on going and going, but you will never arrive. It is a false way. It appears like a way, but it is not a way. It has the appearance, but only the appearance.

Let us first understand the false way because if you can understand the false as the false, half the journey is over. Then it is very simple to understand the true as the true. To know the false as the false, you have already come to an understanding of what is or what can be the true. So always start by understanding the false first. False eliminated, the true remains. So first the false way.

Everybody is prone to getting into the trap of the false because it is very alluring; it functions almost like a magnet. The mind feels very much attracted to it. The mind has a Osho - The First Principle

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tendency to be attracted to the false. Why? Because the mind itself is the false. It feeds on the false. So wherever your mind feels attracted, beware: something false, something illusory, something of the world of dreams is attracting you. Mind lives in dreams; it is made of dream stuff. In the day you call those dreams

thoughts, in the night you call those thoughts dreams, but it is all the same, the same flow, the same energy. The mind goes on spinning dreams, sometimes verbally, sometimes through images, but the whole production of the mind is dream.

The mind feels very much attracted to the goal-oriented way because the mind is always attracted to the future. The mind is afraid of the present; it does not want to be in the present.

Have you ever observed a very, very significant fact that the mind cannot be in the present? -- cannot be in the present at all? When you are in the present, the mind is not. The present is so small that there is no space for thoughts to move. It is so small that thoughts cannot exist. They need a little space to play around, to jog around. The present moment cannot contain any thoughts, so mind cannot exist in the present; it exists in the future or in the past. It is an expert about the past and an expert about the future -- and both are not: the past is no more, and the future has not yet happened. So mind lives in the false: either that which is no more or that which is not yet. Both are false, both are unreal. So mind either runs backwards or forwards, but the mind is never now, never here.

And the whole art of meditation is to be herenow. To be herenow means you have slipped out of the mind. And even to slip out for a single moment is of tremendous beauty and tremendous significance because then you see what reality is. Then you see that which is.

Then you see God, or truth. Then you see existence in its authentic color, quality, sound.

The moment mind starts working, the future has entered, or the past. Either you are imagining or you are remembering. So the mind feels very happy with the goal-oriented way.

It gives enough space for the mind to fool around, to go on thinking thoughts, dreaming dreams. There is enough space. Future is an opening for the mind.

But the moment mind starts working, you are closed to the present -- and the present is all that is true. The present means the eternal. The future and past are part of time; the present is part of eternity. Through the present you slip..

into God: you slip out of the mind and into God. You slip out of the ego, and into

your innermost core, which is also the innermost core of the whole existence.

Your center is not your center alone. It is my center too. It is the center of the trees too. It is the center of the stars too. We are different on the periphery; we are one at the center. On the periphery you are separate from me. At the center there is no I, there is no you; there is only we. And the "we" includes trees and rocks and stars and everything; it includes all. The

"I" is a mind product. The "we" is a totally different direction, totally different dimension.

The goal-oriented seeker thinks, "What is the ultimate and of existence? To what meaning is existence moving? Where are we going?" The goal-oriented seeker thinks, "What are we going to become? What HAVE we to become?" He never looks into being; he looks into becoming: "What am I to become? A saint? What am I going to become? What is my destiny in the future? What is the goal my life is striving to attain?" He looks into the future. The future is not. It is very dark there, very silent there, so you can easily imagine whatsoever you like. And the future cannot say you are wrong, because the future is not, so whatsoever you imagine never struggles, collides with reality. There is no reality; it is simply your projection.

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You can go on imagining, and there is nobody who will say you are wrong. You are always right, in the future.

In the present the reality is too much, and the reality will destroy the dream, but in the future there is no reality. You are alone. The world of the future gives you a freedom, gives you a freedom from reality -- a bondage to dreams and freedom from reality.

The goal-oriented person starts thinking. "How should I be so that the goal can be attained?" He starts changing his behaviour, his character, his style, his actions. He becomes a perfectionist. The goal-oriented person is always a perfectionist. He has some idea of perfection -- how man should be -- and he

starts managing his own being according to that idea. Christians have one idea, Hindus have another, Jainas have another, but all have ideas how man should be. Christians may think man should be like Jesus; then that is the idea, and everybody has to fit with the idea. If you don't fit you are wrong; if you fit you are right.

Now the misery is: if you fit you are false. If you don't fit you are wrong, you may be real.

So reality starts becoming wrong and unreality becomes right. Let me explain it to you.

Nobody else can fit with Jesus exactly, because God never creates anybody the same way again. God does not have an assembly line; he is not making men as cars are manufactured.

You can have as many cars similar to each other as you want. There is a mold, and the car is produced according to the mold, so you can have one Ford, another Ford, another Ford, millions of Fords, exactly similar. But God has no mold. God has no factory. He does not create according to molds. God is creativity; he never repeats. He is very innovative. Never again is the same person repeated, each is unique, so there is only one Jesus; there is never again. So the problem is if you try to fit with the idea of Jesus: how Jesus is, you should be, because that is the idea of the Christian; or the goal of the Buddhist -- Buddha -- one should fit with Buddha; or the goal of the Jaina -- one should fit with Mahavir. Now, these are all false ways to approach reality.

If you fit with Jesus you will be false because you have not been made to fit with Jesus.

You can be only yourself, nobody else, never anybody else. The only real way for you is to be yourself, whatsoever you are. And you cannot find any similar being in the past, and you cannot find any similar being in the present or in the future. You are alone, and this aloneness is beautiful. This is the way God respects you, by making you absolutely anew, unique, and alone.

If you fit with Jesus you are false, but Christians will say you are right. Now see how false becomes right! If you don't fit with Jesus you may be right, but then you are wrong. If you don't fit with Jesus you may be real, authentically yourself, but then you don't fit, so no Christian will appreciate you: you are

wrong. Real becomes wrong, the false becomes right.

Whenever you have any idea, fixed idea, fixed ideology, you are creating neurosis in man.

And there is great anxiety, naturally. If you cannot fit with the idea and you have been brought up as a Christian or a Hindu, you cannot fit with the idea, great anxiety arises: you are going wrong. Your life is the life of sin. You start feeling guilty. You feel nervous, you lose confidence, you lose courage, you become very much afraid. You become a coward, because whatsoever you do seems to be wrong. k is not fitting with Jesus or Buddha or Mahavir or Krishna, so you must be wrong. How can Buddha be wrong? And when you start feeling, "I am wrong," naturally, you tremble with fear.

Soren Kierkegaard has said that man is a trembling, but I would like to say man is not a trembling, man has been FORCED to become a trembling -- forced by the so-called religions, Osho - The First Principle

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who give you ideologies. "How you should be" -- once you start thinking in that way, you are bound to be trapped into some trouble, misery, neurosis.

The first thing to become authentically yours, authentically yourself, is to get rid of any idea whatsoever that you are carrying.

Zen has no idea how you should be. That's why Zen people say if you meet Buddha on the way, kill him immediately. That is just a way of saying don't allow any idea to settle into your consciousness. Kill that idea immediately. Don't be an ideologist. Don't have any ideals, and don't be a perfectionist.

A perfectionist is a person who goes on trying to make himself according to the idea. One day you can succeed. That possibility is there -- that dangerous possibility is there -- you can succeed, but then you become pseudo. That's what hypocrisy is all about. You become a hypocrite. If you really become the idea that you have been carrying, you become a hypocrite.

Go and look into your mahatmas, into your saints, and you will find them

hypocrites, untrue to themselves. True to some idea, but untrue to themselves. And if you are untrue to yourself, you are untrue to God.

Then, the perfectionist has so many shoulds and should-nots. The whole life is without joy. He cannot enjoy, he cannot celebrate, he cannot be happy, he cannot delight. He cannot lose himself in any moment, he cannot abandon himself in any moment, because those shoulds and should-nots are continuously haunting him: "You should not do this, you should do this, you should not be like that, you should be like that ..." He cannot relax. How can he relax?

Now, people come to me, and they want to relax, and they say, "We cannot relax." How can you relax by being a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan? It is impossible to relax; they won't allow you to relax. They want you to be tense; they create your tensions.

Relaxation means you don't have any shoulds. You are simply living moment to moment, not according to some future idea of yourself, but according to your reality that is herenow. To live with the reality, moment to moment, is to be sane. To live with the idea is to be insane.

The whole earth has become almost a madhouse because of these perfectionists. Perfectionism is a sort of madness; only mad people try to be perfectionists. Sane people never try to be perfectionists.

Sane people are humble people. They know their limitations, they don't try the impossible, so they enjoy the possible. If you try the impossible you cannot enjoy the possible, and in trying the impossible you miss the possible too. And from the other end, sane people enjoy the possible and they don't hanker for the impossible, and enjoying the possible, one day suddenly they stumble upon the impossible too.

Their joy becomes so much by and by, moment to moment, they go on being blissful. In ordinary things they are blissful. They don't ask for great things, they don't ask for paradise, to be blissful, they don't ask for God, they don't ask for nirvana. Small things. Playing with your own child, loving your wife, eating your food, taking a shower, or going for a morning walk, is more than enough. Just running on the beach is more than enough. What more do you want to be happy? The touch of the cool sand, and the warm rays of the sun showering on you, and the wild roar of the sea playing around you ... what more do you need

to be happy? Playing with a child, the laughter of the child ... what more do you need to be happy?

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But there are neurotic people. They will say, "What is there? Unless we achieve God we cannot be happy." And let me tell you, these people will not be happy even if they can achieve God. They cannot be. They will find faults; they are fault finders. Even God will not be able to fit in their idea of perfection. They will find faults with God. They will not be able to see any limitations, they will not allow any frailty. These are impossible people. And these impossible people destroy their own lives and destroy many others'. These people are the very source of madness on this earth.

The goal-oriented way is an ego trip: the ego always wants to be perfect. And the search cannot be fulfilled, because it is almost a blind man's search, a blind man groping in the dark, a blind man groping in the dark night with no light for a black cat which is not there.

The future is not yet. There is no goal in existence. Let this sink into your heart. There is no goal in existence, the existence is not moving towards any purpose. There is not any purpose; it is sheer joy. It is not a business; it is a play. Of course, I understand you cannot even play without the business mind.

Just a few days before, a young man came to me, and he was very tense, and I asked him --

because I could see from his face too much goal orientation -- I asked him one thing, "Do you play anything?" He said, "Yes, I am interested in games. I play many games. I play chess."

And I asked him, "What happens when you don't win?" He said, "I feel very much frustrated; I cannot sleep. I feel good only when I am the winner." Even in play, you know it is a game, just a makebelieve -- even in play, if you are not the winner, you become tense. You have to be the winner, even in play.

Such a type of person, if you tell him, "I went to the cricket match," he will ask, "Who was the winner?" He will not ask whether the players enjoyed, whether it was a beautiful game, no; he will ask, "Who was the winner?" This is a wrong person.

If you meet a person who really knows how to enjoy, he will ask, "Did the players enjoy it?"

If you are playing chess and you enjoy it, it does not matter who wins and who is defeated, because that is secondary, that is not the purpose of the game. The purpose is to enjoy. The goal is not the purpose; the purpose is the way. If you can enjoy the way, the trees and the birds singing on the way, who bothers about the goal? In fact, the existence has no goal. It is just a way.

That is the beauty of the Chinese word TAO; it means the "way". They don't talk about God, because the moment you talk about God, it appears as if God is the goal. They say,

"There is no God. There is TAO, the way."

You must have heard about one Japanese religion Shinto. The original was not Shinto; the original was SHINTAO. That is very beautiful; it means "the way of the gods". SHIN means gods, and TAO means the way. Shintao: the way of the gods. Everything is a god, and existence is the way. Gods moving on the way. You are not going to become gods. You are.

The goal-oriented idea is driving you mad. Drop that idea, and suddenly you will see sanity explodes into your being. You start laughing again. You start dancing again. You start singing again. You start playing again. And you have become religious. That is the idea of real religion, that you start dancing again, that you start loving again, that your life energy starts flowing, that your juice is stuck no more, is not stale, again flows, that you start sharing.

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We are not going anywhere! We are here! And we have been here for the whole

of eternity and we are going to be here for the whole of eternity. Now it is up to you to enjoy or not to enjoy. We are here and we are going to be here. There is no way to escape. Now it is for you to choose whether to enjoy or just to cry and weep for the goal.

The goal is not; there is no goal. The world is not moving towards some goal so that once achieved, it is finished. Then what will you do? Have you ever thought about it? Once the goal is achieved, what will you do? You will have to commit suicide. What will you do? If the whole existence achieves the goal, then? Then there is nowhere to go, nowhere to move; the goal has been achieved. Then the whole existence will dry up, will become dead, the juice will flow no more, the love will not be there, and the laughter will not be there, and trees will not bloom and birds will not sing and rivers will not flow. All has stopped. No, the world has no goal.

If the world has any goal, it would have achieved it by now. How long it has existed! The very fact that it has not achieved it yet is proof enough that it has no goal to achieve. It simply goes on; it is an ongoing affair. It is not a film that comes to an end, it is not a novel that comes to an end. We are always in the middle, never in the beginning and never at the end.

We are always in the middle. And that is the way things are.

So the goal-oriented person misses all that is beautiful in life. The goal he cannot achieve because there is no goal, and on the way he misses all things. Have you watched? Sometimes you are rushing towards the market, to your shop or to your office, you pass through the same street where you go for a morning walk, or sometimes in the moonlit night you go for a stroll

-- the same road, the same trees -- but when you are going to the office you have a goal in mind; then you don't see the greenery and then you don't listen to the birds. You are not interested in the way; you are interested in the goal. You want to finish it any way. The faster you can go, the better. You will not like to walk to the office. You go in a car or in a bus.

And if someday science manages to materialize and dematerialize man, you will simply stand in a machine in your house and dematerialize there and materialize in the office -- so no need for the way. One day it is going to happen. There is no need to go. Immediately, from one place to another place you can have a

quantum leap, a quantum jump. In the middle you will not be. Speed. Because you are not interested in the way.

But, the same way, in the morning when you go for a walk, has a totally different quality.

You enjoy it. Each breeze passing through the trees and each bird flying around. You enjoy it because you are not going anywhere in particular. You are just going for a morning walk. It is playful. You can turn back from any point. There is no goal in your mind. You are nontense, you are relaxed. There is joy, there is poetry. You start singing a song.

You can treat yourself on the way of life in these two ways. If you are goal- oriented --

God, heaven, MOKSHA, nirvana, whatsoever you call it -- then you cannot enjoy, you cannot celebrate on the way. Zen says the way is the goal. That is the meaning when they say the samsara is nirvana. The way is the goal, so don't miss anything. Enjoy. Each moment has to be tasted; each moment is delicious. Each moment brings something to you, a blessing, a benediction. Don't miss it.

This is the first way, the false way, that is very attractive to the mind.

On this false way masochists feel very good, masochists become mahatmas. A masochist is a person who likes to torture himself. The greater the self-torture, the greater the mahatma.

If somebody fasts for months, the crowd of worshipers will become bigger and bigger. And Osho - The First Principle

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who are these worshipers? These are sadists. They enjoy. This foolish man torturing himself, and they enjoy -- and they bring flowers in respect. What are they saying? They are saying,

"We would like to torture you, but we cannot do so because of the law and a thousand and one things, and you are so kind that you save us the trouble and

you are doing it on your own, and we are really happy." Masochists become mahatmas and sadists become followers, worshipers. They say, "Look at our mahatma. For three months he has not eaten anything," or

"For years he has lived only on fruit juice," or "For years he has not slept," or "He is sleeping on a bed of thorns. Look at our mahatma. He has lived a life of celibacy; he has never enjoyed any relationship with anybody. He has never loved a woman. He has never tasted love; he has denied himself all the beauty that love can give."

These deniers, these life-negative people are worshiped tremendously. Who are these worshipers? And why should they worship these people?

I went to one town, and a few people came to me, and they said, "In our town there is a great mahatma. For ten years he has been standing, and people come from faraway places for his DARSHAN. " SO I said, "But what else has he done?" They said, "What else? He is just standing." I insisted, "But still something?" They were puzzled; they said, "Why do you insist?

He has done such a great thing. What else is needed? He is just standing for ten years."

I went to see the man because I wanted to see -- that man must be mad. And he was mad!

He was standing ... his feet, his legs had become so thick. His whole body's blood had gone into the legs. Ten years of just standing, he had become just legs. The whole body had shrunk.

He had elephant legs. Now even if he wanted to sit he could not. The flexibility of the body is there no more; the elasticity is lost. And I looked into his eyes; I have never seen such an idiotic person. Such dull eyes. And bound to be, doing such an idiotic thing, just standing. He was holding himself on crutches, he was holding ropes with his hands; and the whole night disciples would do KIRTAN and singing so he kept awake. Or if sometimes he would fall asleep standing, then a few people would support him so he didn't fall. These are sadists.

Hmm? They should have helped him to go to sleep, but they were helping him not to fall.

Now, these people have killed this man's whole life.

And why is he standing? He is enjoying in a way. Thousands of people come to see him.

He has nothing. His ego is feeling very much fulfilled; he thinks he is a great mahatma.

Money is being poured at his feet. Flowers and respect.

But nothing of the creative. He has not written a poem. If you respect a man who has written a beautiful poem, it seems meaningful. He has made the world a little more beautiful.

If somebody has painted a picture or somebody has danced a beautiful dance, he has made the world a little more beautiful. He has to be appreciated. But nobody will appreciate him.

A man standing just doing nothing -- dying. It is a long, slow suicide. And the man must be really interested in selftorture. This is great torture, but people call it TAPASCHARYA, they call it austerity, asceticism. Asceticism is part of the goal-oriented mind.

And the world is divided between masochists and sadists. Masochists become leaders, mahatmas. And sadists become followers; they say, "We cannot do it; we want to do these things to people, but we cannot do them." But there are a few people who are doing it on their own, so they appreciate.

Avoid this false way. Know it is false. Osho - The First Principle

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And on this false way many illusions exist. Now, a man standing for ten years will become hallucinatory, he will have hallucinations. Whenever he will close his eyes he will have dreams. And those dreams will become very, very real because he has deprived himself of sleep. You just try it for a few days. Don't

eat, don't sleep. Within three weeks your hallucination will be perfect. You may start talking to God, you may start seeing God. Deprive yourself of your ordinary necessities, and the mind starts becoming hallucinatory. The mind goes berserk, and you can start seeing things which are not.

I have heard, a real story:

Fred P. Shields, 73, spotted a nest of copperheads one day in the eighty-foot well on his farm in Cheshire, Ohio, so he enlisted his forty-two-year-old son Fred D. and his eighteen-year-old grandson James to help kill them ...

Now the son and the grandson didn't bother about whether those snakes were there or not.

... They attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of their pickup truck, stuck the hose into the well, and filled it with carbon monoxide. After a while, Shields lowered himself into the well to see if the snakes were really dead. When he failed to come out again, his son went in after him. When the second man failed to come out, the grandson went in. Rescuers from the sheriff's office retrieved the three men, all dead, apparently of carbon monoxide poisoning, but they found no sign of any snakes in the well.

You can see things which are not. Always remember that the mind is capable of seeing things which are not. And by seeing things which are not, you will miss seeing things which are. So the hallucinatory effort has to be avoided. Don't deprive -- don't deprive your body either of food or of sleep or of rest. Don't deprive your body of anything. Let your body function as healthily as possible, as normally as possible. Don't torture the body, because your mind is part of the body. If you torture the body, the mind goes berserk and starts seeing things.

And once you start seeing things you are trapped. Then you want to avoid them or kill them, or, if they are beautiful things, you want to attain more of them.

That which is needs no deprivation. You need not lie down on a thorn bed and you need not go on a fast and you need not torture your body by not sleeping. In fact, the more healthy and normal you are, the more is the possibility for the truth to be seen.

The people who are goal-oriented, they don't look into life. They look in books, because they can find the goal only in books. In life there is no goal. If you look

around there is no goal. Life is there, every part of existence is full of joy, celebrating, the children are turning and dancing, and the birds are dancing, and the peacocks are dancing, and the stars are turning and dancing. The whole existence is turning in a dance. If you look into life there is dance, but there is no God. Where to find the God? Where to find the perfection? You have to look in the books. It exists only in the books, in the imaginations of those people who have written books.

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A Japanese academic who wished to understand Zen more fully went to a monastery to submit himself to the koans. He was asked, "What is mu?" -- to define, that is, a word which has no meaning in Japanese ...

It is just like "hoo". "Hoo" is a Sufi word; it means nothing; it is just a sound. Exactly is the word "mu"; it means nothing; it is just a sound. In English there is one word coined by a new logician; that word is "po". Yes means yes, no means no. Po is just between the two; it neither means yes nor means no. Learn this word; it is a very significant word. If somebody asks, "Is there a God?" say "Po", because if you say yes, it is wrong -- you don't know; if you say no, it is wrong, because you don't know. So po. Po does not make you committed to any ideology. It makes no sense; it is simply a nonsense sound. So is mu. If you ask a Zen Master,

"Has a dog buddha nature?" he will say, "Mu". It means neither no nor yes. If you ask, "Do Buddhas exist after they have left the body?" he will say, "Mu". Or my disciples can use the word "hoo". This word "mu" has no meaning.

... As a good scholar, he proceeded to look up the syllable in Japanese and other Oriental dictionaries to determine a potential root meaning and habitual usage ...

When the Master gave him mu to meditate on, he went to the dictionary. Naturally, a scholar goes that way. He must have gone to the library. The Master has said, "Meditate on mu": the Master has said, "Meditate on something

nonsensical, so that you can get out of your mind." The mind can manage the sensible, the mind can manage the rational, but the mind cannot manage the nonsensical. The nonsensical takes you out of the mind.

So if you meditate on mu, what will happen? Nothing can happen, because mu means nothing. If I say, "Meditate on 'dog'." much will happen. You may start thinking about a dog you had in your childhood, you may start thinking about dogs that you were always afraid of, the neighbors' dogs, or you may start thinking of a dog your girlfriend had, and then about the girlfriend and then all the girlfriends that you had, and so on and so forth. You can move from

"dog" and the mind can function, the law of association. And infinite are the possibilities. You may think about "dog", you may read it in the reverse order; it becomes "god", and you may start thinking about theologies and religions ...

The word "mu" means nothing; you cannot go anywhere with it. You have to remain stuck: mu. Now where to go? It does not remind you of anything; it makes no sense, so there is no association with it. If you go on meditating on mu, there will come a point of frustration, boredom. Exhausted, your mind will start rebelling. Your mind will say, "Drop this. Enough of it! And I cannot think anything about it." The mind is ready to think, but what to think about mu? There is no door opening anywhere, it leads nowhere, so one time comes, one moment comes, when the mind simply, fed up with the whole thing, drops itself, disappears.

And in that moment there is a vision of reality.

That is the way of a koan. A koan is a nonsensical thing, you cannot figure it out; but the scholar went to the library.

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... he proceeded to look up the syllable in Japanese and other oriental dictionaries to determine a potential root meaning and habitual usage. He presented his findings to the Master, who repulsed him and immediately sent him away. Our scholar next thought the question to be more subtle and tried to analyze the tonal

component of the syllable in every language of the Chinese group. He again presented his findings and research to the Master, who now thought it was time to convince this poor scholar of the seriousness of his situation, that it was not a question of another academic excursion. "I will give you one more chance,"

he said, "and if you do not solve the riddle, I will cut off your leg."

Now, even in the most extreme arguments or thesis examinations of the academic world, things usually don't become this tough and this rough ...

The scholar could not believe what type of Master he is. "He will cut off my leg! At the most you can fail, you can say that 'You have failed', but cutting off the leg? This is too much, this is too rude."

... But the threat did frighten the scholar out of his wits, so to speak. He completely concentrated upon the syllable itself, NOW ...

Because it was dangerous. This man can do something, and he looked dangerous. Zen Masters look dangerous.

I have heard about one Zen seeker who was working and working upon his koan and was not able to solve it and was becoming very much afraid to go to his Master because the Master would beat him, throw him, jump upon him, and would do anything, whatsoever happened in that moment. So he was becoming so afraid, so much afraid that he was avoiding going to him. And that night he received a message that "Tomorrow morning you have to come," so he was very much afraid. He tried hard on his koan so that some answer would come that appealed to him, to this madman, "... otherwise he will beat me again." He could not sleep. He meditated, meditated, and he was feeling very tired and exhausted.

So, sitting in meditation, just for a moment he fell asleep, and in sleep, it is said, he saw in a dream Bodhidharma, the archpriest, the patriarch, the original patriarch, the Master of all Zen Masters. And Bodhidharma is really dangerous looking; his eyes are so big. And Bodhidharma looked into the face of this young seeker, and he became so afraid of Bodhidharma's eyes that, the story says, he awoke out of fear -- and not only out of the ordinary sleep, but from the sleep of lives together. He awoke. Out of fear he became enlightened. The face of Bodhidharma and his eyes!

So this scholar was very much frightened; out of his wits he was.

... He completely concentrated upon the syllable itself, trying to puzzle out the meaning, and in the process of concentration itself achieved the result. The question had a nonanalytic effect, and a nonverbal result as well.

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Those who are not privy to the extreme concentration brought about by the Zen Master's exercise, or the scholar's reply, might not realize that many of the most important and compelling questions that face us cannot be looked up in an encyclopedia or dictionary. There is no place where the meaning of one's life is written up.

There is no book, no scripture, no bible which has the answer for your life. There is nobody who can give you the answer. In fact there is no answer; there is only an understanding. By understanding, the question disappears. There is no answer.

And the goal-oriented man seeks the answer, so he will come upon many answers and will hang around one answer for a few days, few months, few years, sometimes a few lives, and then will get fed up and will move to another answer. But that is a long procession; one can go on ad infinitum, from one answer to another answer.

The real path is not of finding an answer, but of finding an understanding. In the light of understanding, the question disappears. And suddenly YOU are the answer! Suddenly life itself is the answer! The way is the goal, the samsara is nirvana.

I have heard a very beautiful anecdote. You may have heard it. It has many versions, but this version I don't think you will have heard before: Six blind medical students sat by the gate of a great city as an elephant was led slowly past. Inspired by scientific curiosity of the highest degree, the six blind students rushed forward to palpate the great beast and to determine the nature of his being. The first man's hands fell upon the elephant's tusks. "Ah," said he, "this creature is a thing of bones; they even protrude through his skin." Later on, years having past, this man became an orthopedist.

At the same time the second blind medical student seized the elephant's trunk and identified its function. "What a nose!" he exclaimed. "Surely this is the most important part of the animal." Accordingly, he became a rhinologist.

The third man chanced upon the elephant's great flapping ear and came to a similar conclusion: for him the ear was everything, so he, in time, became an otologist.

The fourth rested his hands on the huge chest and abdomen of the elephant. "The contents of this barrel must be enormous," he thought, "and the pathological derangements infinite in number and variety." Nothing would do but that he would become an internist.

One of the blind men caught hold of the elephant's tail. "This," he said, "would appear to be a useless appendage. It might even be a source of trouble. Better take it off." The blind man became a surgeon.

But the last of the six did not depend upon the sense of touch. Instead he only listened. He had heard the elephant approaching, the rattle of the chains, and the shouts of the keepers. It may be that he heard the elephant heaving a great sigh as he trudged along. "Where is the creature going?" he asked. No one answered. "Where did he come from?" he asked. No one knew. Then this man fell into a deep reverie. What was in the elephant's mind, he wondered, in having left wherever he was and having come to this great city? Why does he submit to the indignities of our curiosity and the slavery of chains? And while he was wondering how to find out the answers to these questions the elephant was gone.

This man became a psychiatrist. Osho - The First Principle

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The other students were disgusted at this impracticality. They turned their backs upon their visionary companion. What difference does it make, said they, what the elephant's purpose may be? And his chains -- they constitute a legal not a medical problem. The important thing is to recognize the animal's structure.

Then they fell to quarreling among themselves as to whether the elephant's structure was primarily that of a nose or that of an ear or that of a tail. And although they all differed flatly from one another on these points, they all agreed that the psychiatrist was a fool.

People look into books, find out fragments, make philosophies out of fragments. That's how all the religions have evolved, and all the theologies and all the philosophies. They are all fragmentary.

The whole vision cannot be contained in any book, and the whole vision cannot be contained in any creed. Then where to find the whole vision? The whole vision can be found only when you drop the mind and look into the reality of things without thinking about them.

It is not a question of contemplation, not a question of thinking, not a question of logical thinking. It is not a question of any syllogism. You have to just look silently, innocently, into that which is already herenow. That is revelation.

And not that you come upon a truth. Suddenly you find the seeker is the sought and the observer is the observed, that the objective and the subjective are not two, that they were looking like two because the mind was standing in between and was making a boundary. Now the mind has disappeared, the boundary has disappeared; there is only oneness, one whole.

Now the second way. The second way is the way I call source-oriented. The source is already here, the goal is not. The source is within you, the goal is without. The goal will be somewhere in the future, the source is already nourishing you. It is hidden in you; otherwise you would not be alive. It is flowing in you. The source is present, the goal is absent. To look for the absent is to look in a wrong way. To look into the present and for the present is to look in the right way.

The source-oriented person is never a perfectionist, cannot be. The source- oriented person is a holist, a totalist. He has no idea of perfection. He simply lives moment to moment in its totality. He lives a very unpredictable life. He lives a life of wonder and surprise. You cannot predict him. Even he himself cannot predict what he is going to do the next moment. Who knows? The next moment will come and we will see. The next moment will bring its own reality, and the next moment will create its own response. He lives responsively,

responding.

He is always alert to respond to every situation, whatsoever, but he has no prefixed idea how to react, how to respond, what to do. He is alert. The situation arises; he responds. He responds out of his alertness, but he never responds out of any answers that he has gathered in the past. His each moment is total.

Remember, I am not saying "perfect". His each moment is TOTAL. What is the difference? A perfect man, maybe, will never be angry. That is the idea of a perfect man: he will never be angry. But a total man can be angry. You can only be promised one thing, that he will be totally angry. It cannot be said he will not be angry. Only one thing can be said, that he will be totally angry; if ever he is angry he will be totally angry.

It happened a scholar came to Raman Maharshi, and he was arguing and arguing and arguing; and nobody had seen Raman Maharshi ever being angry. Raman was saying again Osho - The First Principle

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and again, "I am not a philosopher, and I don't believe in proofs and arguments, and I don't know any logic. I say 'God is' because I have experienced it so." But the scholar wouldn't listen. Then suddenly the disciples saw something they could not believe. Raman Maharshi jumped, with his staff in his hand, and rushed after that scholar. And the scholar ran away; he also could not believe that this man would do such a thing. He chased him out, came back laughing, sat on his couch, and forgot all about it.

Now, this is a whole man. He is not perfect according to your idea of perfection, but he is whole. Yes, sometimes anger may be needed: that may be the right response. So one never knows. Even he himself would have been surprised by it. When he came back after chasing the man out he must have been laughing at himself too. "So this is possible," he must have laughed. He must have enjoyed the whole thing; he must have chuckled.

A whole man lives moment to moment, not knowing what is going to happen. His life has no script. His life is not a drama; he has no script. Nothing is decided beforehand. Each moment opens a door, and he responds accordingly. He

responds with the totality of his being.

I can see Raman TOTALLY angry in that moment. And that is the beauty of it, that is the innocence of it.

The whole man is spontaneous, natural. He is not a hypocrite, he is not pretending anything. He is open, vulnerable, available. He is childlike, simple, and tremendously beautiful.

This is the way of Zen. It is the most unique phenomenon in the whole world of religions.

Zen is the highest peak that religion has attained yet. It is the sanest religion.

Now this beautiful anecdote. It is simple, but now you will be able to understand.

HAKUJU SERVED AS A DISTINGUISHED LECTURER AT THE TENDAI- SECT

COLLEGE.

Hakuju was a great Zen Master, but a Zen Master continues to live his ordinary life.

Somebody once asked Bokuju, another great Zen Master, "What did you use to do before you became enlightened?" He said, "I used to cut wood for my Master, and carry water from the well." Now he himself had become the Master. And the inquirer asked, "And now? Now what do you do?" He said, "I chop wood, and carry water for myself." And the man asked, "Then what is the difference? Before also you used to chop wood and carry water, and now also you do the same, so what is the difference?" Bokuju said, "Before, I used to do it unconsciously.

Now I do it consciously." The quality of being has changed; action remains the same.

HAKUJU SERVED AS A DISTINGUISHED LECTURER AT THE TENDAI- SECT

COLLEGE. And remember that Bokuju was in a simple situation. To chop wood is easy, even after enlightenment it is easy, but to lecture in a college is more difficult. It is more difficult than chopping wood. But Hakuju continued; he became enlightened, but he continued the way he was doing. He became famous all over the country, but he continued, he remained a lecturer.

Zen believes that the ordinary life has not to be renounced. The ordinary life has to be transformed by your inner understanding.

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Another great Zen saying. Another great Zen Master has said, "Before I came to my Master, rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains. Then my Master confused me utterly; then rivers were no more rivers and mountains were no more mountains. Then living in the presence of my Master, by and by the confusion disappeared, the smoke disappeared, and one day again rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains."

Now, what is the difference, because rivers were rivers before and mountains were mountains before? Now they are mountains and they are rivers again, so what is the difference? The difference is not in the outside. The difference is in the inside. Before, they were just ordinary mountains, rivers; now they have an extraordinary quality. That quality YOU give to them, you pour into them. Your luminosity makes your whole existence luminous.

A man is not what he does; a man is what he is. So the emphasis of Zen is never to change your actions; just transform your understanding, transform your consciousness. Bring a new consciousness into existence.

AS BE WAS LECTURING WITH HIS CUSTOMARY ZEAL ON THE CHINESE

CLASSICS ONE HOT SUMMERS AFTERNOON, BE NOTICED THAT A FEW OF THE

STUDENTS WERE DOZING OFF HE STOPPED LECTURING IN

MIDSENTENCE AND

SAID, "IT IS A HOT AFTERNOON, ISN'T IT? CAN'T BLAME YOU FOR GOING TO

SLEEP. MIND IF I JOIN YOU?"

Now, a perfectionist will not be able to do it at all. How can a perfectionist fall asleep before his students? Howsoever hot the summer is, and he may be feeling sleepy, because the body is the body ... Whether it belongs to an enlightened person or to an unenlightened person doesn't make any difference: the body follows its own laws. He must have been feeling sleepy; it was really hot. But a perfectionist will try to pretend. A holist, a totalist will not pretend.

The moment he felt sleep was coming to him he stopped in midsentence. He would not complete even the sentence; he lives moment to moment. Even to wait to complete the sentence is false. Why wait? He stopped in midsentence and asked the students, "IT IS A HOT

AFTERNOON, ISN'T IT? CAN'T BLAME YOU FOR GOING TO SLEEP."

And see the point. A perfectionist will always be blaming everybody, that "You are wrong," that "You are not doing this," that "This should be done this way." A perfectionist is continuously condemning everybody; that is his joy. He is trying to put everything right in the world.

It is said a man, must have been a perfectionist, came to a Zen Master, Rinzai, and the man, who was a Christian, said to Rinzai, "In our scripture it is written that God created the world in six days, and then on the seventh day he rested. But what sort of world? I have been asking my Christian missionaries, but they can't answer, so I have come to you, Master. What sort of world? Such an ugly world, so full of pain and misery. Full of imperfections! What a world God created. And he took six days!" Rinzai looked at the man, and he said, "Do you think you can improve upon it?" The man was a little puzzled, but still he said, "Yes, I think I can." So Rinzai shouted, "Then what are you doing here? Why are you waiting and wasting time? Improve! How many days will you take?"

Osho - The First Principle 88

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The perfectionist will find fault even with God. "Why did he create this world? Why did he create tuberculosis and cancer? And why did he create poverty and richness, and why did he create this and that? Why?" A perfectionist continuously condemns; that is his joy.

If this Master Hakuju was a perfectionist, he would have shouted at the students, "What are you doing? For what have you come here? You are falling asleep? This is not the way of a seeker, not the way of a disciple, not the way of a student." But rather than saying this, he says, "IT IS A HOT AFTERNOON, ISN'T IT? CAN'T BLAME YOU FOR GOING TO

SLEEP." He understands. The total man understands. He understands his limitations; he understands everybody else's limitations. He never asks the impossible.

"MIND IF I JOIN YOU?" Really beautiful. Just superb, a master stroke. "MIND IF I JOIN

YOU?" He is asking their permission, because a few of them may be perfectionists! And they were.

WITH THIS, HAKUJU SHUT HIS TEXTBOOK, AND LEANING WELL BACK IN HIS

CHAIR, FELL ASLEEP.

And not only that, when a really total man falls asleep, he snores too: THE CLASS WAS DUMBFOUNDED, AND THOSE WHO BAD BEEN DOZING

WERE AWAKENED BY HIS SNORES.

Must have been a man of childlike qualities. It is very difficult to fall asleep so easily, and to snore. And to snore before one's own students? Must have been a very egoless person.

THE CLASS WAS DUMBFOUNDED ... They could not believe it, because the man was known as an enlightened Master, all over the country. Even the emperor used to come to see him. And this enlightened man has fallen asleep,

cannot keep himself awake, is as ordinary as any ordinary person? They were dumbfounded.

And when they heard him snoring, it was unbelievable. Who has ever heard of a Buddha snoring? But a real Buddha will not be worried. If he wants to snore, he will snore. If he feels like snoring, he will snore. He will not bother what you say about him.

... AND THOSE WHO BAD BEEN DOZING WERE AWAKENED BY HIS SNORES.

ALL SAT UP IN THEIR SEATS ...

Now their sleep disappeared.

... AND WAITED FOR THE MASTER TO AWAKEN.

Osho - The First Principle 89

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This you can find only in the Zen literature, this possibility of being so human, of being so imperfect and yet unworried about it. A tremendous acceptance of all that is, of sleep, of snoring. No effort to hide yourself behind any facade.

Once there was a famous Buddhist layman named Busol. He was a deeply enlightened man; his wife too was enlightened, and so were his son and daughter. A man came up to Busol one day and asked, "Is Zen difficult or not?" Busol said, "Oh, it is very difficult. It is like taking a stick and trying to hit the moon."

The man was puzzled and began to think. "If Zen is so difficult, how did Busol's wife attain enlightenment?" So he went and asked her the same question. She said, "It is the easiest thing in the world. It is just like touching your nose when you wash your face in the morning."

By now the man was thoroughly confused. "I don't understand. Is Zen easy? Is it difficult?

Who is right?" So he asked their son. The son said, "Zen is not difficult and not easy. On the tips of a hundred blades of grass is the Buddha's meaning."

"Not difficult? Not easy? What is it then?" So the man went to the daughter and asked her.

"Your father, your mother, and your brother all gave me different answers. Who is right?" She said, "If you make it difficult, it is difficult. If you make it easy, it is easy. But if you don't think, the truth is just as it is."

If you make it difficult, it is difficult. If you make it easy, it is easy. But if you don't think, the truth is just as it is. THE TRUTH IS JUST AS IT is. This suchness, this total acceptance, this total surrender to truth -- no pretensions, no hypocrisies, no effort to hide yourself behind screens, no effort to show yourself as more than the life-size -- this authenticity is Zen. And this authenticity is the door to the first principle.

Be spontaneous, be natural, and you have already arrived. I was reading a few lines of Ogden Nash:

The centipede was happy quite, Until a toad in fun Said: "Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run.

If you ask a centipede ... A centipede has a hundred legs.

The centipede was happy quite, Until a toad in fun Said: Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run.

Now it becomes impossible. The moment you think, things become impossible. If you don't think, the truth is as it is.

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The last parable:

The Buddha sprang from the right side of his mother and took seven steps in each of the four directions. He then looked once each way, pointed one finger to the sky, and touched the ground with his other hand. He said, "In the sky above and the sky below, only I am holy."

This is a very beautiful story. When Buddha was born, the mother was standing under a tree. He was born while the mother was standing, and he was born in a very miraculous way.

He suddenly sprang from his mother's side, stood on the ground, walked seven feet, put one hand towards the sky and touched the earth with the other hand, and said, "In the sky above and the sky below, only I am holy."

Zen people have laughed about this story very much. If they were Christian they would have tried to prove it, that it has to be real, historical. But they don't take things seriously.

One Zen Master, Un-mun, said ...

Somebody asked Un-mun, "What do you say about this nonsense story?" He said, "On the Buddha's birthday, I was there, present." Un-mun present? The inquirer was surprised.

Un-mun said, "As he sprang from the side of his mother, I hit him and killed him, and fed him to a hungry dog. The whole world was at peace."

The inquirer was very much puzzled, so he went to another Master, saying, "What do you say? The story is nonsense, and Un-mun's answer is even more nonsense; he says, 'I was present. Not only present, I killed Buddha then and there, and fed him to a hungry dog, and the whole world has been at peace since then.'"

Otherwise Buddha would have created trouble for people. Zen Masters say, "Buddha, why were you born? You created so much trouble for people, because everybody is trying to meditate since you came. Had you not come, the world would have been at peace. Nobody would have been meditating, nobody would have been into this trip of nirvana. Why did you come?" That is the meaning of Un-mun when he says, "I killed him and fed him to a hungry dog, and since then

the world has been at peace."

The inquirer went to another Master, Lin-chi.

"What the Buddha said on his birthday is wrong," said Lin-chi, "so I will hit him thirty times. And what Zen Master Un-mun said is also wrong, so I will hit him thirty times. And what I just said is wrong, so I will hit myself thirty times."

In fact, the moment you say something about the first principle, you go wrong. Nothing can be said about the first principle. Yes, it can be experienced. Drop the mind, and experience it.

Osho - The First Principle 91

Next >

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