14

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‌CHAPTER 14

2 October 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine and prasadam means a gift, a divine gift.And one should learn to treat one’s life as a divine gift. It is of immense value and one should not waste it. Because it has been given free we should not waste it. It has been given free because it is beyond value – but ordinarily people think it is valueless, as if there is no value to it. It is beyond value. It transcends value.

So each moment has to be transformed into a great offering to God. As He has given life to you, you have to respond. That response is prayer. When you start understanding that this life is so valuable, and that God has shown so much love by giving life to you, by breathing life into you, you start responding towards His love. That response is prayer. It always comes when one feels that one is a gift... that God has been a great benediction.

So just feel that you are immensely valuable. When I say immensely valuable, I don’t mean that you have to be comparative. You are not more valuable than others. Everyone is immensely valuable; there is no comparison. When I say immensely valuable, I don’t use the word in a relative way, I don’t say that you are more valuable than others. Nobody is more or less. All are valuable, and all are uniquely valuable. So just try to understand your intrinsic value and start responding towards God. It is already late, and it should not be delayed any more. So feel grateful, feel prayerful.

[A sannyasin says: I feel that I’m softening up now after the West. It was hard there.]

The West is difficult because there you are as if a fish is out of the sea. Here you are in the sea and there you are out of the sea, so it is hard, but that too is a good experience. The fish becomes strong; if it can survive, it becomes very strong. Here meditation comes easier, love comes easier. You are living in a community where communication is very simple. You can say things which you can say nowhere else. You can do things which you can do nowhere else. You can be. That’s what we are trying to do here – to give space to everybody to be.

Sannyas is a space, a freedom – it has no discipline. It is just a space so that everybody can be whatsoever he wants to be. It will not be so easy in the world because the world does not allow you to be yourself: it has its own criterion of how one should be. We have no ‘should’ here. And I accept you totally, unconditionally, as you are.

It is difficult in the West, but sometimes it is good to go and face the difficulty. It gives you a backbone.

[The sannyasin answers: I was teaching there, and I felt that I was brainwashed. I couldn’t teach because I felt at the same level or lower than the children.]

That’s right... that’s exactly how it is. People who are thought to be adults are lower than the children. That’s the misery of the world: they should be higher but they are not. After childhood people go on falling down, not growing up – they grow down, they become more aged. They become more experienced, but they become less innocent, and that is a fall from grace. Once you understand it, children will be just the purest possibilities on the earth... closer to God than anything – than any priest, than any bishop, than any pope. They are closer to God because they are still innocent, uncorrupted.

To be with children is very meditative, it makes you humble – that’s what has happened to you. It makes you humble, and if you are really understanding, you can learn more from them than you can teach. And what you learn from them is more valuable than you can teach to them.

What can a teacher teach? Algebra, geometry, arithmetic, the three r’s – which are really not of much value. They are utilitarian but have nothing of the eternal in them. But a child can teach you the way to go to God, the child can put you God-ward – he can help you to become a child again. You can be reborn – and the second childhood is the real growth.

When you are reborn, you are higher than the child, because the child is innocent but unaware. The second childhood makes you aware and innocent; there you go higher. And that should be the hope for every human being – to become again like children and yet to retain awareness, because that which is unaware has to be lost one day.

Every child is bound to be corrupted, every Adam and Eve is bound to be expelled from the garden of Eden. It is natural, the fall is natural, because the child is unconscious. He does not know what precious innocence he has – and when you don’t know your own treasures, you are going to be robbed. Any snake, any devil, will rob and corrupt you. Innocence is corruptible, vulnerable, unless it is protected by awareness.

Now these are the two ways: either you become cunning – then nobody can rob you – or you become aware; then too, nobody can rob you. Out of one hundred people, ninety-nine have chosen the path of cunningness. They have been robbed – their childhood innocence is gone. Now they have become afraid that this world is very cunning so one should be cunning with it. They become cunning, but by being cunning they go on falling more and more and more.

Childhood is lost but there is no need to be cunning – one has just to be aware. That is the path of religion. To be cunning is the way of the world, and to be aware is the path of religion.

Remain innocent and just be aware, then nobody can corrupt you. Then innocence is incorruptible. For the first time it is really there and it cannot be lost, it cannot be destroyed. It has become a crystallisation in you.

Deva means divine and swabhava means nature, divine nature. Always try one thing whenever you have time: just close your eyes and look into your own nature, into who you are. Just make this question your mantra, ‘Who am I?’ Don’t try to answer it... don’t make any intellectual answer – that I am this or that. Simply ask, ‘Who am I?’ and wait in silence. Again ask, ‘Who am I?’ and wait in silence. Just the question – no need for the answer – and by and by the question will dissolve.

The answer will be there, but with no verbalisation. The answer will be there – not in your mind but in your being. You will feel pregnant with the answer. It will be throbbing there in the deepest core of your being. So the questioning is just to dig deep inside. It has to function as an arrow. So whenever you have time, sitting on your bed doing nothing, just close your eyes and ask the question, and look into your own being. That’s what swabhava is – that’s your nature – and once you start coming in contact with it, it will transform you. It will not only change you – it will transform you.

Change is mediocre – you remain the same, a little change here and there. Transformation is needed – nothing less is going to help. Total transformation is needed: a one hundred and eighty degree turn. So now this is your meditation... your name is your meditation.

[A sannyasin says: Sometimes when I look at your picture, or sometimes when I close my eyes and sit there and meditate, there is that feeling of being pulled, and there’s a lot of fear at the same time.

He says the pull is from his eyes and chest.]

Come here and just look at my hands. (Osho was leaning forward in his chair, and had clenched up the fist of his right hand.) Feel as if you are a fist, completely closed. Really become closed.

When I start opening my fist, you start opening like a flower. First just feel that you are a fist and everything is closed.

[The sannyasin staring intensely at Osho’s fist, began to become more and more tense, his body beginning to shake and beads of perspiration to gather on his face. As Osho slowly and gracefully unfolded his fist, he began to relax until he slumped prostrate on the floor before Osho.]

Good... good. This you have to do. Whenever you feel this energy, first close yourself – that will put pressure on the energy. Close from everywhere, close up the energy. The energy is in the navel, so let the navel be the centre and close up so that the energy cannot escape and there is no outlet.

Then remain in that closedness just for one, two, three minutes at the most, and then start opening. There will be a burst of energy because the pressure will be released. The energy will rush towards your third eye, and once it reaches there, all fear will disappear.

So the energy has to be made like a fountain. First it has to be pressed, so that when the pressure is removed, it simply rushes forth. You can do this twice, thrice a day, and you will start enjoying it. When it starts reaching to the third eye, you will start having a sort of inner orgasm. And it is so pleasant... it is such a blessing.

Everything is good. There is nothing to be worried about. [A sannyasin says: : I feel better every day now.]

That’s very good. That’s going to happen more and more – and there is no end to it. Very good. Just go on enjoying it. The fear is that of happiness, so when it really comes... First you seek and you think too much about it, you dream about it, but when it really starts coming, one becomes apprehensive.

For the whole of your life you have been going only so far in everything. If you were angry, you went so far. If you were sad, you went so far. If you were happy, you went so far. There is a subtle line beyond which you have never gone. Everything goes there and stops. It has become almost automatic, so that the moment you reach that line, you are immediately put off. Everybody has been taught that way – that you are allowed a certain anger but not more than that, because more than that can be dangerous. You are allowed a certain happiness, but not more than that because happiness can be maddening. You are allowed sadness only up to a point, but not more than that, because more than that can be suicidal.

You have been trained and there is a china wall around you and everybody else. You never go beyond it. That is your only space, your only freedom, so when you start becoming happy, joyous, that china wall comes in the way. So you have to be aware of that.

Start doing one experiment that will help tremendously. It is called the method of exaggeration. It is one of the most ancient tibetan methods of meditation. If you are feeling sad, close your eyes and exaggerate sadness. Go into it as much as possible, go beyond the limit. If you want to moan and sob and weep, do. If you feel like rolling on the floor, do, but go beyond the ordinary limit, where you have never gone.

Exaggerate it, because that limit, that constant boundary that you have lived in, has become so much of a routine that unless you go beyond it, you will never be aware – it is part of your habitual mind. So you can become angry but you will not become aware of it unless you go beyond the boundary. Then suddenly it comes into your awareness because something is happening that has never happened before.

So do this with sadness, with anger, with jealousy, with whatsoever you are feeling at the moment – with happiness particularly. When you are feeling happy, don’t believe in limits. Just go and rush out of the limits: dance, sing, jog – don’t be a miser. Once you have learned how to trespass the limit, how to transcend the limit, you will be in a totally different world. Then you will know how much you have been missing your whole life.

Try it. Close your eyes and be happy.

[The sannyasin closed his eyes and began to laugh, after a few moments falling backwards into the lap of a sannyasin. Slowly sitting upright again, he began to raise his arms slowly, a beatific smile on his face. Osho called him back... ]

Good... very good! Things are really going well. You were just knocked down by the china wall.

You will come against that china wall many times but by and by you will start knowing how to get out of it – because it is really not there; it is just a belief.

[Osho described the phenomenon of the magic circle of the gipsies and primitive tribes of the Middle East, whereby once a child has been told that he cannot leave a certain space, he finds he simply cannot do so, so strongly is the belief imbedded.]

Gurdjieff learned his first hypnotic method from the Kurds – these people. They are really tremendously hypnotic and they have worked for centuries in hypnosis. This is an hypnotic method. And the china wall is the same kind of thing.

In fact it is not there, but you have believed it for so long, so whenever you go, you will be knocked down, back inside – you cannot go beyond it; it has become an automatic mechanism. You simply go so far and you are put off. Your energy simply disappears; you become impotent.

This china wall has to be broken. Once this is broken you have infinite space available. Then one has freedom. That’s what moksha is – that you have no boundaries.

All boundaries are of belief and mind; they don’t really exist. You believe – that’s why they exist. If you start disbelieving them, doubting them, if you try getting out of them, by and by they wither away; because they are only in your mind, they are not part of reality.

So first do this method and then do the camp, mm? And after the camp, do a few groups. Good.

[A sannyasin who had recently left hospital after an attack of typhoid fever, said that she was feeling paranoid and that her partner did not love her.

Osho said it was natural to feel negative after illness, unless one was aware, and that illness was a great catharsis. He then asked her partner how he was feeling.

He replied that he didn’t hate her, he loved her, but that his initial response to her paranoia was one of anger.]

It is natural. There is a little misunderstanding that you have to understand, and which is a good thing to understand.

When you love somebody, and when you are happy with somebody, of course health is part of that happiness. You share the energy with somebody because the person is healthy, flowing. Then suddenly the partner is ill, health disappears; you are left alone. The very reason to be with the person is no more there. You were with the person because you were feeling happy and healthy, because the other person was healthy and happy. So everything was good. Now the other person is ill. He or she is no more flowing, and the whole point of being with them is lost – you feel angry.

Unless you understand that this is a part of love, that sometimes the other will be ill and that it is natural.… Sometimes you will be ill. You have to be aware and responsible and see that when the other was healthy and happy, you enjoyed her health and happiness. Now the other person is ill. You have to serve, you have to care so that the person becomes healthy and loving and flowing again.

In the West this is happening too much because something very basic is being misunderstood. People think that relationships are for when they are happy, good. When something goes wrong – even a physical illness – then why bother? Find another woman, another man – this seems very inhuman. If this attitude remains, love cannot grow. Then whatsoever you call love is nothing but sex, because love means that you care for the person in health, in illness. You care for the person. When the person is loving – and sometimes the person is not loving – then too you care. You care for the person and you accept all summers and winters. You accept everything that is in the person. Health is there, illness is there, old age is going to be there, youth is there, anger is there, hatred is there – everything is possible.

When you choose a person, you commit yourself to the person’s totality. I’m not saying that you should celebrate her illness. I’m not saying that you should want her to remain ill, because that is a part of life. Try in every way to bring her back to health but don’t be angry with her. If you want to be angry, be angry with the illness. Don’t create any trouble for her in any way, and then she will come out of the illness sooner.

The illness is frustrating you, but don’t direct it towards her. Of course Geeta is ill, but she is not ill on her own accord – she has not chosen to be ill. One day you will be ill. And this is part of the game of being together – that we care about each other. In fact love is known only when the other partner is in tremendous need of you. When everything is going well, it is nothing much. When things are going wrong and you still stick to the person, still stand by the person, then only you show that you belong, that the person belongs to you; that you are really together.

A togetherness is a sacred commitment. It is a great involvement – for better, for worse, for life, for death. If you really love a person even death can not destroy that love. Death may come and your beloved may die, but your love and your commitment remain. When love reaches to that depth and height, it has a fragrance of the divine – otherwise it is very low, animal-like.

So nothing is wrong. These are the situations one has to grow through. Put your anger against her illness. Because you are feeling angry, she is feeling that you don’t love her, that you hate her or something. So a misunderstanding has been created. Make it clear to her that you don’t want her to be ill and that you are angry because you don’t want her to be ill. You are angry with the illness but not with her. In fact you are angry because you love her. Do you follow me?

Put your anger in the right direction and help her to come out of this, mm? She loves you very much. Good.

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