CHAPTER 23
11 October 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means divine and chitsukha means consciousness in bliss. Chit means consciousness, sukh means bliss; divine consciousness of bliss. And this you have to imbibe by and by into your being – the spirit of it – that just to be conscious is blissful. Whenever you lose consciousness, you descend into misery. Whenever you are unaware, you are miserable – or vice versa. Whenever you are miserable, you are unconscious; they go together. So it can be said that unconsciousness is misery. And whenever you are fully conscious, alert, aware, suddenly there is bliss. So bliss and awareness are two aspects of the same coin. That is the meaning of Chitsukha.
So become more and more conscious, less and less mechanical. Don’t move like an automaton: don’t go on doing things because you have been always doing them. Don’t go on doing things because you have become efficient in doing them. Remember that whatsoever you are doing, you have to bring a quality of awareness to it.
You are walking on the road – a simple thing. You have gone for a morning walk. Now just don’t walk – bring consciousness to it. Walk consciously, slowly, deliberately. Each step should be known – that you have taken one now to the right, now to the left, now you are turning at the road. Now your breathing is going faster and faster. Suddenly there comes a breeze or a car passing by, or a dog starts barking or a child is crying. Just be alert, so that whatsoever is happening you are present to it.
Bring the quality of presence into your life. You are eating, but just don’t go on eating in a mechanical way as people do. They simply go on stuffing; something has to be done so they do it. They don’t taste it, they don’t smell it. They don’t feel any respect for food. They don’t feel any respect for the provider of the food. They don’t have any gratitude, because they are not aware.
Eating, eat slowly... savour each bite. Smell, touch, feel, and whatsoever is happening all around, that too has to be in the consciousness. Awareness is not exclusive – it is not concentration. When
you concentrate on something, other things have to be denied. Mm? If you concentrate on me – a sudden noise outside, but you are not expected to listen to it. Then it is concentration. I am not talking about concentration, I am talking about awareness. Awareness is all-inclusive. You are listening to me – you are also listening to whatsoever happens around. You are simply open – alert and open. Whatsoever happens, you will not exclude it, you will include it. Consciousness is so vast that it can include the whole existence. It’s bigger than the sky, bigger than space.
So just try to bring the quality of consciousness, presence, to whatsoever you are doing. Taking a shower, bring it: by and by you will see it as a blessing, like a shower of pure energy, and you will feel soaked with it. And once you start making contact with that energy that always comes whenever you are alert, you will be surprised at how much you have missed in your life. And it was always yours. You just needed one thing, and that was awareness. You have lived in a sort of a sleep, you have been a somnambulist.
Hence I give you the name Chitsukha. Now get out of your sleep and get out of your dreams!
[A visitor says she cannot take sannyas: I think I will go the same way as your sannyasins, but I think I must do this on my own, not in this community because I have been in a lot of other prisons in my life – childrens’ homes, boarding homes, schools – so I feel to be free.]
You be free – but you don’t know my sannyas. Be free and soon you will understand that you cannot be more free than my sannyasins can be. But wait. Soon you will start feeling jealous (laughter)... jealous of my sannyasins.
[She answers: MaybeBut why cannot I go on my own by myself?]
You try! I’m not saying not to try – you try. But that is a reaction against your past – it is not freedom. Because in the past something has happened, that makes you afraid of any communities, of any group, of becoming part of any sort of thing. This is just a reaction from the past – it is not freedom.
Just be here. I am not in a hurry to give you sannyas. Just be here and enjoyfeel what sannyas
is. Be with sannyasins, see and watch, and you will know that on your own you will never be so free, because this sannyas is something absolutely new on the earth .
They look as if they are a group, but they are related to me directly and individually. They are not related to each other as a group, and I have no discipline over them – they are not confined in any way.
In fact what you will do on your own is to be confined to yourself, that’s all. You yourself will become your imprisonment now. You have become afraid of other imprisonments – now you will be imprisoned in your ego, and that can be the worst imprisonment possible. You have not been aware that a person can be imprisoned in his own ego, and can call it independence and freedom – and it cannot be freedom.
... Just wait. Meditate and listen to meSo it is only a question of time. You can delay it as much
as you want, but as far as I am concerned, you have already become a sannyasin. I can look into you. You are not afraid of me – you are afraid of your past, but you don’t understand that I am not a
part of your past. You are afraid of your past entanglements, but this is not at all in any way related to your past entanglements. It is absolute freedom.
... I confer absolute freedom on you. Now look at me. This will be your name: Ma Prem Satisha.
Prem means love and satisha means goddess; goddess of existence. Sat means existence and isha means goddess; goddess of love and existence or love and the divinity. And hereby I make you absolutely free – free and orange!
[Osho mentioned this new sannyasin in discourse the following morning, saying:]
Just last night one woman seeker was saying, ‘I would do what other sannyasins are doing, but I cannot surrender... I cannot lose my freedom. I have lived in my confinements from my very childhood, in many disciplines. Now I am afraid to get involved in another imprisonment.’ I said, ‘Don’t be worried. I confer freedom upon you – an absolute freedom.’
Sannyas is freedom. If you understand rightly, it is absolute freedom. And the woman understood the point because I said, ‘Now you are afraid that you may get into another trap, but are you aware? Your ego itself can become the trap – and the greatest of all. You have lived in many other commitments, but your own ego can become the imprisonment.’
When you surrender to a nobody, he cannot make an imprisonment of you, and the very danger of your own ego becoming an imprisonment for you disappears. When you surrender to me, you are not really surrendering to me, because I am not here. And I am not enjoying your surrender at all. Whether you surrender or not makes no difference to me. In fact when you surrender to me, you surrender yourself – you don’t surrender to me. You simply surrender your ego. I am just a device, an excuse.
It will be difficult for you to go and surrender to the river or to the sky or to the stars – it will be difficult and you will look a little ridiculous. So I pretend to be here (laughter), just to help you so that you don’t feel ridiculous, and so that you can put your ego somewhere. There is nobody to receive it and nobody to be happy about it, but it helps.
Buddha used to call such things devices, ‘upaya’. It is just an ‘upaya’, a device. to those who cannot put their egos down unless they find some feet. I make my feet available to you, but inside there is nobody.
[A sannyasin says: I’m becoming more mad.
... It’s coming out. I’ve been holding it down.
... I keep judging it.]
I always thought that you were perfectly mad, so how can you be more mad? You cannot be! Enjoy it. Don’t be worried.
... That is really neurosis. Madness in itself is not a pathology, but if you judge it and you repress it, you are getting into a pathological state.
Don’t judge it – madness is perfectly good. The whole existence is mad, otherwise it cannot exist. You think these trees are sane? These birds singing in the morning? You think the stars moving are sane? You think God is sane? If God were sane He would have committed suicide long ago, but He continues.
Nothing is wrong with madness; you have to accept it. Once your madness changes its quality completely, a new dimension opens to it. The madness itself can become your meditation. All the mystics have been mad people, but mad with a method. They transform their madness in a creative way. Then the same madness became a great enlightenment, a great realisation.
The same madness can become dance, it can become poetry, it can become music, or if you judge it can become pathology. So don’t judge it – judge ye not. Accept it, love it. That’s how you are so what can Prabuddha do? If Prabuddha is mad, he is mad. So what? There is no need to judge it. Accept it and enjoy it. And suddenly when you start enjoying it, it disappears, because madness cannot exist when you enjoy it. When there is no tension, no anxiety, how can madness exist? If you judge, there is tension.
[The sannyasin says: Sometimes when I go out of my room and I see somebody, I just can’t bear to look at them. I can’t talk to them.]
Don’t look! Who is forcing you? There is no necessity.
... Nothing is wrong. You must be enjoying your loneliness better, that’s why the comparison arises. There are people who enjoy company. When they are alone they feel mad. If you leave them alone in a room they cannot be in the room, they feel mad... that they will do something.
There have been many experiments in sense deprivation. A person is kept in a cabin or in a tub, in a closed place, for a few hours. It is very difficult for people. Just after forty or fifty minutes they become so anxious to get out of there; the loneliness is such a torture. At the most people can tolerate six hours. Beyond that they start going neurotic or crazy – and normal people!
So there are people who cannot live alone – they always hanker for company – and then there are people who are happy alone but always feel some tension in company. Your situation is better than the other type of person. At least you are at home with yourself. So live more silently and more alone. Enjoy your solitude and avoid relationships for one month. Then after one month, tell me how things are, mm? Good.
[The Tao group is present. One group member says: I was very confused because I felt I was opening on one side and closing down on the other.
This morning I felt in a very silent mood, looking inwards more and not intervening – just watching what’s happening with the conflict and seeing the ego.]
The group has been really good. It may not have been ecstatic, but it has been very very useful. And you misunderstood, that’s why the problem was there.
Whenever you open, you simultaneously close also. If you become open towards love, you close towards your hatred. If you become more open to compassion, you become more closed to anger
– that is natural. When you open towards the sky, you become closed towards the earth – that is natural. In the beginning this is how it is going to be. You cannot go in all directions. When you start going in one direction, all other directions are left.
One day it becomes possible – but that is the very last thing – that suddenly you are so free – you are freedom – that you can move in all directions, all together. Then you can be angry and compassionate at the same time. and there will be no conflict in it. But that will take time... wait for it.
Right now whenever you are opening to something, immediately you will be closing to something else – the opposite will be closed. Where your energy has been flowing will be closed and your whole energy will be channelised into a new dimension – this is natural. You became confused because you thought, ‘What is happening? On one hand I’m becoming open, on another I’m becoming closed.’ You started looking at these two things and you became confused because you could not figure it out – but this is natural.
The group has done something beautiful in you, and you will be reaping more and more in the camp because of this group. After passing through five, six, seven groups, you will have a complete grip of your being, because you will enter again and again from different doors. It is very good to know oneself from different angles. Man is a multi-faceted being – he has many faces – and one has to know one’s many faces. Then there is only a possibility of knowing the original face, the innermost core – not before it.
Anand means bliss, nirakar means formless – formless bliss.
In the East we have conceived of God in two ways: one is with form, another is without form. The unmanifest God is without form, and the manifest world is God manifest with form. But everything is divine – whether in form or formless. You are divine in form. One day when you disappear and you leave the body behind and you are not reborn again, then you disappear into the formless, as a river disappears into the ocean. Then the river loses its form, its embodied existence. Then there are no boundaries to it.
We are gods in form, and we are towards the formless God. And that is the whole journey of sannyas
– from form to formless... from word to wordless... from mind to no-mind.
So remember it. Whenever you see something.You see a tree – don’t just remain with the form
of the tree. Try to penetrate into the being of the tree which is formless. The tree is just a form. As you are a form, the rock is a form, the cloud is a form. If you start looking into things deeper and penetrating to the formless, you will see that one pervades all. The many are just the faces of the one, and that one has no limitations. The one is beginningless, endless.
So just try to see into things deeply and try to bypass the form. You see a woman who is beautiful. Try to look into the beauty of the woman and forget the form. Suddenly you will be meeting the divine beauty. You listen to music.somebody is playing on the guitar. Forget the form of the player