12

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‌CHAPTER 12

30 September 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine and naveen means new. The divine is never old, and that which is old is never divine. The divine is eternally new – it is divine because of its eternal newness.

So the whole effort, the whole purpose of sannyas, is to make you unconditionally new. It is not something that happens once and forever – it is something that is going to happen every moment of your life. Each moment you have to drop the yesterday, each moment you have to drop the past. The tendency of the mind is to accumulate it, to thrive on it, to become stronger on it – the past, all the yesterdays.

So the moment the moment has passed, let it pass completely; then there is no meaning in clinging to it – you cannot relive it, you cannot go into it again. Now to have it inside you is to have junk – which is useless, which cannot be used in any way. But it will occupy your inner space, and if there are too many yesterdays – and there are – they go on piling up. Every day is going to become a yesterday, and when you go on piling up yesterdays, you become old. To be old is to be in the world; and to be continuously fresh, is to go beyond the world – it is to be in God.

So every day clean the slate completely of the past. Forgive and forget. Remember it as if it had never happened – or at the most that it happened in a dream, and now there is no need to worry about it, to chew it again and again. There is no point of going into it. Then you become available to the present. That availability is sannyas – to remain available to the present, to remain available to the here and now.

Remember one thing about time: life is multi-dimensional and time is one dimensional. Right now as you are listening to me, you are also listening to somebody shouting... the train passing by far away... the sound of the night... the presence of the people around. It is not in your focus. I am in your focus, but they are present.

This moment is multi-dimensional. Many things are happening together simultaneously. But the mind functions in a linear way, in a line. If you remember this moment tomorrow, you will not be able to remember the simultaneousness of it. You will have to arrange everything in a line: you were hearing me, then there was a man shouting outside, then the train passed by, then somebody coughed, then this happened, then that happened. Now you arrange it in a line like a railway train – but when it was really happening, it was simultaneous. It was not then and then and then; it was always now. There was no before and no after – everything was going on together.

Existence is a togetherness, but when the mind thinks about it, it makes a linear arrangement. That linear arrangement is the problem. That makes you old because that makes you unavailable to the simultaneous, unavailable to existence itself. Thinking is one-dimensional, the mind is one- dimensional, time is one-dimensional, space is multi-dimensional. To be in time is to be in the mind, and to just be in space is to be in meditation.

So constantly reclaim your space, and don’t allow it to be occupied by time and its junk. From this moment, die every moment to the past and be reborn again and again and again. Once you are no more concerned with the past, you are no more concerned with the future, because the future is just a projection of the past. It is the past again seeking its way into your being. Past pleasures want to be repeated – that becomes your future. Past pains you don’t want to repeat – that becomes your fear in the future. Your greed, your fear, your anger – they all come from the past. If you drop yesterday, tomorrow also disappears. It disappears automatically. Then you are suddenly here. Then this moment is all.

The whole eternity is available herenow. That is my meaning of sannyas. And I give you this name – deva naveen; divine newness – so that you can remember it.

Ira means the earth and prem means love – the loving earth. And the feminine being is exactly like the loving earth. The earth is the symbol of the feminine in the East. The sky is the symbol of the male, the masculine, and the earth, the symbol of the feminine.

The earth has many qualities: all that is beautiful arises out of it, all that is alive arises out of it; all life comes out of its womb. The woman has tremendous possibilities to flower – to flower in many dimensions. So remember this: the earth can remain barren if the opportunity is not used. It can become a beautiful garden if the opportunity is used. Sannyas is going to be just a seed. Be the earth and let the seed go as deep in you as possible. Allow it into your innermost heart. Don’t resist.

This is one of the problems that every sannyasin has to face. The mind tends to resist, to fight. Even with me the mind will fight. But those days are wasted days, and one thing is certain – you cannot win against me. So the wise person simply surrenders – he does not bother to fight. Then immediately things start happening.

And for a woman it is very easy to surrender because that comes naturally to her. Fight is unnatural, struggle is unnatural; will is unnatural for a woman.

So just allow these seeds that will now be constantly falling on you. Absorb them, and allow them access to your deepest core of being. The deeper they go, the better will be the crop.

And whenever you go outside, whenever you have the opportunity, lie down on the earth, on the bank of the river... just lie down on the earth and feel one with it. That will give you much energy, fresh energy. Just sit silently on the earth and feel joined with it – as if you have roots, and those roots are going into the earth and the earth is vitalising you, nourishing you.

Man also has roots; they are invisible. Man is also like a tree. The tree has visible roots. Man is a moving tree, but he has roots in the earth. So whenever you find time, just lie down, look at the sky, and let there be a meeting between the sky and the earth deep inside you, and you will feel tremendously happy in those moments. Many problems that you have always been carrying with you will simply disappear. Just let the sky and the earth meet in you, and ecstasy will arise out of it.

While you are here do a few groups, mm? so you can destructure your past, so you can uncondition your past. These groups are like a dehypnosis, so the past can be cleaned. And once the past is cleaned, there is nothing to be done. Then everything happens on its own accord, because you fall in accord with nature.

The only thing is to dismantle the past, and the past is big. It is not only of this life – it is of many lives. It is a great concrete structure. Once it is demolished, everything becomes easy. If it is not demolished. it goes on influencing you. And if the past goes on working, you remain a machine. Man is a machine if he functions through the past.

Ordinarily if you meet ten thousand people, nine hundred and ninety-nine people are machines. They may know, they may not know; they may even feel offended if you say this to them. But this is one of my purposes – to offend people – because if they are offended, they start getting out of their sleep. But people function like machines.

Sannyas is an effort to make you, for the first time, conscious of your life, conscious of the mechanism that surrounds you. Then there is a possibility that the mechanism can be used, but then you become the master. And then the second possibility is that one day there is a hope that you can function beyond the structure. Those are the moments of meditation when the consciousness functions without mind.

That is the definition of meditation – consciousness functioning without the mind, consciousness moving, dancing, without any structure, unstructured.

So these groups are just to help you to unstructure the past.

[A sannyasin says: I was a potter and teaching pottery... I’m fed up with it.]

No, the interest will come back. Just be here. The work is really beautiful; it is no ordinary work. It can become a very great method for centring. In the East we have used it as a deep meditative light.

[See ‘The Passion For The Impossible’, September 3rd, 1976, where Osho talks about pottery to another disillusioned potter.]

But it’s okay. We get fed up with everything. Everything proves to be boring because we never function out of our centre. Even love becomes boring, so what to say about other things? Even life

itself becomes boring because we don’t know how to function from our inner space. We only go on functioning through motivation. One has to earn, one has to be famous, one has to compete – one has to do this and that. We remain part of the market, that’s why we become bored. We never do things out of no motivation. And this is the real way to do things – with no motivation... out of sheer joy, out of sheer love. But I will teach you. I am going to make you a potter. Just wait.

Right now forget about it. Do a few groups, meditateBecause I love it, and it can be of tremendous

value for inner growth. But you must have been doing it in some wrong way. It is not the work itself you are bored with – it is the motivation that was wrong, that made you tense. But all motivations make people tense – unless you learn how to live without motivation, how to simply live without motive. That’s what sannyas should be, because all motivation is creating trouble.

One should function just like trees, animals, or God. One should do things because one loves, because one cares. One should not do things out of economic, political reasons. One should do things out of aesthetic sensibility. It is a form of art, it is like painting or music. It is to create rhythm in things – playing with the earth and creating form out of formlessnesscreating something out of

nothing really.

And if you know how to meditate with it, outside, on the wheel, the pot starts arising – simultaneously inside your being something else starts arising. You can become deeply connected in that moment. Time can stop. You can move into eternity in that moment. It can be tremendously absorbing.

But wait. For a few days completely forget about it. You need a rest. You really need to be reborn – but that is going to happen.

[A sannyasin says: I feel very good being here with you. I feel that before I had never experienced deep love. Now I feel energy moving.]

Very good. You are just on the brink. Any moment you can disappear.

Be ready to disappear – then only is love complete, total, absolute. Then you are lost in it. If you hold a little, if you remain a little, then love is never complete. And without love being total, one is never satisfied. Blessing is in the totality of love.

Much is going to happen.…

[An ethiopian sannyasin says: I sent my brother a book, ‘The Way Of The White Clouds’ and other books. He read them and liked them very much. He asked me what is meditation, and I don’t know what to tell him.]

So you can send him a tape of the Dynamic meditation – of the whole process of people doing it. And tell him that there is no way to say what meditation is. There is only one way to know about it and that is to do it.

It is impossible to say what meditation is – it is a taste – and whatsoever we say is going to only be symbolic. How can you say what sweetness is? The only way is to present sweets to the person who wants to know what sweetness is. If he is willing to eat them, he will know. If he says that first

he must know, only then can he eat them, there is no way. Then you can talk ad infinitum about what sweetness is, but it is just going to be futile. It will be just words and words and words – and all dead. Only experience is alive – language is always dead.

Once you put a truth into language it becomes a lie. The moment you utter a truth, it has become a lie. You have betrayed it.

All scriptures are lies. Because the truth has been given words, they have become lies. Only the experience is true. And God is not a word; the word ‘god’ is not God. If you become too attached to the word ‘god’, that will become the greatest barrier towards Him. One has to forget all scriptures, all concepts, all philosophies, all belief systems, to know what is. That which is has to be known immediately and directly. It is existential.

So tell him about meditation but tell him that this is not meditation. It is just like a photograph. You can have a beautiful photograph of the sunrise and you can present that photograph to a person who has never seen any sunrise. You can have a beautiful photograph of the Himalayas, and a person who has never known those peaks and that virgin ice on the peaks, will not be able to understand what it is all about. He will have a picture but it will be a dead thing.

So tell him that you are saying something about meditation but it is not meditation. It is just like a map of a country; it is not the country. And send him a tape so that he can listen to it. Tell him to do it, and for three weeks not to bother whether anything is happening or not – just to go on doing. Within three weeks he will have a taste of it and then he will know. This is the only way.

This ashram is just a device, nothing else. I am not interested in creating a monastery or an ashram. This is just a device so that people can be here with me and learn how to love and surrender... how to transform small things into great... how to transform cleaning into prayer or cooking into worship, or typing or editing or guarding or gardening into holy experiences.

[There follows a description of ‘a day in the life’ of the ashram]

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