Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

8 July 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8007085 ShortTitle: GWIND08 Audio:

No Video:

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

The most significant thing about bliss is the it is intrinsically a paradox and because of its paradoxical nature it has almost always been misunderstood. The paradox is: man needs to make much effort, and yet it does not happen because of the effort it always happens as a gift of god. But without effort man never becomes capable of receiving the gift. Even though the gift is always available, man remains closed.

1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

So the whole human endeavour is not really the cause of attaining bliss, it cannot cause bliss; it can only remove the barriers. It is a negative process. It is as if you are living in a closed room, all the windows, all the doors closed: the sun has risen but you are in darkness. The sun cannot rise because of your efforts.

Whatsoever you do you cannot make the sun rise, but you can open your doors or keep them closed -- that much depends on your effort. If you open the doors the sun becomes available to you, otherwise it waits just on your doorsteps, without even knocking. You can live in darkness for eternity -- can and all that was needed was to remove the barrier between you and the sun.

Exactly the same is the case with bliss. God is always showering bliss, it is his nature. Bliss is intrinsic to existence. It is not something that happens once in a while, it is not seasonal; it is its intrinsic nature, its very innermost core. So it is always there, but it is not available to us because we are not available to it.

Because of this paradoxical nature there have been two kinds of misunderstanding. There have been people who have said that because bliss always happens through the gift of god as a gift, as a grace, then there is no need to make any effort, so whenever it happens it happens; we cannot do anything about it.

These are the fatalists, this is the fatalists' fallacy. They think that whenever god decides, it will happen; before that no effort on our part is going to help, so why make unnecessary effort? These people will remain always in misery -- bliss will never happen.

The other extreme is the people who think that some effort is absolutely necessary, without effort it cannot happen. So they go on making efforts, with the fallacious notion that it is by their efforts only that they will be able to achieve it. They remain obsessed with their effort. This is the fallacy of yoga. Great endeavour -- body postures, psychological techniques, fasting, austerities... People go on doing all kinds of things, and they completely forget that whatsoever they are doing is unnecessary, it is not needed.

Exactly between these two extremes is the right path: a little bit of effort is needed and a little bit of trust is needed; a little bit of effort to remove the barriers, and a little bit of trust, patience, awaiting, 'God is gracious, so whenever my barrier is removed and I am ready, it is bound to happen, it is inevitable.'

This is my approach, the golden mean: to walk exactly in the middle between the polar opposites. Mind always chooses the extreme. The mind is an extremist; from one extreme it goes to the other. First it will make all kinds of efforts, then it will fail -- it is bound to fail -- then it will move to the other extreme, it will

drop all effort. That too will not succeed; then sooner or later it will move again to the first extreme. In this way, like a pendulum, the mind goes on moving from right to left, from left to right; sometimes it is leftist, sometimes it is rightist, but it is never in the middle.

If the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops. If your mind stops in the middle, your inner clock also stops, time disappears, mind itself disappears. Suddenly you are showered with infinite bliss. From all directions? from all sources, from all planes bliss starts rushing towards you in millions of streams.

Love in fact is always great. If it exists, it is great; if it is small, it exists not. There is nothing like small love -- that is a contradiction in terms. It is just as you cannot say 'the small sky'; if it is small it is not the sky, if it is sky it is not small. Sky means the vast, the unbounded, the infinite. So is the case with love: greatness is part of it, vastness is its very flavour.

That's why our so-called love is not really love. It is too small, it is too confined, too conditional, too demanding. It gets suffocated; in fact it commits suicide.

I see almost everybody's committing suicide. And then life becomes a desert; then one feels that there is no meaning, no poetry, no music, that all is futile. But in fact we are responsible for that desertlike, juiceless existence.

Love is the very juice. Without love we are dry. With love we are green; with love there is foliage, flowers, fruits, with love there is growth. But love can only be great. And the problem is that we want to maintain something impossible: we want love and we also want to protect our ego.

Now, ego is intrinsically small, just as love is intrinsically great. They cannot be partners, they cannot co-exist. And this is what everybody is trying to do: asking for the impossible which has never happened and which is never going to happen because it is against the tao, against the law of nature, against dhamma.

Either you have to choose the ego or you have to choose love -- you cannot have both. And in this conflict between the ego and love, ninety-nine point nine per cent of people choose the ego, for the simple reason that it is small, manageable, controllable, within your grasp. You feel safer, secure. It feels like a small, cosy hut. Of course the vast sky of love is beautiful, full of stars, but one feels afraid, sacred, to go into such a vast unknown territory which goes on and on, which will possess you; you cannot possess it.

1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Ego can be possessed, love cannot be possessed. With love you have to understand one thing: You will have to be possessed by love -- love is vaster than you -- so love will take whole possession of you. Unless one is ready to surrender totally, one cannot know what love is. And without knowing love one never comes to know what life is either. Then all talk of god is mere talk. You don't know lire, you don't know love --

how can you know god? God is the ultimate crescendo of life and love. It is the highest peak of life and love.

Sannyas means becoming ready to go into the unknown, to go into the great, into the vast, to go into the uncharted, going into the ocean with a small boat. The other shore is not known; in fact there is no other shore -- it is just ocean and ocean and ocean. But the very adventure creates the soul.

Gurdjieff used to say that people are not born with a soul; the soul has to be earned, deserved. It belongs to only those few rare people who risk, who are gamblers.

The businesslike person has no soul at all. He lives a soulless existence. Because of his calculations he always remains within the boundaries.

Sannyas means always being ready to go beyond the boundaries, always leaving the known behind, searching for the unknown. The very search gives integrity, the very search creates a centre in you; otherwise people remain without a centre, just a circumference.

Learn the art of great love -- that is the very foundation of true religion. Those who have known love have known all, those who have missed love have missed all.

Meditation is not serious, as it is ordinarily thought to be; it is a song, it is a

dance, it is a celebration.

The serious person can never go beyond the mind. It is the mind that is serious. Mind does not know how to take things playfully; even while playing, mind becomes serious. You can watch chess players: they become utterly serious, far more serious than you will find anybody else in the world. Many chess players go mad because of seriousness.

There is an ancient Sufi story of an Egyptian king who was a great player of chess. He went mad. All kinds of treatments were tried -- nothing worked. His condition was deteriorating every day. Finally a mystic, whom the king used to visit, came to know about the problem. He said, 'This is very simple. Find some great chess player and pay him whatsoever he asks for -- because he will ask a fabulous price, otherwise who would be ready to play chess with a madman? Give him whatsoever he wants but let him play chess with the king. And come back after one year...'

They found the champion of chess players. He really asked an almost impossible sum of money -- they agreed. Out of greed he started playing chess with the madman. After one year they went to see the mystic; he asked, 'How are things?' They said, 'Things are perfectly good. The king has regained his sanity, but that chess player has gone mad!'

The mind is basically serious. Playing cards, people become so serious -- start cheating, deceiving, they become dishonest. If they lose a game they are ready to fight. Sometimes people have killed just because of chess or playing cards; some stupid game and they have shot each other!

Mind cannot take anything playfully: even in ordinary games it becomes serious.

Meditation is not anything of the mind, it is something beyond the mind. And the first step is to be playful about it. If you are playful about it mind cannot destroy your meditation. Otherwise it will turn it into another ego trip; it will make you very serious. You will start thinking, 'I am a great meditator. I am holier than other people, and the whole world is just worldly -- I am religious, I am virtuous.' That's what has happened to thousands of so-called saints, moralists, puritans: they are just playing ego games, subtle ego games.

Hence I want to cut the very root of it from the very beginning. Be playful about it. It is a song to be sung, a dance to be danced. Take it as fun and you will be

surprised: if you can be playful about meditation, meditation will grow in leaps and bounds.

But you are not hankering for any goal; you are just enjoying sitting silently, just enjoying the very act of sitting silently -- not that you are longing for some yogic powers, siddhis, miracles. All that is nonsense, the same old nonsense, the same old game, played with new words, on a new plane.

His may be the only commune in the whole world where meditation is taught as fun, as joy, playfulness, where we are not taking it seriously at all. We are taking everything with great laughter. Life as such has to be taken as a cosmic joke -- and then suddenly you relax because there is nothing to be tense about. And in that very relaxation something starts changing in you -- a radical change, a transformation -- and the small things of life start having new meaning, new significance. Then nothing is small, everything starts taking on 1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

a new flavour, a new aura; one starts feeling a kind of godliness everywhere. One does not become a Christian here, does not become a Hindu, does not become a Mohammedan; one simply becomes a lover of life. One learns only one thing here, how to rejoice in life.

But rejoicing in life is the way towards god. Dance your way to god, laugh your way to god, sing your way to god! And god must be tired of your serious saints by now or centuries those stupid guys... Either he must have committed suicide, seeing all those saints -- I cannot even keep their pictures in my room -- or he must have gone mad, or he must have escaped.

It is impossible to conceive god living with all those Christian, Hindu, Jaina saints -- impossible to conceive. If you look at life, if this life is a creation of god, if this life is the expression of god, then god is a dancing god, full of flowers and fragrance, full of songs -- very creative, very sensitive -- full of music... If this life is any proof -- and except for this life there is no other proof -

- then god cannot be a serious person.

I always love to relate a story about a Hassid fakir's last moments. Zusya was dying -- and for his whole life he laughed and joked and danced... I love that kind of person; to have such a man as company is a blessing. But the elders of the society were worried about him.

When he was dying somebody asked him, 'Zusya, have you made your peace with god? Or have you wasted your life dancing, singing, joking, fooling around?' Zusya opened his eyes and hc said 'But I have never quarrelled with him, so why should I make peace with him? I have never quarrel ed with him; we have been always on good terms. Sometimes I tell jokes -- he laughs; sometimes he tells jokes -- I laugh.

Things have been going very well.

And I have saved a few jokes which I have never told anybody; they are especially for him, because I know when I arrive there he will ask "Zusya, what have you brought?" I have saved a few jokes especially for him! What else? I am a poor man,' Zusya said, 'what else I can keep, to take with me as an offering?

Prayer he has heard enough of, serious people he must have seen enough of.'

Nobody knows how Zusya was received, but I can say with absolute authority that nobody has been received with such joy as Zusya!

This is the way of a truly religious man.

The Golden Wind

Chapter #9

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