14 Become a child, full of wonder

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‌CHAPTER 14

Become a child, full of wonder

16 June 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin, returning to the West, says she is confused.]

Confusion remains, and one has to learn to live with it because life cannot be sorted out; it is so big. The confusion arises because of our impossible effort to sort everything out; it is too big for that! There is no way to know everything so something or other always remains unknown. That unknown goes on creating confusion.

So one has to learn to live with it, then by and by it disappears and instead of confusion a totally different new thing arises... and that’s what is called wonder. It is the same energy that becomes confusion or wonder.

When a child has the same energy he simply feels wonder – because he is not in any way concerned about solving anything; he is ready to accept the mystery of it. He has no conflict between the known and the unknown; he does not make any distinction between the real and the dream.

Sometimes it happens that a child may have been playing with a toy in his dream and when he awakes he cries for the toy and asks, ‘Where has it gone?’ We go on saying that it was just a dream but he says, ‘But where is it now?’ He makes no distinction between the dream and the real, he does not make distinctions. If you don’t make distinctions confusion cannot arise.

So the more a person is trying to solve things, the more confused he will become. Intellectual people become more confused than emotional people. Then there are gut people also. They never become confused: they simply like things as they come.

The moment we think about life as if it is a problem, we are in confusion. The moment we start thinking that it is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived, that there is no way to know and whatsoever we know will remain very very limited; the unknown will remain unlimited.We can

create a small candlelight around ourselves but the whole existence remains dark. How can you be unconfused? You will remain confused if you don’t accept that darkness, if you don’t accept the mystery of life.

Yes, there are problems and there are many things which one would like to sort out, but they cannot be sorted out. This is what I call learning to live with it. Once you start learning to live with it, by and by confusion disappears, because confusion is an interpretation, and instead of confusion the same energy becomes more and more full of wonder. You are simply surprised by the mystery of life, you are simply surprised that nothing can be solved. You are simply surprised that it is not a puzzle; it is a mystery. And the mystery is more fundamental than us – because we come out of it.

The mystery was there before we came in, the mystery will be there when we are gone, so the mystery is infinite. We are just small waves of the ocean. Confusion arises and the wave sometimes goes mad. It is not an accident that great thinkers in the West – a Friedrich Nietzsche or a Mayakovsky – people who were really of great intelligence have almost always gone mad.

Now my feeling about Nietzsche is that had he been in India he would have become a buddha. His intelligence is superb, incomparable – but he simply went into a madhouse, a mad asylum, and died as a madman. In India the same energy would have been transformed with a totally different outlook. He would have become a poet. He had that quality and unconsciously many of his writings are more poetic than philosophic: ‘Thus spake Zarathustra’ is great poetry, as great as Bhagavadgita. But he went mad, because a wrong notion exists in the western mind that everything has to be clear-cutly solved; everything has to be reduced to statistics. No comer of mind should be left in the dark. Everything should finally be decided in black and white, only then can we be at ease. Then there is confusion.

Become a child: don’t try to solve it – it is too big and in trying to solve it you will miss your life. Those beautiful moments which could have been of tremendous joy will be lost in trying somehow to manage the problems of life, to solve the confusions of life, the riddles of life, and it will be a burden rather than being a celebration.

Don’t be cerebral, don’t be in the head. Start enjoying more, laughing more. Start approaching the mystery of life more innocently... with no concept of finding the answer. There is none, there exists none. The answer is no answer. The wise man drops questioning. The moment you drop questioning there is no confusion; suddenly it disappears. The confusion is created by our questioning mind.

My whole effort here is to create an unquestioning consciousness – a great trust, a deep acceptance, a reverence for life. In fact, the very effort to solve it is disrespectful. It means we want to reduce god to a syllogism. We want to reduce love into chemistry. We want to reduce everything into the manageableand wherever we find that things are unmanageable, beyond us, cannot be grasped,

we are in confusion.

Turn this confusion into mystery – it is the same energy, and mystery is such a joy! Confusion is such a disease, confusion creates hell!

Wherever you are, continue to meditate. And let this be your approach: create more wonder in life, remain surprised, and remain available for more and more surprise. Let each moment be an encounter with the mysterious. Continue to meditate and help my people wherever you are.

Keep this with you (Osho passes her a box), and whenever you need me, just put it in your hands, sit silently, and remain completely unmoving, just like a buddha statue, as if you have become a stone statue. Do this just for three minutes and you will feel me whenever you need... and come back!

[Osho tells a sannyasin he should be total in everything he does here. You can bring a horse to the water but you can’t make him drink, he says... this reality may be dull, but with a slight change of emphasis, a slightly different perspective, another reality becomes available to you. That’s what these groups here are about: they give you insights into other dimensions of your being, give you glimpses of other ways of being and experiencing life... can bring a radical change in you.]

I have looked into you, and there is not much of a problem. You have a simple being, not very complex; that’s why I’m saying just to do. And doing will be enough... things will start happening.

[The sannyasin says he is a gardener.]

Very good! That may be one of the causes why you are so simple. Gardeners, farmers, fishermen, woodcutters, have a totally different kind of energy – the best kind of energy. When a politician comes he carries such a nuisance inside him, such a deceptive kind of energy. He does not know what he is saying, he does not know what he is. He is one thing, he goes on saying another and does something else again. He is so divided: he is many people, he is a crowd.

When a man who is a money-maniac, comes to me, then it is very difficult, very. very difficult, because he knows only one value – that is money. Now, by meditating you cannot get money, so he cannot get into meditation, howsoever much he wants. His only value is money: all that counts in the world is money. Now, out of meditation money is not going to be produced. Although he has come to meditate he cannot because his whole orientation is against it.

A politician cannot go deep in groups because he is afraid to lose the ego, and that is his whole stake in life. He wants to make the ego more and more strong; he wants to become more and more successful. He wants to be the first man in the world; he is ambitious. He is violent, he is aggressive – and all these groups teach you how to love, how to be non-violent, how to be non-aggressive and how to drop ambition and the ego.

Now, even if he comes for some reason – maybe he is getting a little bit too worried, maybe he cannot sleep, maybe his health is deteriorating, maybe he is getting heart attacks and blood pressure and this and that – and he wants to be helped, he cannot be because the basic foundation of his life energy is so wrong.

It is not an accident that jesus could have as his followers only people like you: farmers, fishermen, woodcutters. Not that there were not professors available, not that there were not great rabbis and religious priests, not that there were not politicians; they have always been here. The world has never been in such a state, in such a blessed and blissful state, that politicians were not there; they have always been there. They didn’t turn up, and sometimes even if they did come, they were not able to connect with Jesus. Only very simple people...

The people who collected the gospels were very illiterate, uneducated people, simple people. That’s why the christian gospels have a beauty which the Vedas don’t have, which the Dhammapada is missing – because the Vedas were written by great scholars, very literate people, trained philosophically, theoretically, logically. They don’t have that simplicity, that down-to-earthness, that concreteness. They don’t have that natural, metaphoric mind. When a farmer thinks, he thinks about trees and plants and animals.

Just the other day I was reading.…

Two small children were asked to make a sentence to explain the word ‘slow’. The child who came from the city said ‘Slow means travelling in an old ford’. The boy who had come from a village was a farmer’s boy. He said, ‘Slow means a cow walking while she is pregnant.’

Mm? now, the difference: a ford and a cow pregnant. Such an alive phenomenon – a cow pregnant, and a dead mechanism – some old T-model ford.…

A different kind of mind exists when you are with nature: researchers call it the metaphorical mind. It is not mathematical; it lives in metaphors. That’s why jesus talks in parables. People ask him intricate, complex, philosophical questions, and he answers in such a simple metaphorical way: he tells a story or a parable.

Very good. Just be totally here and allow me to do something.

[A sannyasin who has returned from the Himalayas said it was easy to be high there, to feel thankful – here in the city with the smog it is difficult.]

That has also to be learned... because if you cannot be thankful here, the quality is of the mountains. It has not entered you, it has not become part of you. To be in the mountains is good, but then one has to keep those mountains inside, the himalayas within, and then you carry them wherever you go. And that is the criterion, that is the test!

You can also be that high here; only then does that highness have any value – otherwise you will lose it again. Then it is a drug trip... so it is again the same thing. At a higher altitude the gravitation is less. When people are not there, people’s vibes are not there.

When you live with the trees, with the mountains, stars, moon and sun, naturally, you live beyond human society. You live with far simpler organisms: trees, animals, birds. They don’t have a mind, they don’t create the mind-wave around you, so you are alone there. You don’t have anything to make you disturbed. Nobody insults you, nobody scorns you, nobody disturbs you.

[The sannyasin says: My wife!]

That is not much... that is not much... and in the mountains even the wife becomes silent, because the mountains will affect her too. There is more oxygen, there is pure air; these all make chemical changes. You feel more at ease, more together... but then it is nothing: if you come back and you lose it, it is meaningless.

You have to come to the world and go on having and containing that silence. So, go many times to the mountains but go back again and again to the world. That day you can carry the mountains into the marketplace is a day of great blessing.

So never become an escapist... because that happens to many people. Once they start living in the mountains they become afraid of the world – and all kinds of fear is poisonous. Then they have not become free; they have instead become afraid.

There are many sannyasins, old, ancient sannyasins, living in the caves; they cannot come back to the marketplace. They have become very afraid. Now they are afraid to lose their peace... but this peace is worthless! You should go where the challenge is and see whether you can retain it. If you can retain it, then something has happened; if you cannot retain it, then it is meaningless. It is good to practise in the mountains but the examination will be in the plains.

So come back again and again to poona, come back to the world, and try to keep your quality. It can be kept; you just have to be alert about it. It can be kept. Just keep your consciousness vibrating in the same way it was vibrating there; don’t get distracted by people.

It is very easy to throw the responsibility on the smog and the people and the market, but that is not the thing. You throw the responsibility on others; you are just finding an excuse to lose your high! Keep your high. Let people be there, let there be smog. What can you do?

The smog is there, the people are there, and they are the way they are – keep your cool!

... Next time, try it. And you can create it here again! Just try one meditation every day.…

For one hour in the morning, just sit with closed eyes. Forget Poona and visualise the mountains: just visualise the mountains, relive being there. And every night before you go to sleep, do it again for ten minutes. In the morning go to the river, sit there, and for one hour visualise that you are in the mountains again. Move in the mountains, smell the mountains – the fresh air, the trees, the flowers... Listen to the sounds. Just be there again.

And it is not to be just a memory trip: relive it! Don’t go on standing outside of it and looking at it like a film being played on a screen, no! Be part of it, a participant in it, not a spectator but an actor in it. Be on the stage. Live the whole thing: you are moving on a mountain path, it has rained and the earth is wet. Smell the new rain, the trees and the wind.

You will be surprised: you can catch hold of it, of that spirit again. And in the night before you go to sleep, just for ten minutes sit in your bed, again visualise, and go into sleep.

Go into sleep thinking of the Himalayas, being in the Himalayas, fall asleep in the Himalayas. And in the morning you will be surprised! Do this for one week and then report. It will be far more valuable if you can create that here... and it can be created!

I am in the himalayas here so there is

Just do this experiment for seven days, then write a letter, mm?

Prem means love and tao means the ultimate law – the ultimate law of love. And that is the only law: all else is just arbitrary, all else is utilitarian. Only love is non-utilitarian. All else exists for us. It is only love for which we exist. Love is the end, the ‘summum bonum’.

Once we start falling into love energy we start growing. The more we are resisting love energy, inhibiting it, we remain stuck.

And tao is the chinese word but the best yet used for the ultimate. Christians use ‘god’ but that has been so much misused: it has fallen into wrong hands and all associations have gone wrong.

The indians have used ‘dharma’, but that too has become dirty. ‘Tao’ remains one of the purest words ever used for the ultimate because ‘tao’ has no meaning so nobody can corrupt it. When a word has a meaning it can be corrupted. Tao is just a sound: it does not say anything; it simply indicates. It does not say; it shows.

And the basic thing in tao is to go with the whole – never to go against it, never to push the river and never to try to go upcurrent. Mm? – that’s what ego is.

Whenever we are pushing, trying to prove something, trying to get something, trying to fight for something, trying to struggle, whenever there is some kind of will, we are against tao. Tao is will- lessness: just going with the current wherever it is going, moving with the river.…

[Osho suggests some groups to the new sannyasin who assisted therapy groups in the west. She says: I have this idea about therapy – I don’t want therapy... but I’ll do them.]

Mm mm, it is not therapy, because you are not a patient and it is not therapy. The word is ugly... but this is a necessary evil with language: whatsoever word we use it is never true to the fact.

Now, therapy is ugly. It presupposes that somebody is abnormal, ill, diseased, that somebody is not in the right shape, that somebody is a case, somebody is mental or something. It presupposes a division between the patient and the doctor. It is one of the dualities, as there are other dualities, and naturally the doctor is the knower, he is the authority, he is in the know, so he manipulates the patient, he dominates the patient, he oppresses the patient. In the name of helping him he exploits the patient.

So you are right – the word is not very good but any word.And because the human mind lives

in dualities, it immediately creates that class: the dominator and the dominated, the oppressor and the oppressed; it always creates that classification. It has nothing to do with words; it is the mind. It always makes one the master and another the slave, and then the whole nonsense goes on persisting. Names change, labels change, but the same thing continues.

To me, the reality of therapy is love. It is not that the therapist is the knower, no, and it is not that the patient is ill. All that is the case is that the therapist, or whatsoever name we call him, is able to become available to the energy of the whole; he has learned that art. Through his availability he helps the other, whom we call the patient, to become available to that healing energy. The therapist is just a door, and he is as much helped as the patient.sometimes even more!

My own observation is that the therapist grows faster than the patient. And if he understands this too – that therapy is a function of love, that you simply become a bridge, a vehicle, between the healed and the real healer, god...

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