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then comes back slowly, a little sad, sits back, starts eating. Rukamani asks, "What is the matter? What happened? Where were you going so suddenly, as if there was some emergency? And now suddenly you turn back from the door and you are sad. What happened?"
Krishna says, "One of my lovers, one of my devotees, is passing through a capital and people are throwing stones at him and blood is flowing from his head and he has wounds, but he remains utterly helpless -- not a condemnatory word on his lips, not even in his mind. His surrender is total. I had to rush to help him. He was so helpless!"
Then Rukamani is even more surprised. "Then why did you come back?"
Krishna says, "By the time I reached the door, he had taken a stone in his own hand. Now he is ready to answer himself. Now I am not needed. Now he is no more helpless."
Remember, all human help becomes a barrier to divine help. My purpose here is to make you REALLY helpless, utterly helpless, so God rushes towards you and fills your emptiness.
That will be the day of real rejoicing, ecstasy.
Don't ask for my help. Ask that I destroy all that you have arranged around yourself as help, comfort, consolation. Ask that I kill you. Ask that I behead you. The moment your head has rolled down on the earth, you will grow a new head, and that head will be the divine. That will be God's head.
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17 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall
A PUZZLED MONK ONCE SAID TO FUKETSU, "YOU SAY TRUTH CAN BE
EXPRESSED WITHOUT SPEAKING, AND WITHOUT KEEPING SILENT. HOW CAN
THIS BE?" FUKETSU ANSWERED, "IN SOUTHERN CHINA, IN THE SPRING, WHEN I WAS ONLY A LAD, AH! HOW THE BIRDS SANG AMONG THE BLOSSOMS."
God IS. Truth IS. Love IS. There is no way to say it, and there is no way to hide it. There is no word which can express it, and there is no methodology of how to keep it unexpressed.
That is the dilemma of the mystic. He has to say it, and it cannot be said. He cannot keep quiet about it, he cannot keep silent. It overfloods him; it starts overflowing; it is beyond him to keep silent. He has to say it, and nobody has ever been able to say it.
God is not a word, neither is truth a word, nor is love a word. And they are not just silences either, because their isness is a singing isness; they are songs. It is not just dull and dead there. It is full of joy, it is overflowing joy. It is celebration, it is ecstasy, it is orgasm, because it is a meeting of the opposites, because it is a meeting of the polarities, because it is a marriage, a marriage of yin and yang, day and night, summer and winter, life and death, sound and silence.
So when it happens, you cannot say it, but you have to sing it, and that is the beauty of the song. It has something of the word and something of silence in it. That is the beauty of poetry, the beauty of dance. Something is visible, something is invisible; the manifest and the unmanifest meet there, embrace each other, are fulfilled in each other.
If you simply say and use words and there is no silence in those words, your words will be like dead stones. They can hit somebody's head, you can argue with them, but you cannot convert. They don't have that quality of silence which becomes conversion. When a word has a silence at its innermost core, when a word is luminous with silence, it brings conversion.
Then it is a gospel, then it is good news. Then somebody, who is saying something with silence in it, is not throwing a dead rock at you, but is throwing a flower. It will also hit you, but it will also caress you, and it will go deeper because you can be vulnerable to it and it will reach to your very heart. Because how can you protect yourself against it? You will be nondefensive.
So remember, all the mystics have been singing and dancing, celebrating. They go on saying, "We cannot say it," and they go on saying all the same.
There is a difference in saying and saying. When you say without knowing it, without realizing it, it is just gibberish, just words and words and words, without any soul in them; it is a corpse; there is no aliveness in it. Those words stink -- they stink of death. There is no heartbeat of life. When you know, when you have experienced, when you have fallen into that abyss called God, when you are transformed by that surrender, when you are totally immersed in it, when your every cell is bathed in it, then you say; but your words are not mere words.
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They carry silence. They are vehicles of silence; they are gestures of silence. We have a special name for it in the East: MAHAMUDRA -- the great gesture.
Look at my hand. If it is empty, if there is nobody behind it who has experienced, then it is an ordinary gesture. But if there is somebody behind it who has known, who has lived, who has experienced, then raising this hand is a great gesture, MAHAMUDRA. Then the ordinary hand becomes extraordinary. Then ordinary words are no more ordinary words. You cannot go to the dictionary to find their meaning. When a word is full of silence, you will have to go within yourself to find its meaning, not to a dictionary, not to a library. You will have to go within yourself. The meaning will be found in your experience.
The word of a man who knows is loaded, loaded with great fragrance. You will have to decode it in your innermost core of being, into the innermost shrine of your being.
Truth is a transcendence, transcendence of all duality. So those who say truth
cannot be said, only say a half-truth; and those who say that truth can be said only in silence, they also say a half-truth.
Zen brings the whole truth to the world. Zen is a great blessing to the world; it brings the whole truth.
The whole truth is: Truth cannot be said, and yet can be said. If not said, then showed, indicated. The ordinary duality is transcended. We are always moving from one pole of the duality to the other. Sometimes we say, "Yes, it can be said"; this is one pole. Then we become aware, "How can it be said?" -- the other pole. Then we keep silent, but then again we become aware that there is something left: "Yes, it can be said." This way it goes on moving, it swings.
Zen says truth is a transcendence, transcendence of all duality. The duality between the word and the silence is also to be transcended.
The Bible says in the beginning there was the word. The Vedas say in the beginning there was silence, eternal silence, and the silence brooded over the sea, and it was dark. And the Bible says there was the word. The first thing that happened in existence was the word. God said let there be light, and there was light. Both are half-truths.
If you ask the Zen people ... They have not written any Bible or any Veda yet, and they will never try, because they don't believe in scriptures. They say it is beyond the scriptures; it is a transmission beyond the scriptures. But if they ever write a Bible, or if they are forced to, like Lao Tzu was once forced to write the Tao Te Ching because the king wouldn't allow him to leave the country unless he wrote his experiences ...
Lao Tzu wanted to go to the Himalayas, to die there; certainly there cannot be any more beautiful a place to die. Those eternal peaks, those snow -- covered virgin peaks, where can you find a better place to disappear in God? What better moment? He wanted to go -- he was very old and he wanted to go to the Himalayas to rest and disappear there, nobody ever knowing about him. He wanted to disappear absolutely alone. He wanted his death to be private.
And death is a private thing. Nobody else can be with you when you die; it is absolutely internal. So he wanted to escape and go away from the crowds. He was afraid too many people will surround him and his death will become a public affair.
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But the king insisted, "First you write whatsoever you have known." And he ordered the guards on the boundary saying that "This man is not to be allowed to go out." So he was caught at a guard post, and for three days he sat in the guards' room and wrote down the Tao Te Ching.
If somebody, forces a Zen Master to write down a Bible, a Veda, then they will say there was song in the beginning. Neither word nor silence, but song. There was song in the beginning, and God sang and danced. Not "Let there be light": God sang and danced. And that dance became the beginning of creation.
That dance continues. That dance is what existence is.
The song has a mystery about it because it is a meeting, a marriage of opposites. In the song there is sound and silence. The song says something, but says in such a way that you cannot grasp it. Not that it doesn't say anything. It makes much available, but you cannot grasp it, you cannot just possess it. If you try to possess, you will kill it. You cannot have a song in your fist; otherwise the song will be killed. It is too delicate; you cannot be that rough with it.
A song has to be preserved in the heart, not in the fist. About a song you have to be receptive, not aggressive. You can keep an argument in the fist; it is hard, rocklike, it will not die. You can keep and possess an argument, you can become the possessor of an argument. That's why the ego enjoys very much to have arguments, proofs, logic, philosophies. The ego feels very much fulfilled: "I know so much."
The song cannot be possessed that way; the ego cannot be its possessor. The song can penetrate your being, but the ego has to give way. If the ego comes in between, the song will be shattered. You may get fragments of it, and you may start interpreting those fragments, but you will miss the unity of it. And it was in the unity.
A song has not to be thought about. If you start thinking, about a song, you are already missing it. When you listen to music, how do you listen? Do you bring
your mind in? If you bring your mind in, where is the music? Music and the mind both cannot exist together. That is the mystery of music: you have to put your mind aside. You cannot argue with music; you cannot nod your head in agreement or disagreement. You cannot say, "Yes, I agree," or "No, I don't agree." There is no question of agreement or no agreement. With music you simply become one. If you want to feel it you have to put your head aside. The heart has to open towards it. It goes directly to the heart, it showers on the heart. It helps the flower of the heart to open and bloom. It is a nourishment for the inner lotus.
The Zen people will say, "There was song in the beginning, and then God sang and God danced, and that's what he has been doing since then." Each moment it is a dance. Look around. Can't you hear these birds? These are not birds; don't be deceived by them. These are not birds. It is God singing, the God of the beginnings -- because it is always a beginning.
Each moment is a beginning. Never think that the beginning was somewhere in the past. This is the beginning, and it is always the beginning and there is no end. It is God singing.
Can't you hear the silence of the trees? It is God, silent.
In the birds he is singing, in the trees he is silent. Birds cannot exist without the trees, and, let me tell you, the trees cannot exist without the birds either. The birds sing for the trees, and the trees are silent for the birds, and there is a marriage. They are tied together. If trees disappear, birds will disappear. Kill all the birds of the world, and you will one day see the trees are disappearing. Everything is intertwined, everything is interlinked. This is what we mean by the word "ecology" -- everything is together.
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Chapter 7 - The Song of Sound and Silence It is God singing, it is God silent.
Once you understand that God is both, then this highest possibility opens for you. This is the first principle, that you need not divide, all division is false, that
you need not create any duality, because existence is nondual, because existence is one.
And all our misery is because we are divided. Why do you feel so thrilled when you are in love? What happens? Is the thrill just chemical, hormonal? No, it is not. The thrill is existential. When you are in love, at least with one person you feel to be one, at least with one person you have dropped duality, at least with one person you are no more separate, at least with one person the boundaries are not there. You have removed the boundaries. Two spaces have come so close, they overlap. You feel so thrilled with love, so blissful with love, because it is an experience of God, a very limited experience of course.
And if it is so beautiful to be one with one person, how much more beautiful will it be to be one with the whole, to be one with all the persons, men and women, trees and birds and animals and the clouds and the mountains and the stars? How will it be? How much more beautiful? The beauty cannot be imagined, because the difference will not be only of quantity, it will be of quality. It will be utterly different.
Love can at the most be only a glimpse of a ray, not the ray itself, but only a glimpse in the lake. A ray of the sun playing on the lake, and you see the glimpse. That glimpse is love.
When you find out the real ray, it becomes prayer. When you start moving through that ray, upwards, you start climbing on that ray and you start reaching towards the source of all light, then you are growing in spirituality. One day you are dissolved into that light. You yourself have become that light. That is the orgasm I talk about. That's ecstasy.
And Zen people say that when you know, you have to say, knowing well that it cannot be said. You have to sing it.
Zen Masters have been very creative. Either they were singers, dancers, or painters, or in some sort of art, calligraphy, pottery. Whatsoever they could do they did. That became the gesture of their expression. They were not inactive people. Deep down they were not doers, and on the surface they were not inactive at all. Deep down they were just instrumental to the divine. No doer, no idea of doing anything -- just being, but on the surface very creative. The world would have been far richer if every religion had developed such a school as Zen.
For example, Hindu monks have lived a very uncreative life. Jaina monks have lived a very uncreative life. Except Zen, even Buddhists have lived a very uncreative life. So has been the case with the Catholics.
Zen brings creativity. And remember, if you want to be one with the creator, you will have to learn some ways of creativity. The only way to be one with the creator is to be in some moment of creativity, when you are lost. The potter is lost in making his pottery; the potter is lost while working on the wheel. The painter is lost while painting. The dancer is lost; there is no dancer, only the dance remains. Those are the peak moments, where you touch God, where God touches you.
Now, the scholar, the so-called scholar, becomes wordy. He goes on learning more words, more words, more information, more scriptures. He has no silence. That is a very lopsided phenomenon. Then against the scholar there are a few saints, who keep quiet; they don't even say a single word. That too is moving to the other extreme. They become uncreative. Of course, they are silent, better than the scholar -- at least they will not throw their rubbish into Osho - The First Principle
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other people's heads, at least they are not committing any crime -- but in a higher sense they are also criminals because they are not benefiting existence. They are parasites. They are not making existence richer by their being here. They are not helping God in his dance, in his song.
Zen brings the highest synthesis. Don't be afraid of speaking, but don't go on speaking if you don't know. Don't be silent. Just being silent will not help.
It has to be understood because too many times this comes to your mind too: Why go on speaking? Why not keep quiet? But your silence will be YOUR silence. The words will go on moving, revolving inside you. You will become a madhouse inside. You may look silent from the outside; you will not be silent inside. How can you simply drop those words, those old habits of many lives? The mind will go on chattering, the mind will go on saying things, repeating things. The mind is like an automaton; even if you don't want to talk the mind goes on. If you don't talk to others it goes on talking to itself. It creates both the
parties: it talks from one side and answers from another side; it goes on playing the game. From the outside one can be easily silent, but from the inside?
And if you are silent from the inside, you will be surprised that your silence becomes so loaded with ecstasy that you have to sing. There is no other way. That you have to dance, that you have to share. When you have you have to share. If you have it at all you will have to share. If you don't have it you can keep quiet, but what is the point of keeping quiet if you don't have it?
There are two types of people: one who goes on talking without having it, and one who goes on keeping silent without having it. Both are in the same boat.
There is a third type of person, who has come to know it, who has really become silent and in the silence he has heard the soundless sound, in the silence God has delivered his message to him. God has spoken to him. He has had a dialogue with God himself. The silence has filled his heart with so much juice, with so much life, with life abundant, that he is bursting.
He has to say it. There is no way to get rid of it.
And his saying will have a totally different significance because words will not be mere words. If such a person sits silently, even his silence will be a sharing. If such a person keeps completely silent, you will see his silence is singing all around him. You will feel the vibe.
His silence is saying something. He is indicating from his silence too. If he speaks he speaks.
If he is silent, then too he speaks.
If you don't sing it, remember, you don't have it. If it does not overflow in a thousand and one gestures, then it is not there. You cannot hold it if it is there. And you cannot possess it if it is there; it is not your property. You cannot become the owner of it. You cannot hoard it, you cannot be miserly about it. If it is there at all, it drowns you utterly. It possesses you. You cannot possess it; it possesses you. And then it leads you into a thousand and one gestures. In a thousand and one streams you start flowing, and whatsoever you do becomes an expression.
I have heard a very beautiful legend. The legend is, there was a great Master in
India, the twenty-seventh successor of Gautam the Buddha; his name was Hanyatara. A king in south India requested him to come to his court. The king himself came, bowed down to Hanyatara, touched his feet, and said, "Please, come to my court, to bless us. And this has been my desire, to listen to some sutras of Gautam the Buddha by a man who is a Buddha himself, so I have been avoiding scholars, pundits, professors. I have been avoiding, I have been waiting, Osho - The First Principle
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because those sutras that Buddha uttered are so pregnant that only a man who has attained to that consciousness will be able to give expression to them."
Hanyatara came to the court with an attendant. The king was thrilled; it was his dream for his whole life one day to have a Buddha in his court, in his palace. The whole palace was decorated, the whole town was decorated; the whole capital was celebrating. It was a great day of celebration. But the king was puzzled, a little bewildered: Hanyatara sat silently, not saying a single word, and the attendant recited the sutra. Now, this was not the purpose at all. The king could have found better people to recite the sutra than the attendant. He was just an attendant who looked after Hanyatara, just used to do small errands, a very ordinary man, not even a great scholar. His grammar was faulty, his pronunciation was not exactly as it should be. He was an ordinary man.
Just out of respect, the king kept silent. When the sutra was finished, he touched the feet of Hanyatara and said, "Sir, enlighten me about this; otherwise I will remain puzzled. Why did not YOU recite the sutra?"
And Hanyatara said, "What, I did not recite the sutra? Then what else was I doing the whole time here? You fool!"
The king was even more puzzled, because he had kept quiet, he had not said a single word.
The king said, "Please, explain it to me. I don't understand. I am an ordinary, ignorant person.
I may not know the ways of the Buddhas."
And Hanyatara said, "I sat silently, breathing in, breathing out. That was my sutra. What else is there in life? Breathe in, breathe out. Be alert, aware. When I breathed in, I was aware; when I breathed out, I was aware. It was all awareness! What else is a sutra? Awareness. If you had listened to the rhythm of my breathing you would have understood. I have recited it!
Words are one way to recite it. Breathing silently, but with full awareness, is another way to recite it -- and far better a way. I have been very expressive today, as I have never been before.
Thinking that you have been waiting for so long, I thought, 'Why not give the real thing?' "
The king was thrilled, seeing the compassion. Now he felt there was a certain rhythm in his silence. Now he became aware, retrospectively of course, that this man was not silent in the ordinary way. He had seen silent people; sometimes he himself had sat in silence. This was a different silence. There was a song, certainly there was a song. There was a fragrance around this man. There was a vibe of a different quality; he was vibrating. Strange it was, but now he remembered, yes, it was there. And the way he was breathing was no ordinary way.
Not that he was doing anything special in the breathing: his breathing was pure, natural, like a small baby.
When you breathe, your breathing is never natural. If you are a little angry, your anger changes your breathing. If you are full of passion, lust, your lust changes your breathing. If you are greedy, your greed is reflected in your breathing. Continuously your mind mood infiltrates breathing and changes it. You can watch it. When you are angry, try not to disturb the breathing, and you will be completely unable to be angry. Just try not to change the breathing. Let the breathing remain as it was before you became angry, and then try to be angry. It will be impossible. The breathing has to change first. Through the breathing the body changes; the mind first affects the breathing. When you are in a moment of lust, watch, keep the breathing natural, and you will suddenly find the lust has disappeared, the moment came and passed.
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By and by you will be able to see each mood is reflected in your breathing, so your breathing is never natural, because there is some mood or other. The natural breathing means there is no mood: that means there is no mind -- neither anger nor greed nor lust nor jealousy nor love nor hate. No -- mood means no-mind. In that state of no-mind the breathing is natural. Then there is a song to it, then there is a totally different quality to it. Then it is pure life. Then the flame is without smoke.
Yes, the king remembered, there was something strange, something was happening. He had missed it. He started crying. He said, "I have missed it. Why didn't you tell me before?
Now I know there was something, and I had even felt it, but my consciousness is not so developed, so I could not understand what was happening.
"And I was too concerned about that foolish sutra. I was continuously thinking about why you were not reciting the sutra and why this attendant was reciting the sutra. I was so much concerned about the sutra that I missed.
"But I am grateful that you showed such compassion, that you showed your being so naked, so true, so authentic."
He presented a great diamond, the most valuable he had, to Hanyatara, and then he said to Hanyatara, "I have three sons. Sir, be kind enough. I will call them. Bless them."
Thinking that young people are young people, and the youngest was only seven, they may disturb the sutra reciting, he had not called them to participate before.
The three young princes came in.
Rather than blessing them, Hanyatara showed the diamond that the king had presented to him to the first prince, the eldest. He must have been somewhere near fifteen. The prince looked at the diamond and said, "A great diamond, of the finest water, purest water. Where could you get it? It is rare. It is no ordinary diamond."
Yes, his understanding about the diamond was perfectly true. It was a rare
diamond, of the most perfect water. Even Hanyatara had never seen such a thing.
Then he called the second prince, who must have been near about ten, and the second prince looked at the diamond, and he said, "Not only the finest, not only the best, it is certain that it belongs to my father because in this kingdom nobody can have such a diamond. It is rare. Sir, it does not belong to you, it cannot. To protect this diamond you will need a great army, otherwise you cannot have it. Just this attendant won't do."
Yes, his understanding was also very correct.
And then the third son was called. He was only seven. He looked at the diamond, looked at Hanyatara, and laughed and said, "What? Do you want to befool me?" He was only seven, and he said, "Do you want to befool me? You cannot! Because the real diamonds are never of the outside. And what are you trying to show me? You have the real diamond within YOU. I can see it! This is just a stone that you have in your hand. Throw it, sir!"
And it is said that Hanyatara hugged this small boy.
This boy's name was Bodhitara, and Hanyatara changed his name to Bodhidharma. He became the twenty-eighth successor of Buddha; he was the first patriarch of Zen in China, this small boy Bodhitara, whose name Hanyatara changed to Bodhidharma.
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Hanyatara said, "This boy has looked into the deepest reality anybody can look into.
DHARMA means 'the ultimate reality'. He has penetrated to the ultimate reality." He said to the king, "Even you could not see who I am. That's why you missed my sermon, my silent sermon. That's why you missed my silent song. I was singing here but you missed. But this boy, yes, I cannot befool him. This boy is going to be my successor."
And then he said to the king, "Sir, forgive me. I have not come for you and I have not come because you requested me to. I had to come because of this boy. I have been in search of this boy! This has been a promise from the past life, and this has been a decided gesture: in the past life I told this boy, 'I will seek you and find you and I will show you a diamond, and that will be the moment of your examination. If you can see my inner diamond and you are not befooled, you will be my successor.'"
The legend is of tremendous value. First, the silent sermon. Yes, sometimes a mystic can be silent -- but he is not silent! His silence is a very telling silence. He may not do anything, he may not even move his eyes, he may not move any of his limbs, but still his presence goes on doing a thousand and one things. Just to be in his presence, just to breathe with him in the same rhythm, and something is transferred: his song, his silence, his dance. You will never be the same again.
Truth is not hidden, from the very beginning. Truth is unhidden; only your eyes are closed.
Truth is being preached from every tree and from every bird and from every rock and from every star; just your eyes, your ears, your sensitivity is not there. You are deaf. Truth is not dumb; you are deaf. And truth is not hiding anywhere.
A man came to a Zen Master and asked, "Sir, where should I go to find the truth?" And the Zen Master said, "You just keep looking in front of your nose and go on, and you will find it.
It is just in front of your nose! Truth is just in front of you. In fact, wherever you look it is truth, you just need to know how to look for it. But you are looking for other things; that's why you go on missing.
That great king missed Hanyatara's sermon. It was a Zen sermon, the same as Buddha preached to the first Zen Master, Mahakashyap, sitting silently, holding a flower in his hand.
This second sermon, of Hanyatara to the king, was even more subtle. He was not even holding a flower in his hand. He was just breathing in and out, a natural breathing, an ordinary breathing, unaffected by the mind. And truth was there and the sutras were recited there through his breathing, but the king missed.
You may have come across a Buddha in your life -- or you may have come
across many Buddhas in your past lives -- but you have missed because you were not sensitive enough to feel that vibe. That vibe is subtle. You were not aware enough to move to that height, to feel the presence.
Be a little more alert. The sermon is preached constantly. From everywhere God is speaking to you. Even when everything is silent he is speaking through silence. His song is eternal.
Zen says, "Truth is not hidden, from the very beginning, so you are not to uncover truth, you are only to uncover your eyes." You just have a curtain on your eyes. Just pull your earplugs out. Your ears are plugged; hence you cannot hear.
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How to unplug the ears? How to open the eyes? How to drop barriers that don't allow you to become sensitive enough? What is the way? The way is IMMEDIACY. Be immediate, be in the moment.
Otherwise Buddhas can go on shouting from the housetops, and you will not hear -- or you will hear something which has not been said at all.
A few scenes. First scene:
Warden: "Can't you see the sign 'NO FISHING HERE'?"
Angler: "Yes, and I don't agree. There is good fishing here! Just look at this lot I have landed today. Whoever put that sign up must be crazy."
The second scene:
The Dean of Women was lecturing to a class on the subject of sex morality. "In moments of temptation, ask yourself just one question: Is an hour of pleasure worth a lifetime of shame?"
One of the girls raised her hand naively and asked, "How do you make it last one
hour?"
The third scene:
Ethel was shapely out shy, and visited a doctor for the first time. He ushered her into his private office and said, "Now, my dear, please get completely undressed."
Ethel blushed and replied, "Okay, Doctor, but you first." Fourth scene:
The following ad appeared in the Personal column of a London paper: "My husband and I have four sons. Has anyone any suggestions as to how we may have a daughter?" Letters poured in from all over the world. An American wrote, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again." A Buddhist from Thailand suggested that they should seek the help of Buddha.
A South African recommended a special diet. An Indian proposed yoga. A Frenchman merely wrote, "May I be of service?"
And the last and the fifth scene:
A lion tamer had quit without notice, and the circus manager needed someone to replace him for the next night's show. He put an ad in the local paper, and the next morning two Osho - The First Principle
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applicants showed up outside his office. One was a rather ordinary looking young man, and the other a ravishing redheaded beauty. Neither one of them looked very much like a lion trainer, but the manager was desperate. "All right," he said. "Here is a whip, a chair, and a gun. Let us see what you can do with the big Leo over there. We will let you have the first try, miss, but be careful. He is a mean one."
The ravishing redhead strode past the whip, the chair, and the gun, and empty-
handed, fearlessly entered the cage. Big Leo rose, snarling, then came charging across the cage towards her with a ferocious roar. When the lion was almost upon her the girl threw open her coat.
Underneath, she was stark naked. Leo skidded to a stop and crawled the rest of the way on his belly. He nuzzled the girl's feet with his nose, purred, and licked her trim ankles.
The astonished circus manager grinned happily and turned to the pop-eyed young man.
"Well, young fella," he asked, "think you can top that?"
"Yeah," panted the applicant. "Just get that stupid lion out of there."
Truth is all around, but your interpretations are YOUR interpretations. God is speaking all the time, but you hear not, or even if you hear, you hear something else. You hear according to you, your mind comes in, and hence you go on missing.
Unless the mind is dropped you will not be able to know what truth is. Truth cannot be discovered by mind; mind is the barrier. It is because of the mind that you have not been able to discover it. It is not a question of how to train the mind to know the truth. The more the mind is trained and becomes capable, the less is the possibility to know the truth. The more skilled a mind, the farther away you are from the truth.
Mind is the barrier. No-mind is the door.
How to attain to no-mind? The only way -- the ONLY way -- is to be in the present. The only way is not to think of the past, not to think of the future. And you cannot think of the present. That is the whole secret: you cannot think of the present; there is not space enough for thought to move. Thought needs room to move. Can you think anything right now? If you think it, either it will be of the past or of the future.
This moment of silence. If you think, "Yes, this is a moment of silence," it is already past.
Or you say, "How beautiful!" It is already past. Utter a word "beautiful," and it is
already past.
You cannot think. Thinking stops when you are in the present. So that is the only key, and it is a master key; it unlocks all the doors of being. Immediacy, that is the whole insistence of Zen.
If you go to a Zen Master and you ask something, it is unpredictable what he will do to you. He may hit you. Or he may not hit you; he may hit himself! Or he may say something absurd, totally irrelevant to what you have asked. Somebody asks, "How to attain Buddhahood?" and the Master says, "The cypress tree in the courtyard." Now what? How are they related? They are not, but the Master is indicating, "Please, drop all this nonsense. Look at this -- THIS -- cypress tree in the courtyard. What nonsense are you talking about? --
Buddha, and how to become a Buddha. You are talking about the past and the future. You have heard about Buddha in the past, so you have a greed, a desire. Now you want to become a Buddha in the future, so you have come to me. All nonsense." He simply gives something immediate; he says, "Look! The cypress tree in the courtyard." It is not relevant if you think in terms of the mind. If you think in terms of no-mind it is the only thing relevant.
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A man comes to a Zen Master and asks, "What is the way?" And the Master says, "Listen,"
and everything becomes silent, and just by the side of the Master's hut flows a fountain, and the water is making the sound, the murmur. The sound of the water, the sound of the running water. For a moment everything is silent, the seeker, the questioner, is also. The Master says,
"Listen. Hear. This is the way." The sound of the running water? That's all he has heard. And the Master says, "Hear! This is the way to become a Buddha, to attain to enlightenment." He is bringing the mind to an immediacy, to a state of immediacy.
What is he saying? He is not saying anything about the sound of the running water. In that moment, when suddenly the Master shocked the inquirer -- because he was asking about the way to attain to nirvana, and the Master says, "Listen", it is so out of context, it is so unrelated to his question, that for a moment, out of the shock of it, the sheer shock of it, everything becomes silent. And when the Master says, "Hear. This is the way." He is not saying anything about the running water or its sound. He is indicating the silent moment that has penetrated into the consciousness of the inquirer. He says, "Hear. This is the way."
If you become immediate you attain. If you live moment to moment you attain. Once a Western psychiatrist went to see a Zen
Master in Japan. "How do you deal with neurotics?" he asked. The Master replied, simply, "I trap them."
Trap them? The psychiatrist could not understand what he means by trapping them. How can you trap a neurotic? The neurotic will trap you!
"But how?" pressed the psychiatrist.
The Master replied, "I get them to where they cannot ask any more questions." Then they are trapped, if they cannot ask any more questions.
If the mind is allowed to ask questions, then the mind goes on and on, so the Zen Master brings you down to the immediate facticity of life. Sometimes he may hit you. By hitting, suddenly you are herenow. It is great compassion.
You ask, "Has God created the world?" and the Master hits you, sharply. For a moment you are puzzled, shocked. For a moment all thinking stops. The very shock of it, the unpredictableness of it. For a moment, certainly, certainly for a moment, everything stops.
And the Master says, "This, this is how God created the world." This is how God goes on creating the world. This moment of pure silence, this moment of no- mind, is the door to all solutions, to salvation, to liberation.
This is unique; sometimes a Master will do something which you had not expected at all.
And the Master can do that only if he is not following certain rules. He is not following any. If he simply repeats from old Masters, then disciples become acquainted with it. No, sometimes he will do something you cannot believe.
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There was a Zen Master who used to talk about God or Buddha, but whenever he would talk about God or Buddha or the ultimate reality he would raise his hand: one finger pointing towards the sky. This became a joke among his disciples. Whenever they would talk about such great things they would raise their fingers and point to God. A small young boy was the attendant of the Master; he used to bring his tea and things like that. He became a perfect master in showing his finger, and he was always there and the Master was always doing it to everybody, so he became very perfect; he could imitate it perfectly.
And the Master was aware of it. Sometimes he would be standing by the side at the back and the Master would raise his finger and he would also raise his finger and everybody would laugh -- and the Master was aware of what was happening.
One day the boy did that, and the Master called him in front of him, took a sharp knife, and cut off his finger. The boy's finger was cut off. The pain was sharp; the boy shrieked. And the Master said, "Stop! Now do it. Now do it! Whatsoever you have been doing for so long --
now do it without the finger!"
And when the Master shouted, "Stop!" all pain disappeared in that moment, there was silence. And the small young boy showed the finger which was not there anymore, blood was flowing. But it is said in that moment he became enlightened.
Now, it is possible. That very sharpness of it.
Another story. In a Zen Master's ashram there were five hundred monks, and there were two wings. Just in the middle was the Master's hut; on one side was one wing, on the other side the other wing. There was a beautiful cat, and there was a great debate between these two sides as to whom it belonged. It almost became a quarrel, and things went to such a state that both the wings were ready to kill each other for the cat. To whom does it belong? The left wing was saying, "It belongs to us"; and the right wing was saying. "It belongs to us." It was a really beautiful cat.
The Master heard it. He called the whole ashram, and the cat was brought, and he said,
"Now, give me a true answer, any one of you, and the cat will belong to him. Stand up and show your understanding of reality, any one of you. And if you don't show within seconds, I will cut the cat in two, and one part will go to the left side and one part will go to the right side."
They were shocked. They could not find out how to respond to the Master's demand. What to do so that the cat can be saved? What to do? They started thinking. In their very thinking they missed the moment because when you think, you cannot be immediate and you cannot show your understanding of reality. You cannot show the understanding of immediacy. Not a single monk out of those five hundred could show.
For seconds the Master waited, then took a sword, cut the cat in two; half the cat was given to each wing, and he disposed of it. He said, "Now go." They were all sorry.
By the evening, one monk, who had gone outside, came back. When he came in to see the Master, he was just taking his shoes off, and the Master said, "Where have you been? Were you not there when I cut the cat in two? I had told the other monks that if they can show some understanding of reality the cat can be saved. Where have you been?"
The young man, who had taken off one shoe and was going to take off the other shoe, took that shoe, put it on his head, walked back.
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And the Master called him, "Come, my son. Had you been here the cat would be alive still.
The cat could have been saved if you were here."
That immediacy. Not that this is the answer, but the immediacy. That was the moment. He allowed it to happen. It was not done with the mind, with thinking. It was done without any thinking, it was done without any mind. He simply said that it is as foolish as me having my shoe on my head to cut the cat. It is as foolish. But it was not an answer from the mind. It was an immediate response. And the Master said, "My boy, if you had been here, the cat would have been alive. But those fools could not show any understanding."
Now this small, beautiful anecdote:
A PUZZLED MONK ONCE SAID TO FUKETSU, "YOU SAY TRUTH CAN BE
EXPRESSED WITHOUT SPEAKING, AND WITHOUT KEEPING SILENT. HOW CAN
THIS BE?"
FUKETSU ANSWERED, "IN SOUTHERN CHINA, IN THE SPRING, WHEN I WAS
ONLY A LAD, AH! HOW THE BIRDS SANG AMONG THE BLOSSOMS. "
A very simple anecdote, but with great significance. Meditate over it. A PUZZLED MONK ONCE SAID TO FUKETSU ...
From where do you become puzzled? From the mind. The mind is always dividing things, and then cannot figure it out. Once you divide, there is conflict and confusion. How can it be?
Once you divide -- this is good, this is bad -- then the question arises: "Why has God created a world where so much evil exists?" You divide, that this is good
and this is bad, and once you divide, then the problem arises: "Why has God created such a world where so much evil exists, so much bad?"
Now, you call God "God" because you think he is good. God is both and neither. Division is yours. It is your problem; it is not God's problem. You say, "Why do so many people die?
Why has God created a world where death happens?" You don't understand at all. First you divide life in two parts, life and death. It is undivided. For God death is as beautiful as birth; they are both parts of the same phenomenon. For the whole there is no distinction between birth and death. Birth is a death, and death is a birth. They both are the same: two polarities, two which can exist only in togetherness. Life cannot exist without death, and neither can death exist without life.
Have you ever observed the fact? All that you love in life is possible only because of death. You love a woman because today she is beautiful, tomorrow she may not be. Old age.
Today she is here, tomorrow she may not be there. Death is possible. You love the woman. If you knew that the beauty is eternal, that always and always the woman will be beautiful and that nobody is going to die, will there be joy in life? It will be sheer boredom. And if it was impossible even to commit suicide, you cannot conceive of a more miserable life -- just people living and living and doing the same thing again and again and again and nothing ever Osho - The First Principle
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changes and everything is eternal, nobody ever dies. Just think if all the people that have lived on the earth were living now -- there will not be any space even to stand -- and everybody was eternal ... Life will lose all beauty. The beauty is in its momentariness.
That's why I go on insisting: Celebrate the temporal. By celebrating it you will know that this is the way the eternal functions. The temporal is a function of the eternal.
Celebrate the temporal. Celebrate the momentary. In the momentary is the eternal, hiding.
Don't throw it away. If you throw the momentary you are throwing the baby with the bathwater. The eternal is hidden there. The eternal comes in the momentary, penetrates the moment.
A PUZZLED MONK ONCE SAID TO FUKETSU ...
What was his bewilderment? What was his confusion? Why was he so puzzled? The puzzle was there because he says the Master has said ... "YOU SAY TRUTH CAN BE
EXPRESSED WITHOUT SPEAKING, AND WITHOUT KEEPING SILENT. "
Now, this is impossible; this is very contradictory. If you say, "Truth can be expressed by words," okay. If you say, "Truth cannot be expressed by words," then it naturally means,
"Truth can be expressed by silence." But the Master says, "Truth cannot be expressed by words, and truth cannot be expressed by silence." And the Master says, "Truth can be expressed by words too, and it can be expressed by silence too." Now, it is confusing. Now, it is illogical, it is absurd.
How can this be that truth can be expressed without speaking and without keeping silent?
One can do only one; either one can speak it or one can keep silent. You deny both? Then what is the possibility?
FUKETSU ANSWERED, "IN SOUTHERN CHINA, IN THE SPRING, WHEN I WAS
ONLY A LAD, AH! HOW THE BIRDS SANG AMONG THE BLOSSOMS."
Now, this is very irrelevant. What the disciple is asking and what the Master is saying is not related at all, but it is related in a nonmind way. Meditate over it, how it is related in a nonmind way.
He has said many things. First, he says "IN THE SPRING'.' First, he says,
"When the spring came, HOW THE BIRDS SANG AMONG THE BLOSSOMS." They were expressing truth, but they were silent when the spring was not there; and when the spring came they sang, they burst forth into celebration. So the first thing is "when the spring is there". What does he mean? He means when you have the spring in your heart, when the light has dawned upon you, when the right maturity has happened, when the right climate has happened, when your fruit is ripe, when the spring has come -- that is what satori is, the spring of the inner heart --
when the SAMADHI has come, then you need not bother: the birds don't go to schools to learn how to sing. The spring has come. They don't seek teachers. They don't go in to anybody, they don't ask the elders, "How to sing? The spring has come." When the spring comes the spring starts singing in them.
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What the Master means is that when SAMADHI is there, you will know. How to say it without saying it and without keeping silent -- you will know it. It is not a question.
Many people go on asking foolish questions. The question was foolish. People come to me, they say, "If we become enlightened, what will happen to our family?" You please first become enlightened. "If we become enlightened what will become of our business?" You first become enlightened. Right now you are asking it as if it will create some problem. It has never created any problem. Whenever somebody becomes enlightened, he knows what to do. If an enlightened person does not know what to do, then who will know?
If you come to me and you ask me, "When truth has happened, how are we going to express it?" ... When it happens when the spring comes -- the birds know how to sing. In fact, there is no "how" to it. The very presence of the spring, and the birds are thrilled. Something goes berserk in their hearts. Something simply starts pulsating their being, something simply starts singing in their being. It is not that they sing. It is spring that sings in them. It is satori, it is SAMADHI, that is expressed by you. It is not a question of YOU expressing it.
That's why the Master says, "It cannot be expressed through words, and it cannot be expressed through silence." The very question that can be expressed through words is foolish, the very question that can be expressed through silence is foolish, because nobody knows --
when the spring comes the cuckoo will sing in its own way, and the parrots will fly in their own way, and there will be a thousand and one songs, different, unique.
The cuckoo cannot screech the way parrots do, and the parrots cannot imitate the cuckoos.
And there is no need. The cuckoo is beautiful, so is the parrot.
When satori has happened, nobody knows. Meera dances; Buddha never danced. The cuckoo and the parrot ...
Listen ...
Chaitanya sang, took his drum and danced all over Bengal. Mahavir remained in silence, never spoke a single word. Now, you will be puzzled. Then how do the Jaina sutras exist?
How? It is a beautiful story.
Jainas say Mahavir never spoke, but those who were able to hear him, they heard, and they have collected the sayings. Listen again; you may have missed: Jainas say Mahavir never spoke, but those who could hear, they heard. In his silent presence they heard what he was saying, and they collected the sayings. The Jaina sutras start always, "We have heard." They don't start, "Mahavir said," no. The disciples say, "We have heard. That's true, on our part, we have heard. We don't know whether he has said it or not, but in a certain moment we heard it.
A voiceless voice, a soundless sound."
Yes, a cuckoo is a cuckoo, a parrot is a parrot, and both are needed. If the world is only for cuckoos it will be ugly. Too many cuckoos, it will not be good. Existence needs variety, and existence is rich because of variety. Yes, it is good sometimes a Mahavir keeps silent, and it is good sometimes a Meera goes mad, dancing. It is good to have a Christ and a Krishna. It is good to have a
Zarathustra and a Mohammed and a Lao Tzu. All are so different and so unique, and yet the message is the same.
Those who have eyes to see, they will see the same truth being expressed in millions of forms. And those who have ears to hear, they will hear the same song, sung in so many different languages.
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It is the same rose; whether you call it "rose" or GULAB does not make any difference. In India we call it GULAB, in the West you call it "rose". Sometimes we can even quarrel and argue "What is it -- GULAB or rose?"
Zen Masters say, "Don't quarrel, please. Bring a GULAB or a rose, whatsoever you call it.
Bring it here. Make it immediate, and then look." And then the quarrel ceases because when somebody brings a rose you will see -- and he call it GULAB -- you will understand; you will say, "Okay, that's okay. Call it whatsoever you want to call it. It is the same thing I have been calling rose and you call GULAB, and we have been quarreling."
Scholars quarrel, argue. Masters look at the thing called rose or GULAB, or there can be a thousand names -- there are so many languages, each language has a different name for it.
Each person who attains to SAMADHI gives expression in his own way. But the question is: Has the spring come?
So the Master says, "IN SOUTHERN CHINA, IN THE SPRING, WHEN I WAS ONLY
A LAD, AH! HOW THE BIRDS SANG AMONG THE BLOSSOMS." The
second thing he says, "When I was only a boy when my eyes were innocent, when I was young and fresh and virgin, when I was not corrupted by the society, when I was uncorrupted, when my freshness had not gathered any dust of
knowledge, experience -- THEN. "
"... IN THE SPRING, WHEN I WAS ONLY A LAD, AH! HOW THE BIRDS SANG
AMONG THE BLOSSOMS." There were a great many flowers and a great many birds, and singing, the same song, the same spring, the same youth, the same life juice. What he is saying is, "Please, let the spring come first, and don't be worried about how it can be said neither in words nor in silence."
It can be said both in words and in silence. In fact, whenever it is said, there is word and silence together. But the word is not a mere word; that's why they say it cannot be said through words. And the silence is not a dead silence, it is not the silence of the cemetery; that's why the Master says it cannot be said through silence, either. The word is not of the pundit, and the silence is not of the dead man; but there is a great marriage between word and silence.
The word speaks through silence, the silence speaks through the word; and when silence and word meet there is song. Then there is celebration.
When the spring has come there is celebration. When the SAMADHI has happened there is celebration. In that celebration it is expressed, and it is expressed abundantly. In that celebration, in that blossoming, it is expressed. But it is expressed only for those who can understand, who can see, who can feel, who can love.
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The Profound and the Trivial
18 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall Question
MY EXPERIENCE OF ME IS THE MOST PROFOUND EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE.
IT IS ALSO THE MOST TRIVIAL. PLEASE CLARIFY.
The question is from Dhruva, and the question is really significant. The question has arisen out of an insight, almost a mini-satori.
That's how life is, profound and trivial at the same time, simultaneously. There is no contradiction, Dhruva, in the profundity of life and its trivialness. You have been taught that the sacred is far away and it is never the profane. You have been taught a distinction between the profane and the sacred, between the profound and the trivial. In fact, there is no distinction. The trivial is the profound, the ordinary is the extraordinary, and the temporal is the eternal.
So this is a great insight. Don't lose sight of it. More possibility is there that you will lose it, because it will go against the grain. Your whole training has been such that you are always dividing: into good and bad, into the pure and the impure, the perfect and the imperfect, into virtue and sin, the holy and the unholy. You have always been making these distinctions, and because of distinctions you have missed the reality of that which is.
This cuckoo singing there and Christ speaking to you are not different. A leaf falling from the tree and a word falling from the lips of Buddha are not different. The very dust is divine.
The distinction is man-made, it is a mind trick.
And because of these distinctions, these categories, we are never together, we cannot be together. How can you be together if you make such an unbridgeable gap between the profound and the trivial? Then you will find your whole life is trivial. Eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, going to the office or to the farm -- all is trivia.
Then where will you find the profound? In the church, in the temple, sometimes praying and meditating, sometimes listening to me? Then the profound will not be much in your life, and the profound will be, in a way, false. It will not permeate your whole life. It will not be there always with you. It will not surround you like a climate. Sometimes you will have to make an effort to have that quality of profundity, and again and again you will lose it. And you will
become divided, schizophrenic; you will become two, split, and you will start condemning yourself.
Whenever you will see something trivial you will condemn yourself, that "I am just trivial, ordinary." And whenever you will see something profound you will start feeling holier than thou; you will start feeling very egoistic. Both are dangerous.
To feel that you are trivial is a condemnation. It creates an inferiority complex. It pulls you down into sadness. It forces you to remain depressed. And, naturally, you cannot love Osho - The First Principle
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yourself: you are so trivial. You are so ordinary, how can you love yourself? You fall too short from the ideal of perfection. So a great condemnation arises in your being, and the moment you condemn yourself you are in hell. Then nobody can take you out of it. Even if somebody comes and says you are beautiful, you will not trust him. You will think he is trying to cheat you, bribe you. He is trying to exploit you. How can you be beautiful? You know yourself better than he knows you. You are not beautiful; you are ugly. You are the ugliest person in the world.
Because of this condemnation, love will not happen. How can you love anybody if you are feeling so condemned in yourself? And how can you allow somebody to love you if you are feeling so condemned? Love is impossible. When you live in self-condemnation you live in hell. Hell is not somewhere else: it is in your attitude; it is a condemning attitude.
When you accept yourself and you enjoy yourself, you are in heaven. Heaven is also an attitude.
And you can move from heaven and hell any moment you decide! And you go on moving; you swing between heaven and hell. Just understand that it is your creation.
So if you feel condemned because of your trivia, you will be in hell. And then sometimes you will start feeling very holy because you have done something great. You have saved a life
-- somebody was drowning in the ocean and you saved him, and a child was caught in a house on fire and you jumped in and you risked your life, you have done something great -- then you will feel very egoistic. Ego is again hell.
To feel superior is to be in hell, to feel inferior is to be in hell. To drop all superiority, inferiority, and just to be is to be in heaven.
The idea of condemnation is also ego-oriented. People have impossible ideals. Just the other night Vishnu came; he writes again and again that "I am not perfect. What should I do?"
that "I am imperfect," that "Whatsoever I do is imperfect." He is torturing himself because he is imperfect. But who is not imperfect? The very idea that "I should be perfect," is very egoistic. The very effort is egoistic. Nobody is perfect.
In fact, perfection cannot exist, by its very nature. To be perfect means to be dead. Then there will be no evolution, when you are perfect. Then how can you survive? For what? If God is perfect then God is dead. If God is imperfect only then is he alive and can be alive.
I preach the imperfect God, and I preach the imperfect existence, and I preach the beauty of imperfection and the life of imperfection. The very idea that "I have to be perfect," that "No flaw should be there in my life" is egoistic. And certainly you will find a thousand and one flaws.
So on one hand you are on an ego trip, which creates trouble, makes you miserable, because you are not perfect; and on the other hand the same trip creates condemnation. You want to be superior and you know that you are inferior: both are two aspects of the same coin.
You remain in hell.
Enjoy your imperfection. Enjoy the way you are.
And drop all distinctions between the holy and the unholy, sin and virtue, good and bad, God and devil. Destroy all those distinctions. Those are the traps you are caught in. Those are the traps which don't allow you to live, don't allow you freedom. You cannot dance: one foot Osho - The First Principle
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is encaged in inferiority, another foot is encaged in superiority. You are chained. How can you dance? Drop all these chains.
That's what Zen people say: "A hair's distinction, and heaven and hell are set apart." That's what Tilopa says. A little distinction, a hair's distinction, and hell and heaven are set apart, and you are caught in the duality. No distinction, and you are free. No distinction, is freedom.
The profundity of the trivial and the trivialness of the profound, that's what I teach.
Eating is trivial if you look from the outside. If you look from the inside it is profound, it is a miracle -- that you can eat bread and the bread is turned into blood, that it becomes your flesh, that it becomes your bones, that it even becomes your marrow. You eat bread, and the bread becomes your thoughts, dreams. It is a miracle. It is the profoundest thing that is happening. When you are eating, it is no ordinary thing. God is at work. It is creative. While chewing bread you are creating life, unknowingly, unconsciously. You are making a thousand and one things possible. Tomorrow you may paint: and that bread that you had eaten has become painting. Tomorrow you may sing, or right now you may do something which would not be possible if the bread was not there.
The Christian prayer is beautiful; it says, "God, give us our daily bread." Looks very trivial! What does Jesus mean when he says, "Pray every day, 'Give us our daily bread'"?
Couldn't he think of anything more profound? Bread? You just change the word "bread" and say every day in your prayer, "Lord, give us our daily tea," and you will see how foolish it looks. But the bread or tea or coffee -- or Coca-Cola! ... yes, Coca-Cola too is divine.
Everything is divine -- because how can it be otherwise?
The prayer says, "Give us our daily bread." It is raising the trivial to the profound. It is a great statement. The Hindus have always been saying, "ANNAM BRAHMA" -- "Food is God." Raising the trivial to the profound.
Looking into the trivial so deeply that it changes into the profound.
You are taking a shower. It is trivia, everyday business, but it can become profound. Just look deep into it. Just standing under the shower, and the water goes on flowing, and the body feels fresh and young and alive, and the water is a blessing. Because we are made out of water. A man is almost eighty percent water, and the first glimpse of life happened in the sea.
The first thing that existed was the fish, and even now, in the mother's womb, the child floats in seawater, with almost the same ingredients, the same saltiness. That's why when a woman is pregnant she starts eating more salt; she needs more salt because the child needs seawater around him. The child is still a fish in the beginning, primary stage. Water is life, and when you are taking a shower life is showering on you -- eighty percent of life is showering on you, the most necessary element for life. No life is possible without water. These trees will not be there if the water is not, and these birds won't sing, and these animals won't be there and these men will not be there. All life will disappear if water disappears.
There is a profound experience when you are touched by water. You can make it so profound! It depends on you, how you go into it. It can become a meditation, a prayer. You can feel grateful, that God is great, that water is still available.
To breathe is so trivial, who bothers about it? But breath is your life. All languages have words for "life" which really mean "breath". Sanskrit has PRANA for "life"; it means
"breath". The word "soul" means "breath"; the word "psyche" means "breath". Osho - The First Principle
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And the Bible says God made man and breathed life into him. Life started by breathing into man; otherwise man was just dust. "Adam" means "dust," "earth". God made Adam out of mud. "Adam" is the Hebrew word for "earth". Then he breathed life into him. And that's how life happens always. A child is born and the first thing we wait expectantly for is that he should cry. Why? Because only
through crying will he start breathing. For two, three seconds even the doctor cannot breathe, the nurse cannot breathe. Whether the child is going to breathe or not, who knows? He may not breathe. If he is not going to breathe then there will be no life.
If he breathes there will be life. Still the same happens as it happens with Adam: God breathes in the child, in each child.
God is the invisible force, the life energy that surrounds you. It enters through breath in you, and the day you die you will die through exhalation. You start life with inhalation, you stop life with exhalation; then you will not breathe anymore. Again Adam is adam, again dust is dust, dust unto dust.
Breath is life, but have you looked into it? Standing under the sun in the morning, breathe.
It is God you breathe in. And then it becomes profound. It is your attitude.
The trivial and the profound are not two separate things. They are one, they are together, they are two aspects of one energy. Your life is trivia if you don't look deep. If you start looking deep your life is profound.
So Dhruva, it is a great insight. You say, "My experience of me is the most profound experience of my life. It is also the most trivial. Please clarify." Don't get confused. There is nothing to clarify. It is how life is: the trivial is the profound.
The question has arisen because Dhruva must have been thinking these are contradictions, the trivial and the profound. No, they are not contradictory; they are complementary. The trivial hides the profound. The trivial functions like a cover, like a crust; it protects the profound. It is almost like a seed. The seed is protecting the possibility of the tree. That possibility is very soft; the seed is hard. The hard seed, the hard crust of the seed, is protecting the softest possibility, of flowers, of a big tree. And the seed will protect it till the seed finds the right soil. Then the seed disappears, then the sheath disappears, then the hard crust dissolves into the earth and the soft life arises.
The profound is hidden in the trivial, so look deep. Wherever there is the trivial there is the profound. Don't escape from the trivial; otherwise you will be escaping from the profound.
And don't seek the profound AGAINST the trivial; otherwise you will never find it.
Question
A PLAY QUESTION: IF YOU WERE TO COME HERE NOW TO THIS ASHRAM AS
A YOUNG UNENLIGHTENED MAN, HOW WOULD YOU RESPOND? WOULD YOU
BECOME PART OF THE ASHRAM? WHAT WORK WOULD YOU DO? WHERE
WOULD YOU SIT?
The question is from Somendra. A beautiful question.
First, he asks, "If you were to come here now to this ashram as a young unenlightened man, how would you respond?
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Even if I was unenlightened I would not be so unenlightened to come to this ashram. That much is certain.
Mulla Nasrudin's wife was dying, and of course he was consoling her in every way, and the wife opened her eyes and said, "It seems almost certain that this night will be my last. I will not be able to see the sunrise again. Mulla, how will you react to my death?"
The Mulla said, "How will I react to your death? I will go mad!"
Even in that serious moment the wife started laughing: she said, "You cunning fellow.
You will not go mad. I know within a week you will be remarried."
And Mulla said, "No. I will go mad -- but I will not go THAT mad." So even if I was unenlightened I would not be THAT unenlightened. Second thing, you say, "Would you become part of the ashram?"
Even now I am not part of the ashram. I cannot be part of any institution or any organization, even my own. And if I had come as an unenlightened man, naturally, the ashram will not be mine, will be somebody else's. I cannot be a part even of my own organization, so how can I be a part of anybody else's organization? Impossible.
And then you ask, "What work would you do?"
I have never done any work. I am the laziest man in the world you can find. And the last, you ask, "Where would you sit?"
I would escape immediately! I would see some organization, some ashram and I would run! You are asking, "Where will you sit?" I will not sit at all.
Question
USUALLY I AM "THIS WAY" OR "THAT WAY". BUT FOR SOME TIME I HAVE
EXPERIENCED ALL KINDS OF CONTRADICTIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. I SEE
WOMEN AS OBJECTS OF WORSHIP, AND AT THE SAME TIME I LUST AFTER
THEM. I AM CONTENT TO LET LIFE FLOW, AND I AM AFRAID OF THE FUTURE. I CRAVE TO BE ALONE, AND I CRAVE TO BE ALWAYS WITH PEOPLE. I FEEL
BIZARRE BECAUSE THESE CONTRADICTIONS ALL SEEM EQUALLY REAL AND
TRUE. IS THERE ANYTHING TO BE UNDERSTOOD OR DONE ABOUT
THIS?
Whenever you come across a contradiction, watch very carefully. There is bound to be something of great significance. Never avoid contradictions, because life is contradictory. Life exists through the tension of contradiction. So whenever you come across a contradiction you are very close to the source of life. Let that be always remembered.
The ordinary reaction is whenever you come across a contradiction you start trying to solve it, start finding explanations for it, or start dropping it into the unconscious so you need not worry about it. You start doing something about it immediately the moment you feel some contradiction because you have been taught to live noncontradictorily. You have been taught a Osho - The First Principle
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very dangerous thing. Nobody can live noncontradictorily. If you want to live you have to live through contradiction, AS contradiction.
You have been taught to be consistent; that's why you have become false. This is the whole trick. How does such great hypocrisy exist in the world? Why? Why has the whole world turned out to be hypocritical? There is a trick to it, a great trick; a great technology is behind it. The technology is: teach people to be consistent, and they will become hypocrites.
Because life exists through contradiction.
Life is inconsistent. One moment this, another moment that; life is that way. One moment you are feeling loving, another moment you hate the same person; life is like that. Now, you have been taught if you love, then love always. What happens? You cannot love always, so only one thing is possible: when hate comes you hide the hate, you repress the hate, and you go on pretending love. This is what hypocrisy is. When you don't love you pretend.
You are full of hate for your wife, but you come home and you hug her and you kiss her and you inquire, "How are you, honey?" and all that. And deep down you are hating her and you want to kill her. In fact, the whole day you have been
fantasizing how to kill this woman.
But you have been taught to be consistent. So, once, you had fallen in love, and you have said things in those love moments and you have promised that "I will love you forever and ever" --
now you have to be consistent.
What will you do with your hate that is bound to arise? Each love object is bound to be the hate object too. If you want not to hate, then you will have to stop loving. If you really want not to hate anybody, then you will have to stop loving, but you cannot love consistently. The inconsistency will come up again and again.
It is as if somebody has told you, "If you see the day, don't see the night. That is inconsistent." So what will you do? In the day you keep your eyes open, in the night you keep your eyes closed and believe that it is day. But the night comes; it doesn't follow your ideas. It has to come. The night follows the day; the day follows the night.
You have been taught, "Be consistent." Your so-called character is nothing but an effort to be consistent.
A real man cannot have any character. A real man is bound to be characterless because to have a character means to have consistency. To be characterless means to be free.
I said something yesterday. Now, if I have a character, I will try to be consistent with my past; whatsoever I said yesterday, I have to say the same thing today. But then I have to repeat my past. I cannot live in the moment and I cannot live in the present.
In fact, a consistent man is one who goes on changing his past into his future, who goes on putting his past as his future, ahead of himself. That is the man of character, consistent man.
An inconsistent man is one who never allows the past to become his future, who remains free for the future, who has no promises to keep, who has no commitment with the past. Whenever it was, he lived it totally; gone, it is gone.
A real man will love you and will hate you too. And sometimes he will say, "I will love you always"; and sometimes he will say, "I cannot love you again. Impossible." Sometimes he will be in a deep honeymoon with you and sometimes in a deep divorce, and both things will go like day and night. A real marriage is a continuous honeymoon and divorce, and honeymoon and divorce. Mini honeymoons, mini divorces; big honeymoons, big divorces. It continues like day and night.
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So whenever you come across a contradiction, be watchful, be very alert. You are very close to life. And when you are consistent you are just false, a plastic thing, you are not real.
I don't teach consistency. I teach the freedom of being inconsistent. I teach the freedom of being contradictory. That's my whole approach towards life.
Of course, you are afraid of being contradictory because then you will not know who you are. With character there is something, something very secure: you know who you are. You have a label: a good man, a bad man, a saint, a sinner. You can believe in your identity when you are consistent -- that you are a good husband, a good Christian, a churchgoer, and this and that. With the inconsistency your identity disappears; you don't know who you are. You become an opening, you are no more closed, you have an open future. You don't know what you are going to do the next moment; only the next moment will tell. To live in that insecurity needs courage.
Sannyas is what I propose. Sannyas means to remain in insecurity; sannyas means not to allow your past to influence your future, not to allow your past to project itself into the future.
Let the dead bury the dead. The past is gone, gone. Don't cling to it, and don't help it to cling to you.
The moment something has passed it has passed. Be completely clean of it and be free and fresh again; then you will be real, authentically real, and there will be
joy, and there will be celebration and song. I am not saying you will not ever be sad, no. You will be sad. The false man is never sad -- because he is never happy. The false man just remains in the middle, never happy, never sad. He is simply so-so, lukewarm; he is never too cold and never too hot. He is just "okay". He somehow manages. He has a comfortable life, but no real life.
I am not saying that the real man will always be happy. I am saying the real man will always be real. When he is sad he will be really sad. He will sing a song -- of sadness. He will accept his sadness as part of life, as part of growth. He will not reject it. If he feels like crying he will cry; he will not say, "What am I doing? This is not good. Only women cry, and I am a man." He will not say that. He will say, "If my eyes want to cry and the tears are rolling down, good. I have to be real. I am only whatsoever I am." He will cry. His tears will be true.
Your smiles are false, your tears are false. You manage to smile, and you manage to cry too. So you live an empty life. The real man's life will be full, sometimes full of joy and sometimes full of sadness.
And the real man one day becomes enlightened. The unreal man never becomes enlightened. When the real man becomes enlightened, then there is no joy and no sadness.
Then his being is just a witness. Joy comes: he watches it. Sadness comes: he watches it.
Now, these are the three stages. The false man: his joy is just a show, a mask, his sadness too; he pretends. The real man, the second stage: he is natural, spontaneous; his joy is true, his sadness is true. You can trust him. When he is crying, his whole heart is crying; and when he smiles, his whole heart is smiling. And the second stage is a must to attain to the third, the enlightened man. The enlightened man is neither sad nor happy. He has attained to the witnessing soul; he simply watches. He knows the sadness has come, the happiness has come, but these are like climates that come and go and change, and he remains centered.
The false man cannot jump to the enlightened state; hence I teach the real man, but the real man is not the goal.
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That's why my work goes beyond the Encounter ideology, Gestalt ideology. The Gestalt ideology or the Encounter ideology stops at the real man. Good. Better than the unreal. But not enough. Something has yet to happen. I use Encounter groups, Gestalt groups, and all the therapies that have become available in the West. They are perfectly beautiful; they bring you from the first, false state to the authentic, real state. But my work goes beyond them. But I can go beyond only if you have gone through the second stage. From the first there is no way, from the false there is no way, to enlightenment; only from the real is there a way.
You will have to go through the ecstasy of the real and the agony of the real. When you have lived deeply all the realities of life, the witness will arise. It arises naturally, out of being real.
So you say, "Usually I am 'this way' or 'that way'." That is not a good way. You get fixed with one thing, this way or that. Become more fluid, remain more fluid, because life is not solid; it is fluid, it is flow. And that's what is happening and is confusing you.
"But for some time I have experienced all kinds of contradictions, simultaneously." Good.
You are blessed. This confusion is the beginning of a great journey, a great pilgrimage. If you become afraid you will go back to the false.
The false is secure. Let me remind you again and again: the false is comfortable. A good way to die is the false, but not a good way to live. Even your death will be false, because how can the death be real? When you have not lived really, how can you die really?
So many people die, but rarely does a real death happen. When a Buddha dies it is a real death, or when Lin Chi dies it is a real death. There are very few deaths which are real, because there are very few lives which are real. You only pretend to live, and then one day you pretend to die.
I have heard, a man met an old friend on the road, and the old friend was a very, very fanatical Christian Scientist. The old friend asked this man, "How is your father now?" and the man said, "He is very ill." The Christian Scientist, of course, to be consistent with his philosophy, said, "He is not ill. He only thinks
he is ill."
That is the Christian Scientists' ideology, that you only think that you are ill, that's why you are ill. You are not really ill. He said, "He only thinks he is ill. He is not really ill."
After eight days, these two men met again, and the Christian Scientist asked again, "How is your father now?"
And the young man hesitated a little, and then he said, "Now he thinks he is dead." -- to be consistent with this old man's ideology.
The father has died, but this is a reality.
You go on living in a fantasy world. Your life is nothing but your thinking, a pseudo thing; and so is your death. Your illness, your health, your happiness, your sadness are all so bogus that how can you die a real death? A real death has to be earned. One has to become worthy of real death. And one becomes worthy only by living truly.
Now you are very close to a great source of light. That's why you are feeling all sorts of contradictions simultaneously. That means your solidity is melting. Your hate and love are not categorized as two anymore. They are not put into boxes separately anymore; they are merging with each other. The profound and the trivial are coming together, and you are confused because now you cannot label what is what.
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"I have experienced all kinds of contradictions, simultaneously. I see women as objects of worship, and at the same time I lust after them." That's what has happened down the ages.
There are two things man has done with woman: either he has worshiped woman as a goddess or he has condemned woman as a witch. Either he has exploited the woman for his lust or he has touched her feet and said, "You are divine. Divine
mother." Either the woman has been a prostitute or a divine mother. Man has not accepted woman just as human.
And woman is human, as human as you are. She is neither a divine mother nor is she a prostitute, but that's how the mind goes on. The mind makes things different, separate, puts them in categories. You have killed the real woman, because the real woman is both, the prostitute and the divine mother, together, simultaneously. If you fall in love with a prostitute you will find a divine mother. Even a prostitute will turn into a divine mother if you are in love with her; you will not find the prostitute. And fall in love with a divine mother and you will find the prostitute too.
What I am saying is that life is not so small as to be put into boxes -- that this is a prostitute and this is a divine mother. Life is vast, so big. It contains contradictions. And that is the beauty of life and that is the richness of life.
Man has been changing between these polarities. Sometimes he calls the woman the divine mother. That too is inhuman, because then you put the woman on a pedestal and you don't allow her to be human. Watch. When you force a woman to be a divine mother, what are you doing? You are not allowing her to be human. And she will pretend that she is a divine mother, so if you want to make love to her she will be reluctantly ready. She will say no, and she will mean yes. She has to say no; she is the divine mother.
A good woman has to be a dead woman. Even while you are making love, she will lie down there like a corpse. A slight movement, and you will become afraid: so are you wrong, she is not so good, not so virtuous? If she starts enjoying your lovemaking, you will think that she is a bad woman. Only bad women enjoy lovemaking, not good women. Good women?
They don't think of sex at all.
Look at the trick. You put the woman so high; then you don't allow her to be human. You have made her "superhuman". That is a way to make her inhuman. Or you force her to be a prostitute; that is again a way, to put her below the human, to make her again inhuman. Then you go to the prostitute, you give her the money, you make love to her -- with no responsibility, with no love. It is simple, pure lust, but you know that that woman is a bad woman. How can you love her? You feel good, there is no problem. You can lust after this woman and
you can use her as a thing. She is just a prostitute, not a human being; you don't relate to her. You just go and do things to her, pay the price, and you are finished. Next day in the marketplace, you will not even recognize her.
In both these ways you have turned the woman into inhuman beings. Both are ugly.
The woman is both: the divine mother and the prostitute. Just as you are both: God and animal.
Let me repeat: the profane is the sacred, the samsara is the nirvana.
Through these categories ... The reality is so complex and so deep it cannot be categorized, it cannot be demarked into definitions. No woman is just a prostitute and no woman is just a divine mother. And that is true about man, the same way. Once you see this, you are freed from categories, logical boxes, pigeonholes, and you can see reality as it is.
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A woman is a human being, as you are a human being. Yes sometimes she is a witch; just as sometimes you are mean, ugly, horrible, she is too. And sometimes she is ecstasy, pure ecstasy. Sometimes she is the most beautiful phenomenon on the earth, just as you are.
In India we have the right representation, the symbol of Kali. You must have seen the pictures of Kali or the statues of Kali. That is really a great understanding about women. Kali is painted as black, as black as the devil -- "kali" means "black" -- and yet she is the divine mother. And she is most beautiful. She is black, as black as the devil, but her form is that of the divine. She has a beautiful face, a beautiful body, absolutely in proportion; but she is black. And then, she is dancing on the chest of her husband, almost killing him. Shiva is her husband, and she is dancing on his chest and almost killing him. And she loves him too. She loves and kills together. All contradictions put together.
The mother gives you birth, the woman gives you birth, and by and by the woman kills you too. She brings your death closer; hence the attraction and the fear. You are attracted with the divine, and you are afraid with the devilish.
So you say, "I see women as objects of worship, and at the same time I lust after them."
Both are complementaries. Accept them. That's how reality is. The woman is both, and you are both. And if you accept this contradictory reality, one day you will go beyond it, you will transcend it.
There is a transcendental element too, but that transcendental element can be understood only when you pass through contradictions. If you avoid contradictions you will never attain the transcendental. Go through the contradictory, and by and by you will become just a witness to them both.
How does it work? It works in a simple way. If you think you are good, you are identified with good. If you think you are bad, you are identified with the bad. But if you allow both good and bad together, you cannot get identified with either. You remain unidentified, and that is the fundamental, the radical change. You remain unidentified. You cannot figure out who you are, good or bad, day or night, life or death, beautiful or ugly. You cannot identify with anything, so you remain unidentified.
Good comes and passes, and you know you cannot be good, because the bad is coming.
And the bad comes and passes, and you know you cannot be the bad. either, because the good is coming. So you cannot be good and you cannot be bad; then who are you? You are a witness. a witness who watches everything come and go, a watcher on the hills.
"I am content to let life flow, and I am afraid of the future." The same. The same contradiction on so many levels.
"I crave to be alone, and I crave to be always with people." The same.
"I feel bizarre because these contradictions all seem equally real and true." They are. And when for the first time you recognize that they are true and real, one feels bizarre. That's what the Zen people say: first the rivers are rivers and the
mountain are mountains, then the rivers are no more rivers and the mountains are no more mountains -- bizarre, confusion, clouds, everything topsy-turvy, all disturbed -- and then one day mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers, everything settled again, on a higher plane of course, on the transcendental plane of course.
You will have to go through this bizarreness. To be sane one has to pass through many insanities.
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"Is there anything to be understood or done about this?" Just understood, nothing to be done about it. I don't teach doing. Nothing has to be done. You just watch. Watch more and more carefully, watch in detail. Watch the subtlest nuance of any change in you. Watch all --
which no prejudice, with no judgement. And that watching will integrate you, will make you more and more aware.
And that is the whole purpose of life: to create more intelligence, to create more awareness.
Question
IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN GIVE YOU BACK?
Nothing, because that is what I give to you. I give you nothing, and only nothing can you give me back.
In fact, don't start thinking of giving me anything back, because I am not giving you anything. I am simply making you aware of things that you already have. You don't owe anything to me, not even a thank-you. If you thank me, that is simply generous of you, you are just being polite and gentlemanly; otherwise there is nothing. You don't owe anything to me. I have not given anything to you and I am not going to give anything to you, and nothing can be given, in the very nature of things.
In fact, if you are not angry at me, I will be happy enough. Because I take away many things. I don't give anything to you. I take away your ego, and I don't give anything instead. I take away a thousand and one things. And when those thousand and one things have been taken away, suddenly you become aware of that which has always been there from the very beginning.
So let me say it in this way: I give you that which you already have, and I take away things which you don't have but you think you have. I take away that which is not there but you believe is there. I take away your illusions.
But I cannot give reality. Reality is that which cannot be given; it is already there. I eliminate the illusion, and the reality is there. I simply give you back to yourself.
There is no need to be worried -- "Is there anything I can give you back.?" Just if you are not angry, that will be enough. If you can forgive me, that will be enough.
I know it is very difficult to forgive me. That is the greatest danger a Master takes on his shoulders. It is very difficult for the disciples to forgive him, and they are always watching from the corner of their eyes to find some fault. They are always waiting to find some loophole so they can jump upon it and they can say, "So, I have found the reality. This man is nothing," and they can go and condemn. It is a very dangerous game.
The disciples are continuously watchful. They are like spies, spying on the Master, if they can find something.
Just the other question-answer day, when I talked about Dr. Kovoor, two, three persons got almost mad about me. They have written letters that "Why did you do this? It is cheap!" And I go on telling you the cheap is the costly! And the trivial is the profound! And the world, the samsara, is nirvana! Do you hear me, or not? And they have demanded, almost it is a demand, Osho - The First Principle
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that "You have to answer it, why you attacked him." I have not attacked him; I
have attacked these three people who have written to me. What have I to do with Kovoor? He is not going to come here, I am not going to go there. We are not going to meet anyway. I have attacked these three persons, and I have got them, trapped them, they are trapped. I have attacked their idea of me.
One has written, "It is inconceivable that a man of your height should come so low." But who in the first place has told you that I am a man of height? You yourself project, and if your projections are destroyed, you are angry at me?
I go on repeating, just to be safe, that I am a very ordinary man. Otherwise you will hang me in the sky. You will say, "You are so high."
If you find me eating or if you find me taking a bath ... Do you know? In heaven there is no provision for God's bathroom. No provision. I have gone through all the scriptures.
Can you believe God farts? Impossible. So high, and farting? Belching? These things are good for human beings, not for gods.
Who has told you I am so high? But you project.
And I am not so foolish as to accept your projections. If you want to project such things, you will have to find some other people. You are not allowed to project anything on me. I will go on throwing it. I am not here to fulfill any of your expectations. That is the very trouble you have to tolerate with me. You would like me to be dead and sitting on a golden throne, and then you can worship me easily. But I am alive.
And I go on doing things that I like. I don't care what you think. If you are disturbed it is your problem; it is none of my business. Then you have to look into yourself and find ways not to be disturbed.
These things come again and again in your mind, and you don't see that they are YOUR
problems.
Somebody else has asked, "Why do we have to pay money here?" "I have no money," he says, "and I want to be here." But then who is going to pay for you? You will need money, you will need food, you will need a shelter, you will need
clothes, sometimes you will be ill, you will need the hospital: who is going to pay for you? Now, he thinks that this ashram is money obsessed. If people who don't have money are allowed, then Laxmi will have to go even more money obsessed because for them also she will have to arrange. Just to avoid money obsession, money has to be arranged. There are many people who would like to be here, but then who is going to arrange for them? And if somebody else arranges for them, he will demand something in return.
The person says, "Even Christians don't ask for money; even they are not that bold." I know they are not that bold. They need not be; they have enough money. The Vatican has enough money; that is the richest party in the world. But then you have to pay -- not in money, money is there -- you have to pay with other things: you have to pay with your freedom.
Here I want you to be free. I don't want to hinder your freedom.
If you want to stay here without money, then I will have to ask some people who have money to give money to the ashram. But then they have their conditions. Then their conditions have to be fulfilled. Otherwise why should they give their money? They give money in return for something. Then you will not be free here. And I will not be free here. I will not be able to Osho - The First Principle
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say what I want to say. Then they will dictate to me that this has to be said and this has not to be said.
Nobody is money obsessed. But the questioner is money obsessed: he has no money and he wants to be here. But what is money? Money is just that you have to pay for everything.
You eat: you have to pay for it. You live: you have to pay for it. You need clothes: you have to pay for it.
And why should you not pay? Then somebody else will have to pay for you. Why exploit somebody else?
If you don't have money, then go and earn money and come back. YOU are
money obsessed! But you think that Bhagwan is demanding money. It is your problem.
Somebody has said, "I can't see the point why I have to pay when I come to the lecture.
When I have to pay ten rupees for the lecture, then I cannot think of you as God." So the price of thinking of me as God is ten rupees! If he does not have to pay, he will think of me as God.
What do you think? You are trying to bribe me? Pay twenty rupees and think of me as the devil, perfectly okay!
Why should you not pay? Why should you like to exploit?
And this is my understanding, that you hear only when you pay; otherwise you don't hear.
When you have nothing to pay, there is no need to hear. The more you pay, the more alert you are -- because those ten rupees are gone. If you don't listen it is your business; you remain a little alert. J know you are money-minded; those ten rupees will keep you awake.
And my godhood is not in danger, because I don't care what you think about me. That is not the point at all. It is not that you have made me a god. This is my declaration; it is not your recognition. If nobody believes in me, then too I am a god. If only I believe in me, that's enough. I don't need a single witness. This is MY understanding.
Then again, the moment you think that this man is Bhagwan, then he should behave in such a way and in such a way. Then he should be on a high pedestal. He should not behave like a human being.
Then you don't understand my concept of Bhagwan. My concept of Bhagwan is not that a Bhagwan is a special being, that a Bhagwan is a perfect being, that a Bhagwan is not of this world. My concept of Bhagwan is that God is a normal quality of existence. Just by being, you are God.
You are not a painter by just being. For painting, you will have to learn some skill, you will have to go to an art school. And then too your being a painter will
depend on so many recognitions -- people will recognize, may not recognize; the critics will appreciate, may not appreciate; a thousand and one things. If you want to be a musician, just by being, you are not a musician. You will have to learn; this is something which has to be learned.
When I say God, I mean you ARE God, just by being. It is not a specialization.
Then what is the difference between me and you? The only difference is that I recognize my godhood and you don't recognize yours. Otherwise there is no distinction. I am as imperfect as you are! Then what is the difference between me and you? The difference is that I enjoy my imperfection and you don't enjoy yours, that I am perfectly happy with all my imperfections and you are not happy with yours. You have a notion of perfection and I have Osho - The First Principle
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none. I am perfect in my imperfections. I have accepted them totally, in toto. I am not trying to improve myself; I am simply the way I am. And I am happy the way I am.
The day you are also happy the way you are, the day you are also happy with all your imperfections, you are God. You are still God, whether you recognize it or you don't recognize it, but you have your ideas about God, and then you project those ideas. And if, sometimes, they are shattered -- and they will be shattered again and again because I cannot keep to your expectations ...
I am a free man. I live the way I live. And see the whole point: I am not expecting anything from you; still you go on expecting things from me. My whole effort here is to help you to be yourself, and your whole effort here is to make me something that you want me to be. Drop all this nonsense.
That's why I say even if you can forgive me, that will be enough. You need not even say a thank-you.
It is very difficult to be safe amongst disciples; hence I need bodyguards. Because a disciple has "surrendered," now he will take revenge. And of course, if he surrenders to me, he will take revenge on me. Where else will he go to take the revenge?
Watch all these tendencies in you.
It was not Kovoor, it was not my criticism of Kovoor, that has hurt you. It is your idea of me, it is your expectation of me, that is feeling hurt. So drop the expectations; otherwise you will feel hurt again and again -- I will find other Kovoors. Sometimes, even if they are not there, I can invent! But I am going to destroy all your expectations of me because if you cannot drop expectations about me, how can you drop expectations about yourself? It will be impossible.
And my whole work consists in a simple thing: to live a life without expectations, without hope, to live a life moment to moment, with no ideals.
Two men were chatting when the name of a mutual friend was mentioned. "Are you a friend of Harry's?" the first asked.
"Are we friends?" the man said. "Twenty years we are friends. There is nothing I would not do for Harry and there is nothing he would not do for me. In fact, for twenty years we have gone through life together, doing absolutely nothing for each other."
I am doing nothing to you. You, please, do nothing to me. Even if this can happen, there will arise a great friendship. You need not feel obliged; you don't owe anything to me.
Question
MEHER BABA REMAINED SILENT FOR THE LAST FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF HIS
LIFE. PLEASE COMMENT ON ITS IMPLICATIONS.
There is nothing much in it. He just got fed up with the questions of his disciples.
And sometimes the idea arises in me too. So watch. Osho - The First Principle
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OSHO, THERE ARE A FEW WORDS YOU ALWAYS PRONOUNCE WRONGLY.
WHY?
So that you can say to people that at least in one thing Osho is consistent.
My English is not that of the Englishman; my English is not that of the American; it is not even of the Indian. My English is just MINE. So you have to tolerate it. And I am very reluctant to improve about anything.
And my English has been of a great help to me. I used to live in Jabalpur, for many years.
The first day I was driving to the university, a woman, who lived next to me, an American woman, she wanted a lift. Now, this was going to be dangerous. This was the first day -- and every day then I will have to carry her and tolerate her chattering for almost half an hour, going to the university and coming.
I had heard the American expression "Can I drop you off somewhere?" but I managed it into my English and I asked her, "Can I throw you down someplace?" And finished! She never asked again.
Once, another, an Englishwoman, got interested in me. I don't know what she saw in me, but she was almost in a fantasy. She was a lecturer in the same university, in the English department. She was after me. I was simply surprised as to what she saw in me because I don't see anything in myself; it is just emptiness there. But my English helped.
You know the expression ...? I had read somewhere, in a novel, that a young man gazes into the eyes of his woman and says to her that "Your face, your beauty, your joy, your presence make time stand still." So I did the same to this woman.
I told her, "You have such a face that it would stop a clock." And finished! My English helped me.
Sometimes you will find it difficult too, because my structure of the sentences is mine, and sometimes the meaning I put into words is mine, the pronunciations are mine; sometimes you can't even get what I am saying. That helps you to keep awake. You have to listen attentively; you can miss. You cannot take me for granted.
One man was discussing with me about a politician, and I told the man, "That politician is a spherical S.O.B."
The man was puzzled; he said, "I have come across many S.O.B.'s in my life. But what do you mean by 'spherical'?"
"I mean," I said to him, "he is an S.O.B. any way you look at him." "Spherical," that is my own word.
And my English has a certain reputation, and I am not going to destroy it.
A little lady from Fresno, visiting San Francisco, got quite a thrill out of attending a daring party in the Bohemia known as Telegraph Hill.
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A friend who was showing her the sights pointed out a familiar-looking young couple and whispered, "Don't look now, but those two artists there are living in sin."
"Sin, my foot!" exclaimed the Fresno lady. "I know them. It is just Lois and Maurice, and they were married in the Fresno Baptist Church five years ago."
The young couple overheard and quickly drew the Fresno lady aside. "For God's sake don't tell anybody we are married," said the young man in a tense undertone. "It would ruin our artistic reputation."
I have a certain reputation of my English, hmm? And I am not going to change it in any way.
Question
WHAT IS PORNOGRAPHY, AND WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MUCH APPEAL?
Pornography is a by-product of religious repression. The whole credit goes to the priests.
Pornography has nothing to do with pornographers. The pornography is created, managed by the Church, by the religious people.
In a primitive, natural state, man is not pornographic. When human beings are naked and nude and man knows the woman's body and woman knows the man's body, you cannot sell PLAYBOY. It is impossible. Who will purchase PLAYBOY? And who will look into all that crap?
They have repressed so much that man's mind is fascinated of pornography. The whole credit goes to them. They have repressed so much that man's mind is boiling. The man wants to see the woman's body. Nothing wrong in it, a simple desire, a human desire. And the woman wants to know the man's body. A simple desire, nothing wrong about it.
Just think of a world where trees are covered with clothes. There are people ... I have heard about some English ladies who cover their dogs and cats with clothes. Just think, cows and horses and dogs dressed. Then you will find new pornography arising. Somebody will publish a NUDE picture of a tree -- and you will hide it in a Bible and look at it!
This whole foolishness is out of religious repression.
Make man free, allow people to be nude. I am not saying they should continuously be nude, but nudity should be accepted. On the beach, at the swimming pool, in the home ...
nudity should be accepted. The children should take a bath with the mother, with the father, in the bathroom. There is no need for the father to lock the bathroom when he goes in. The children can come and have a talk and chitchat and go out. Pornography will disappear.
Each child wants to know. "How does my daddy look?" Each child wants to
know, "How does my mother look?" And this is simply intelligence, curiosity. And the child cannot know what the mother looks like, and the child cannot know what the father looks like; now you are creating illness in the child's mind. It is YOU, that YOU are ill, and the illness will be reflected in the child's mind.
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I am not saying sit nude in the office or in the factory. If it is hot, it is okay, but there is no need to be naked, it should not be an obsession; but this continuous obsession of hiding your body is just ugly.
And one thing more. Because of the clothes, bodies HAVE become ugly, because then you don't care. You care only about the face. If your belly goes on becoming bigger and bigger, who bothers? You can hide it. Your body has become ugly because it is not exposed; otherwise you will think a little: the belly is getting too big. Just let one hundred people stand nude, and they all will be ashamed, and they will squirm and they will start hiding themselves.
Something is wrong. Why is it so? They know only about their face. The face they take care of; the whole body is neglected.
This is bad. This is not good. It is not in favor of the body, either.
Any country where people are allowed a little freedom to be nude becomes more beautiful; people have more beautiful bodies. If American women are getting more beautiful and have more beautiful bodies there is no wonder in it. Indian woman will have to wait long; they can hide their ugly bodies in the saries very carefully. The sari is a great help.
Nudity should be natural, should be as natural as animals, as trees, as everything else is nude. Then pornography will disappear.
Pornography is there as a sort of mental masturbation; it is mind masturbation. You are not allowed to love women, you are not allowed to love men, you are not allowed to make as many contacts as possible; the mind is boiling and starts a sort of inner masturbation.
Pornography helps you; it gives you visions of beautiful women and beautiful men, to dream about, and it gives you a thrill.
Your alive wife does not give you any thrill. With your alive wife you suddenly go dead.
There are people, even while making love to their wife, they are imagining some other woman; they are imagining some PLAYBOY picture. They can make love to their woman only when in their imagination there is some other woman, some fantasy. Then they get thrilled. They are not making love to their woman, and the woman is not making love to them.
She may be thinking of some actor or some hero or somebody. There are four people in each bed! Of course, it is too crowded, and you never contact the real person; those imaginary ones are standing in between.
You should know that masturbation -- mental or physical is a perversion. It does not exist in nature. Homosexuality does not exist in nature, but in zoos it comes into existence. In zoos animals start masturbating. In zoos animals even start becoming homosexually interested.
Wherever the situation is unnatural, unnatural perversions enter. In the military, in the army, people become homosexual, because it is an "all-boys" club, no woman available. Their pent-up energies start making them insane; they think they will go mad if they don't allow some outlet. In the boys' hostels, in the girls' hostels, where no boy can come, no girl can come, the other sex is not allowed, naturally pornography will be greatly enjoyed. It will help masturbation.
But these things have not been talked of directly. Now many will be offended -- why am I talking about these things? I am here to make everything clear to you so that you can become more and more natural. The appeal for pornography simply says that your mind is in an abnormal state. It is perfectly good to be interested in a beautiful woman, nothing wrong, but to have a picture of a nude woman and to get excited about it is just stupid. That's what people are doing with pornography.
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I have heard a beautiful joke. Listen attentively, don't miss it.
A husband was suspicious of his wife, so he hired a private detective to find out whether she had a lover or not. The detective, a Chinese immigrant, came back to report after only two days. His arm and nose were broken and his head was tied up in bandages.
"What happened?" the husband inquired eagerly. "Any proof yet?"
"Well," the detective answered, "I hid outside your house when you left in the morning.
After half an hour a man came and let himself in with a key. I climbed a tree to see into the bedroom, and there was he holding she and she kissing he. So he play with she and she play with he; I play with me and I fall down from the tree."
That's what pornography is.
Beware of all sorts of perversions. To love is good; to dream about it is ugly. Why? When the real is available, why go for the unreal? Even the real never satisfies! So how can the unreal satisfy? Even the real, in the final analysis, proves to be illusory, so what to say about the illusory?
Let me repeat: Even the real, one day, proves to be just unreal, so what to say about the unreal?
Go into the real love, and you will become so aware one day that even the real love, the so-called real love, will disappear. And when a man is completely beyond sexuality ... Not that I am saying "TRY to go beyond," no, not at all, God forbid. What I mean when I say when a man "goes beyond" is that when a man has gone deeper into sex, into love, and has known and has found that there is nothing, that very finding takes him above. He starts floating above the earth, he grows wings. That transcendence is BRAHMACHARYA, that transcendence is celibacy. It has nothing to do with your effort; it has nothing to do with repression.
A repressed person can never attain BRAHMACHARYA; he will become
pornographic.
And there are a thousand and one ways of being pornographic. In the old Indian scriptures there are descriptions of great RISHIS sitting in meditation and beautiful women trying to seduce them, dancing around them, naked. And the stories say they are sent by the God of heaven to corrupt them because the God in heaven is afraid if they attain to their SAMADHI they will become competitors. The God of heaven is afraid of their competition, so when they are attaining closer and closer, coming closer to SAMADHI, he sends beautiful women to seduce them.
Now, there is no God, and no beautiful women come from heaven; this is mind pornography. These RISHIS, these so-called seers, have repressed sex so much that at the last moment, when they are really getting closer to their innermost center, that repressed sex bursts forth, explodes. And in that explosion their own images, mind images ... It is a mind panorama, it is very colorful, and it is so colorful and looks so real that even they are deceived; they think really women are there.
Just go in a cave for three months and be celibate and force celibacy. After three months you will be a great seer -- and you will start seeing things. That is what a great seer is. You will start seeing damsels and beautiful APSARAS from heaven coming and dancing around Osho - The First Principle
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you seducing you. They are just your mind picture. When you are deprived of reality, your dreams start almost looking like reality. That's what we call hallucination.
In those old days PLAYBOY magazine was not available, so the RISHIMUNIS had to depend on their own. Now you can have some support from the outside.
But beware: even the real is proved, finally, to be unreal. So don't move into the realms of the unreal. Go into the real, let it be a great experience. I am not against it, I am all for it, go into it, because only by going into it, one day, BRAHMACHARYA, one day, you simply get out of it.
Not that love will disappear. In fact, for the first time love will appear, but a totally different kind of love. Buddha calls it compassion -- a cool love, with no sexual heat in it.
Your being will become a benediction. Your very presence will make people feel your love.
Your love will fall and shower on them. In your very presence, people will start moving into the unknown.
Yes, great compassion will arise in you. It is the same sexual energy, released from the sexual objects. Not repressed. Released. Not forcibly repressed, but understandably released.
The same sexual energy becomes love, compassion.
And when love, compassion, arises you are fulfilled. Buddha has said two things are the goals: awareness and compassion. And both come out of the sex energy; both are born out of it. Those two are the flowers, ultimate flowers, of sex energy.
That lotus is waiting in you to flower. Don't waste your energies. Use your energies to understand them, go into them deeply, meditatively, so that one day that lotus opens.
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You: the Greatest Lie There Is
19 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall
THE OFFICIAL, RIKO, ONCE ASKED NANSEN TO EXPLAIN TO HIM THE OLD
PROBLEM OF THE GOOSE IN THE BOTTLE.
"IF A MAN PUTS A GOSLING INTO A BOTTLE," SAID RIKO, "AND FEEDS HIM
UNTIL HE IS FULL GROWN, HOW CAN THE MAN GET THE GOOSE OUT WITHOUT
KILLING IT OR BREAKING THE BOTTLE?"
NANSEN GAVE A GREAT CLAP WITH HIS HANDS AND SHOUTED, "RIKO!"
"YES, MASTER," SAID THE OFFICIAL WITH A START. "SEE," SAID NANSEN, "THE GOOSE IS OUT!"
"I do not seek, I find", says Pablo Picasso. And I say to you: You need not seek, because if you seek, you will never find it. And you need not find it, also, because if YOU find it, it will not have been found at all.
Seeking means the truth is not and you have to seek it. Seeking means the truth is hidden and you have to seek it. Seeking means the truth is far away, distant, and you have to journey to it. And truth is herenow. No pilgrimage is needed; one has not to go anywhere. Truth is not THERE and truth is not THEN. Truth is here and now, so all seeking is going astray.
Seek, and you will not find, because in the very seeking you have missed the point, you have missed the first principle. In the very effort, you have gone away from the truth.
Seeking is a desire. With the desire comes in the mind -- mind is nothing but desire.
Seeking is in the future, and the future is not. Truth is always present, always present. Truth is always now; there is no other way for truth to be. You cannot say about truth, "Truth was,"
and you cannot say about truth, "Truth will be." That will be absolutely wrong. Truth IS -- and it is always so, and it will be always so, and it has always been
so. Truth IS.
How can you seek that which is? One seeks that which is not yet. Seeking is in the future.
Seeking assumes it, that it is not here. You seek money, you seek power, you seek prestige, you seek heaven; but how can you seek truth? That's why, let me repeat. seeking, you go astray. Seeking, you become a victim of desire. Seeking, the mind becomes predominant.
Seeking, the secondary becomes primary and the primary is lost track of.
And I say if YOU find it you have not found it at all. Because if YOU remain to find it, then it cannot be truth. Truth is found only when you are not. When truth is, you are not. You both cannot be present together. You are the greatest lie there is. If you are still there, then you will go on missing the truth. The very presence of you functions as a barrier. "I" cannot find; when the "I" is not there it is found.
That's why I say Picasso's statement is a half-truth. Half of it is true: "I do not seek." But that half is untrue when he says, "I find." It looks almost Zenlike, but it is not. A half-truth is Osho - The First Principle
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more dangerous than a plain lie because you can see the lie as the lie sooner or later, but the half-truth can go on pretending to be the whole truth; at least it appears like the truth. Many have been deceived by Picasso's statement. It is almost Zen: "I do not seek, I find."
If he had said, "I do not seek, and it is found," it would have been Zen. If the "I" remains, then truth will remain clouded. The "I" functions as a cloud, and the sun goes behind. The "I"
functions as a darkness, as a vale of darkness. The "I" is very noisy, and the voice of truth is very small, still. If the "I" is there beating its drums, then it is almost impossible to hear the whispering of truth.
Yes, truth is a whisper. You feel it only when you are absolutely not. In your
absence it is present.
So this is the whole thing: if you are present, truth is absent; if you are absent, truth is present. To be absent is all that meditation is. To be absent is all that is involved in meditation.
How to become absent? How not to be? Yes, "To be or not to be" is the question. And ordinarily we decide to be. The moment we decide to be, the samsara. The moment we decide not to be, the nirvana. Yes, that is the basic question that encounters every human being: to be or not to be. A Buddha decides not to be.
And the paradox is that those who decide not to be, they become true, and those who decide to be, they become a lie. The lie can persist; you can go on feeding it.
Truth is, just is, only is. Seeking, you miss it. Seeking, you have started looking somewhere else. Seeking, you don't look HERE. Seeking, your eyes are turned upwards towards the sky. That's why whenever we think of God we look upwards towards the sky. It is very significant: God is far away, sitting in the seventh heaven, up. It is a long journey; only very rare people can do it -- saints, mahatmas, ascetics. All nonsense.
God is where you are right now! Not in the seventh heaven, but within you.
But about those seven heavens, the metaphor of "seven" is beautiful. God is not in the seventh heaven somewhere, but is hidden behind seven layers of lies. There is a very strange incident in Bodhidharma's life, the founder of Zen. It is said that Bodhidharma collapsed seven times and arose eight times, when he realized enlightenment. Collapsed seven times and arose eight times. Very significant. Those are the seven layers of the ego, the seven layers of the "I". Each "I" will help you to collapse, and if you cannot rise eight times, that means if you cannot rise at least one time without the ego, you will not attain.
So the whole question is not that the truth is very far. It is very close, very, very close. It is in you, it is you, it is your intrinsic nature, it is your DHARMA. That is the first principle, but somehow, seeking, you have missed it.
Seeking, you have been for many lives. A seeker you have been. Nonseeking will reveal it.
That's why I say seeking, you go astray. Seeking, you go in dreams. How can you seek God? You have not known. How can you seek the unknown? You have never seen. How can you seek the unseen? Even if God comes across you, you will not be able to recognize him, because recognition is possible only if you have experienced him before. And you have not experienced him. He may have come across you many times in your life, and you will go on missing because how will you recognize him?
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It is impossible to seek the unknown. Then what do you do? First you create a dream about the unknown and you start seeking the dream. The Hindu has one dream of God, the Mohammedan has another dream, the Christian has still another -- but those are all dreams.
The Christian will attain to his dream. That is the misery, because if you persist too much, your dream will start becoming almost a reality. If you pour your energy into your dream too much, then your dream will start becoming a reality; you will convert it into a reality. But it is not reality; it is still a dream.
The fight between Hindus, Mohammedans, and Christians is not the fight about reality.
The fight is about their different dreams. Hindus have a certain idea of God, so have others, and they fight. They say, "Our dream is true." When a Christian meditates deeply, he comes to see Jesus. A Jaina never comes to see Jesus, never. A Buddhist never comes to see Jesus; Jesus never crosses his path. For a Buddhist, Buddha comes on the path. For a Jaina, Mahavir crosses his path. They are their dreams; they are dreams and projections and desires. And if you persist too much, the mind has the faculty to impart reality to the dream.
You do it every day, so it is not something very strange. Every day in the night when you fall asleep you dream, and in the dream you never recognize the fact that it is a dream. In the dream it looks true. In the dream it looks real -- howsoever absurd. In the dream you see a dog is walking, and suddenly the dog becomes a cat, and you don't even doubt that it is possible. In the dream you
accept even that. Your acceptance, your capacity to believe, is tremendous.
Even the people who think they are skeptical, people who think they are great doubters, logicians, rationalists, even in their dreams all their rationalism is gone and all their doubt disappears. In their dreams they believe absurd things. In the morning, when they are awake, they will be amazed, but then it is too late.
Just think of a person who is in a coma ... Once a woman was brought to me who had been in a coma for nine months. Now think, if she is dreaming for nine months, she must be thinking they are realities. A man can be in a coma for nine years, or ninety years -- or for nine lives. Then? The dream will look real. In fact, if this woman is awakened out of her coma for one minute and she looks around and falls into her dream again, which will be more real, her dream that has lasted for nine months, or the reality that she saw for one single minute? What will be her conclusion if she can conclude? She will conclude that she had fallen for one minute into sleep and she saw a dream and again the dream is gone, so she is awake and her reality continues.
The greatest possibility of the mind and the greatest capacity of the mind is imagination. It lives through imagination. The moment you start seeking truth you are moving in the direction of imagination. What are you seeking?
Zen says there is nothing to seek, because you don't know what is there. So if you seek, you will miss. Now, this is a very much higher standpoint. Jesus says, "Seek, and you will find." A very much lower statement, nothing to be compared with Zen. Meaningful, meaningful for those who are starting on the journey, but if you follow Jesus, one day or other, you will understand that by seeking, you cannot reach. Jesus was talking to people who were not highly evolved, people who had not even started seeking. He had to teach them: "Seek and you will find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you, ask and it shall be given to you."
If you go to a Zen Master he will smile; he will say, "Start," because his statement is a higher statement. When you have sought and you have not found, when you have struggled hard and nothing comes in your hands except dreams, then the Zen Master's approach will become Osho - The First Principle
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possible, you will be able to understand it. Then he will say, "Seek, and you will not find.
Now, please, drop seeking. Drop seeking and find it herenow!"
But I am not saying that Jesus is wrong. I am saying it is a beginners' class. And unless you follow Jesus for a time you will not understand Zen. So Jesus will prepare you, Jesus will help you.
Jesus was talking to the Jews, who have been one of the most earthy races in the world. To talk Zen would have been impossible -- they would have killed him even earlier. They didn't allow him much life, only three years of ministry. At the age of thirty he started his work; by thirty-three he was gone. They could not tolerate even a very primary statement about religion.
It was not very rebellious, it was not very absurd. It was in tune with the Jewish thinking, but still they could not tolerate it. It was "otherworldly". He was talking about the world that he calls the Kingdom of God. Jews have been very worldly; that is their success. They are very down to earth, and this man was distracting them. They were seeking money and they were seeking power and prestige, and this man was talking about God. Jesus was trying to change their seeking towards religion. It is religion of the kindergarten class.
Zen people are talking about the highest statement. India's highest consciousness was transplanted into China, and China's highest consciousness, Taoism, met with Buddhism.
These are two of the greatest flowerings of human consciousness. Never again has humanity reached such a peak as Buddhism, as it reached in Buddha; and never again has it reached anything like Lao Tzu. And just think: Zen is a crossbreeding of Taoism and Buddhism. It is a meeting of Buddha and Lao Tzu. It is a meeting of two of the highest peaks. Naturally Zen goes still higher. Zen goes higher than Buddhism and higher than Taoism because it contains all that was beautiful in these two cultures, the ancientmost cultures, the longest seekers in the world, who have staked all that they had for their seeking. Zen is the purest flower.
In fact, Zen is not a flower. It is essence, it is fragrance. Even a flower has something gross in it, something of the earth. So remember it, when Zen is saying something, it is to be understood at the highest level; otherwise there will
be no understanding about it. You will misunderstand it.
Seeking, you go astray; seeking, you go in dreams; seeking, you go somewhere else; and truth is here. Seeking, you go then; and truth is NOW. Seeking, you are, and seeking, you are too much. The more you seek, the more you feel you are. The harder and more arduous the seeking becomes, the stronger the ego becomes.
Seeking, you are, and seeking, you are too much; and there is no space for the truth to be.
You fill the whole space of your being. Seeking, you are closed.
Have you not seen this happening in ordinary life too? A man is suddenly told that his house is on fire. He rushes towards his house from the office or from his shop: now he cannot see what is happening in the market, on the road. Somebody says, "Hello"; he cannot hear.
Somebody comes and collides with him, but he cannot see who he is, and he will not remember that somebody collided. His whole mind is narrow now -- his house is on fire. His mind is concentrated.
Seeking means concentration, and truth is never achieved by concentration. Truth is achieved by meditation. And the difference is vital, and the difference is great. And you have to understand the difference because ordinarily people who don't know anything about meditation, they go on writing books in which they write that meditation is concentration.
Meditation is not concentration! Meditation is just the opposite state of concentration.
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When you concentrate your mind is narrowed down; when you meditate, you mind is widened. When you concentrate, there is an object on which you concentrate; when you meditate, there is no object.
People come to me and they ask, "On what to meditate?" Then they are not asking about meditation. They are asking about concentration when they come and they say to me, "I cannot concentrate. Osho, can you help me?" Concentration means you want your mind to cling to something, you want your mind to remain with something. Concentration is a sort of attachment, so whenever your attachment is there you are concentrated.
Your wife is dying, and if you are attached to her, you will forget the whole world. Now nothing exists except your dying wife. You will be sitting by her side and you will be concentrated; your mind will not go here and there.
Or if you are driving a car and suddenly you see an imminent accident is going to happen
-- some madman is coming, driving his car madly, and on the turn you see now it is too late, it is going to happen -- suddenly you will be concentrated, because you are too attached to life.
There will be no thoughts any more. Just a moment before, you were thinking to see your girl friend, a moment before, you were thinking to go to the movie tonight, or do this or that; suddenly all has disappeared; there is no thought in the mind, no object. You are too attached to life. Because of this attachment, all other objects have disappeared. You are concentrated now only on your life; only one thing has remained: your life.
Dostoevsky has written a memoir. He was young and he was a revolutionary, and he was caught by the czar with twenty other people, and they all were sentenced to death. The day came, ditches were dug, and they were standing in front of the ditches and the man was getting ready with the machine gun. Everything was ready.
Just close by on a church tower there is a clock, and each moment is passing fast, and the life is disappearing. At exactly six o'clock, they will be shot dead. It is ten minutes to six.
You can imagine how concentrated they must have become. Dostoevsky writes, "Never again have I been so concentrated in my life. All else disappeared. I could hear my heart throbbing, I could see my breathing for the first time, I felt my body for the first time. I had never felt my body, never heard my heartbeat, never seen my breath. Everything became simply concentrated -- and we could
hear the clock moving.
Five minutes, four minutes, three minutes ... and the concentration is becoming more and more and more. One minute ... and everything else has disappeared.
When life is at stake, only life is in the mind.
And then comes a horseman, running, and the czar has pardoned them; their death sentence has been converted into a life sentence.
One man, at exactly six o'clock, fell in the ditch, Died! without being shot. Must have become so concentrated with the idea of death. Died! Nobody could believe it. The officers ran. He was taken out of the ditch, but he was dead. He believed it; he must have become hypnotized with the idea of death. Death is coming, death is coming, fifteen minutes, death is coming ... It was coming for two, three months; now it was closer and closer and closer, and the mind became concentrated. The man fell and died.
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Another man shouted, "I am dead!" He became mad. For his whole life he remained shouting, "I am dead. I have died, don't you know?" He will meet people and say, "Don't you know? I died on that day. Six o'clock they killed me. I am a ghost! "
Dostoevsky himself could not believe it, because it was unimaginable, that the czar was going to forgive them. But he writes in his memoirs that "Never again was I concentrated; that was the peak of concentration."
It is not meditation. If it was meditation, then Dostoevsky would have become enlightened. That peak of concentration?
It happens to you. When you are studying for an examination, as the examinations come closer, you become more and more concentrated. Just the night before, your mind functions so concentratedly. Once the examination is gone, the mind relaxes again.
Concentration is a mind thing; meditation is a no-mind thing. Concentration means pouring your whole energy onto one object. Meditation means not pouring your energy onto any object, but just overflowing in all directions.
For example, if you are listening to me you can listen in two ways. You can listen in the wrong way: the wrong way is the way of concentration; you can just remain tense, strained. Or you can listen in a relaxed, let-go way; you can remain relaxed. E you listen in a tense way --
that is the meaning of the word "attention": "with tension, concentration" -- then you will not listen to the birds singing in the trees. Then you will listen only to me, and everything else will be blocked out, bracketed out. That means only this small voice that is here is in your concentration and the whole existence has been blocked out.
Meditation is just the opposite: nothing is blocked out, you are open in all directions. You are listening to me; you are listening to the birds also. If the wind blows in the trees and the trees start a murmur, you will listen to that too. And there will be no distraction, remember.
You are so open, you listen to me and the bird and the wind, and they all become one. And when you can listen in that way, you have listened to God.
When you listen meditatively, you listen to God -- whatsoever you listen to, it is God, it is God's message. He has reached you through the tree, through the wind, through the bird, through me. He is coming from everywhere, because he is everywhere. He surrounds you. So when you are open to everything that is happening, to all that is happening, you are herenow, you are in meditation. And this state is a state of nonseeking.
Concentration is part of seeking; when you seek something you become concentrated.
When you don't seek anything you become relaxed. When you seek something and you are concentrated, you are going away from yourself. Your object will be the goal, you forget yourself. Your arrow of consciousness goes only to the object. When you are not going anywhere, where will you be? When you are not going anywhere you will be where you are, you will be whoever you are. You will be simply relaxing and resting into yourself.
Ashtavakra says, "Rest in yourself, and you will attain all." Because resting in yourself you will know who you are.
So it is not a question of seeking. Seeking, you are too much. Seeking, you are so arrowed towards something that you don't see anything else, your eyes don't allow all to enter into your being, and then there is no space for the truth to be. Seeking, you become a cloud and the sun goes behind. Hence, seeking, there is night and darkness and death.
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When you are not seeking there is life, eternal life, and light and God, or you can choose any name which you prefer. Buddha calls it nirvana, nonseeking: you have arrived. In fact, you had never gone anywhere else; you were only imagining.
"Tell us, Master," a monk asked Daito ... Daito was a great Zen Master.
"Tell us, Master, when Shakyamuni Buddha saw the morning star, what did he see?" ...
In Zen this is the legend, that Buddha was seeking and seeking for six years, then he got tired and fed up with seeking, and one day he dropped seeking too. As one day he had dropped his kingdom, his family, his THIS world, one day he dropped his OTHER world too. As one day he had become disinterested in the material, a day came when he became disinterested in the spiritual too. And that was the night when he rested in himself -- because there was nothing to seek. So he slept under a tree, the Bodhi tree; that became the most famous tree in the world. He rested under the Bodhi tree, slept well. There was no seeking, so there was no dreaming either. The whole night was just a peaceful rhythm, not even a thought, because the material world was gone, the spiritual world was gone. It was an absolute rest into oneself.
By the morning, the Zen legend says, his eyes opened. Not that he opened his
eyes, because there was nothing to do now: he will not even open his eyes. The Zen legend says the eyes opened because the rest was complete. See the difference. You can open your eyes; then there is strain. You can close your eyes; then there is strain. When the eyes are closed by themselves there is rest; when the eyes open by themselves, then there is rest.
When a life is not a life of doing, but happening, then there is rest.
The eyes opened and he saw the last morning star setting, it was just disappearing, the last glimpse of it, in a moment it was gone, and he became enlightened. The last trace disappeared with the disappearing morning star, and he was utterly empty. He was utterly nobody. He became a nothingness, a pure nothingness, a content-less consciousness.
What is the significance of this last star disappearing? When the eyes opened and he saw the last star, there was a little concentration, a slight concentration, must be the old habit, thousands of lives of old habit. He must have become a little strained; a little concentration must have arisen. Looking at the last star, he must have become focused, his consciousness must have become narrow -- just out of old habit. There was nothing to look at now. But then the star disappeared
-- it was the last star and the sun was going to rise soon, so the star disappeared -
- the star disappeared, and the last object of concentration disappeared.
Suddenly he was released from all concentration, suddenly there was freedom, there was no content. The last star disappearing took away the last trace of concentration. He was there
-- and he was not there. He was there for the first time authentically -- and he was not there for the first time as an "I", as an ego.
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"Tell us, Master, when Shakyamuni Buddha saw the morning star, what did he see?" ...
Why did he become enlightened by seeing the last star?
Many people have copied it -- people are foolish, people are monkeys. Many Buddhists sit, they even go to Bodhgaya -- they come from China, from Korea, from Japan, from Ceylon --
they go to Bodhgaya, they sit under the Bodhi tree, they try to rest the whole night, and they watch, many times it must be, in the night they must be looking: whether the last star is there or gone. And they must be closing their eyes again -
- it is still night and there are so many stars -- and they must be afraid and tense: will they be able to see the last star, or will they miss? And they have to see the last star disappearing.
Once a Japanese man came and stayed with me. I said, "Why have you come from Japan?"
He said, "To see the last star disappearing." I told him, "Can't you see a last star disappearing in Japan? Don't the stars behave the same way there? Don't they disappear in the morning?
For what have you come here?" And he said, "I have come to sit under the Bodhi tree." But any tree will do. Buddha was not sitting under that tree specifically. It was just a coincidence, it was accidental. He had not searched for that tree. That tree was in no way special; it was as ordinary a tree as any tree.
You can sit under any tree and under any sky and in any country, but the question is not of country, not of the sky, not of the stars, not of the tree. The question is, "Has your attachment to things -- and attachment to other-worldly things -- disappeared, or is it still there?"
Now, in fact, you have come to sit under the Bodhi tree because you want to become enlightened. The desire. The seeking. You have come as a seeker, and Buddha did attain because he was not a seeker that night.
This is how things go on and man goes on imitating and becoming foolish.
"Tell us, Master, when Shakyamuni Buddha saw the morning star, what did he see?"
"Clean blank nothing," Daito replied at once. And then added, "But if a person
has only so much as just one speck of dust in his eyes, he may look at a blank and see all sorts of imaginary things."
Just a speck of dust will do, just a small speck of desire will do, and then you will start seeing imaginary things. If you really want to see that which is, then the eyes have to be utterly clean, blank. With those blank eyes you are a Buddha
-- with those empty eyes.
Seeking, one never finds. Let it be a fundamental remembrance. So Pablo Picasso is true, but only half true.
And half-truths are really dangerous. They can pretend, they can masquerade as truths, as whole truths. That's what happens. Whenever a man like Buddha moves, walks on the earth, that's what happens -- his truths become half-truths in our minds. A half-truth is a reflection of truth. A half-truth is a shadow of truth. In our monkey minds, in our imitative minds, we start Osho - The First Principle
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imitating half-truths. And there is something which has to be understood. A half- truth deceives better.
But Pablo Picasso could not have done better, because art itself cannot go beyond the half-truth. That's the difference between art and religion. Art is the world of the shadows, the world of the reflections, the world of imagination, the world of dreams, the world of desires, the world of projections. Art cannot give you the whole truth, but the best art is always giving you half of it -- that too the best art. I am not talking about the third-rate art. A third-rate art is simply a lie, a fantasy, a fiction. But Pablo Picasso is one of the greatest artists the world has ever produced. The best art always give you half; more is not possible through art.
The artist has glimpses of truth, reflected in the world of his dreams, in the world of his imagination. The artist is a pool of imagination, a lake of imagination. In that lake is reflected the full moon. And sometimes the moon in the lake looks far more beautiful than the real moon. On the glossy, silent surface of the lake, on the placid, silent surface of the lake, the moon looks even more innocent. But that is not a real moon -- although the reflection belongs to the real.
That is the difference between the mystic and the artist. The best artist comes closer to the mystic than anybody else, but the artist is not a mystic. He is a shadow, a shadow mystic.
William Blake or Pablo Picasso or Emerson or Rabindranath, they give beautiful reflections of the truth. And even the reflection is so enchanting, what to say about the original?
But if you jump into the lake to find the moon, even the reflection will disappear. You are not supposed to jump into the lake. And where the reflection is, you are not to go in that direction. You have to move exactly in the opposite direction, then you will find the real.
The artist has some quality of the mystic; he is on the way to becoming a mystic in some life. The mystic has all the qualities of the artist, plus.
Sometimes mystics have been artists, particularly Zen mystics. They have painted. They have written poems, haiku. They have carved wood, they have sculpted. They were great artists. In fact, all Zen Masters have been creative people.
That should also be remembered. When you have attained to a state of consciousness, your consciousness has to create something, something visible. You have to materialize something of your consciousness into the world so that this world also becomes beautiful. And people who cannot understand religion at least can understand art. You may not be able to understand the meaning of the Upanishads, but the very poetry of it appeals, and if the poetry appeals, then the truth is making a way towards your heart. You may not be able to meditate, but if somebody is dancing with deep meditation, that dance may appeal, and through the dance, lingering by the side, something of the meditation will enter into your being.
Gurdjieff had prepared a group of dancers, and he took the dancers to many great cities of the world. It was a rare opportunity made available. When in New York those meditators danced, people were suddenly amazed, they could not believe what was happening. The dancers created such meditative energy, such a great wave of energy, that those who had come just to see the dance suddenly forgot the dance completely. Something else was there by the side, a door opened through it.
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"Stop!" And they will all become just marble statues, as they were. If the hand was raised, it will remain raised. If one leg was up, it will remain up.
At one moment when he said, "Stop!" they were in such a position that they all fell -- fell from the stage, in front of the audience in the hall. But not a single person moved; they fell as if dead. And one man who was watching, something inside him also fell. The very shocking incident, these people fallen as if dead, and something changed in his mind. He became one of the great followers of Gurdjieff and attained to greater heights of consciousness.
Looking at a Zen painting you will be surprised because the painting brings to you something of the man who has painted it. If you look at modern painting, that too brings something to you. If you look at a modern painting long enough, you will start feeling a little crazy. If you put too many modern paintings in your bedroom, beware, you will have nightmares. Those paintings will start entering into your dreams. You cannot look at a modern painting for long; you have to move. You start feeling weird, something is wrong, something is bizarre.
The modern painter is insane. He is painting out of his insanity. If you look at a Zen painting, a silence oozes out of it, suddenly something beautiful surrounds you. You are transported to another consciousness. The painting carries something of the touch of the Master. The painting has been done in deep meditation; the painting has been done by one who has arrived.
Gurdjieff used to call such art "objective art". When somebody who has attained to consciousness does something, that something becomes objective art. Looking at that thing, you will have some glimpse of the Master. The Master may have been dead for three thousand years, that doesn't matter. The painting, the statue, the carving will represent him, and through it you can again become connected to him. If you know how to meditate with a painting, it will be easier.
Within these twenty years a rare thing has come to light because of too much use
of drugs.
The underground world of drugs has stumbled upon a very significant fact; they call it
"contact high". It is exactly the meaning of SATSANG. Let me explain it to you.
A "contact high" is a state. Somebody has taken LSD and is turned on, and you love the man, you really love the man, or the woman, you really relate to him -- the man or the woman is somebody who turns you on by her presence or his presence. The person has taken LSD.
You simply sit by the side, and you love the person, and the person's presence turns you on, and by and by you will start feeling that the LSD is affecting you too, that somehow his consciousness is infiltrating your consciousness, that your space is being overpowered. And you will start feeling high. This is contact high.
This is the meaning of SATSANG too, on a different plane. If somebody has attained, just being with him in deep love. in deep gratitude, in deep relatedness, and you will start feeling that something, through him, reaches your heart, stirs your being, and you are put on a totally different plane, where you cannot go by yourself. You are transported, carried to it. Yes, it too is a contact high.
That's why in the East we have praised SATSANG so much, to be in the presence of a Master, to attain contact high. And once you have started attaining through somebody, by and by you can find your own way.
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This contact high is possible even after thousands of years, through objective art. Read some haiku of Basho, small haiku. Read one haiku, repeat it, sing it, chew it, swallow it deeply, and then sit silently, waiting for the meaning to be revealed. Don't think about it; thinking, you will go astray. Don't analyze it; analyzing, you will go far away. Meditate, just be with it, let it be with you, and suddenly you will find something is changing in your consciousness. You are moving upwards, or you are moving deeper.
The very small haiku can turn you on. It can almost become an LSD trip because the haiku carries Basho's consciousness, condensed. It is no ordinary poetry. It is not written by a poet, not by an artist. It is done by a Master.
And the Master has put it almost like a mantra. If you simply allow it to spread its meaning on your being, its fragrance on your being, you will be in the state of contact high.
That's why I say Picasso's statement is a half-truth. "I do not seek" is the half- truth, and "I find" is the half-untruth, because it is never the "I" that finds it. "I" is the barrier, the cloud, the hindrance, the obstacle. Truth is found, but not by "I". Truth is found only when there is no
"I", when there is nobody to find it. Truth is found only when there is nobody to seek it and nobody to find it.
Now, the "I" has seven layers, those seven times when Bodhidharma fell and again rose.
You will also fall seven times before you can attain to enlightenment. The first layer consists of the past: "I" is memory. Go with me into it as deeply as possible because this will lead you to the first principle. The first principle cannot be said, but can be showed, how you can attain it.
The first layer of "I" consists of memory, the past. If you want to get rid of the "I" you will have to get rid of the past. Many people come to me and they say, "We would like to drop this ego." But they think that the ego is a noncomplex thing, a simple thing. It is not. It is very complex, the most complex. In fact, the one who wants to drop it may be the ego itself. That is so subtle, it is so tricky. Layer upon layer. The first layer is the memory.
If you really want to drop the ego -- and that is the only way to find the truth; all religion consists only of dropping these seven layers -- don't live in the memory. By and by, the moment you catch hold of yourself, that you are moving in the memory, immediately slip out of it. Immediately. Don't waste a single moment. I am not saying repent about it, I am not saying feel guilty about it, no, because that too will be the past. I am simply saying the moment you find you were moving into a dream about the past, a nostalgia, the moment you find it so, just slip out of it. There is no need to fight with it. If you fight, you will be defeated.
There is no need to feel angry about it. If you feel angry you will be defeated. You need not value it in any way, good or bad. You simply do one thing: the moment you find out, slip out of it.
And the one who finds it red-handed is your awareness. Eckhart says the one who finds is God, God within you.
Just try. Whenever you find your memory is hovering around you too much, the one who finds this sudden recognition that "Yes, I am again in the memory," that one, that awareness, is God within you. Slip out of the memory.
And I say slip out of it because there is no need to fight. Fighting, you will cling to it.
Fighting, you will have to be there. If you have to fight with somebody you have to be there.
Don't fight.
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And you are capable of slipping out, just as a snake slips out of the old skin. Go on slipping out of the memory. Memory is an old skin. In fact, you have already slipped out of it; it is just in the mind, it is nowhere else.
The second layer consists of unawareness. We live almost in a drunken state. We live with the minimum of consciousness. You go on doing things, you go on moving, this and that, but you are not conscious. Have you ever had any moments of consciousness so that you can see, you can compare?
For example ... Just now! See what is there. Gather yourself together. Just be herenow and see what is there, and you will find your consciousness is more, you have come out of a fog.
Soon you will again disappear into the fog. This fog surrounds you. Sometimes you come out of it. Sometimes something penetrates your fog, brings you out.
But ordinarily, life is so monotonous, there is no surprise, nothing brings you out.
Whenever you are a little more aware, many things happen. If you watch you will understand. A beautiful woman passes by; suddenly you become more aware. A bird on the wing, you were watching an empty sky and a bird passes by
...
Ramkrishna attained to his first SAMADHI, to his first satori, by seeing a row of cranes against the black clouds. He was very young, must have been thirteen. He was sitting by the lake of his town, it was cloudy, dark clouds were gathering, the beginning of the rain, and suddenly a row, many white cranes against the black clouds. Almost like lighting they were there and they were gone, and he attained to his first SAMADHI. For days he was drunk with the unknown, he danced, sang. His town's people, his family thought he had gone mad. But he was so happy.
That sudden experience. Something penetrated like a sword. Something was cut.
Sometimes it happens to you too. You don't take account of these moments, because you are afraid. You try to forget them. And they are so extraordinary and they are so exceptional and so rare that even to talk about them, nobody will believe it. So you don't take account of them; you think, "Must be a fantasy, an imagination." But one day in the morning suddenly the world is beautiful -- for no reason at all. The reason IS there: the reason is you are more aware. Maybe you rested well in the night, it was a good sleep, the dreams were not too many, your stomach was not too full of food or hungry. Things somehow went well, and in the morning you felt on the top of the world. It is nothing but awareness.
With a friend you have not seen for many years, suddenly you become more aware.
Anything that makes you more aware, watch it, take account of it, remember it, so that you can go more and more into it. Don't put it aside. Don't neglect it. It has to be fed and watered, taken care of.
The third layer of "I" is ambition, comparison with the others, where I am, higher or lower, inferior or superior, ahead or lagging behind -- who I am. Watch it: never compare. You are you. And there is nobody like you, so comparison is not possible. And everybody is so unique and so different, how can you
compare? Drop comparison. Whether you find yourself caught in comparison, immediately drop it, then and there. It is not good to carry these things in the mind longer; otherwise they leave traces, they make grooves in the mind. Never compare.
Somebody is more intelligent, somebody is more beautiful, somebody is more healthy ... Don't compare. You are you.
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And this is the way God wanted you to be. Feel fulfilled the way you are and accept yourself. Don't condemn yourself.
The fourth layer of "I" consists of future, always thinking ahead, what to do tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Or people are so mad, they are thinking of what to do in the next life: where to go, to hell or heaven?
People come to me and they ask, "Osho, what do you say about life after death?" I say,
"You are not alive even now, and you are talking about life after death? I don't even see life before death."
Man is not! Man only thinks that he is. Man has not happened yet. Rarely it happens. Once in a while, in a Buddha or a Bodhidharma a man is there; otherwise you are just a belief. And you are thinking about life after death? Think of life after birth! Think of life before death.
Think of life now. Don't go into the future too much.
I am not saying that if you want to go to Bombay don't book a ticket -- I am not saying that. Otherwise there are fools of that type too. One day I talked in the morning, "Don't think of the future," and by the evening I received a letter. One friend threw his passport into the river. "Why bother? 'Don't think of the future,' Osho has said." I am not saying that. There is a practical world, but that is not a problem at all. To carry a passport is not a problem.
To carry fantasies about the future is a problem. A passport is not such a burden. To think about tomorrow and to go and book a ticket is not a problem. These are factual things, ordinary, practical things. But to think that tomorrow you will be happy, not today, that tomorrow you will love, not today, that tomorrow you will sing, not today, is dangerous --
because tomorrow never comes. Again when it comes, it will be today, and your old habit will say, "Tomorrow I will be happy." Tomorrow again and again, you will be happy, and you will never be happy.
What I am saying is psychological future has to be dropped. The ordinary future is okay, it is not a problem at all.
The fifth layer consists of conditionings. You have been conditioned -- Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist, English, German, Indian -- these layers are there. Start dropping them.
Again, please, don't throw your passport!
These ideas from the mind -- that I am a German or a Japanese or a Chinese -- are just foolish. You were born just as pure consciousness and you will die as pure consciousness, and all these are just dresses, formalities, forms, what Hindus call NAM-RUP, name and form.
But you are not confined to them, you are not contained in them; you are beyond them.
The sixth layer consists of arrogance, of nonhumbleness. One has to learn humbleness because that is reality. We are interdependent, so how can we be arrogant? You cannot live without the air, you cannot live without fire, you cannot live without the sun, you cannot live without the trees, you cannot live without the woman, woman without the man -- you cannot live at all independently. So all arrogance is just ignorance. We are interdependent, we interpenetrate each other, and everything is required.
If the sun sets tonight and never rises again we will die. Within ten minutes we will die. If all the forests disappear and the trees disappear we will die, we will not be able to live. We breathe through the trees, they are continuously working for us and we are working for them.
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Don't think that they are slaves and we are masters. Nobody is a slave here and nobody is a master; everybody is a master here and everybody is a slave here. This is humility. They go on releasing oxygen for you; they serve you. And you go on releasing carbon dioxide for them, they live on carbon dioxide; so you serve them. They serve you, you serve them.
We are servants of each other or masters of each other, but we are all in the same boat. The animals, the trees, the birds, the rocks, we are all in the same boat. We exist in a togetherness; that's the meaning of humbleness.
I am not saying become humble and start being arrogant about your humbleness and start saying that "I am the most humble man in the world." That will be arrogance again.
Humbleness is an understanding, not a cultivation.
And the last layer of "I" consists of imitations. We learn to imitate -- that's what I mean when I say we are monkeys. Somebody is doing something: we start doing that. Somebody is making something: we start making that. We learn through imitation. Good for the children because otherwise children will never learn, but when will you become mature, when will you start not imitating, and being true to yourself?
If these seven layers are dropped, you will simply become aware of who you are. You are God, as everybody else is God.
These seven layers are the "bottle".
Now let me tell you this beautiful anecdote. It is one of the most beautiful anecdotes in the Zen literature, and Zen has many beautiful anecdotes. This is one of the topmost. Listen to it.
THE OFFICIAL, RIKO, ONCE ASKED NANSEN ...
Nansen was a great Master. You must have heard another story, I must have told you sometime. A great professor comes to see Nansen. The professor was the head of the department of philosophy in a university. He comes, and immediately he asks, "Do you believe in God? Is there any life after death? Has man a soul?"
Nansen says, "Wait. Let me prepare tea for you. You are tired and you are perspiring. And there is no hurry; these problems can wait a little. Let me prepare tea for you." And he prepares the tea. This is the humbleness of a Zen Master.
He brings tea. He goes on pouring the tea in the cup. The cup is full and the tea starts overflowing into the saucer, and then the saucer is full, and the professor shouts, "What are you doing? Are you mad? Now there is not any space, not even for a single drop, and you go on pouring and you go on pouring. It will start dropping on your floor!"
And Nansen laughs and he says, "So you understand. Now do you have any questions, still?"
The professor says, "Why, what do you mean? How does this explain my questions?"
And Nansen says, "Have you any space in your head? I can give you the answer, but there is no space. I don't see any space in your head. And you are alert, very alert; you can see that when the cup is full, no more tea should be poured in. Go, please, and clean your skull. Empty your skull and come back! Because these questions are such that they can only be answered to an empty skull."
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THE OFFICIAL, RIKO, ONCE ASKED NANSEN TO EXPLAIN TO HIM THE OLD
PROBLEM OF THE GOOSE IN THE BOTTLE.
The problem is very ancient. It is a koan; it is given to a disciple, that he has to meditate on it. It is absurd; you cannot "solve" it. A koan is something which cannot be solved.
Remember, it is not a puzzle. A puzzle has a clue; a koan has no clue. A koan is a puzzle without any clue. Not that more intelligence will solve it. No, no intelligence will ever solve it. Even if it is given to God, it will not be solved. It is made in such a way that it cannot be solved. This is a koan.
"IF A MAN PUTS A GOSLING INTO A BOTTLE," SAID RIKO, "AND FEEDS HIM
UNTIL HE IS FULL GROWN, HOW CAN THE MAN GET THE GOOSE OUT WITHOUT
KILLING IT OR BREAKING THE BOTTLE?"
Don't break the bottle -- and the goose has to be taken out -- and don't kill the goose. Now, these are the two conditions to be fulfilled. The koan becomes impossible. The bottle has a small neck; the goose cannot come out from it. Either you have to break the bottle or you have to kill the goose. You can kill the goose, and piece by piece you can take the goose out, or you can break the bottle, and the goose can come out alive, whole. But the condition is the bottle has not to be broken and the goose has not to be killed. The goose has to come out whole and the bottle has to remain whole. Nothing has to be destroyed; no destruction allowed.
Now, how are you going to solve it? But meditating on it, meditating on it ... one day it happens that you see the point. Not that you solve the problem, suddenly the problem is no more there.
NANSEN GAVE A GREAT CLAP WITH HIS HANDS AND SHOUTED, "RIKO!"
"YES, MASTER," SAID THE OFFICIAL WITH A START. "SEE," SAID NANSEN, "THE GOOSE IS OUT!"
Now, it is tremendously beautiful. What he is saying is that the goose has never been in, the goose has always been out. What is he saying, the moment he said, "Riko!"? What happened? Those seven layers of ego disappeared and Riko became aware. The shout was so sudden, the sound was so unexpected. He was expecting a philosophical answer.
That's why sometimes the Zen Master will hit you on your head or throw you out of the window or jump upon you or threaten you that he will kill you: he will do something so that those seven layers of ego are immediately transcended and your awareness, which is the center of all, is alert. You are made alert.
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Now, shouting "Riko!" so suddenly, for no reason at all -- and he has brought a small puzzle to be solved and this Master suddenly shouts "Riko!" -- he cannot see the connection.
And that is the whole clue to it. He cannot see the connection, the shout startles him, and he says, "Yes, Master."
"See," said Nansen, "the goose is out!" Those seven layers of the bottle are crossed.
"Yes, Master" -- in that moment Riko was pure consciousness, without any layer. In that moment, Riko was not the body. In that moment, Riko was not the mind. In that moment, Riko was just awareness. In that moment, Riko was not the memory of the past. In that moment, Riko was not the future, the desire. In that moment, he was not in any comparison with anybody. In that moment, he was not a Buddhist or a Mohammedan or a Hindu. In that moment, he was not a Japanese or an Indian.
In that moment, when the Master shouted "Riko!" he was simply awareness, without any content, without any conditioning. In that moment, he was not young, old. In that moment, he was not beautiful, ugly. In that moment, he was not stupid, intelligent. All layers disappeared.
In that moment, he was just a flame of awareness.
That is the meaning when the Master says, "See, the goose is out -- and I have not broken the bottle, I have not even touched the bottle." The bottle means the ego, those seven layers. "I have not broken the bottle, it is there, and I have not killed the goose. And the goose is out."
Now, there are three types of religions in the world. One which will destroy the bottle.
Then you become very vulnerable, then you become very insecure, then great trembling arises in you, and then there is every possibility you may go mad. That sort of thing happens many times in India. There are methods which can destroy the bottle, easier methods. They destroy the bottle, and the goose is out; but then the goose has no house to abide in, no shelter; then there is every possibility the man may go mad. And many people in India, seeking, searching, working towards the unknown become mad. When the unknown comes into them, they have no protection.
Remember, you need protection even against God because God can be too much too suddenly. Those protections have not to be destroyed; practically, they have to remain there.
Just think of a person who has no ego. Now, the house is on fire: he will not run out. For what? "I am not. The fire cannot burn me, because I am not." Just think of a man who has no ego, and he is standing in the middle of the road, and there comes a bus and the driver honks and honks, and he does not bother. He is the immortal soul, he is not the ego. This state can be dangerous. It happens if you destroy the bottle.
Zen says don't destroy the bottle. Use it when it is needed. Whenever you feel to have protection, the goose simply goes inside the bottle. Sometimes one needs rest, and sometimes the bottle is also useful. It can be put to a thousand and one uses. The ego can be used if you know that you are not the ego. Then the ego cannot use you, you can use it.
And there are methods which will save the bottle and kill the goose -- self- destructive methods are there -- so one becomes more and more unaware. That is what I mean when I say kill the goose: one becomes more and more unaware. Drugs can do that. Drugs have been used in India for thousands of years. They
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not ready to absorb them, by and by you will kill the goose, your consciousness will be gone, you may fall in a coma.
The first possibility, if the bottle is broken and thrown; you may go mad. The second possibility, if the goose is killed, or almost killed: you will become so unconscious that you will become a zombie. You can find zombies. In many monasteries there are zombies, whose goose is killed, or at least drugged. And there are mad people, maniacs.
Zen says avoid both. The bottle has to remain and the goose has to come out. This is a great synthesis.
"YES, MASTER," SAID THE OFFICIAL WITH A START. "SEE," SAID NANSEN, "THE GOOSE IS OUT!"
It must have been a moment of great discovery to Riko. He must have seen it, "Yes, it is out." He is fully aware. The trick worked, the device worked, the shouting and clapping worked. In fact, Riko must have been almost on the verge; otherwise shouting would not do.
You can go on shouting. Clapping won't do. But the man must have been just on the verge of it. Just a small push, and he has jumped the barrier.
Meditate over it. This is the way to attain the first principle: to know that the goose can be out without destroying the bottle, that you can be God without destroying your humanity, that you can be God without destroying your ordinariness.
A disciple of His Divine Grace Prabhupad came to see me. Prabhupad is the founder of the Krishna Consciousness movement. Naturally, to be respectful to me, he also called me His Divine Grace. I said, "Don't call me that; just call me
'his Divine Ordinariness'."
The ordinary is the extraordinary. The ordinary has not to be destroyed. Once the ordinary is in the service of the extraordinary it is beautiful, it is tremendously beautiful.
Let me repeat: the trivial is the profound, samsara is nirvana. Whatsoever you are, there is nothing wrong with it. Just something is missing. Nothing wrong with it! Something is simply missing. Just that missing link has to be provided, that plus, and everything that you have becomes divine.
Love has not to be destroyed; only awareness has to be added to it. Relationship has not to be destroyed; only meditation has to be added to it. You need not go from the marketplace, you need not go to any cave and in the Himalayas; only God has to be called there in the marketplace.
The bottle is beautiful, nothing is wrong in it. You just have to learn that you can come out of it whenever you want and you can go into it whenever you want, that it is your pleasure. It is almost like the house. When you feel too cool or cold in the house, freezing cold, you get out under the sky, under the sun, to warm yourself. Then it becomes too warm and you start perspiring; you go into the house. You are free. The same door takes you out, the same door takes you in, and the house is not the enemy.
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But if you cannot get out of the house, then something is wrong. There is no need to leave the house, there is no need to drop being a householder. There is only one thing needed: in the house become a sannyasin, in the world remain in such a way that the world is not in you.
See, the goose is out. In fact, the goose has always been out, just a recognition is needed.
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20 April 1977 am in Buddha Hall Question
THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN I FEEL NO HOPE, WITHOUT FEELING
DESPERATE, WHEN THERE IS RECOGNITION THAT THE "I" HAS FOUGHT
ENOUGH AND CANNOT HELP ANYMORE. YET UNDER THESE MOMENTARY
COVERS LINGERS THE ONE AND ONLY LONGING: TO BECOME MY REAL
NATURE, TO EXPERIENCE TRUTH AND TO LIVE IT IN THE WORLD. MY MIND
PLEASES ITSELF TO CALL THIS LONGING AN AUTHENTIC, GENUINE THIRST.
HOWEVER, THE SUSPICION IS THERE THAT IT IS JUST A WAY TO HIDE MY
PLAIN GREED.
The question is from Gunakar. Yes, Gunakar, it is a way to hide the greed. And not only that, it is a way to avoid the real. It is not a thirst for the real; it is a way to escape from the real. All greed, all desire, is an escape from the real. The desire is for that which is not. That which is already there; you need not be greedy about it, you need not desire it. Whether you desire or not does not make any difference. It is there. By desiring, you will miss, because you will create a
cloud around yourself.
This is how the mind goes on playing games. It can play the game in the name of reality too, in the name of God, in the name of enlightenment, nirvana.
One thing has to be remembered always, that you are not to become real, you are real. That which you are is the reality. Gunakar has said: Only one longing lingers, to become my real nature. But then who are you? You are your real nature. What else can you be? How else can you be? There is no way to go away from your reality. There is no way to go against it. There is no way to be anything else other than it.
But you can forget about it. You can start looking in some other direction. All that is possible is to be forgetful. You cannot lose contact with reality; you can only forget it. You can start looking in some other direction. You can put it at the back. You can avoid your eyes.
You can pretend that you are not the real.
The first thing: you are the real. Whatsoever you are is your reality. It has not to be attained; it is already there. It has happened. Nirvana is not somewhere in the future. Either it is now or never. To seek it is to miss it. If you want to find it, don't seek it. Just be herenow.
And when I say just be herenow, don't make a desire out of it. Don't start asking how to be here and now. Don't start planning that "I have to work hard to be here and now." You have moved away; that "how" takes you away.
You are your real nature. This is the great declaration of Zen. Other religions say you have to find God. Zen says you are. Other religions say long is the journey. Zen says there is no question of any journey whatsoever. You are already there! Maybe fast asleep, snoring, but you are there. The goal is where you are. You are the goal, you are the target.
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You want "to experience truth and to live it in the world". That's what you are already doing. Drinking tea you are living the truth. Talking to a friend you are living the truth. Going for a morning walk you are living the truth. Even being angry you are living the truth. How can it be otherwise?
The ordinary is the extraordinary, and the trivial is the profound. The samsara is nirvana.
It is just a question of remembering.
"... to become my real nature, to experience truth and to live it in the world". That's what you are doing, Gunakar. Just the mind goes on playing a game. The mind says things can be better. The mind says life can be improved upon. The mind says there must be something more, you must be missing something -- seek, search, do something. This is greed, and the greed is so subtle that it can hide in millions of ways. It can even start trying not to be greedy.
Now, listening to me, your mind will say, "Right. Now I am not to be greedy at all because it is greed that is destroying my life. So I have to get rid of greed." Again the greed has come, from the back door.
"It was deep in the woods back yonder," began old Herman, the guide. "I was plodding along minding my own business when suddenly a huge bear sneaked up behind me. He pinned my arms to my sides and started to squeeze the breath out of me. My gun fell out of my hands.
First thing you know, the bear had stooped down, picked up the gun, and was pressing it against my back."
"What did you do?" gasped the tenderfoot.
Old Herman sighed. "What could I do? I married his daughter." But the bear or the daughter, it makes no difference. It is the same.
Just be aware of the ways of the greed. Don't try to get rid of it. Don't try to do anything.
Just be aware of how greed takes a thousand and one forms. Watch it. There is no hurry.
And you are not losing anything. You are living the truth. You cannot lose, in the very nature of things. We are all winners. Here nobody can be a loser. God has managed the world in such a way. That's why mystics say this i3 the most perfect world. God has managed it in such a way that everybody is a winner, nobody is a loser. Everybody is a victor, nobody is ever defeated. Even in your defeat there is victory, and even when you think you are lost you are not lost. It is all dream. The day you become awake you will find you have never been outside your home, you have always been there.
The only thing is to become more and more alert. Just watch. You see greed arising in one way, watch it. Don't try to stop it; otherwise it will arise in another way. It may choose just the opposite so it can deceive you. Don't do anything to it; otherwise it will find another way. No need to fight with it. Just watch it, let it be there. Watch it. See it naked, through and through.
Awareness functions like an X-ray. It sees things through and through, and in that very seeing there is freedom. If you have seen the greed totally, in that very seeing greed disappears. Not that you make it disappear. It disappears. In that vision it is not found. In that light that darkness is no more there. Suddenly you are free of greed.
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And when you are free of greed you know you have never left the home, you have always been there. You have never left God. Adam has never been expelled from the garden of Eden.
He still lives there; he just dreams that he has been expelled. This is the Zen interpretation of the biblical story.
I must have given you a thousand interpretations about the story. The story is so beautiful.
Zen says Adam is still living in the garden of Eden. The snake has not tricked him into sin.
The snake has only tricked him into a dream. And God has not expelled him. How can God expel you? And to where can he expel you? It is all his garden. Where will you be? Wherever you will be it will be his garden, so to where can he expel you? And how can God expel?
Expelling Adam, God will be expelling himself, a part of himself. He will fall into parts. No, it is not possible.
Then what has happened? Adam has fallen asleep. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam has fallen asleep and is dreaming that God is very angry. It is his own dream. It is his own idea. It is his own guilt. It is his own mind, that "I have broken the rule,"
that "I had promised, and I have broken my promise." Now he is trembling and feeling guilty, and in the sleep the guilt is creating a dream that God is very angry. He is projecting his guilt on God. His guilt is becoming God's anger, in his mind. Naturally God must be very angry, and he is expelling him, and he has expelled him. The gates are closed, and Adam is thrown into the world.
But it is just a dream. The moment Adam becomes awake, he will laugh. He will have an uproarious laugh. He will roll down on the ground. His belly will start bursting with the laughter because he will see the whole absurdity of it: he had never been out.
Have you not dreamed dreams like this? In a dream you are being killed, and in that moment when you are being murdered, can you doubt it? It is so real. You shriek, you scream, and because of the shriek and the scream you become alert, you become aware. The dream is broken. Even after the dream your heart is beating louder, your breath is not in rhythm, your hands are shaking. You know now it was a dream, a nightmare, you are sitting in your bed and there is nobody, just your poor wife sleeping by your side -- no murderer -- the doors are closed, everything is silent, there has been nobody in the room, nobody was murdering you; but still you are trembling. The fear has been so deeply there, the idea of murder has penetrated so deeply in you, that even when you are awake, a little smoke of it continues to be there. But now you know you have never been out of the room and nobody is trying to murder you, there is nobody.
This is what I say to you. You are still in the garden of Eden. God has not expelled you.
You have fallen asleep.
And the work of the Master is to bring you back. Back, not from anywhere, but only from sleep. Back to awareness.
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WHY DO YOU TALK ONLY TO YOUR DISCIPLES? WHY NOT TO THE MASSES?
There is a beautiful Zen saying. Let that be the answer.
"I sing my songs to him who understands them. I drink my wine with the friend who knows me well."
Question
IT ALL SOUNDS SO GREAT, AS PERFECT AS CAN BE ARTICULATED. BUT
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU DO IN THE MEANTIME?
You have missed. You have not understood what has been said to you. You have not heard. Again the greed has become a barrier. Listening to me you are listening through the greed.
When you listen to me, if I am talking about enlightenment and the joy of it, you become greedy. You start thinking, "When am I going to become enlightened?" So you say it is great
-- it all sounds great, "as perfect as can be articulated". Now, this greed creates a problem.
You put whatsoever I am saying as a goal. Of course, the goal is far away. There is a distance between you and the goal, and the distance has to be traveled, so the
second question arises:
"What the hell do you do in the meantime?"
But there is no meantime. I am not talking about the goal; I am talking about the way. And I am not saying anything about the future or afterlife; I am saying something about THIS
moment, this very moment! This is it! You think in terms of tomorrow. I am talking about today.
Jesus says to his disciples, "Look in the field. Look at the beautiful lilies. They don't think of the morrow, they toil not, they labor not. Look at these beautiful flowers. They are just herenow. Even Solomon attired in all his costly clothes was not so beautiful. Look at these lilies in the field."
I am talking about THIS moment. What do you mean by "meantime"? There is no meantime. This is it! These birds, this cuckoo, these trees, you and me: this moment. This is the moment of nirvana.
But you start thinking in terms of desire. You say, "It sounds great." In fact, a thing that could have released your celebration becomes a desire, and through desire you start feeling sad because the goal is far away.
The cuckoo is singing right now. And the trees have flowered right now. It is all beautiful this moment. It will never be more beautiful. It has never been less beautiful. Each moment is perfect. But you start thinking about the tomorrow. Then the whole glory is there, somewhere away from you, and here you are a miserable creature, crying and weeping for the goal.
You create the meantime. I am not talking about the meantime. I am not talking about time at all, so what to say about meantime? I am talking about the eternal moment, about eternity.
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The mind cannot be herenow. The mind says, "Right. Hoard this, whatsoever Osho is saying. Hoard it. Someday we are going to practice it, and one day we are going to attain to this Buddhahood. It sounds great." Then the misery, then the sadness. Then you will remain miserable your whole life. This Buddhahood will never happen, because you missed it in the first place.
You have become so miserable that you cannot trust me that the celebration is possible right now. You say, "First one has to prepare. First one has to become this and that. First one has to meditate. First one has to become a great saint. First one has to become virtuous." This is something which from the very childhood has been deeply conditioned on your mind.
The parents, the teachers, the schools, the universities, the priest, the politician, they all have been teaching you, "Get ready. Get ready; something is going to happen." And then you go on getting ready -- and one day you simply die, just getting ready. It never happens. When you were a child they were saying, "Wait, grow up, first be educated. Go to the university, come back home." Thrilled, you go to the university and you suffer all sorts of tortures there, in the hope that it is not going to last forever, in the hope that now you are getting ready. You don't know what for, what you are getting ready for.
To listen to this cuckoo singing? To watch a bird on the wing? To see a full moon in the night? To hold a friend's hand? To love? For what? Because all this is available right now.
You go to the university, you go through a thousand and one imprisonments; by the time you come back home you are destroyed. It is very rare; very fortunate people come back from the university without being destroyed by the education system.
Then they come home. Then the father says, "Now find a job -- and get ready. Get married, and get ready. Then everything is going to be beautiful." And you read the novels and you go to the movie and you see the film, and once the marriage happens, the story says, "Ever afterwards they lived in happiness." Have you ever seen anybody living after marriage and happy? But these stories circulate, they condition the mind: Get ready.
So one day you find a job. Another humiliation. One day you get married.
Another distraction from the moment. And so on, so forth. Then you go on missing, it is not happening, so somebody says, "How can you have it unless you have a child?" Right. So get ready, have a child. And so on, so forth.
Finally you recognize the fact that the whole life has been a wastage.
I am not saying don't go to the university, and I am not saying don't get married, I am not saying don't get a job. Please, don't misunderstand me. What I am saying is: For happiness don't get ready, it is already here. Go to the university. Enjoy. Have a job, but enjoy it. It is not going to lead to happiness. Each moment is an end unto itself; it is not to be converted into a means towards something else. Love, and enjoy love. Don't think that you will be happy while you are married. Get married, and BE happy. Don't think that when you will have a child and you will become a mother or a father then you will be happy. Have you not seen your mother and your father? So what are you hoping for? And don't wait and don't go on postponing.
The greatest calamity that has happened to humanity is postponement -- always postponing. There are people who are always looking at the timetable and thinking about where to go on the holidays, what trains to catch and what planes to go by, this place or that, to the Himalayas or to the Alps, to Kashmir or to Switzerland. And they are always preparing and preparing, and they never go. What will you say about these people? You will think they Osho - The First Principle
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are mad. They have all the guidebooks and all the maps of the world and all the literature that government information services go on publishing. They have a whole library, and they go on looking into it and they go on preparing, but they always prepare and they never go. What will you think about them? Will you not call them neurotic?
This is what the situation is with everybody. You always talk about God, you always talk about MOKSHA, nirvana, heaven, paradise, you always talk about it, but it is always tomorrow. So you have to prepare. "Meantime" you prepare.
I am saying there is no meantime. God is available right now, just for the asking.
Start enjoying. Don't ask how to dance! Start dancing. Can't you move your body? It may not be very graceful. So who bothers? It may not be a trained, disciplined thing. So who bothers? Start dancing. Don't go on consulting manuals about love. Start loving. Don't go on and on in the mind. Start moving into existence, be existential. That is the message of Zen.
Question
OSHO, ARE YOU REALLY CRAZY?
How can I be crazy? I have no mind out of which to go. Question
AS SIN CAN BE DEFINED AS "MISSING THE MARK", COULD ONE DEFINE ZEN
AS "HITTING THE MARK"?
The question is from Yoga Anando.
No. Sin means missing the mark. Zen means there is no mark to miss. There is nothing, no target. There is no destiny. It is all beautiful purposelessness. It is all beautiful meaninglessness. It is a song. It has no meaning. It has a rhythm, but no meaning. It has tremendous beauty in it, but no logic. And it is not a syllogism; there is no conclusion. It is an unconcluded existence, and it remains always unconcluded.
We are always in the middle. There has been no source, and there is no goal.
Sin exactly means missing the mark. That's why Zen people don't talk about sin. Christians talk about sin, because they think God has to be achieved, heaven has to be achieved, there is some goal. If you miss that goal, that is what is called sin; sin means missing the goal. Zen people don't talk about sin. The word "sin" exists not for them, because there is no goal to miss. You are already at it! The arrow has reached, the arrow has always been there, not for a single moment has it been otherwise. Zen is so profound. It gives you utter freedom to be. It does not yoke you to some ideology and doesn't yoke you into some guilt.
The moment you talk about sin, guilt arises. The moment you start thinking you
are missing the mark, tension arises, anxiety arises, anguish arises: "So how not to miss?" Then there is great trembling, and then the fear you may go on missing. Who knows? -- for so long you have been missing. So who knows, you may go on missing. You may go astray.
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Christianity talks in terms of duality. You are separate from God, so you can miss him, you can move in a wrong direction, you can go astray. Zen is nondual. It says you are in God, you cannot go astray. See the beauty of it. See the great declaration. See the declaration of freedom
-- utter freedom.
Freedom from the goal is utter freedom because the goal keeps you tied together in a direction. Zen has no direction. When you have a direction to move in, you will have to choose where to go. And the fear will always remain, whether you are going in the right direction or not. Who knows? -- even your leader may be wrong. The one who is leading you may himself be misguided or may be a cheat. Who knows? And if you come close to your priest and your leader, you will become more suspicious.
Gurdjieff used to say that if you want to get rid of religion, live near the priests. Then you will get rid of religion because you will see they are trembling as much as you are trembling.
Their public faces are different, their private faces are different. Live close to a priest, and you will be surprised. He is as much in the dark as anybody else. He just pretends. He is as blind as anybody else, but he goes to the masses and pretends to the blind people that "I have eyes."
And all religions depend on priests. Why don't the priests say the truth? They cannot, because their whole trade depends on one secret, that they have to go on pretending that they have eyes. That pretension is very basic to the trade of the priest.
And one priest may fight against another priest -- the Hindu priest may say something against Christianity and the Christian priest may say something about Hinduism -- but they never say anything against priesthood. Never.
I have heard a beautiful anecdote. Meditate over it.
The little island in the South Pacific was in an uproar when the American missionary visited the chief of the tribe. "What is the commotion?" demanded the missionary.
"There is a white baby born in the village," replied the savage, "and you know we don't like no man messing around with our women. Since you is the only white man on the island they is fixing to fry you alive."
The missionary was in a state of nervous collapse when he spied a flock of sheep on the hillside behind the village. Turning to the chief he cried, "Look there on the hillside, chief, you see that flock of white sheep?"
"I sure do," replied the chief.
"Well," said the missionary. "Do you see the black sheep in the middle of the flock?"
"I see it," responded the chief.
"There is no other black sheep and there never has been, has there?" "Well?"
"Well."
The chief beckoned the missionary aside and whispered in his ear, "You not tell, me not tell."
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This is how it goes on. They have to protect each other. They may fight about
dogmas, they may fight about principles, philosophies, that is all okay. But they never say anything against the priesthood. The Shankaracharya of Puri will be as much in favour of the priesthood as the Vatican Pope. There will be no problem about that, no conflict about that. If priesthood is at stake, they will all fight for it.
When Buddha declared these ultimate truths in India, there were many religions in India.
They all went against him. Not only Hindus, Jainas were against him. Not only Jainas, Ajeevekas were against him. And so many others. Why? Whenever a real man is there, all priests will be against him because the real man will bring the message to you that you are being led by blind people: they don't know; you don't know. The blind are leading the blind.
Zen says there is no need to be led by anybody, because there is nowhere to go. This is Cutting the very root of priesthood. Look at it. This is destroying priesthood totally. Zen does not say that one priest is right and another is wrong. If it is said that way, then priesthood is still protected. Zen says there is nowhere to go.
A man came to Nansen and asked, "What do you say? Is Zen the right way to achieve God?" Nansen said, "Zen is not a way at all, it is not a path, because a path leads somewhere.
We don't lead. A path reaches somewhere. We don't lead you anywhere. We simply throw you to where you are. We simply throw you back to yourself."
If it is a path, then leaders will be there. If something has to be done, then you will find people mediating between you and God, between you and reality. Nothing has to be done, so nobody has to show and guide you. You alone are enough.
Zen is not "hitting the mark". Zen is knowing that there is no mark and nowhere to hit, that you are the target, and the arrow has always been in the target.
You must have heard the great Tibetan mantra "AUM MANE PADME HUM". It has many meanings. One meaning is "Look! The arrow is already in the target." AUM is just a shout, so that you can look; it is almost "See!" "Look!" -- "Aum! mane padme hum." Literally it means "jewel in the lotus" "mane padme hum".
Jewel in the lotus. Literally it means "Look!
The jewel is already in the lotus." Metaphorically it means "Look! The arrow has already reached the target."
You are at home already, so it is not "hitting the mark", because "hitting the mark" will again be the same thing. Then you will ask, "How to hit it?" Then one has to learn archery, then one has to go through discipline, and then the whole priesthood comes in from the back door.
I have heard:
One summer's day when a man in a rowing boat caught a cramp and fell into the water -- it was an ornamental lake -- arms and legs wildly flailing, he screamed, "Help, Help! I can't swim!" Finally a bystander shouted back, "Stand up, you bloody fool!" The drowning man did so -- and found that the water just came up to his waist.
But he was thinking he was drowning. The water just came up to his waist. You are not drowning. Just stand up!
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I have heard another story. A traveler lost his track one night in the hills. It was a dark night, and he was very much afraid. The hills were very tricky and dangerous and the track was very narrow, and he was afraid he could miss a step and could disappear forever in the valley. He could fall into any abyss; they were all around. So he was just creeping on his hands. Still he fell, he slipped. He caught hold in time of the roots of a tree. Now, he was very much afraid. He tried hard somehow to get out of that hole he was hanging in, but he could not. And it was getting colder and colder and his hands started becoming frozen, and now he was certain that it was a question of minutes. Once the hands are too cold, he would not be able to hold onto the roots, and he would die. That became certain. Now there was no way to escape.
He started crying and weeping, and he started praying, and he had never been a theist, but in such moments nobody bothers about principles. He started saying to God, "Save me," this and that, and "I will not do this sin or that sin, and I will be straight now; I will not drink and I will not smoke," and all sorts of things he was promising. But no help came, and by and by his hands started slipping, and a moment came when he thought, "Now it is finished." And he fell.
And to his surprise, he was standing on his feet. There was no abyss there; it was just plain ground. For hours he was hanging between life and death.
Once you stop planning, you will suddenly be on plain ground. Once you stop thinking about the target and how to hit it, you will be at home. Zen says drop all ways, because all ways lead astray, because to God there is no need of any way. He is there in your heart. It is he who is listening to me, it is he who is talking to you. It is he who is breathing in you, it is he who is beating in your heart. God is not far away. God is not even outside. God is the innermost core of you.
So drop this sin-oriented idea of hitting or missing. Both are in the same category; both will create anxiety.
My whole effort here is to make you free of anxiety, free of guilt. Free of guilt, free of anxiety, you are a saint, because you are innocent then, you are a child again. You are born again.
Question
YOU CONFUSED ME VERY MUCH BY SAYING THAT THE SAMSARA IS THE
NIRVANA. NOW, FROM WHERE TO BEGIN?
There is no need to begin. I am not sending you on a journey. Not even the first step is needed. Take the step, and you have moved in the wrong direction. It is not that any direction is wrong; all directions are wrong. Movement is wrong. It is not that a few people go astray and a few don't, no. All going is going astray.
Let this sink in your heart as deeply as possible.
When I say the world is samsara, I mean don't divide into the profane and the profound.
Live the profound in a profound way, live the profane in a profound way. Don't divide into the material and the spiritual. Live the material in a spiritual way; bring the quality of the spirit to matter.
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What do I mean when I say live in the ordinary world? I mean live the profane life in a new way, with a new being, with a new style, with a new flavor, the flavor of meditation.
I am not telling you to go away anywhere.
I am for God, but I am not against anything. And God, my God, is so vast, he includes all.
Yes, you can sip your tea in such a meditative way that it becomes prayer. Try it. You can love your woman in such a meditative way that love becomes ecstasy, that when you are lost with your woman or with your man, suddenly you are lost in God. Those moments become of tremendous value. Those moments become the first glimpses of divinity.
Start living your ordinary life in an extraordinary way. What is the extraordinary way? To bring awareness. Whatsoever you do, let it be soaked in awareness, let it be showered with awareness.
Question
WHAT IS MATURITY? HOW CAN I BE MATURE?
You will have to understand first what immaturity is. That will give you the idea of what maturity is. Immaturity has a few ingredients in it. One, immaturity is a sort of dependence. A child depends on the parents; he is immature. If you are still depending, you are immature.
You may depend on God or you may depend on me, but it is immaturity. You are still seeking your parents. Maybe your parents are gone and lost; now you are
projecting your parents.
There are many people who come to me and I can see immediately in their eyes they are searching for their father. It is not accidental that the pope is called the pope. "Pope" means
"papa". People are looking for a divine daddy, continuously. This is immaturity.
When are you going to stand on your own feet? How long are you going to remain a dependent on the mother, on the father, on this and that?
These dependent people are very dangerous people because they can be exploited easily.
Anybody who pretends to be their father, they will become victims to him. They will follow Adolf Hitler; the fuhrer will become their father. The Germans used to call their country the
"fatherland", others call their countries the "motherland", but it is all the same nonsense. We go on projecting. The country becomes the mother, the country becomes the father, or God the Father, or Kali the Mother. You go on projecting.
You want to remain a child; you don't want to grow. Growth is responsibility, and you don't want to take any responsibility.
People come to me and they say, "Osho, we surrender to you. Now you are responsible."
How can I be responsible for you? Surrender can only mean that you have come to me to learn responsibility. Now you want to avoid responsibility. Surrendering to me can only be a way, a means, to learn to be responsible. But if you want surrender as a substitute for responsibility, your surrender is wrong, ill. It is not healthy, it is dangerous. And then you will start getting angry at me. If nothing is happening you will get angry. Because nothing is happening, you will think I am not doing anything.
Only you can do something. I can indicate, but the real thing is going to happen within you. Nobody else can do it. If I can do it, then I can undo it also. That will not be much of a Osho - The First Principle
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gain. If Buddha can deliver you from your ignorance, then one day if he gets angry with you he will release all your ignorance again, back to you. That will not be of much use. Freedom is possible only when you learn responsibility, when you start standing on your own feet.
Of course, one feels very helpless. So what? It is how life is. That helplessness is not bad.
It teaches you that ego is wrong, that you have to be humble, helpless. And yet there is no other way to stand: you can stand only on your own feet. Nobody can take you on his shoulders to God. You will have to enter into divinity on your own.
So maturity has to be understood through understanding immaturity. First thing: we are taught to be dependent on the parents, on the leaders, on the priests. Nobody wants you to be free, because people are afraid, the society is afraid, of free people. Free people will be rebellious. Free people will start doing THEIR thing, and the society is very much afraid of such people. The society wants you to do things that the society wants. The society wants you to follow a certain pattern. The society has its own goals; they have to be fulfilled. The society does not want you to become a Buddha or a Christ, because they have always been dangerous people. The society wants just zombies. And an immature person can easily become a zombie because he is an imitator.
Have you watched small children imitating, and by imitation they think they are becoming grown-ups? Small children start smoking. Not that they feel very good about smoking, not that it is great or anything. When a child starts smoking he cannot even believe why people smoke, because his eyes start getting red, his throat feels irritated, and he starts coughing, tears come down his cheeks. It is really painful, but he will tolerate the pain because the cigarette gives a certain feeling that he is a grown-up. Only grown-ups are allowed to smoke, so the smoking becomes a symbol of grown-upness.
I have heard:
A man walking down the street noticed a small boy about ten years old sitting on
the front doorstep of a house, smoking a cigarette. "Aren't you a little young to be smoking?" he asked.
"Of course I ain't," replied the lad. "I got a girlfriend and all." "A girlfriend!" said the man.
"Yeah, Picked her up last night, I did. Smashing it was." "Good Lord! How old was she?"
"I dunno. I was too drunk to ask her."
There are symbols of grown-upness. You need to have a girlfriend, you have to smoke, you have to drink, and even small children start learning these tricks. And then they never grow up, They only imitate, They imitate other, false grownups. And their children will imitate them, and so on it goes.
This world is a world of imitators, monkeys all. And it does not make much difference --
you can be a chairman of the board of monkeys, that doesn't make much difference; or you can be a president of a monkey country, that doesn't make any difference -- all the same you remain the monkey. Maybe you are more monkeyish than others.
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A grown-up person is one who does not imitate, who starts feeling his own way, who starts being in his own way, who starts looking into his nature: "Who am I? And what REALLY do I feel?"
One woman came home, driving, she got out of her car, and fell down flat on the ground.
The husband rushed, asked, "What is the matter? What happened? Why did you
faint?"
She said, "It was too hot."
The husband looked at the car and he said, "But why didn't you open the windows?"
She said, "What! Open the windows, and let the neighbours know that our car is not air conditioned?"
One can die but cannot allow the neighbours to know that the car is not air conditioned.
She had to keep the windows closed. She was fainting, but that is okay, but to keep the windows open hurts much more.
Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost. Risking all to be oneself, that's what maturity is all about.
If you imitate you will again and again fall into a ditch because whatsoever you imitate never fits reality. Reality is continuously changing, it is a flux, nothing is ever the same. It is a river; it goes on flowing.
If you imitate your father ... Just see, your father lived many years before. Your father was a child maybe thirty years before or forty years before. He learned things in a different world.
For example, your father, when he was a child, was not sitting five hours glued to the chair before the TV. Now, you don't know how much the TV has done to the small children. The father does not know. His childhood was not at all influenced by the TV. Five hours sitting before a TV is no ordinary phenomenon.
In fact, before TV happened, down the centuries, people had never looked into a source of light for five hours continuously. Now the scientists say that the whole nervous system changes because of those five hours of looking directly into the source of light. The TV goes on throwing strong rays on your eyes. It has never happened before. Five hours is too much.
Scientists may if you sit near a color TV, four feet away, you will get cancer, you will suffer from many diseases which your parents had not known, ever. The eyes are eighty percent of your life. Five hours of just strong light rays reaching into your head -- your sleep will be disturbed. If America suffers from insomnia, it is natural. The TV is one of the basic causes.
Ordinarily man has lived with light, natural light. In a primitive society, the sun rises, people rise, and the sun sets and people set, people go to sleep. A natural rhythm with light.
Now we are living too much with the light; the eyes are not made for that much light. The inner nervous system is disturbed; it becomes too loaded.
And a thousand and one things will happen. In America a new phenomenon is happening.
Many places it has happened, and people have become really worried about it, what to do? In one place a woman was murdered, and twenty persons were standing there, almost paralyzed, not doing anything. A psychological investigation was done. What is the matter? Twenty young, healthy people standing there, and a woman was killed just in front of them and they Osho - The First Principle
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didn't do anything -- they didn't even shout, they didn't call the police. What happened? And you will be surprised. The finding is that it is because these twenty people have lived on TV
for too long.
On the TV screen murder happens so many times. What do you do? You don't do anything; you remain glued to your chair. They have become accustomed to it. It was another TV scene. They have lost track of reality. The TV has become more real. For five hours you are not with anything else -- and a continuous bombardment of light, and strong light, and things are moving in your head. You become a watcher. They were standing there just glued to their spots, paralyzed -
- just watching. They could not do anything, because they are no more doers.
Now, your father, who had a different kind of childhood, will not be able to understand it.
You are living in a different world, in a world which is more of TV watchers than of participants. Whatsoever he says will not be fit for your world; hence the generation gap. The father speaks a different language, you speak a different language. You live in a different world, he lived in a different world. Now, those two worlds never coincide.
If you are an imitator you will always be taking false moves. You have to learn to live in YOUR world; you have to respond to the reality that surrounds you. Things have changed dramatically. They have always been changing, but the change has been too fast in this century. And it will be faster and faster.
You have to become aware of the situation and respond accordingly. An experienced plumber was giving instructions to his apprentice.
"Working in other people's homes," he said, "can sometimes lead to embarrassing situations, but you can always get out of them by using tact. For example, the other day, I walked into a bathroom and found a lady taking a bath. I backed out saying, 'Excuse me, sir.'
In that way, the lady thought I had not gotten a good look at her and it was all right."
The following afternoon, the apprentice staggered into the office in a beat-up condition.
"What happened to you?" asked the boss.
"You and your tact," cried the apprentice. "I went to the bridal suite of the Etter Plaza Hotel to fix a faucet. I was halfway through the bedroom before I realized there was a couple making love in the bed. The husband cussed at me, but I remember what you had said, so I tipped my hat and said, 'Excuse me, gentlemen!'"
If you simply follow and you don't understand, you are immature. Never follow. Try to understand. Let understanding be your basic law of life. Let things come out of your understanding, not out of your memory.
The immature person functions through memory. Whenever there is a situation he looks into his memory, into his past, and finds a clue. The mature person looks into the situation, puts his past aside, because the past is irrelevant. He brings his total attention to the present situation and functions out of that totality. His action is in the present. The immature person is always living through his past; the immature person is always turning his future into his past.
He is repetitive, he is parrotlike, he is a shadow, a reflection. He is not real. Osho - The First Principle
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When a party of tourists climbed to the top of a famous echoing mountain, they saw an old man, sitting on a rock, an enormous telescope in his hands. Every few moments he let out a series of shouts.
The puzzled tourists watched him for some time. Then one of them went up to the old man and asked, "Why do you keep looking through that thing and then calling out as if you were in pain?"
The old man-answered impatiently, "Don't talk to me. You will distract my attention and I will lose my job. I am the echo for this hill."
Many people have become just echoes. Watch yourself when something happens and you react. Are you reacting the same way as your father used to react in such a situation? Are you saying the same thing as your mother would have said if she were in this situation? Are your gestures the same as your teacher's in the school you loved so much? Just watch -- your gestures, your words, your actions -- and you will be surprised. Ninety-nine percent they are just echoes, they are not true.
How can you be fulfilled with such echoes?
Your father is living through you, not you. Your parents are living through you, not you.
Your parents' parents are living through you, not you. The whole of humanity and its past is living through you, but not you. This is immaturity.
Maturity means you discontinue with your past. With one stroke of the sword you become discontinuous with your past and your heritage and the tradition, and you start living independently. The gesture is yours; then it is meaningful, then it is full of significance, then it is not an empty gesture. The words are yours, not borrowed, not somebody else's; then your life becomes more and more authentic and real.
To live in immaturity is to live in a kind of dream. It is a shadow world. Your eyes are so full of fog, you don't have clarity.
A frustrated young man went to see his doctor.
"Doc," he explained, "every night I have the strangest dreams. Beautiful blondes, brunettes, and redheads appear, and one by one they try to kiss me and put their arms around me."
"So?" answered the doctor.
"So nothing, Doc. I keep pushing them away -- every one of them." "What would you like me to do?"
"Doc, please," pleaded the patient, "break my arms."
People are living in their dreams. They are ready to break their real arms for their unreal dreams.
Watch! You will find many times the same happening in your life. You are ready to kill your reality for some unreal ideal, some utopia, some ideology, some scripture. Somebody insults the Bible. Are you ready to fight? Then you are a fool. Somebody says something Osho - The First Principle
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against Ram, and you are Hindu and you are ready to be killed or kill. Then you are a fool.
Then you are living in shadows and you have become too attached to shadows.
In fact, a really alert man will not feel offended even if somebody insults him personally.
Even if somebody says something against his name, he will not feel offended, because he will know, "I am not my name. The name is just an appendage, a label -- useful, but not real, just a make-believe. Any other name would be the same." He will not feel offended.
A really alert man, even if you hit his body, will not feel offended, because he will know he is not the body. He will know he is not his mind. He will know that he is something transcendental, and he will remain in that transcendentalness. In that transcendence is his being.
Then life will have a totally new quality and it will become a new experience. That experience is divine. Maturity is the door to divinity. Immature, you remain asleep. Mature, you become awake.
The question is from Prem Anam. He has many things which are immature in him. His question is relevant, relevant to his being, and it is good that he has asked.
Now, Anam, watch, become more careful. Drop your childishness more and more.
I say again and again, I quote again and again, Jesus' saying that "Unless you are like a child, you will not enter into my kingdom of God." But remember, he does not mean childishness. Childishness is just the opposite of being LIKE a child. A childish person is never like a child. He pretends to be a grown-up; he is a pretender. A childlike person is one who has become so mature, so alive, so aware, that he drops all pretensions. He is nude and naked, he is true, he is innocent.
Drop childishness, and become a child; and you will be mature. And you will be ready, ready to take the jump into yourself.
Question
I SEEM TO BE MORE INTERESTED IN HELPING OTHERS REACH ENLIGHTENMENT THAN REACHING IT MYSELF; HAVING GRASPED
IT
INTELLECTUALLY. I LOSE NO OPPORTUNITY OF TALKING ABOUT IT. THE EASE, THE JOY, THE PEACE, AND THE ENERGY THAT I FEEL MAKE ME BELIEVE THAT
I AM ON THE RIGHT TRACK. BUT AM I? OR SHOULD I BETTER BE SILENT
TILL ...?
The question is from Ajit Saraswati.
For Ajit Saraswati it is perfectly right. He can continue. But remember, I am saying so only to him, not to anybody else. It is a very personal question.
He has nothing of the ego. He can go on. In fact, this too is part of his humbleness, that he has asked.
It is good to help others, because there is nobody really who is other. Helping others, you are helping yourself because we are parts of each other, members of one another. We are joined together. If I help you to be happy, I become happy. If I help you to be miserable, I Osho - The First Principle
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become miserable. Our life is together here; it is a togetherness; we are not separate. On the periphery we may be separate; at the center we are one.
Nothing to be worried about. If you have the feeling that you enjoy sharing whatsoever you have understood, howsoever little it is, if you have the feeling that you enjoy, you feel blissful, you feel joyful -- and no ego arises out of it ... Let that be the criterion: if ego arises out of it, then you are not helping others, and you are destroying yourself meanwhile. If no ego arises --
you simply feel peaceful and silent and happy that you shared something with somebody, a grace descends on you -- then you are perfectly right. Then go on the housetops and shout.
When you have, share it.
And there is no need to wait, that when you have the whole of it, then you will share it.
Then you will not have the whole, ever. Share it, and you will get more. Give it, and you will get more.
But remember only one thing: the ego should not enter in. The moment you see ego arising, the moment you see you are feeling great, superior to others, holier than others, then something is going wrong. Then it is better to wait. You are not to wait for the whole of God to happen to you, but you are to wait for the whole of the ego to go.
With Ajit Saraswati, it is already the case. The ego is not there. Slowly, slowly that rock has disappeared. I have been falling on him like a waterfall. Yes, the ego was there one day.
And the water is very soft, so the rock never feels worried, but the water goes on falling, goes on falling, goes on falling, and by and by, unaware what is happening, the rock slowly, slowly disappears, becomes sand, and is taken far away.
The rock was there, but it is not there. So enjoy it, delight in it, rejoice, share. Question
OSHO, CAN YOU GIVE ME TWO VERY FUNDAMENTAL RULES FOR THE
SEEKERS?
Here are two ancient rules, very ancient:
First, that you must be like a man who has been bitten by a snake and knows he has not a moment to lose.
And second, that you must be like a man who has awakened to find that his horse has been stolen and it is too late to lock the door and there is no hurry.
Question
OSHO, WHAT IS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE?
If I were to tell you, it would become the second principle. Osho - The First Principle
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