< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter title: Drunk with awareness
11 September 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code:
8709110
ShortTitle:
PILGR10
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
123
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
I WOULD LIKE TO BE IN SYNCHRONICITY WITH YOU. WOULD YOU MIND
TELLING ME WHAT TIME IT IS, SO THAT I CAN SET MY WATCH BY YOURS?
Anand Vimal, it is not difficult for me to tell the time. But keeping your watch in
synchronicity with my watch is not the real thing; your heart has to be in synchronicity with my heart. The watch will not help. Just for your consolation, on my watch it is eight-ten. But you have to synchronize with my heart, with my being.
And I know you are coming along, slow but steady... and the moment will come when your heart will beat with the same rhythm as my heart.
Your question is, in a way, significant. Superficially, it is stupid... but there have been many cases of enlightened people whose watches stopped when they died. Perhaps their disciples could not manage to synchronize with the master's heart, but their watch did.
One famous Zen master, Bokuju even told the people that, "when my watch stops, you can understand I am gone. It beats with my heart."
But this is not the case with me. I am in every way eccentric. Automatic watches simply stop on my hand -- because an automatic watch needs some movement, and I am so still.
Finally, I had to change from automatic watches and turn to quartz watches, because whether I am dead or alive they will continue. A battery does not know how to synchronize, but the automatic watch needs movement.
But I rarely make any movement and I don't keep the watch on my hand twenty- four hours -- just when I come to you, so that I remember now it is morning and I have to go to you; and in the evening when I come to you... just these four hours the watch is on my hand.
The remaining time I don't need to know what day it is, what date it is, what time it is.
My people love me so much that they know at what time they have to serve my lunch; at what time they have to put me in the bed; at what time they have to wake me up and push me into the bathroom.
And as far as days and dates are concerned, they are absolutely irrelevant to me. I have no need of any calendar. Even Neelam reminds me about the year, that it is 1987; otherwise, I have no concern. I am not in a hurry, not going towards a goal.
Once in a while, while speaking, I look at my watch; you must be thinking that I am looking at the time, but really I am looking to see whether the watch has stopped or not.
If it has stopped, it is better to stop now; if it is still running, I can manage.
It was a great surprise to scientists why many people's watches stopped when they died, exactly at that moment. Those watches were running in deep harmony with their heart; slowly, slowly those watches had become in a dance with the rhythm of the heart.
But, Vimal, making your watch run exactly as mine will not be of much help. You have to put your heart with my heart, you have to learn to dance with my being -- and that I cannot do. I can provide the opportunity, then it is all up to your intelligence, to take it or not to take it.
If you want to be in synchronicity with me, you have to be as drunk with awareness as I am. It is a strange drunkenness: you are fully aware and still you are as drunk with joy, blissfulness as no drunkard can be. You just look at my eyes: anybody will think I am drunk. You just listen to my words: anybody will think I am drunk.
I have not drunk even water for twenty years! I have been traveling around the country, and this country has such an ugly culture that in the same rivers buffaloes are enjoying their bath, donkeys are drinking, dogs are pissing and men are standing amidst them, chanting to God -- and that water is being used. It is absolutely polluted.
I have heard that America will destroy itself by its nuclear weapons, Russia will follow the same route, England will die because of its hypocrisy and its seriousness and France will die from its sexuality and sensuality. The person who was telling me, I asked him --
"Because I am here now in India, tell me of what India is going to die." He said, "Shitting all over the country!"
India is a big toilet. This is the only freedom India has -- freedom to shit anywhere. I wonder why they have not included it in the constitution? Where they talk about freedom of speech -- although nobody has anything to say -- they should have mentioned that everybody is free to urinate anywhere he wants;
everybody is free to shit anywhere he wants. Those would have been realistic considerations.
Freedom of speech in this country? -- I have not seen a single person who can claim that he is a free thinker. They are learned, they are scholars, they can repeat scriptures, but free thinking? -- that does not exist, has not existed since Gautam Buddha. He was the last free thinker in this country. For twenty-five centuries, nobody has bothered to think.
In fact, nobody has time; raising children, creating more misery, more poverty, who has time to think?
I am certainly mad, because I am telling you to go beyond thinking, and you have not even started thinking! Here my work is first to make you start thinking... just to drop it.
You cannot drop anything if you don't have it. A beggar cannot say, "I have renounced the world." The fact is just the opposite: the world has renounced him. Only an emperor can say, "I have renounced the world" -- and it makes sense.
A few suggestions for you, Vimal.
Two drunks were staggering along the railway tracks. "My God!" said the first. "I've never climbed so many steps in my whole life!"
"It's not the steps that bother me," replied the other. "It's the low hand-rails."
Just get a little drunk! This temple belongs to drunkards... and I will know before you know whether your heart is in synchronicity with me or not. You have come a long long way -- just a few steps more.
The politician was trying to calm a group of angry farmers because he had not fulfilled any of his promises.
"If you put a bull into a field of cows one night," he declared, "you would not expect to get a lot of new-born calves in the morning, would you?"
"No," said a voice from the back of the hall, "but you would certainly expect to see a lot of contented faces."
Just looking at you, I know how you are growing. Just the contented faces, just the silence surrounding you... just the depth of your eyes going deeper, becoming oceanic...
just your gratitude to existence reaching to its peak. This is the language that I understand.
If somebody comes to me and says that he is absolutely in synchronicity with me
-- that won't do, because that is not the language of synchronicity. Synchronicity speaks itself.
There is an ancient proverb, "Lies have to speak; truth remains silent." But lies deceive you forever, and the silent truth can become your eternal treasure. It has not said anything.
In deep silence you all synchronize with me, because silence knows no distinctions. In laughing together you synchronize with me, because laughter knows no boundaries. In understanding what I am saying and where I am leading you, you synchronize with me.
Watches won't do, Vimal. In fact, you don't want to synchronize with the watch; you want to synchronize with me. That happens as your meditation deepens, as your love becomes unconditional, without any expectations. Once it happens, it has happened forever.
And the synchronicity, the harmony with the master, does not think of contradictions, inconsistencies; those are all far below in the dark valleys. The moment you synchronize, you start rising towards the sunlit peaks, towards the stars.
It will happen.… The way I have been watching you, it is already happening. Don't bother about watches -- because what will you do if I don't have a watch? In fact, the watch I have is not mine. Even if you synchronize with it, you will be synchronizing with somebody else, whose watch I am wearing. People give me watches to wear while they are here, just to bless their watches, so they can rejoice when they go that they are going with something, some heartbeats of me. This is difficult for the outside world to understand.
Gayan makes my clothes. She could have been paid highly anywhere; she is a perfect seamstress. Here she gets nothing except my love. She works day and
night -- but perhaps she has got the insight that there is nothing more valuable than the love of one who has arrived. His love will pull you also with invisible strings to the whole.
Everything I have does not belong to me. My shoes Arpita goes on making; my hats Veena goes on making. They rejoice that I am wearing their hats, their shoes, their dresses. Somebody brings a car and is grateful that I am using the car for coming to Buddha Hall. I could have come walking -- it is not such a great distance, just from one house to another house -- but then I would not have made somebody happy without any effort.
It is difficult for the outsiders to understand me. They have never known such a thing --
that anybody will give me their watches just to wear so that the watch starts vibrating with my heart, and then it becomes sacred to them.
One of the best television interviewers in America, Ted Koppel, asked me, "I cannot believe why people should go on giving you watches to wear, Rolls Royces to drive in.
And not one but ninety-three Rolls Royces, and thousands of watches!" I said, "You don't know the ways of love."
He said, "But I have friends "
I said, "A friend is one thing -- you don't have a master. You have never loved somebody more than yourself. The moment you love somebody more than yourself, then you are ready to do anything."
It does not matter whether it is valuable or not valuable people from around the
world go on sending me strange things, knowing perfectly well what I will do with them. Just the other day somebody sent a beautiful stone from Mount Sinai, where Moses met God, according to the theology of the Jews, so Mount Sinai has become a holy place.
I respect the idea, although the story may be false. The story may be just a story, but the person who sends a stone, packaged beautifully, has a tremendous love in his heart. What should he give to me? -- everything is trivial. But this stone from
Mount Sinai, which is the only place God has ever spoken to any man, is holy. Although it is just a stone, because it is holy, somebody sends it to me.
I go on receiving all kinds of things, and I will go on distributing them to others. What will I do with them? -- I have come naked and I will go naked from the world. And I am still naked under my clothes, I know it!
I have been seeing you, watching you, Vimal. Perhaps you need a few sutras: they bring you closer to me. Seriousness separates; laughter brings closer.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can enjoy today.…
If you enjoy it today, you can enjoy it tomorrow too. Why postpone it? Postponement is a disease of the mind; it always goes on saying, "Tomorrow"... particularly for significant things. Any trivia and rubbish it will do today, the significant can be done tomorrow. But that tomorrow never comes: all that comes is always today. And if you have become accustomed to postponing for tomorrow, you have postponed your life completely.
If you have two wives, that is bigamy; if you have many wives, that is polygamy; if you have one wife, that is monotony.
To avoid all these troubles, I don't have a wife! Polygamy will drive you mad; bigamy is enough to destroy your whole life -- and even monotony is powerful enough.…
In my vision of a future humanity, there will not be polygamy, there will not be bigamy, there will not be monotony. Individuals will relate with each other, but will not create any relationship. They will remain free, independent individuals.
Now, Chamanlal is sitting before me -- he is from Amritsar -- and he loves me immensely. Very few people have loved me so deeply. I used to stay in Amritsar in his house. He is suffering from monotony: it has taken all his life and all his juice and all his joy. I have stayed in many, many houses all around the country, and it is always monotony.
One of my friends was rich enough... I asked him, "What are you going to do with so much money? Whether you have nine crore rupees or ten crore rupees it won't make any difference. With ten crore rupees you will not be happier than you are with nine crore rupees."
He said, "That's right."
I said, "Now you are fifty. This is the time to turn towards the mountains."
He was a courageous man; he stopped all his businesses, all his factories. When he met me next time, he said, "You have put me in such trouble."
I said, "Trouble?... I was thinking you were troubled continuously -- financing this, financing that, taking loans from the banks. I have put you out of all trouble."
He said, "That's okay -- but now I am suffering from monotony. I have only one wife and for thirty years... just seeing each other is enough torture!"
I told him, "Take a beautiful bungalow in a hill station and move there."
He said, "I can -- but you will have to come with me. If you are there then I don't care.
But if my wife and I are there, we will kill each other." They loved each other -- it is not that they were not loving people. They loved each other, but I could understand his psychology.
Having nothing to do, he opened a dharamshala -- a free house with two hundred bedrooms, for people who come to visit in his city to stay free of charge -- just to create some work for himself and to avoid his wife the whole day. So early in the morning he would go out -- and he was not earning anything... on the contrary he was losing, but he had enough to lose. He would return at ten or eleven in the night.
His wife told me, "You have stopped him from earning money. Now he is losing money, but still the same trouble; in the morning he goes, and in the night he comes back."
I said, "It is not the factories, it is you. Do you really want him -- be frank and sincere --
to to twenty-four hours in the house?"
She said, "No. I have taken a vow not to lie: it is good for an hour or two that we
meet, but twenty-four hours... then it becomes heavy. Then we start torturing each other, knowing perfectly well that it is useless."
Every small child wonders why his father did not go into the ice cream business.…
The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it.
Do you really believe your girlfriend likes you? When you see your face in the mirror, you cannot like yourself. Either the girl is an idiot, or... why should she like and love you?
But the reverse is also true: no woman believes that her lover really loves her. She thinks his desire is to possess, she thinks his one-pointed goal is to have a sexual object, available twenty-four hours. Prostitutes are costly, and you cannot depend on them. They are temporary -- temporary structures; you need a permanent, guaranteed relationship with a woman who cannot deny you. The women always suspect they are being used.… I cannot say that they are wrong, neither can I say that the men are wrong.
Love can exist only after meditation, not before it.
That is a simple existential law. Before meditation -- only lust, only sexuality. Before meditation you are an animal and not really a human being. With meditation a transformation comes: you become human, and out of your humanness, love flows.
And when the meditation reaches to the highest peak, the Everest of consciousness, then a new change happens. In science they say that a certain quantity brings a qualitative change. You boil water up to ninety-nine point nine degrees, and it will not start evaporating. It will evaporate only at one hundred degrees. Now, nobody can say why.
This makes life mysterious.
At a certain height, meditation -- when it becomes so easy for you to move into it that no thought hinders -- becomes as easy as breathing. Then comes a transformation, a second transformation: you are enlightened.
And parallel to it, from sex through meditation you move to love. From
enlightenment you will become love. It will not be a question of loving anybody; it will be simply a question of your presence. Your presence will be love.
The moment one man's presence becomes love, he has fulfilled his destiny. There is nothing more beyond it. He has come to the beyond.
Home is the only place where you can scratch where it itches.
A diplomat is a man who can make his wife believe she would look fat in a mink coat.
Women like strong, silent men because they think they are listening. Never look back -- something might be gaining on you.
I was twelve years old before I found out that "Shut Up" was not my real name.
It always pays to smile in the morning, because later in the day you may not feel like it.
Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second nature in a married woman.
Vimal, you need not worry. Although I may not be able to see all the faces who are around here, I can certainly feel their heartbeat, whether they are part of my silence or just spectators, or they have come here just out of curiosity, or they are government CID
informers. I can feel at least the heartbeat.
There are police officers, and naturally, they are the most afraid people here: somebody may recognize them. They have changed their dress... but you cannot change your heart. I don't care about your dress and about your uniform; my concern is with your inner being.
That you cannot change, because you don't know about it. Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
FROM SOME BOOK I REMEMBER THIS SENTENCE: "FOR THE PILGRIM TO
REACH HIS DESTINY, IT'S ESSENTIAL TO MOVE INSTANTLY, BUT WITHOUT
HURRY. IT IS SO URGENT THAT HE REACHES HIS DESTINY, THAT THERE IS
NO TIME TO HURRY."
COULD YOU PLEASE SPEAK ABOUT IF THERE IS ANY URGENCY, AND HOW
THAT RELATES TO WAITING?
Rabia, you have got caught into a verbiage; otherwise the message is very simple. And it should be simple to you, because that's what I'm saying in many, many ways.
First... the situation is every moment urgent for the simple reason that you cannot rely on the next moment; whether it will come or not is not in your hands. So every moment we are living in urgency. If you want to do something, do it now and here, because how can you postpone it?
Secondly, you say, "From some book I remember this sentence: `For the pilgrim to reach his destiny, it is essential to move INSTANTLY...'" Certainly if you want to come to yourself you should not lose a single moment, because there is always a possibility that death may interfere. But you must have got into trouble because the sentence certainly comes from some great mystic... "but without hurry."
Move instantly because it is urgent, but without hurry, because in hurry you are not together, in hurry you are always late, in hurry you forget the essentials, in hurry you need time. Just to be in a hurry you will require time -- and there is no time. This moment is all and all, and the situation is urgent.
You have been born without your agreement, without a contract, even without your permission; that was not in your hands. You will die without any advance information, without fixing a date and time -- that is not in your hands. Once
dead you cannot complain; and not yet born you are nowhere. To whom should existence ask, "Do you want to be born or not?"
So what you have really got in your hands, solid and real, is only this moment, in which you can act intelligently or stupidly; in other words, in which you can act as a meditator or as a mediocre.…
But the statement is really beautiful. You got into a puzzle because you cannot think what kind of madness this is. First you say it is urgent, and urgency creates hurry; then you deny that there should be hurry, but the question is so urgent that you should start instantly. You got puzzled into the words. I will tell you how one can get puzzled into beautiful words.
Two men met at a bar and struck up a conversation. After a while one of them said, "You think you have family problems? Listen to my situation. A few years ago I met a young widow with a grown-up daughter and we got married. Later, my father married my stepdaughter. That made my stepdaughter my stepmother, and my father became my stepson. Also, my wife became the mother-in-law of her father-in-law.
"Then the daughter of my wife, my stepmother, had a son. This boy was my half brother because he was my father's son, but he was also the son of my wife's daughter, which made him my wife's grandson. That made me the grandfather of my half brother.
"This was nothing until my wife and I had a son. Now the sister of my son, my mother-in-law, is also my grandmother. This makes my father the brother-in-law of my child, whose stepsister is my father's wife.
"I am my stepmother's brother-in-law; my wife is her own child's aunt, my son is my father's nephew and I am my own grandfather. And you think you have family problems?"
Just don't get caught into words!
The statement is very clear: the situation is urgent because you have no guarantee for the next second. You have to start instantly because you cannot postpone -- the future is not insured -- and yet you cannot be in a hurry because hurry takes time.
So silently, peacefully, without hurry, without any tension, without any anguish, move into yourself instantly. It is urgent. Unless meditation becomes urgent to you, it will never happen; you will die before it. Put meditation on your laundry list as the most important, urgent... number one.
But meditation in your life is just at the very end of your laundry list -- and the laundry list goes on becoming bigger and bigger. And before you finish your laundry list, you are finished, so the time for meditation never comes.
So I take that statement, whoever has made it, as tremendously significant. Rabia, don't try to understand the sentence; I have cut it into pieces clearly for you, so you are not confused.
There is no time for hurry, there is no time for worry; in a single moment what can you do? Only one thing: you can settle within yourself. That will be the great transformation of your being. And certainly it is the most urgent thing -- which we have been trying to postpone as long as possible.
Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,
HOW IS IT THESE DAYS THAT THE MEN ALL SEEM TO BE GOING CRAZY, YET THE WOMEN JUST GO ON BECOMING MORE BEAUTIFUL, MORE
SILENT, MORE GRACEFUL?
Milarepa, it is so simple... that I am amazed that you have asked it. When men go crazy then anything is beautiful. The beauty does not depend on the woman, the silence, the grace; it depends on your craziness.
But still it has some significance to be understood. It does not matter if you ask something stupid or idiotic, still I will give you a significant answer.
You are asking, "How is it these days that the men all seem to be going crazy, yet the women just go on becoming more beautiful, more silent, more graceful?"
A few fundamentals our men and our women all have to understand: one is that man's sexuality is positive, women's sexuality is negative. Negative is not a
condemnation, it is just indicating the nature of their sexuality. Man is the donor and woman is the receiver.
My own experience of old-style Hindu monks, Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests is that they don't understand the nature of sexuality. They have a positive sexuality; they collect sperm and they don't have much space for it. They go on eating, they go on nourishing their body, they go on exercising, they go on doing everything that creates more sperms -- and the bag where the sperms collect has a very limited capacity.
That's why man can have only one orgasm at a time: just one shot, and his gun is empty!
But the woman has a negative sexuality. She can have multiple orgasms, because she is not losing anything in orgasm -- except she is getting tired of all the huffing and puffing, and the ugly beast on top doing push-ups! That's another thing, they get tired... they keep their eyes closed and they lie down almost like stone statues: "Let him do it, it is just a question of a few seconds. One can survive."
Within a few seconds the man is finished, but those few seconds are aggressive. His sexuality is aggressive; that's why if he cannot get a woman, he becomes crazy. What to do with his aggressive sex energy? It needs some outlet. That's why he finds all kinds of perversions. Strange... he goes to a woman, to a prostitute, just pays her and loses his energy -- a strange business!
One prostitute can have many customers in one night, because she does not lose energy; on the contrary, the more people are attracted towards her, she starts becoming more graceful, more beautiful. And on the other hand the man is in such a hurry to get rid of his energy, which is becoming a burden, that his eyes go blind. He starts looking at anything resembling a woman -- and suddenly he has found a Cleopatra or a Sophia Loren. His eyes are not clean and clear. A great fog is surrounding him because his sexual energy is so aggressive. It is bound to happen.
And why is the man's semen so overpowering? They have their own problems. In one sexual act a man releases nearabout one million living cells, and those one million living cells have a lifespan of only two hours. Once they are out of the body of the man, that is where politics is born: then one million cells are
rushing, trampling over each other to reach to the woman's cell. And the woman has only one cell.…
The woman's cell is non-aggressive; it can wait, there is no overburdening. Moreover the woman has every month a menstrual period in which that cell is released. Then for one month she is completely free from sexual desire. In one month another cell will come, another egg will come, so her situation is far more non-aggressive. You have not heard of any woman raping a man.
But man goes mad. He is going crazy because those cells want to get out. It is too crowded, they want a little open sky, a little air. Once they enter into the woman's body, a great marathon race starts, because only one will be able to reach to the cell. The cell, the egg of the mother, is constituted in such a way that it is very loose and very available, but the moment one male cell enters it, it naturally closes, becomes hard. Now no other cell can enter into it.
The passage of the woman's vagina to us seems to be very small, but to the poor male cell it is almost two miles long in proportion to his size. They have never traveled that much, so everybody is an amateur.
I have always wondered why the world is full of idiots and mediocres and fanatics, fundamentalists, fascists of all kinds and sorts -- they come in all sizes. My understanding is that when the man's cells start moving into the woman's body, the wiser ones stand aside. The intelligent ones don't want to mix with the crowd; only the boxers, football players, champions of all kinds of stupid games, wrestlers... they do their great job, rushing over each other. It is a question of life and death: if within two hours they don't reach first, their life is finished, within two hours they will be dead.
Only once in a while it happens that two wrestlers of equal strength reach to the woman's cell at the same time; that's why twins are born. Sometimes even seven children have been given birth -- I think nine is the record -- but it is very rare that out of a million people, nine will reach exactly at the same time, not a single minute, a single second, a split second behind. Then they all enter into the woman's egg.
The world is full of idiots and fools, bureaucrats, politicians, Don Quixotes and all kinds of stupids, competitors, competing in every field of life -- it may be money, it may be power, it may be prestige, it may even be saintliness. It is
expected... these are the people who have won the first race.
The intelligent ones, the poetic, the silent, who could have become a Gautam Buddha, who could have become a poet like Rabindranath or Kahlil Gibran... We know -- it is a simple fact -- that intelligent people will not compete with this crowd, and the crowd is not small: one million.…
Rabindranath was the thirteenth son of his father. We don't know how many Rabindranaths we have lost, and how many Albert Einsteins are never born, and how many Picassos, van Goghs, Mozarts have never been able to make the race. There are things which only idiots can do. Have you ever seen any wise man participating in a marathon race? Have you ever seen any enlightened one being competitive, begging for votes so that he can become the president?
The wise people keep aloof. The idiots rule.
And the idiots are in the majority.
I was thinking, Why are they in the majority? -- but then I found that the first marathon race has created the whole trouble. And this situation will continue unless we are more intelligent and stop this accidental birth -- what I call accidental birth.
Now we are at a stage where genetic engineering can manage very easily to give us as many Rabindranaths, as many Picassos, as many Bodhidharmas, as many Nijinskys as we want, on demand, because in those one million cells all kinds of people are there.
The point is we should drop the old idea that you have to produce your son yourself.
Strange... you order your clothes from the best tailor, you purchase the best car, you make the most beautiful house -- not with your own hands. You don't insist that "I will make my car, I will make my house, I will make my clothes, I will make my food"... you will go insane. So why do we insist that the son should be ours? But just our old superstition continues.
According to me, each hospital, each medical college should have semen banks,
just like blood banks. You can go and ask for what kind of child, boy or girl, what kind of face, what kind of color you want, how long a lifespan, what kind of intelligence -- poetic, scientific, mystic... you can ask for it. They will have categories sorted out, and your wife will be injected with just a single sperm.
I don't think there is anything wrong in it. You can go on making love, but you should use every birth control method. For birth you have to enquire to the medical authorities.…
It will change the whole face of the earth. There will be so many intelligent people, creative people, loving people. It will raise the standard of life, it will raise the standard of health, it will bring about more inventions, more poetry, more sculpture, and it will make man no longer accidental, at the mercy of blind nature.
Then there is no need even to get married, because you will not be creating children of your own. The possibility is already accomplished that the child need not be raised in the mother's womb; the child can be raised in a mechanical womb, far more scientifically.
The best parents will be those who have chosen the best child, with the best qualities, with the best scientific womb, so when he comes out of the womb they can take him home.
This will do two things: the children will become so beautiful and so intelligent, so healthy, so long living, and also the parents will be unburdened.
Every parent is harassing the child to become great, to become Alexander the Great, to become Gautam Buddha. What can the child do? -- it is not in the program of his basic cell. So parents are disturbed because children don't listen to them, and children are unnecessarily harassed and hurt. They cannot forgive their parents their whole life for the way they have been treated in their helplessness, in their childhood.
What you are demanding of them they don't have in their basic program. Every human psychology is completely programmed, his physiology is completely programmed, and everything goes according to the program. There are no accidents. You can have as beautiful women in the world as you like; you can have as strong men in the world as you like.
Now it is within our hands.
Who is preventing it? Your priests and your politicians -- because they will be the ones who will lose all glamour. Far more intelligent people will be there, so these stupid politicians who know next to nothing...
I have seen education ministers who cannot even sign their names, and they are deciding the education for the whole country. I have seen finance ministers who don't know the meaning of finance, who have not any idea how the economy runs. I have seen soldiers who don't have any courage.
This whole society is upside down.
Milarepa, particularly amongst my people it is going to be this way. Man, unless he meditates, will go crazy -- crazy after women. And man finds meditation more difficult than the woman. Experienced mothers who have given two, three births can be asked before the birth and can say whether there is a girl or a boy in their womb, because a girl remains silent, and a boy starts playing football. He starts kicking here and there.
In meditation girls can enter deeper. On the one hand they can go deeper in meditation; on the other hand their sexuality is negative, it is not a compulsion on them.
I was amazed in my experience moving amongst all kinds of monks and nuns, because no monk is really celibate, but nuns are celibate. They can manage to be celibate; they don't have an aggressive sex, and moreover nature has provided that every month their sex energy goes out of their body automatically, they are clean again for one month. But man is in a difficulty. His sex energy can be subdued only by deeper meditation. Then he will not go crazy.
You have to understand another basic law: the woman looks more beautiful the more she runs away from you. She does not want to run away; she waits for you to come closer, and then she starts running again. She wants to be caught, but she is not going to take the initiative so that later on, after the honeymoon, when there will be continuous struggle, she can always say to you, "You were after me. I had never intended to marry you."
After the honeymoon all beauty disappears, because your sexual energy has gone down the drain. Even the most beautiful woman will no longer look beautiful to
you because you have used her. You know her whole geography, you know her whole topography; now there is nothing to explore. And man is by nature an explorer, a hunter, an adventurer.
You may not have perceived that all the great cities, all the beautiful houses, all the beautiful gardens are not to man's credit; they are to be credited to woman. She never wanted to be a hunter, she never wanted to run continuously after animals, she never wanted to move. She wanted to live peacefully in a beautiful house surrounded with a beautiful garden.
But man basically is a nomad. That nomadness comes from his basic sexual cell. He is made of those sexual cells which keep telling him, "Go on, go on." He will go to all kinds of strange places for no reason, just because he needs money... and once he has money he starts traveling. A home he does not have.
You will see it in tourists: ninety percent are Americans, because they have so much money that what to do?... Go on, anywhere. And when they go on to the Taj Mahal or to Khajuraho or to Ajanta or to Ellora, they cannot stay there. They cannot watch the beauty silently, look at the great art that has taken thousands of years to make, thousands of people were involved to make it; they will simply go on running, taking photographs.
Back at home they will make a good album and then they will see how beautiful are the things they have seen. And they have not seen... they have only photographed! Those photographs could have been purchased from the market; there was no need to go around the world.
But man is a nomad. Woman is not.
In Hindi we have a word for the wife, gharwali, one who owns the home. But that word we cannot use for the man, who really owns it; nobody can say to any man, "You are gharwala." He has paid, he has earned the money, but the woman is called the owner of the home.
But it is exactly right. Man may have earned, but the woman has made the house. Woman has forced man to live a life settled, silent, peaceful, not to go on running like stray dogs from one place to another.
In my people's world, Milarepa, unless you are meditating deeply you will not be able to transcend your sexual craziness. And I can see -- I have been
continuously observing --
women get into meditation quickly. It comes to them easily. The more meditative they become, they will become more beautiful, more serene, more calm, more quiet, more graceful.
But you, not doing meditation, not creating a state of no-mind, will fall a victim of jazz music or skinheads; you will do something stupid.
The doctor was explaining to Paddy how nature makes up for a person's deficiencies.
"For example," he told Paddy, "if a man is deaf, he may have very good eyesight, and if a man is blind, he may have a very good sense of smell."
"I think I see what you mean," said Paddy. "I have often noticed that if a man has one short leg, then the other one is always a little bit longer."
Great thinkers, coming to great conclusions!
The student demonstration had turned into a riot. Suddenly a man staggered out of the crowd carrying a limp girl in his arms.
"Here," shouted a cop running up to the man, "give her to me. I will get her out of this."
"The hell with you," replied the man, "go and find one of your own!"
Even in a riot, when people are being killed, shot, the man's mind remains continuously thinking of sex.
Sex is man's greatest bondage.
You have to make every effort for meditativeness, so that all your sexual energy, instead of moving downwards, starts moving upwards. Instead of finding a beautiful woman, start creating a beautiful man within you. Rather than finding a graceful woman, your energy can make you graceful.
But man is more stupid than woman. The whole of history has been made up by man, and you can see the madness: it is a history not of mankind, but of
madness, wars, rape, burning living people, destruction. And now they have come to the peak; perhaps Ronald Reagan will be the last chapter of history -- although there will be no one to read it, and perhaps no one will be able to write it even.
A married couple took their little boy to the circus. During the gorilla act the husband had to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone, the little boy nudged his mother and said,
"What is that long thing hanging down between the gorilla's legs?"
His mother was very embarrassed and said quickly, "Oh, that's nothing, dear."
When the husband returned, the wife went off to buy some popcorn, and while she was gone, the little boy nudged his father and said, "Daddy, what is that big thing hanging down between the gorilla's legs?"
The father smiled and said, "That son, is his penis."
The little boy looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "Then why did mummy just say it was nothing?"
"Son," said his father proudly, "I have spoiled that woman." Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #11
Chapter title: Meditation -- now or never!
11 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code: 8709115
ShortTitle:
PILGR11
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
133
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
COULD DRY LEAVES REALLY BE FALLING AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE? I AM
THIRTY, AND I ENJOY SEX WHEN IT COMES, THOUGH I DON'T COME SO
OFTEN. I DON'T FEEL I AM HOLDING SOMETHING DOWN; ON THE CONTRARY, I FIND I USUALLY HAVE TO HOLD IT UP.
BELOVED OSHO, IT NOW TAKES ME ALL NIGHT TO DO WHAT I USED TO DO
ALL NIGHT. AM I MISSING, OR IS IT MISSING?
Nityanando, this is the difference between the Eastern evolution of consciousness and the Western mind.
In the East, to get rid of sex is a blessing; in the West, it is the ultimate calamity,
it is dying before death. The day one starts feeling that his sexual energy is getting down, he starts counting days -- that death is not far away.
In the East, the day one gets beyond sex, he rejoices -- the earlier the better -- because now the time has come to grow into a new dimension, into freedom from biology, into freedom from body, into freedom from mind. It is the beginning of the experience of your innermost self.
Sex is continuously taking you away from yourself. Whether you are a man or a woman, it doesn't matter: sex takes you away from yourself. The moment sex is not there, there is no drive to go away from yourself. You start settling within.
So, Nityanando, old leaves are really falling because new leaves want to grow. And old leaves have to go and give space for new experiences, new spaces. It is a blessing -- don't take it according to the Western, rotten mind.
The West has everything, but it has forgotten itself. And once you are no longer aware of yourself, then sex becomes the ultimate reality. In the West, sex is God. Sex is now the only God worshiped in the West. But sex simply means you are no longer independent: you depend for your happiness, for your joy, on somebody else -- and that dependence is the greatest misery.
It is not incidental that men and women, husbands and wives, are continuously quarreling. Even if they are not quarreling, they are in the mood, and the reason is that nobody wants deep down to be dependent on the other. It brings many other diseases by the side: if you are dependent on the woman you love, you will be jealous, you will be continuously watchful... you will start becoming a detective, a CIA, a KGB, an FBI agent, upon your own wife! You will put your children on alert: Be careful, when I am away... what happens in the house.
Why this jealousy...? The fear is that perhaps she may start loving someone else. And the fear is natural, because you are starting to think of other women: why should she not think of other men? This is a natural corollary that goes on in both the minds. So she goes on detecting you, she goes on looking into your letters, she goes on searching into your pockets, any address, any phone number...
One night a phone rang, and as the bell was ringing Mulla Nasruddin went there, said
"Okay," and put it down.
The wife said, "Who was there?"
He said, "It was nobody. I have just been unnecessarily disturbed by someone phoning on the wrong number."
The wife said, "What is the number from where the phone came?"
These kind of things go on continuously in every house, because the wife has already read the number in his diary. And when he quoted the number, the wife said, "Don't lie to me that it was a wrong number. This is your diary, and this is the number Now tell me, what is her name?" -- now it is no more his, now it is
her: "Tell me, what is her name?"
Under pressure -- and every husband is under pressure -- he said, "It is nobody, although her name looks like a woman's name. Her name is Kamala... but this is only the name of a horse. And because it is the season of horse racing and I'm thinking to go to the races tomorrow "
Tomorrow morning again the phone rang, and Mulla was standing by it. The wife said,
"Wait. This time I will take the call" -- and she listened and told Mulla, "Come on, your horse is calling!" It is very difficult... one of the most difficult things is to deceive your wife. But man goes on making his efforts, and is defeated continuously.
I have been going to ask one of my childhood friends, Sukhraj, who is sitting here... For years it has been that whenever he comes, I never see his wife smiling. I don't see in her that she has come with joy; it is as if she has come just to keep an eye on him, because here there are so many beautiful women, and he is a beautiful man. And this is a world of people who are absolutely free, who don't live in bondage of anybody.
She comes to me, she touches my feet, but I have never felt that there is any deep love, respect, feeling, emotion. She seems almost like a zombie, and the reason is clear to me.
Perhaps it may not be clear to her or to Sukhraj, but I want it to be made clear to
them.
He would like to come every day; in fact, he would like to live here with me. What is he doing there? -- there is nothing left there for him. And when I am here, and millions of people around the world are coming and going every day.…
He loved me when we were so young that now even the memories of those days are difficult to catch up... and he is the only one left. I had many other friends: they came and they are gone, but he has remained with me unwavering, because it was not a question of any ideological agreement, it was a question of love. It does not matter what I say, what I do, what he says, what he does; that is absolutely irrelevant.
So he comes again and again when he can manage. The wife certainly comes reluctantly; otherwise she should be so joyful and she should enjoy all the people around who are living in peace, in love, in freedom, and each moment rejoicing. Here, sitting like a dead corpse simply shows that she has not come. She has to come: she has to come because she cannot leave the husband alone in this strange place.
Nityanando, let the dry leaves fall. You are fortunate that they are falling at thirty. And they are falling at thirty because, as I say, if you live intensely, totally, then the year forty-two... it is only the average, and in existence nothing is average. It all depends on you: there are people who will be at the age of ninety and still thinking of nothing but sex. All other things are finished... the only thing left is sex. That continues to the very end of their life, because they never lived it intensely; they have spread a thin layer of sexuality over all their life. If you live intensely, it is going to disappear sooner.
The thirtieth year is perfectly the right time. That leaves you -- because you are from the West -- at least fifty to sixty years to work upon yourself, to find yourself, and to find the innermost mysteries of existence. In fact, now begins the real life; up to now you were a slave. Now, boundaries are dropping and the whole sky is becoming available to you with all its stars.
But in the West it is certainly a very difficult problem. The whole conditioning of centuries has brought man to such a state that sex seems to be everything: it is money, it is power, it is position. Everything is sacrificed for sex, and everything is achieved only for sex.
Nobody bothers that sex is not your reality, sex is not love, and nobody even bothers whether you are getting anything out of it or not. What are you getting out of it? -- it is almost like people smoking cigarettes: one wonders why they are smoking, and once in a while they also wonder why. But just a habit... and it is only a mental habit. Sex is a biological habit, very deep-rooted.
You say, "It now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night." That's why
-- you did well. Soon it will take you twenty-four hours to do what you used to do the whole night!
Now, try to understand: you have lost the infatuation and the foolishness and the slavery, and this is the time to start meditating. If you cannot meditate now, then when will you be meditating? I will not prevent you... once in a while you can have your sex, but it will become more and more sparse.
There is a saying in Tibet: If you feel tired, lie down. If you feel energetic, move over.
But first, feel whether you are energetic, otherwise it is better to lie down. And from me the advice is:
If you do not know what to do, at least laugh.
Grandma was in her eighties. She tired easily, had little appetite, and was sometimes confused mentally. Her son called the gynecologist, who arrived shortly and was shown up to Grandma's room, where he examined her thoroughly. Half an hour later he came down.
"There is no need to worry," he explained. "There is nothing really wrong with her except her age. She will be alright."
The son was very relieved and went upstairs to see her. "Well, mother," he asked, "how did you like the gynecologist?"
"So that was the gynecologist?" she said. "My god, I thought he acted very familiar for a priest."
Priests and monks and saints, Nityanando, are in more difficulty than you think you are, because the time when they could have been deeply into sex is gone.
Now only the thought goes on and on like a continuous record. And the needle of the record has stuck at sex; it does not move from there.
Ronald Reagan gets into bed with Nancy. Ronnie is feeling very horny, so he turns to Nancy and says, "Oh, Nancy, I would like to launch my missile into your Gulf."
Nancy says, "Oh, Ronnie, you are so romantic, but you have not been able to bring your missile up since the second world war."
Ronnie pleads, "But Nancy, I think I can do it if you would only have faith in me."
Nancy replies, "But honestly, Ron, it has been so long since we made war that I would not know where to begin."
Frustrated, Ronnie says, "God, I hate peace!"
Don't be an old fool. And if you can become wise while you are young, just thirty, thank God. Be grateful to existence that he is allowing you so much time to explore much that is not available to any other animal, which is only available to man. And the more time you have to explore it, the deeper will be your insight, the greater will be your consciousness and tremendous will be your splendor. You will not die an ugly death; you will die with a grace and with a smile on your face.
A life that cannot reach to enlightenment has been a sheer waste. It is good that your thirty years were passed in the West. Thirty years in the East are bad luck; thirty years in the West are good luck -- but good luck only if after thirty years you can come into contact with the Eastern mysteries. Then you have more chances than the Eastern counterpart, because the Eastern counterpart has been repressing sex, so it will not be possible for him to meditate at the age of thirty. If he can manage to meditate even at the age of sixty, it will be a surprise.
It is a tremendously fortunate moment, at least for my people, because the East is so orthodox, so traditional, so blind, so deaf, that they will not hear me. They can hear Morarji Desai and even can start drinking their own urine. That is possible because for centuries they have been drinking the urine of the cows, so in fact it is better to drink your own -- self-sufficiency! Why be dependent on a cow? And who knows what kind of dirty water she has been drinking? As far as I know
Morarji Desai has no need of any water. The same water goes on circulating, so naturally he never falls sick, because infections are difficult, pollution is difficult.…
But they will not listen to me. They cannot listen to any reasonable, logical, scientific truth.
So it is a very strange situation. I am here in the East, but my people are going to be from the West, because only the Western youth can understand. Sex has become futile, he has lived with too many women; drugs have become useless, he has known too much... now what else? There seems to be nothing around which can keep the youth in the West interested, intrigued, still feeling that life may have some significance.
All the modern, contemporary Western philosophers are talking about one thing only: meaninglessness. And they appeal to the Western youth because he can see himself: it is not a question to be convinced about, to be argued -- he has lived everything and he finds everything falls flat sooner or later. He has lived with many women; the woman has lived with many men. They are all alike... you have just to put the light off! The question is only whether the light is on or off; that much difference and the most beautiful woman or the most ugly woman are the same.
Because they have known many women and many men, the hope that still can be helpful in the East is no more for them. In the East everybody is caught up with one woman, and that means monotony. People call it monogamy, but that is not the right word. They are so fed up with the woman, the woman is so fed up with the man, but there is no other way. It is a lifelong contract.
So they go on hoping that, perhaps what my wife does not have, other women have; what my husband is not able for, other people seem to be able But in the
West, that hope has died. People have tried and found that it is all nonsense; every woman has the same physiology, the difference is just superficial. Every man has the same physiology, and everything comes to the same end.
Then they tried grass, they tried marijuana, they tried hashish, they tried transcendental meditation. Now they are trying yogic flying and making themselves so foolish. But what to do? -- they have to do something, otherwise life seems to be empty.
Nityanando, you are fortunate that life need not be empty for you. If sex is going, say goodbye to it. It was good when it was there; it is better when it is gone. Now begins a totally different space of experiencing. Now begins a new adventure, more free, more individual, more unfettered. And the sky is so vast to explore... and on each step there are miracles and miracles.
So sing and dance and meditate. And life is immensely beautiful: it has all that Gautam Buddha experienced and more, because twenty-five centuries have passed; man has become far more mature, and evolution has gone higher. We can produce greater Gautam Buddhas with more dimensions to them.
In the past it was thought that a man can only experience himself or God -- which are only different names -- if he tortures himself. That was a primitive idea.
I give you a sophisticated, cultured version, the latest edition: there is no need to torture yourself -- it is absolutely absurd! You can be blissful, you can be ecstatic, you can be meditative, comfortably. I don't see the connection that you can be meditative sitting in a bullock cart but you cannot be meditative sitting in a Rolls Royce. If you can be meditative sitting on a camel, then why can't you be meditative flying in a jumbo jet --
which is far more comfortable, far more silent, far more peaceful.
Have you ever tried sitting on an animal like a camel? -- sex is exactly like that! It is the ugliest vehicle I have suffered it, I'm not saying it without experience.
And those two, three hours I was on a camel, I said, "My god, whether I'm going to survive or not "
Life has gone on -- in spite of all hindrances from politicians, from priests, from traditionalists, from the orthodox. Life has gone on, although it could have gone far faster if all these hindrances were not there. But still, after twenty-five hundred years we are in a position to create better Gautam Buddhas, better Mahaviras. We know much more about human physiology, we know much more about human biology, we know much more about human sexuality.
The ancientmost book on sex was written in India; that was Vatsyayana's KAMASUTRAS, sutras on sex. But looking at it, it looks as if a child is writing about sex. After Sigmund Freud and Masters and Johnson, and after so many discoveries in biology, in genetics, we are in such a position that we can create
far greater giants of enlightenment, awareness, illumination. But if you are feeling too much attached to that which is gone, then your life will be a life of misery, continuously thinking of something which you cannot do. It is up to you.
Being my sannyasin, I don't think you will accept this despair. Less than ultimate ecstasy is not our concern.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
THE OTHER NIGHT YOU SAID THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GO INTO
MEDITATION UNTIL ONE HAS EXPERIENCED SEX TO THE MAXIMUM, AND
THAT IT DROPS BY ITSELF.
OSHO, THIS IS VERY DISHEARTENING TO ME. YOU MUST BE WELL AWARE
OF THE FACT OF HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO HAVE GIRLFRIENDS AND EXPERIENCE SEX IN INDIA.
MARRIAGE IS NO SOLUTION BECAUSE THEN I HAVE TO FORGET MEDITATION FOREVER.
OSHO, ISN'T IT POSSIBLE TO GO BEYOND SEX BY BEING A WATCHER OF
OUR BIOLOGY JUST AS WE CAN GO BEYOND OUR MIND BY WATCHING IT?
Manatit Bharti, I can understand your problem. But you have to understand something more difficult than your problem.
You cannot watch your biology. You can watch your mind, because mind is available just like a TV screen before your consciousness. But your biology, your physiology, your chemistry -- that is not available to your consciousness.
You cannot watch how your food is being digested; you cannot watch how your food is being transformed into blood, into bones, into nerves. You cannot watch, because for a certain reason nature has not left any door for you to watch that which belongs to the body.
I agree with nature that it is wise that it has closed all the doors: biology, physiology, chemistry -- nothing is available to your consciousness, for the simple reason that there are things which change their nature immediately the moment you watch. I will have to explain to you.…
You are in your bathroom making faces in front of the mirror, and then suddenly you become aware of somebody -- just a small child it may be -- looking from the keyhole at what you are doing. Suddenly you change. He has not said anything, neither have you deliberately done anything; spontaneously, with the very feeling that you are being watched, you become a different personality. When you are alone you relax, you put your mask aside.
Albert Einstein was tremendously mystified; he died in a great disappointment. He was one of the most successful men in the world.… But when he reached to the farthest inside of the atom, where electrons, neutrons and protons constitute its body, he simply felt he was going mad, because it was against all logic, against all mathematics, against all the science that we have developed in three hundred years. Those electrons were behaving in such a way that he could not have conceived even in the wildest dream.
What he came to know was that the moment you watch -- and you are watching through very sophisticated scientific instruments, not with naked eyes -- they start behaving differently. He was thinking that they are dead particles of electricity -- but they are not.
They are in their bathroom... and now somebody is watching them, they start behaving differently, in a more gentlemanly way.
He could not believe that watching can make a difference to matter. He said, "Perhaps the mystics are right, that everything is full of life, we are just not aware of it."
Secondly, he became aware that an electron can take a quantum leap. I have used that word many times... but perhaps most of you may not have understood it, because it is out of modern physics. It is a made-up word; it had never existed
before Albert Einstein.
One electron is called quanta, because that is the ultimate particle of quantity; you cannot go below it, you cannot divide it anymore. So according to the word
`quantity', he named it quanta. Finished, you have come to the end of the line; now you cannot, at least for the moment... Perhaps in the future, better scientific instruments may be able to cut it down more, but whatever happens, the end will be called quanta.
That quanta dazzles every mind, because it takes a jump from place A to place
B. It does not travel the distance; between A and B it disappears. At A point you see it, and then suddenly you see it at B point. What happens in the space between? Howsoever fast it can go -- we have now instruments even to know the speed of light, the greatest speed --
there is no problem of any speed. A tremendous discovery, a tremendous miracle... it simply dematerializes at one point and again materializes at another point. The space between is never traveled.
It was very shocking in the beginning, but slowly, slowly the shock was absorbed.
Einstein could see a tremendous possibility in it: the possibility of making a machine which can make a man disappear from one place and allow him to appear in another place without traveling the space between.
That seems to be the only possible way if man has ever to reach to the stars; otherwise no vehicle can take him. The nearest star is four years away -- four light-years away. So if you go to the nearest star it will take four years to reach, with the speed of light, not with the speed of your railway trains or your airplanes -- these are now outdated. The speed has to be exactly the speed of light; that is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.
And the problem is that at that speed everything will melt, because it will create such heat, such friction that we don't have any metal to survive in that friction. So anything at that speed will become light, and all the passengers inside will also become light. So that is out of the question, that cannot be done.
At first it had been thought that we may find or we may create some metal, synthetic, which will be able to survive the speed. But that has been dropped; it
is impossible. At that speed everything will become light. That cuts our planet off from the whole universe completely. Then it will not be possible ever for man to visit the stars.
But this quantum leap opened a new vista. Albert Einstein was so happy that night, he could not sleep. His wife said again and again, "Why are you not sleeping?"
He said, "I am so full of joy! A tremendously new dimension has opened. One day --
perhaps I will not be here, but one day some man, one of our children, our children's children, may be able to find a mechanism which can transform a human being here...
and he will appear far away on another planet, on another solar system, on another star, millions of light years away, within a second."
Always look at life as opening new doors. Never be hopeless, never be meaningless.
Never for a moment settle down with the idea that all is finished because sex is finished.
It is good that it is finished... it is good that you are not created by nature in such a way that you can disturb its inner mechanism. If you can look into your chemistry, suddenly your chemical elements will start behaving differently. They don't like to be watched; they are naked, they don't want to be watched! They have their own etiquette, their own culture, their own behavior. They are very traditional people.
So one thing you should remember: biology cannot be dropped just by watching. But sex is not really oriented in biology. In biology is its manifestation; its orientation is in the brain, which can be watched.
So there is no need to be worried because you are in India and girlfriends are very difficult. They are difficult because of your fathers, your grandfathers, and all the idiots that have preceded them. Otherwise there is no reason why they should not be available; the number is almost equal.
But all your great seers have prevented you from getting rid of an ugly slavery, although they are thought to be people who have been teaching you to go beyond sex. I say unto you: They are the people who have been keeping you under the slavery of sex for centuries.
The only way to go beyond it is either to experience it and be finished with it, or the second way, which is a little difficult, is to watch your mind. The center of sex is in the mind, it is not in your genitals -- they are only branches. It shows there, but it is not there.
This was discovered after the second world war, a very recent discovery. A man was shot on the battlefield, and was brought to the hospital. He survived, but his whole leg was to be amputated. His whole leg was hurt in an explosion and particularly his big toe. It was hurting terribly, and he was continuously complaining, "Do something about my toe, it is unbearable."
Finally, they had to give him anesthesia, and when they looked they found it was not only the big toe, but his whole leg had to be amputated, otherwise he would not be able to survive. It is better to have one leg and to be alive than the alternative.…
There was no time to ask the man, there was no time to ask his family; it was on the battlefield, and the doctor simply decided, "We have to do it; otherwise the man is gone."
They amputated his leg, and when he came back to consciousness after a few hours he said immediately, "Do something. My big toe is hurting very much."
The doctors laughed, because they knew now there was no big toe. The whole leg was gone, so how could it be hurting? But he was covered with blankets, so he had no idea what had happened. He insisted, and the doctors said, "You don't understand. It is not possible, it is only your imagination."
He said, "What nonsense are you talking? I am suffering and you are teaching me about imagination...?"
So the doctor threw the blanket off and showed him, "Now tell me, where is your toe?"
The man could not believe it: his whole leg was gone! The toe was gone but it
was still hurting! He said, "I understand now why you cannot understand me and why you are still unaware of the fact that my toe is hurting very badly."
The man was perfectly sane, and the doctors had to work out what the problem was. Then they found that it is not the toe, but some center in his brain which has been hurt, which is connected with the toe. So whether the toe is there or not does not matter; the toe will hurt, because the center continues vibrating in the same way.
So a man can amputate his genitals, but don't believe that he has gone beyond sex. His sexual center will go on vibrating. You can watch that sexual center: in your meditations it will come in sexual fantasies, just as it comes in your dreams. Don't be disturbed, and don't call it evil, sin.…
Don't condemn it, it is natural, perfectly natural. It is just that your society has gone unnatural; otherwise there would not have been so much trouble. If your center of sex in the brain was exhausted by your genitals, there would have been no trouble. But your society has prevented, blocked the way, so the whole of sex has become cerebral. Now it is only in the mind. It goes on and on... and it has no outlet.
Jean-Paul Sartre has written a very beautiful book, NO EXIT. He says, "Any situation in which you find no exit becomes hell." How long can you go on and on, and you don't find any door to get out? The situation may be comfortable.…
Jean-Paul Sartre's story -- it is a beautiful story: in a sitting room, on comfortable sofas, a few people are sitting, all strangers. Whatever they need is immediately supplied... but there is no exit; they cannot go out. How long can you remain? -- it is comfortable, luxurious, whatever you need is supplied, but you don't have any privacy, those people are always there. It is a very confined space; you don't have enough space for yourself, and the ultimate problem is how to get out. There is no door at all, and there is nobody to ask. Everybody is a stranger, and they all said, "We are in the same trap."
This is his description of modern hell. But I understand that this is the situation of the modern mind: you are closed in your skull, there is no door, things go on and on.…
So your question, Manatit Bharti, is meaningful, but not impossible to solve. You will just have to be more meditative than the Western counterpart, Nityanando.
Nityanando can meditate more easily, more relaxedly -- in fact joyously: "This is perfectly good; otherwise the despair..."
You will find it difficult -- but I am not responsible for your difficulty. Your saints, your tirthankaras, your avataras, your mahatmas -- all these whom you have been worshiping, all your jailers, have imprisoned you in such a way that you will never become enlightened.
But if you make a real, sincere effort... and by sincere effort I mean you have simply to watch, not to judge. It will take a little longer time for you than for Nityanando, because he has done thirty years' gymnastics before. So on the whole it won't be much different: he has done much exercise before, but you will have to do it now. His exercise was with other women, your exercise will be with the woman inside your mind, just the image. In a way you will create less mess than Nityanando.
So all in all, all things considered, things are equal. He has done his homework -- you have to start. He is blessed because he is finished with it and he can take a quantum leap into meditation. You are blessed because you need not go through all the pushups that he has done, useless, ugly.…
Every morning one feels, "What an idiot I am" -- but by the evening again one thinks, "At least one time more!" And one knows perfectly well that this has been going on for years: one time more. But every evening one becomes helpless; every morning one becomes wise, a sage, one can even teach others.
Just the other day I was telling you about Vijayanand. In his article he says he can teach me one or two things.…
I have told my people to inform him, "You are too poor -- just one or two? You come here and I will teach you one or two thousand, or as many as you want! One or two things? -- just two bullets in your gun? Then you will look awkward standing there --
what to do...?"
That reminds me: I was a student, and there was in Nagpur University an all- India competition, a debating competition. And just as I spoke and went back to my seat, the second person... he belonged to the Sanskrit University of Varanasi. The Sanskrit University in Varanasi has nothing to do with English; it is pure
teaching of Sanskrit, everything is taught in Sanskrit.
He must have been feeling a little inferior to all the universities' candidates, although the discussion was in Hindi. And it is psychological because there was no need for him to feel inferior. But unconscious man is unconscious.… Just to impress he started, "Brothers and sisters..." and went on. After just two minutes he said, "I will give you a quotation of Bertrand Russell" -- and he did not know much English, so in the middle of the sentence he stopped, the needle got stuck.… He looked all around, and there was no help because there was no question of any help.…
But I could not bear to see his awkwardness -- I was sitting closest to him, he was next to me -- so I said, "Start again." Finding no other solution he had to follow me. He started again... but I meant something else: I meant, "Start the quotation again; perhaps by repeating again you may remember.…" But this is a problem with memory: if you have come with a memorized lecture, then you cannot start from the middle.
He started again: "Brothers and sisters..." and it was such a hilarious scene: he was saying the same things that he had said! And Bertrand Russell... and again at the same point...
because when the needle sticks it always sticks at the same point on the gramophone record.
He looked at me, and I said, "Start again! There is no way out." And people were laughing hilariously and there were almost ten thousand students of the university, all the colleges, professors, and it was such a tremendous chaos.… But he started again:
"Brothers and sisters..." and came to the same point!
He looked at me, and I said, "What can I do? Start again!" And he was such an idiot that rather than sitting down, dropping the whole thing, he tried one time more. Time was running out... because ten minutes only was the time allowed, and this was the last time.
As the ten minutes were over he had come again to a stop. He looked at me, and I said,
"Now it is finished!"
He was very angry at me. When he came by my side he said, "You are a strange person.
You made me a laughingstock."
I said, "You were looking at me. You were asking me for some suggestion, and whatever I could manage, I suggested. It was still up to you to follow it or not. I was not giving you an order, `You have to start...' I was simply saying that this is one of the ways. If one gets stuck, start again. And it is not my experience, so I don't know -- because I have never crammed anything, so I never stop. If I stop, I stop of my own accord, not out of any compulsion. I can stop anywhere, and I can start from anywhere, I don't go backwards.
So don't be angry with me, I was simply being helpful."
He said, "What, helpful...? I will not be able to show my face tomorrow to anybody.
Everybody is laughing."
I said, "Anyway, your face is not such that anybody would like to see it!"
It will be a little difficult for you, because you will come again and again to the point, sex, because that is your repression.
But always remember: the responsibility goes to your forefathers, to SHRIMAD
BHAGAVADGITA, to the VEDAS, to all your so-called great seers. I am not responsible; I am simply giving you the only possible way. I cannot tell the women of India, "This poor Manatit Bharti wants to get rid of sex, so please help him" -- they will kill me! They are going to kill me anyway, but I will try to continue as long as possible.
And certainly I would not like to be assassinated just for this... your meditation. That is not my business. Either you find some woman or you meditate and be watchful -- don't be involved in your sexual fantasies. They will disappear, but they will take time. But Nityanando has also taken time, thirty years.… You may take not more than three years --
that is the maximum, if you try.
But if you are thinking that I will suggest to some woman, "Help this poor Indian" -- I am not going to do that. The women that come from the West report to me again and again that these few Indians who come don't seem to come for meditation. They come here just to stare at women, or just, if they can get a chance, to touch a woman. When everybody is meditating with closed eyes, they open their eyes. These people are not here for meditation.
No Western woman likes this ugly repressive mind, so you have to suffer for your forefathers, your tradition, your religion. That is nobody else's responsibility.
Just meditate. Women will be coming... but don't open your eyes, because then real women are all around. Those real women are not for you; you have to manage with your fantasy women. They are enough: within three years, if you can continue, you will be finished, they will disappear from your mind.
But this is the difference between the East and the West. There are many other differences, but this is one of the most significant, because it is going to change the whole consciousness of man. But ways can be found. If I can help Nityanando, I can also help you.
You are asking, "Is not it possible to go beyond sex by being a watcher of our biology, just as we can go beyond our mind by watching it?"
Biology you cannot watch; you don't understand what you are asking. Just watching the mind is enough, because mind contains all the centers -- the seven hundred centers which control your whole body. Your whole biology, physiology, chemistry, hormonal system -
- everything is controlled by seven hundred centers in your small skull. You just watch that.…
You are carrying a whole load of films in your small head. Sit down anywhere and the film starts. Just don't get involved, don't get interested, don't start saying, "Oh my god, this is the woman I have been looking for!" Don't start saying such things inside you; otherwise you will miss the whole point, you will have to see the film again.
When for the first time in India films started -- those were the days of silent movies -- a touring movie house came into a village. One villager purchased a ticket for the first show -- that was the matinee show -- and there comes a scene when a beautiful woman is undressing. The villager stands up, and many people shout, "Sit down!" -- so he has to sit down.
But he is alerted to what is happening, and just then, when she is going to drop her last piece of clothing, a railway train passes by. He has been trying to look from every angle, but he cannot see the woman. By the time the railway train has passed, the woman is swimming in the lake. He said, "My god, the real thing I missed!"
The show was finished and everybody was gone, but he was still sitting there. The manager came and asked, "Why are you sitting there? The show is finished."
He said, "It is finished, but here is the money for the second ticket. I will see the second show, I will see the third show, I will not leave here unless I get the point."
The manager said, "What point?"
He said, "Don't talk to me; don't disturb me. You just bring the ticket. I cannot leave this seat. From here the view is very clear."
The manager said, "This seems to be strange... but what is the harm?" And he brought him another ticket.
The second show he was very alert, very watchful; he was watching almost holding his breath. But that goddamn train again came!
The second show finished, the point was still missed. The manager came saying, "Now it is time, you have seen the same film twice."
He said, "I have seen it twice, but I will see it thrice, I will see it four times... I will see it my whole life!"
The manager said, "You can confide in me. What is the problem? Don't you understand the film?"
He said, "I understand everything. Only one thing I don't understand: will the train be late some day or not? In this country a train coming exactly at the same time every day is not possible!"
You will have a little difficulty. The train may come at the right time and you may miss the point. Don't be worried. If you can be silently watchful, the mind is enough -- because the mind is exactly all that controls your whole body, the whole system.
I was sitting by the side of the Ganges, near the Christian college in Allahabad. One of my friends was studying there and I was staying with him, but by the evening I had gone on the riverbank. And the Ganges at Allahabad is tremendous, oceanic, very beautiful.
Two great rivers meet there, Ganges and Yamuna.
In ancient times it seems a third great river used to meet there also, Saraswati, which has disappeared in the meantime. What happened to it? -- because in the old scriptures it is mentioned, in all the old maps it is mentioned Something
went wrong: it may have lost its sources of water, it may have changed its route, but it no longer exists. But still, because of the three rivers, Allahabad is called Triveni. Triveni means trinity, three; the English word three is nothing but the Sanskrit word tri.
I was sitting there alone, just watching the beautiful river flowing so silently, you could hardly suspect the flow of it. At that very time a young man also came who was a Hindu sadhu, a monk. It may have been his place to come every evening to meditate, as it was very silent. He sat by my side in his lotus posture and started meditating.
I was sitting by his side, so I started looking at him to see whether he is meditating or not.
You will say, "How can you see from outside?" There is a small art: you can simply see from the eyelids whether the eyes inside are moving or not. If they are moving, you can see the movement from above, you can see the eyes are moving inside. That means he is seeing scenes -- maybe railway trains are moving. If he comes to meditate, that movement stops, because there is nothing to see.
His eyes were moving, so I shook him and I told him, "Whom do you think you are deceiving?"
He said, "You are disturbing my meditation."
I said, "I am not disturbing your meditation. I am making you clear that this is not meditation."
He said, "How can you say from the outside?"
I said, "That is none of your business. But I can say that you were seeing things -
- your eyes were moving."
He became afraid when I said that. He said, "That's true. My eyes were moving, but I never thought that somebody could see that from outside."
I said, "I am in the same profession. You can deceive anybody else, but not me. Now tell me what you were seeing."
He said, "That is too much. You are a stranger, I don't know anything about you!"
I said, "And whom were you seeing? -- they were all strangers "
He looked at me and he said, "That's true, they were strangers. But you seem a strange man, why are you harassing me?"
I said, "I am not harassing you, I am simply asking what you were seeing. Your being a Hindu monk I can predict that these cannot be male strangers, these were female strangers -- because monks cannot avoid seeing women."
He relaxed. He looked at me and said, "You are right. But how could you manage ?"
I said, "There is nothing to be managed; it is very simple. What will repressed people do?
All their repressions will start like vomiting in their mind."
So, Manatit Bharti, you will have to go through a vomiting experience.
Nityanando has already gone.…
It does not matter that you have become a sannyasin; it won't change anything unless your sannyas triggers a meditativeness in you.
"Oy Veh, to be a Polish Jew," said Levitz to Joe Finklebaum. "We are persecuted and harassed, and all because we are the chosen people."
"Yes," said Finklebaum. "That's why I changed my name. I was just fed up with being harassed."
"You changed your name? What did you change it to?" said Levitz.
"Well, I used to be called Joe Finklebaum, and now I'm Swami Joe Finklebaum."
But that will not help much! Just by changing your name... and still you remain Joe Finklebaum.
You have become a sannyasin. Now it is a responsibility on you to fulfill the commitment of sannyas -- and that is meditation.
Without meditation there is no sannyas.
It is only your pure consciousness rising upwards -- slowly, slowly moving beyond the gravitation of lower things -- that will make you a sannyasin.
I can define sannyas as a flying experience to the stars.
You should always remain mindful of one thing: that I cannot be deceived. I know how many people are meditating. I know how many people are simply imitating. I know how a few people are simply hanging around. But don't waste your time -- because time is not money, time is life! And if you have taken a step to change, to transform, then don't try to deceive, because you will be deceiving only yourself, not me.
A husband complained that his wife was a liar. "What makes you say that?" asked the friend.
"Well," said the husband, "she came home this morning and told me she spent
the night with Mary."
"Well," replied the friend, "maybe she did. How do you know she was lying?" "How do I know?" cried the husband, because I spent the night with Mary!"
It is better to be truthful than to be caught lying. Lying is so undignified. But millions of people are pretending to be what they are not. At least I hope my people will simply express what they are.
I told you about this Vijayanand. In his article he says that I preach what I don't practice.
I was amazed -- because I practiced first, then I preached. But these people have their own expectations, and they think their expectations should be fulfilled. For example, a man who is enlightened should be poor, as if poverty is something spiritual. Those who preach it, they should be it. I have no objection about it -- but I have never preached it, so why should I practice it?
I am preaching just the opposite. I have been preaching that the richer you are, the more possibility there is of transformation. And I don't see that comfort is any hindrance to your being meditative: that being in a beautiful garden you can be less meditative than being in the forest; that being naked you can become enlightened more easily than having comfortable clothes.
I think otherwise. I think when it is cold and you are naked -- rather than being enlightened, you will suffer double pneumonia. It is better to have enough clothes, enlightened or not enlightened, then at least double pneumonia will not happen!
But this has been my experience my whole life: people have been condemning me for their teachings. They are not my teachings... I have never said, "Blessed are the poor because they shall inherit the kingdom of God." They are enough blessed if they can even inherit the kingdom of the devil! All religions have evolved only when society was comfortable and rich enough. The twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas were all sons of kings; Gautam Buddha was the son of a king; Rama and Krishna were both kings. And all these idiots go on saying that I should live as a poor man -- then only can their mind be satisfied.
I am not here to satisfy any idiot's mind or his expectations; neither do I expect
anything from anybody, nor am I going to fulfill anybody's expectation. Who is Vijayanand? What does he know about my teaching, and what does he know about my practice? I am exactly doing what I am saying. I say only afterwards... Unless I have done it and experienced it, I never say it, because who knows, it may not be right -- and I would not like my people to be deceived. I have not uttered a single word to you which is not out of my own experience.
But I am not here to fulfill somebody else's preachings. I am not here to fulfill the preachings of Mahavira and be naked, I am not here to fulfill Krishna's teachings and have a garage for sixteen thousand women. I am not going to follow Rama's preachings and kill a poor young untouchable because he has heard the brahmins reciting the VEDAS.
Sudras are not allowed to read, are not allowed even to hear the holy scriptures, because their hearing will spoil the holiness of the scriptures. I don't see any relationship. Who is hearing cannot make any difference to the holy scripture. Rama poured hot melted lead into the ears of the poor young fellow, and he died. This was the punishment so that sudras should not come near any temple where the holy scriptures are being recited. That may have been the preaching of Rama, and that may be Vijayanand's God -- God's incarnation -- I don't care.
If I see this fellow Rama I'm going to ask him, "What right have you got, on what grounds...? You are a criminal, you have committed a murder."
If I meet Krishna, who is thought to be the perfect incarnation of God, the whole God come only for the first time... A very strange idea, as if God comes in parts also, installments. Rama was a partial incarnation, perhaps a hand or a head or a leg or something else... you can understand, et cetera. Of what was he the incarnation? what part?
Only Krishna is a perfect incarnation -- which means God comes complete. Then what happens in paradise? And this complete incarnation teaches absolutely wrong things: he teaches violence, he teaches war, he teaches bloodshed.
I am not going to fulfill these people's teachings. I live according to what I preach.
I challenge Vijayanand to come here and tell me on what grounds he is making such stupid statements. In fact, he is feeling guilty. He was not an ashramite; I
have given him refuge here, because he was condemned in Bombay and he would have been condemned all over India. It is absolutely ugly, unnatural, unscientific, immoral, to marry the daughter of your own sister. It is not only against religion, it is against science. It is not only against this generation, it is against future generations -- because their children will be blind, may be retarded, may be born with AIDS... anything is possible.
The closer the blood, the uglier the children; the farther the blood, the better the breed.
That's the whole science of crossbreeding. We bring English bulls for Indian mother cows, and nobody even bothers, "What are you doing? English bulls for your mothers?
Have you gone mad?..."
But if you want beautiful bulls yourself, you will have to bring as faraway males and females as possible together. The crossbreed is always better than the father, than the mother, both. Otherwise there was no need... everybody could have married his own sister. That would have been the easiest and simplest and cheapest way: no cost, no problem, no dowry -- just marry your sister and, just as every story says, they lived happily ever afterwards.
No society in the whole world allows it. Even before the scientific discovery that close blood breeds distorted children, people must have become aware long before, thousands of years before.… But the logic should be taken to its full consequences: no Hindu should marry another Hindu, no Mohammedan should marry another Mohammedan, no Christian should marry another Christian, no Indian should marry another Indian, no Russian should marry another Russian, and no American should marry another American. Just by this simple formula we can bring about a tremendous revolution all over the world.
Insist on faraway blood, and you will have a generation of highly superior beings, intellectually, physically, in every sense.
As far as I am concerned, whatever I am teaching, I am doing. And if anybody has any objection, he is welcome just before my people to present the case, so they can understand. I may not even need to answer; my people can answer, "What stupidity are you talking about?"
Here things are simple and sincere. Whatever I am saying, I am doing; my preaching and my practice are not different.
Such beautiful silence... This is what I preach,
And this is what I practice.
Just a little story to end up this beautiful peace with laughter.
A salesman is forced to share a room with a rabbi in a crowded hotel. He enters the room and finds the rabbi kneeling in a corner, murmuring his prayers.
"Hi," says the salesman. "I'm your new roommate." The rabbi nods without interrupting his prayers. "Well then, which bed shall I take?"
The rabbi points to one bed, continuing to pray. The salesman nervously unpacks his bag, then all of a sudden says, "Say, rabbi, do you mind if I bring up a girl?"
The rabbi, still praying, shouts, "Two, not one!" Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #12
Chapter title: I am the first world citizen
12 September 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code:
8709120
ShortTitle:
PILGR12
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
110
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
COULD YOU PLEASE GIVE ME A FEW SUTRAS AND JOKES FOR THE NOURISHMENT OF MY POOR SOUL?
Devageet, there is no problem in giving you a few sutras and jokes -- but I will not give them for the nourishment of your poor soul for the simple reason that soul needs no nourishment. The soul is never poor.
The only really poor people in the world are those who are unaware of their soul and the treasures it contains.
There is a poverty of the body, which is man-created. Science declares definitively that we can produce enough food, enough nourishment for more than five billion people; by the end of this century the population of the world will be five billion. Who is preventing them...?
Every six months America is drowning so much food in the oceans that just the
cost of taking it to the ocean comes to two billion dollars. And the same is happening in Europe: every six months they have so much food that they don't have customers for it --
mountains of butter, and they don't have any more warehouses. Keeping it in the warehouses is costly; they have to drown it in the ocean. The last installment in Europe also took two billion dollars... just to drown the butter, cheese and other nourishing food.
At the time they drowned it, one thousand people in Ethiopia were dying of starvation every day. By the end of this century -- if this stupid politics and these ugly lines on the map don't disappear -- then half the population of the world is going to die. Of course, that half will not be in the advanced, scientifically and technically equipped West; it will be in the East.
I am always surprised at what the Eastern politicians are doing: I cannot deny the simple fact that they are trying to gain more nuclear weapons without bothering that their own population will die in such large numbers -- one in two. That means every house will be surrounded by corpses; there will not be even people to bury them or burn them. The by-products of so many people -- for example, in India fifty million people will die -- their death and their rotting bodies will create millions of diseases, about which nobody is bothering at all.
The Indian prime minister goes to Russia to get more military power; he goes to America to get more uranium so that he can also make nuclear weapons. It seems so stupid and so mad... if we could get rid of all the politicians there would really be peace in the world.
And the same applies to the religious people. Now the Vatican pope comes to India, and goes to Mother Teresa's orphanage, where only seven hundred orphans are. He is very much interested in saving them, but he says not a single word when the European market, where he lives, drowns millions of tons of nourishment which could have saved Ethiopia.
What is true about political leaders is also true about your so-called religious leaders.
Their concern seems to be that it will be better that the East is finished... but their part of the world should become more affluent, more rich.
There is also poverty of the mind. That too is man-created, and in that the religious leaders are far ahead of the political leaders. They have stopped all sources of man's intelligence and its growth. All the religions, without exception, have been trying that man should not have intelligence; on the contrary, they are teaching that you should have belief.
Belief is anti-intelligence.
They have been teaching that you should not have doubt -- and doubt is the mother of all invention. Doubt is the foundation of the whole of science, technology. Any search begins with doubt, and disbelief. If you believe and you don't doubt, you stay where you are, and your position goes on deteriorating because the population goes on growing.
You are becoming every moment more poor than you think, because millions of children are born every day. But the pope did not condemn America for destroying food, did not say a single word to the European governments and the European Common Market against destroying nourishment -- which is absolutely ugly when people are dying. With the same money the food could have reached to Ethiopia. But it reached into the deepest ocean, where it will disappear and be eaten by sea animals. It seems there has suddenly arisen a great love for sea animals.…
Man has been kept half nourished as far as the body is concerned, because a half nourished man cannot revolt. His sole concern is at least one meal a day -- and that meal is not scientifically nourishing: just to fill the empty stomach is not to have a nourishing meal. You need certain amounts of vitamins, you need certain amounts of minerals, you need certain amounts of chemicals. Nobody seems to be awake, but an undernourished body is weak, in the state of a beggar -- and beggars don't revolt.
A retarded mind cannot even think that the world can progress, that there can be some evolution possible. The retarded mind has been told by all the religions: Be contented as you are. This contentment is not the real contentment; this contentment is to repress any rebellious situation, to protect the rich and to let the poor die. Be contented.…
Marx was right when he said, "Religion is the opium of the people." I want to add a few more compliments to religion: it is not only opium, it is poison, it is
suicide, it is murder, it is war, it is rape. It is keeping man continuously in slavery, it does not allow any freedom of thought -- and if there is no freedom of thought, consciousness has no possibility to grow. But the soul is beyond these idiots' hands. They don't know anything about it; otherwise they might have tried to keep it also undernourished.
Devageet, your soul is as rich as any Gautam Buddha or as any Jesus or as any Lao Tzu.
Your soul does not need anything -- except discovery. Never think for a moment that the soul is poor; it is the richest exploration. The finding of it will make you far richer than the richest man in the world. Emperors will look like beggars.
Today in America, which is the richest country, the richest men have only four and a half billion dollars; in Japan, the richest man in the world has twenty-one billion dollars. But their souls are completely forgotten. They are only counting their money, knowing perfectly well that all that money is soaked in blood; all that money is out of exploitation of the starving, of the retarded. The retarded and starving have been kept retarded and starving; otherwise it would be difficult to exploit them.
You cannot exploit an intelligent man.
You cannot exploit a man of understanding.
You cannot exploit a man who knows his own eternal being.
Devageet, your soul needs discovery not nourishment. Soul is not material, it is your eternal energy. It was before your death, it will be after your death.
But for your mind, the first sutra:
A smile is the shortest distance between people.
But even smiles have disappeared. People have fallen so far apart that nobody truly smiles; all smiles have become Jimmy Carter smiles. It is very difficult to find a smile which is not plastic. Just stretching your lips from ear to ear does not mean you are smiling; you may be exercising your lips...!
And have you seen any photograph of Jimmy Carter since he was no longer
president of America? I have seen many. I have been watching: the smile has simply disappeared; he looks a sad, defeated, frustrated man. The smile was not his, it was political, diplomatic.
This is really ugly, that people cannot even smile at each other. So I can certainly say it is a significant sutra: a smile is the shortest distance between people.
A statesman is a politician who did not get caught.
They are all thieves, they are all cheats, they are criminals. But when they are not caught, then the politician raises his status: he becomes a statesman.
Life without wife is better than wife without life.
While attending a baseball match, the American president, Ronald Reagan, was accidentally hit on the head by a baseball. Next day, the newspaper headlines read:
"Reagan's head X-rayed -- reveals nothing."
A salesman knocks on the front door of a house and a little boy opens it, turns to his mother and calls, "Hey, Mom, it's a live commercial."
There is always something about your success that displeases even your best friends. I have been asked again and again why America destroyed our commune, and I have answered, "Because we were so successful." If we had not been successful nobody would have cared. But because we were successful in transforming a desert -- which had never produced anything green -- into a beautiful oasis, even friends became enemies.
Nobody can tolerate your success. When you are a failure, everybody has the upper hand; he sympathizes with you, he says, "Poor fellow..." But nobody goes to the successful man to congratulate him; it hurts.
I am happy that the richest country in the world became jealous of a small commune of five thousand people. It has proved indubitably that money does not change people, or their mind.
I could have understood it if our commune in India would have been as successful as it was in America... but I am certain in India we would have been
destroyed exactly on the same lines. In fact, they are trying, because we are still gathering, things are returning...
people are coming again, and the fear in New Delhi is great. It is strange: they have all the power, but still they cannot see people happy, joyous, creative, loving and living their own way, living their own style, living in freedom.
Because the whole world is living in slavery, the free man cannot be tolerated. The whole world is a failure. Even the richest are still beggars because they want more. What is the difference?... A beggar wants more, the emperor wants more -- their minds are functioning in the same way.
The commune became the target of the whole of American politics, and particularly the fundamentalist Christians -- because they were not so successful in two thousand years in bringing a smile to people's faces, bringing light to their eyes, bringing silences to their hearts. I had never thought that they will become jealous. I thought they had everything --
why should they be jealous of our cars or our airplanes, our roads, our turning the desert into an oasis? They should have been happy and helpful.
But this is not the way insane people function. They became afraid that an authentic communism is happening -- a communism which is not imposed from outside, which has no dictatorship. Just out of the joy of creation, people are creating. This became more dangerous to them than the Soviet Union. It is absolutely out of all proportion.… But success hurts even your best friends, and failure even brings your enemies to sympathize.
One hopes one day things will be totally different. Success will receive its reward, and failure will receive all the support that can transform it into success. But that is not the thing: sympathy is empty. And destroying success is absolutely necessary, because people start comparing: What has the government been doing? -- the richest government, the most powerful government, which could have changed the whole of America into a paradise.
But even in America, though they don't talk about it, there are thirty million beggars.
Their news media people come to India to photograph beggars, to propagate to the whole world that India is a beggar. But nobody knows that America has
thirty million beggars --
and by a very strange coincidence, thirty million people who have been eating too much, they are hospitalized. Thirty million are dying on the streets, and exactly thirty million are eating their food... and dying.
And on those thirty million who have become overfed, millions of dollars are wasted because doctors, nurses, medicines... And nobody is bothering about the thirty million people who don't have food, who don't have shelter, who don't have anything, who can't think that tomorrow will be any different. If tomorrow they can get some food to eat, they will be immensely happy.
Anybody who has a little intelligence can change this whole world within ten years, not more than that.
I provoked Ronald Reagan and his company, because I absorbed three hundred beggars into the commune. And those beggars were surprised and shocked because for the first time they were treated as human beings. Letters were written by beggars to me: "We had been treated almost like stray dogs. We had forgotten completely that we are human beings. You have revived our respect, our dignity; you have made us again human."
Nothing was different for them, they were not treated in a different way; they mixed in the commune. That was my fault... and Ronald Reagan began a whole strategy to destroy this commune. Now three hundred, tomorrow three thousand... and these people will create a situation that the American government will not be able to cope with, although they have all the weapons. They can kill, but they cannot cope.
And their democracy -- I have seen -- is such a hypocrisy, so ugly, that everything against the commune and me has been done illegally, so obviously illegally that although I don't know any law, even I could say to them, "This is absolutely illegal."
I was asked in the jail not to write my name, but to write instead the name, David Washington. I said, "I don't understand. That is not my name. You are forcing me into an illegal act. I will not write that name... Do you think I am an idiot? Can't I see your whole plan? I write David Washington and tomorrow you poison me, and the world will not be even able to trace where I have disappeared, because your register will not show that I ever entered, so the
question does not arise that you have killed me."
I said, "Forget all about it. You write whatever you want to write. If you want David Washington, write David Washington." And that law-imposing authority they call marshal in America was asking me to do such an illegal act.…
I said, "You should have at least removed your coat on which a great seal shows: Marshal, Department of Justice. Be ashamed, at least, of your coat. You write, I will sign."
He thought that was a good compromise, so he wrote my name, David Washington -- and I signed my name. He looked at it... and my signature is such that even a man who knows Hindi cannot understand it. He said, "What is it?"
I said, "It must be David Washington. If my name is David Washington, this is David Washington." I said, "I have made it clear. My signatures are world- known. Don't try to be clever and cunning. If anything happens to me you will be caught for two reasons: my name is written in your handwriting, and my signature is well-known. It is not something personal; it is almost copyrighted in all the countries. Everybody knows my signature, and nobody knows what it means."
Their plan failed. Just before sunrise I was shifted to another jail, because what was the point? -- now they could not kill me in that jail, and to keep me there was dangerous, because a young woman was also brought on the airplane, sitting by my side. She had seen me speaking on the television many times, so she said, "I am immensely glad that I have the chance for a few hours to sit by your side. I know everything is being done to you illegally. They have not issued any arrest warrant, and they arrested you; they have not shown any reason, any cause, and they have not bailed you."
For three days the government attorney continued to argue, and finally his last statement was, "We don't have any proof, any evidence, and we cannot legally ask the magistrate to prevent this man from being bailed out. But the government wants that he should not be bailed out." And America has been proclaiming to the whole world that their justice department is absolutely separate from their administrative bureaucracy.
And I was not given bail, although they could not prove any reason why I was arrested, why no arrest warrant was issued from the court, why I should not be
bailed out. Still, the government wants that I should not be bailed out.…
Only in very few moments have I felt my respect for women falling. I have always respected women, and I have given them superiority. But once in a while women have done such ugly acts against me that I had to think twice whether to continue to give them respect or to withdraw it.
The magistrate was a woman, and she did not allow the bail. Even the jailer on the way back to jail from the court told me, "I am surprised... this is the first time. There was no reason at all for anything, they had nothing against you. I had prepared all your clothes and everything so that you can be released; there is no reason to prevent you. But now I know why you have not been given bail: that woman has been blackmailed, she has been told that she will be made a federal judge"... she was an ordinary state judge, and becoming a federal judge is tremendously prestigious. I used to think that women have heart. That day I hesitated a little.
Now they have turned the desert again into a desert; they did not allow us to sell the property. One man was ready to purchase it at forty million dollars -- which was nothing, because the property was worth at least three hundred million dollars. Even the government has appraised it at one hundred million. We were ready to give it to him for forty, but the government did not give us the permission to sell it. The man was suffering from cancer and doctors had said he could not live more than one month. If it can be stopped for one month, it will be easy... then the property cannot be sold.
The man died within a month, and even to the last day he was trying hard. The moment he died, immediately the permission was given, but the permission was given in such a way that any buyer of the property... The government has been preventing, creating a thousand and one difficulties. In one year the desert has settled slowly back. Strange --
they will be happy only when it becomes a desert. Success is never forgiven.
If you see so many people against me around the world, that is nothing but a measurement of my success. If all the prime ministers and the presidents and the popes and the shankaracharyas are against me, the reason is that they are local, ordinary people.
I am the first world citizen -- and that hurts them very much. I have been loved by all races, all religious people from every nook and corner of the world.
Just now there is an exhibition going on in the Soviet Union. I have sannyasins in the Soviet Union; of course, they have to remain underground -- they cannot declare that they are sannyasins -- but there are a large number of sannyasins. Our stall of books is overcrowded; it is the most successful stall even in Russia. But the people don't have money, so they are stealing books. I have informed my people, "Don't pay any attention -
- let them steal. At least those books will reach to millions of people, and if you catch somebody red-handed, just tell him, Ì'm not against stealing; what can you do if you don't have any money? Just keep one thing in mind: when you have read it, pass it on.
That is the price.'"
They confiscated first all our videos, all our audios -- because they were worried, one never knows what is in them.… Now they have released the audios and videos. They must have seen them first, the KGB must have watched everything!
The president of the exhibition was so surprised that an unknown man, who has never come to Russia... and you cannot send any book into Russia, you cannot send any newspaper, you cannot even correspond with people; everything is censored or confiscated. They could not believe that such a crowd would be there on our bookstall the whole day. All the other bookstalls were empty.
The president came to Lani, who went from here, saying, "What is the matter?" Looking at my beard in one of the pictures he said, "Is this man something like Leo Tolstoy?" --
because Leo Tolstoy had a big beautiful beard. "Why are so many people around here the whole day?" They don't know that most of them are my sannyasins! I am the only underground movement in Russia... and there was trouble. The KGB thinks that I am an American agent, and America thinks I am a Russian agent -- and the Indian government thinks it is unfortunate that I was born here, because they cannot deport me. That is their trouble!
Success brings so many troubles. If I had known...
There is a beautiful song of Meera which says, "If I had known before that love brings so many agonies, I would have informed the whole world that nobody should fall in love." I can say to the world that success is not a bed of roses -- not even mixed with thorns; it is completely thorns.
"I have got insomnia really bad," complained a man to his doctor.
"Insomnia," said the doctor, "is insomnia. How bad can it be? What do you mean?
Insomnia is insomnia -- how can it be bad? What do you mean by saying `really bad insomnia'?"
"Well," said the man, "I have got it really bad. I can't even sleep when it is time to get up."
The trouble arises... he cannot sleep when it is time to get up! If you look in people's minds, their bodies are starved, their minds are retarded.
A patient was making his first visit to the doctor. "And whom did you consult about your illness before you came to me?" the doctor enquired.
"Only the druggist down at the corner," replied the patient.
The doctor did not conceal his contempt for the medical advice of people not qualified to practice medicine. "And what sort of ridiculous advice did that fool give you?" demanded the doctor.
"He told me," replied the patient innocently, "to see you."
Ronald Reagan was grooming himself in front of the mirror before leaving to make an important speech on television.
"I wonder how many great men there are in the world?" he mused. Nancy looked up and said, "One less than you think."
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
TOO MANY TIMES I COME ACROSS WOMEN WHO HAVE GIVEN UP SEX. I DON'T HAVE THE FEELING THAT THEY HAVE TRANSCENDED SEX. COULD
YOU PLEASE SAY SOMETHING TO THEM?
Veetdharm, your question shows the essential Indian mind. You may be Indian or not, it doesn't matter. It is a great question! Why should you be worried about anybody else's sex? Are you some kind of sex expert?
You say, "Too many times I come across women who have given up sex. I don't have the feeling that they have transcended sex."
In what way can you feel whether anybody has transcended sex or not? Is there any kind of thermometer? If they are saying they have given up, who are you to doubt them? and on what grounds?
Your question shows more about you, not about the women you have come across.…
"Could you please say something to them?" This is a strange question! Is it your question or their question? If they have any problem, they will ask. What concern do you have?
Why are you worried about somebody's sex? And you want me to tell them, not to tell you... and it is your question!
If you had gone to any shankaracharya, he would have condemned those women. I condemn you; it is your repressed sexuality. Your eyes are blinded with your sexuality, so you cannot see anybody else who is beyond sex.
Just watch your own state.
You have suppressed so much sex. I can say definitely without knowing you or who you are, that your eyes have a thick layer of sexual repression. This colors everything into sex.
A psychotherapist was treating a patient. Just to check on his mind, he drew a line on the paper and asked him, "What does this line remind you of?"
The patient said, "It cannot remind me of anything else; it reminds me of women. It is so clear... what is the point of asking?"
The psychologist drew a triangle and the man said, "This is too much. It reminds me even more...!"
The psychologist drew a circle. The patient stood up and he said, "Are you some kind of sex maniac or what? This is absolutely woman.… I thought you were a psychoanalyst --
you need psychoanalysis."
The psychoanalyst was at a loss about what to do. Just then a camel passed by, and he said, "Just one last question. What does that camel remind you of?"
He said, "Don't provoke me, or it will be your responsibility. I may do something for which you will repent your whole life. That is a pure, beautiful woman!"
The psychoanalyst said, "Just the last question, the very last. What else reminds you of women?"
The patient said, "What a nonsense question! Everything reminds me of women, there is no question of any exception."
Now, does what he is saying reflect the psychoanalyst or his mind?
Veetdharm, you are a sex maniac. Those women may have transcended; if they have not transcended, just seeing you they will be immediately transcending -- fast, quick, urgent...
emergency! You are drunk with your repressed sex. It is the most intoxicating thing, and accumulating over many years -- and that's what happens in this country.
Here everything reminds people of sex: a straight line, an animal... it defeats all intelligence. One cannot conceive even in a dream that a camel, the ugliest animal in the world, reminds you of a beautiful woman. Even Sophia Loren may never have thought that somebody will see her in a camel. There are people here from Italy, they can inform her.…
A drunk was standing watching a man enter a revolving door. As the door swung round, out stepped a pretty girl.
"Unbelievable!" he muttered. "Absolutely unbelievable!"
You don't see that you are drunk. In fact, nobody looks at himself. People are looking at others, judging others, and these are the real criminals. Without any doubt, I say that these are the sickest people in the world -- those who judge others. In the first place, it is not your business. In the second place, you are interfering into somebody else's space; you are going against his individuality and freedom, and you are without any cause suspecting his truth, his sincerity.
The day I left America I received a letter from a bishop of Wasco County, who had been for almost five years condemning my Rolls Royces. In every Sunday sermon he was not preaching Jesus Christ, he was preaching me and my Rolls Royces. The day I was leaving he wrote a letter to me, "Now you are leaving, it will be great kindness on your part if you can donate one Rolls Royce to this church." Now, this shows the man.…
I informed him, "Would you like all ninety-three, or only one?"
And a letter came, "If you can give all ninety-three, that is just the right thing. You are really great. I'm very sorry that I condemned you for five years. You are a man to be worshiped."
It is a very strange world if you understand people: whatever they are saying shows more about them than it shows about the person they are talking about.
"I have brought a frog," said Professor Bradley, beaming at his class in elementary zoology, "fresh from the pond, in order that we might study its outer appearance and later dissect it."
He carefully unwrapped the package he was carrying, and inside was a neatly prepared ham sandwich. The good professor looked at it with astonishment.
"Odd," he said, "I distinctly remember having eaten my lunch."
And these are the idiots who are professors, who are judges, who are police commissioners, who are governors, who are prime ministers, who are presidents.…
My own understanding is that a man who does not know himself... this should be the only criterion of man's idiocy. According to that criterion, only the self- realized people are saying something that is coming from their very heart. Others are just befooling you.
They may be learned, they may be clever, they may be able to deceive the whole world, but they cannot deceive themselves.
Just watch your own mind, and see what I am saying.
I have saved another question from this man, to prove... because I don't want to say anything without proof. I don't know the man... but now I will read his second question.
That will prove what I have told you. Question 3
I AM FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD AND MY MIND IS STILL FULL OF SEX. CAN
I SEE THIS JUST AS RIPPLES OF THE MIND OR IS MY SEXUAL ENERGY STILL
LIFE-ENERGY? DO I HAVE TO LIVE IT ALL OUT? IS THERE ANY CHANCE
FOR ME TO NOT END UP AS A DIRTY OLD MAN? SWAMI VEETDHARM.
Now, do you need any other proof? This man writes these two questions and is not able to figure out himself that it is his problem he is projecting on others. And he is forty-seven -- it is time not to be foolish. But it seems as age grows, foolishness also grows.
Old fools are really fools. Young fools have a possibility to transcend, but old fools --
where will they transcend? What is the alternative?
The old boss had managed to get a date with his secretary, but was worried about his diminished potency. So he went to the doctor and asked for something to pep him up. The doctor gave him two pills and said, "Take these with your dinner tonight and you should not have any trouble performing later on."
So the old man and his date went to a beautiful restaurant, and when they had ordered their soup, the old man took the waiter aside and asked him to put the two pills into his soup before he served it.
They waited for twenty minutes, and still the waiter had not brought their soup. So the old man angrily called the waiter over and said, "What the hell has happened to the soup?"
"I'm sorry, sir," said the waiter, "but I did what you ordered and put those pills into your soup, and now I'm just waiting for the noodles to lie down again."
Veetdharm, it is time! Let the noodles lie down.
But I know the repressed sex will continue in your mind. Now the only way is to go deeper into silence and meditation. Become more watchful. Drop all this idiotic judgment about others. Your responsibility is to transform you, not the whole world. Don't try to be a savior. If you can save yourself, that's enough.
You have passed almost two-thirds of your life, but you are just in time, forty- seven.…
Perhaps thirteen years are available for the whole of humanity to live, and thirteen years are also available for you to live -- so you are exactly synchronizing with existence.
Nobody else is going to have more time, so don't be jealous. Even the youngest child will live only thirteen years, most probably. There seems to be no reason to expect otherwise, because the so-called wise are suggesting, "Stop cow slaughter and there will be no world war"..."Learn yogic hopping and there will be no world war."
A Jew was caught in Adolf Hitler's Germany before the second world war by a police officer, who said, "Listen, Jew, do you know the real reason why Germany is not as rich as it should be, is not the world's greatest power? Why did Germany get defeated in the first world war?"
The Jew said, "I think it is because of the bicycle riders." The policeman looked around.
There was a crowd listening to what was happening, what the Jew says.
He said, "Bicycle riders? What is the connection between bicycle riders and Germany's defeat?"
The Jew said, "What connection is there between Jews and Germany's defeat? It is the same. Destroy bicycles and I promise you, Germany will start rising in riches, power, it will become a world power."
The policeman said, "You seem to be absolutely mad!"
He said, "If I am mad, then what is Adolf Hitler and the people who are following him?"
Adolf Hitler lied completely saying that it is the Jews -- which is absolutely irrelevant --
because of the Jews, Germany is not getting on, it is being defeated, damaged. And in fact, the Jews were the only people in Germany who were productive and creative. If he had not been against the Jews, there is every possibility that now Germany would have been ruling the whole world. Because Albert Einstein was also a Jew, working under Adolf Hitler, but seeing that millions of Jews were simply slaughtered...
Of course, he would not have been killed; he was their only hope of conquering the world, because he was going to produce the atom bomb. But he escaped from Germany and wrote a letter to President Roosevelt of America saying, "I can create atomic weapons which can destroy on such a large scale -- the biggest city within a few minutes
-- that if you want to win the second world war, I'm the man. I give you the guarantee."
Roosevelt was immensely happy, because Adolf Hitler was winning continually. For five years he had not known any defeat, he went on winning. Wherever he entered he was winning.
It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who produced the atom bomb. It might have been produced in Berlin, but it was produced in Washington, and that changed the whole of history. But any idiotic idea... and people have been forced to remain so retarded that they go on following it.
For example, Veetdharm, if you are a Hindu, then most probably everything that you are doing is going to lead you to an ugly old age, full of sexuality. Hindus believe that cow milk is the purest thing, the most spiritual. In fact, except for man no animal drinks milk his whole life. Milk is only drunk in the beginning, for a few weeks, a few months at the most, before he starts eating and digesting solid food -- it is just a temporary measure. It is only man who goes on drinking milk his whole life.
You don't understand: the milk you go on drinking is not a woman's milk, it is the milk of a cow, which has the chemistry and alchemy for the bull, not for the man. These Hindu monks go on drinking milk thinking that this is a great thing to keep them celibate. They become bulls! -- because that is the food for bulls, and it has the capacity to create that much sexuality. This is the greatest danger.
Strange things have been suggested to you by stupid people. They tell you, "Take a cold bath before sunrise, and it will keep you celibate." That is pure nonsense. If you want to be celibate, take a good hot bath after sunrise, so the noodles can lie down. In a cold bath noodles will stand up.
But this is for the first time I am saying this... I wanted to say it always, but I avoided it.
Why unnecessarily wrestle with idiots, very ancient idiots? Cold water is certainly going to make you more sexual. Ice cold water is suggested -- and before sunrise, so the water does not become even lukewarm. Hindu sannyasins go at three o'clock in the morning to take a cold bath, shivering, but they don't know what they are doing. They will feel more sexual -- and then a good cow's milk... that will make them a bull. And a bull with noodles standing up -- you are finished!
Question 4
MOST BELOVED OSHO,
NEVER THE EARTH AND THE SKY HAVE BEEN SO BEAUTIFUL.… NEVER THE
EXISTENCE HAS BEEN SO VIBRATING, DANCING ITS MYSTERIOUS DANCE, PREGNANT TO THE FULLEST WITH JOY, SILENCE, LOVE
AND YOUR DIVINE GIGGLES.…
IT IS SO MUCH.… YET I CAN ONLY WHISPER THE SILENT JOY OF BEING, WHILE I WOULD LIKE TO CELEBRATE YOU TO THE FULLEST. THANK YOU
SO MUCH, OSHO, AGAIN AND AGAIN FOR KILLING ME SO LOVINGLY.
Kavisho, it is true: my work consists in killing you lovingly, because that is the only possibility of bringing you back into a new light, into a new life.
I kill only that which is not yours, but you believe it is you. I kill, in short, your personality, and leave only that which cannot be destroyed: your eternal being.
The moment your personality drops, you will certainly feel like dancing and celebrating and enjoying. And suddenly this universe will become totally different, because now you have fresh eyes, utterly innocent, uncorrupted by any society, any religion, any politician, any kind of ideology.
Once your personality can be taken away from you -- and it is not you -- then you are left in your utter nudity, in your existential being... the beauty of it, the luxury of it, the festivity of it, will start functioning. It will bring great creativity to you, great intelligence to you, great love to you. You will forget how you lived so long in misery, so long in jealousy, so long in ambitions, all kinds of desires which made you a beggar. You will not believe that this eternal freedom was always available for you, just you had to look into it.
I have called you all here. Perhaps you may not know that I have called you here. It is not that you have come on your own; that would be very difficult. On your own you would be doing something stupid somewhere -- giving birth to more children, worshiping before a stone statue which is made by man, praying to a God which does not exist, which is only an unproved hypothesis, afraid of hell, desiring for heaven. And all is just fiction.…
But the personality needs many fictions to support it. Itself, it is a by-product of all these fictions.
Your individuality needs no fiction. It is your authentic existential being.
I give you that which you already have, and I take away all that you never really had, but you believed you had. I destroy your belief, and that is my way of destroying your personality.
And once your personality is gone, Kavisho, you will become contagious. Your joy, your celebration, your song, your dance will spread into other people's hearts. You will become a catalytic agent. Without knowing, people will start joining you in your dance, in your laughter, in your joy.
What you are saying makes me immensely happy. I would like all my people to come to the same space.
The worried father telephoned the family doctor and said that his teenage son had come down with gonorrhea. "He says," continued the father, "that he has not had sex with anyone but the maid, so it has to be her."
"Don't worry so much," advised the kindly doctor. "These things happen."
"I know, doctor," said the father. "But I have to admit that I have been to bed with her myself, and I seem to have the same symptoms."
"That is unfortunate," said the doctor.
"Not only that -- I think I have passed it on to my wife." "Christ," said the doctor. "That means we all have it."
Just go on passing.… Just as disease can be contagious, health can also be. Just as misery can be contagious, blissfulness can also be.
One lighted being is bound to create an urgent, instant longing in others to have the same light. One person dancing and singing with abandon is bound to affect people, because they are also carrying the same song hidden, the same dance. They have been crippled by their society. They also have the same eyes for beauty, but they had been blinded by the society. They have also the energy to celebrate, but this society does not believe in celebration.
This society is absolutely insane. It believes in money, it believes in power, it believes in violence, it believes in rapes, it believes in murder, it believes in all kinds of crimes, and it believes in all kinds of fictions, but it does not understand even a little bit about itself.
The moment a small window opens into you, you are a transformed being. The new man is born in you.
Kavisho, enjoy this celebration as much as possible, because whatever remaining falsities, personalities, parts here and there may have remained, they will be thrown away by your dance. Enjoy... this existence is for your enjoyment. It is our existence, it is our home.
Nobody is a sinner except those who don't celebrate. To me, celebration is the only virtue.
A man was visiting his friend George, who was in hospital dying. The friend said, "Well, anyway George, you have lived a good life. For sure you will be going to heaven."
George replied, "Yes, I have lived a good life, but there is something I never told you."
"What is that?" asked his friend.
"Remember that time I went to Chicago on business last year? Well, I made love with a beautiful woman there."
Shocked, his friend replied, "I can't believe it. I mean, your wife, your kids -- did you not think about them?"
"Yes, I did," replied George, "and then I thought I might as well see what heaven is like, since I already knew what hell was like."
You have known hell; now you are entering, Kavisho, into heaven. Everybody has suffered for many lives in hell. Hell is nowhere in the geography of the world, of the universe; it is in your distorted mind. It is another name for a distorted mind, and heaven is another name for a mind which has transcended itself and reached into a space of no-mind. Hence my insistence continuously for
silence. If you cannot reach to silence through music... because music is next to silence.…
To create silence I have been giving you all the meditations, all these small gaps... not that I am short of words, not that I have forgotten what I was going to say, but just to allow you to have a little experience of silence, which on your own you find difficult. But in the communion of so many silent people, and in the communion of a man who has reached to the ultimate center of being, it is possible to be infected.
Blessed are those who allow themselves to be contagious to festivity, to love, to peace, to silence, to celebration.
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #13
Chapter title: Human mind is a miracle
12 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code: 8709125
ShortTitle: PILGR13
Audio: Yes Video:
Yes Length:
122
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
AM I REALLY GETTING OLD, BECAUSE EVERYONE IS GOSSIPING ABOUT IT?
Devageet again! Just two days ago you had become old, and I had to take so much trouble to bring you back. And you slip again! One time is okay, but twice is too much --
it is becoming really a serious problem.
And don't listen to gossip; you are here to listen to the gospel!
But I have also heard the gossip that is making you worried. So first the gossip: One day at the Poona drugstore, Milarepa, Sarjano and Devageet come in to buy some condoms. Milarepa goes first and says he would like a week's supply, which is six. "Why only six?" asks the druggist.
"Well," says Milarepa, "these days I like to have Sunday off."
Next, Sarjano walks up and asks for eight condoms. "Eight?" says the druggist, "why eight?"
"Mama mia," says Sarjano, "I-a always like-a to do it twice-a on Sundays."
And last Devageet walks up and asks for twelve. The druggist, looking at his size and age, is astonished. "Twelve?" he says. "That is pretty impressive for a man of your age.
But tell me, why twelve?"
Devageet replies, "January, February, March..."
That is the gossip that is going all around. And I have to suffer from all these gossips; now I have to bring Devageet back to his senses.
First thing: feel happy that you have friends. The old saying is:
..."The person who does not gossip has no friends to speak of."
You have so many friends; everybody is gossiping about you. So it is not unfortunate --
just for the gossip's sake, just for the friends' sake -- if once in a while you become old.
But remember one thing:
... The only sure thing about youth is that it will change, and about old age, that it will never change.
Old age has something more than youth: it ends, but it never changes. People are too much worried about old age. Anybody can become old; only a great man can enquire about it. It needs some intelligence to enquire about it.
... Old age is when you have learnt to yawn with your mouth closed.
So let that be the criterion for the future. Don't be bothered by any gossip.
... People who complain they don't get all they deserve, don't realize how old they are.
Just remember one thing: old age or no old age, one should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. And it keeps one always young, at least for the appearance's sake. There are so many ways to appear young; the simplest is:
... Always fall in love with an older woman, and you will be always young. One just has to find a way -- these are problems intrinsic to life.
... Or become a monk: start preaching brahmacharya, celibacy, and you will
forget all about old age; you will start making the young feel guilty. These are well-tried methods, for thousands of years. Only one thing is bad about being old and unmarried:
... Married men don't live longer than the single men, it just seems longer.
... One marriage out of every three ends up in divorce -- the other two fight it out to the bitter end.
In India, a marriage is arranged by the parents and the couple don't know each other until after the marriage. The arrangements in the West are considerably different, but the results are identical. Whether in the East or in the West, you come to know each other only after marriage, but it is too late by that time; nothing can be done about it.
... The one who sleeps does not commit sins. The one who commits sins sleeps better afterwards.
... To find out a girl's faults, talk to her girlfriends and say how wonderful she is!
... Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.
... Never marry a beautiful girl, because she might leave you. Of course, an ugly girl might leave you too -- but so what?
... All marriages are happy. It is the living together afterwards that is tough.*
Devageet, everybody here is sooner or later bound to become old. We have to understand the beauty of old age, and we have to understand the freedom of old age. We have to understand the wisdom of old age; we have to understand its tremendous detachment from all foolish things that go on in the lives of people who are still young.
Old age gives you a height. If this height can be joined with meditation, you will rather feel miserable -- why did you waste your youth? why have your parents destroyed your childhood? why was meditation not given to you as the first gift the day you were born?
But whenever you get it, it is still not too late. Even just a few moments before your death, if you can get the meaning of your being, your life has not been a
wastage.
Old age in the East has been immensely respected for the simple reason that in the past it was thought almost a shameless act -- when your children are getting married, when your children are giving birth to children... and you are still infatuated, you are still in the bondage of biology? You should rise; this is time to leave the ground for other fools to play football. At the most you can be a referee, but not a player.
I loved one cartoon in a Dutch magazine. It was strange, because it all consists of world presidents, prime ministers, great leaders, dictators, kings -- I am the only person in that group who is nobody. And I am the first -- unfortunately Ronald Reagan is the last. They have called it a football team, and I am the referee. I was happy, very happy. I would have sued that newspaper if I was part of the football team, but to be a referee is a totally different matter -- let the fools play!
But it is a great insight: I am nobody, I do not count in any way, I have no power...
Whoever made the cartoon must have great insight.
Devageet, unless you can accept everything that life brings you with gratefulness, you are missing the point. Childhood was beautiful; youth has its own flowers, old age has its own peaks of consciousness. But the trouble is that childhood comes on its own, youth comes on its own; for old age you have to be very creative.
Old age is your own creation: it can be a misery, it can be a celebration; it can be simply a despair, and it can also be a dance. It all depends how deeply ready you are to accept existence, whatsoever it brings. One day it will bring death too -- accept it with gratitude.
This gratitude I call religious. This deep acceptance of everything with no complaint, with no desire for it to be otherwise, is the only religion there is.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
YOU HAVE TOLD US THAT THE MIND BECOMES MORE AND MORE QUIET IF
WE MEDITATE REGULARLY. LAST YEAR, WHEN I WAS LIVING IN EUROPE
OUTSIDE OF A COMMUNE, THOUGHTS BECAME STRONGER AND
STRONGER DURING MY MEDITATIONS UNTIL I BEGAN TO DREAD SITTING.
NOW THAT I AM WITH YOU AGAIN, THIS PROBLEM HAS GONE AWAY. BUT I WONDERED: HOW CAN ONE BE A SANNYASIN FOR TEN YEARS,
MEDITATING EVERY DAY, AND HAVE A MIND WHICH BECOMES MORE
AND MORE NOISY?
Sagarpriya, the question you have asked has many implications. First, one has to understand that your mind is very ancient -- twelve years are nothing compared to the mind's history; it is the history of the whole universe from the very beginning.
It has been working so long, so efficiently that scientists say they have not yet been able to create a computer which can compete with human mind. And human mind is placed in a small space, in your skull; their computers are placed in big rooms. One scientist has calculated that it would need almost a one square mile space for a computer comparable to the human mind. Human mind is a miracle.
Sitting with me, you are sitting with a greater miracle. You are sitting with no- mind.
Naturally, silence becomes easier; meditation comes on its own, just like a cool breeze.
When you are left alone, your mind is all that you have. Unless your meditation goes to such depths that you have something more valuable than the mind, this
problem will continue to happen.
With me you can have a glimpse, just for a moment. And that glimpse creates the longing to have that moment stretched to eternity. It is so peaceful, so cool, so calm, who would not like it?
But as you go back into the world, there are just computers walking all around; you have to communicate with computers. One physiologist has defined man's body as nothing but a mechanism to facilitate the mind's functioning. You think you are carrying the mind.
The physiologist is saying just the opposite: it is the mind that is carrying you; your whole body is functioning just for the mind's sake.
So the moment you go into the world -- this is not part of the world; we have been trying to create small islands where mind as a computer is no longer required. But in the world you will need the mind. And the problem will continue, Sagarpriya, until you have something more than mind. Just having a glimpse of silence is not enough.
You need a centering, you need a realization, you need exactly enlightenment -- only then can you remain in the world, without your mind functioning unless you want to use it.
Mind is a tremendously valuable mechanism, one of the greatest miracles in biology, in the evolution of man. Mind is simply unbelievable, the way it works... because you don't know anything about it, although it is your mind. You don't know how it accumulates millions of memories.
The scientists have calculated that a single man's mind can contain all the libraries of the world. He can memorize everything that has been ever written, down the ages. That is the capacity; you may use it, you may not use it.
And you don't know about the libraries. Just the British Museum Library has enough books that if you go on putting one book by the side of the other, just as you put them on the book shelf in the library, it will take three rounds of the whole world. And that is only one library! Moscow has perhaps a bigger library, and all the big universities of the world have similar libraries. Just India has one hundred universities with tremendously big libraries.
And the very idea that a single human mind has the capacity to memorize all that is written in all the books that are in existence in the whole world... it simply baffles, it looks unbelievable.
You don't know what your mind is doing for you. Your mind is regulating everything in your body. Otherwise, how do you think that for seventy or eighty years, or even a hundred years -- and there are people who have even passed that; they have reached their one hundred and fiftieth birthday, and there are a few hundred people in the Soviet Union who have passed the age of one hundred and eighty.
Scientists say there is no reason for the body to die for at least three hundred years. It is just an old hypnosis, autohypnosis, which has made the idea prevalent that you have only seventy years to live. It goes so deep in your consciousness that by the seventieth year you start thinking you are sinking, you are gone.
And anyway by the time you are retired at the age of sixty there is nothing to do. Death seems to be a relief, not a danger. We have not been capable enough and human enough to provide a situation where our old people can have some dignity, some self-respect, some pride. We have not been able to find dimensions where they can contribute to the world. And they are experienced and certainly capable of contributing enough -- enough for their self-respect, enough for them to live and not to feel like a burden.
When George Bernard Shaw became seventy years old, he started taking trips to small villages around London. His friends were surprised, "What are you doing? For days you disappear. In this old age you should rest."
He said, "I am searching for the place to rest in this old age."
They said, "What do you mean? You have a beautiful house, you have everything that you need."
He said, "You don't understand. I am going around all these villages looking in their cemeteries, at the gravestones, in search of a place where many people have lived at least a hundred years."
And finally he found a village where on a gravestone was the inscription, "This man died at the untimely age of one hundred and twenty." He said, "This is the village worth living in, where people think that at the age of one hundred and
twenty it is an untimely death."
He lived in that village, and he lived beyond a hundred years.
Perhaps it has some significance... not just accidental. He was a man of tremendous wisdom; and if the villagers believe it then the atmosphere is bound to change his own conditioning.
In Pakistan there is a part of Kashmir which belonged to to India; Pakistan has occupied it for forty years. Perhaps that part, because of its secludedness, hidden behind the mountains, has not come in contact with people who die at the age of seventy. They are uneducated people; in fact they cannot count when they are seventy, so how to die at seventy? They don't have a calendar. They don't know when they were born; they don't know how old they are.
They are the most primitive people who have been found living behind the Himalayan peaks, in a valley -- in a beautiful valley, self-sufficient, and they have never gone out.
And there have been people found, according to the doctors, who are two hundred years old. And they are young; they are working in the fields, in the gardens, in the orchards, and when you ask them about their age they say, "We don't know. Nobody here knows; there is no school here."
And now Pakistan is opening schools and hospitals and you can be certain that soon people will start dying exactly at the age of seventy. Those people have just forgotten to die, because they don't remember when they were born, and they cannot count.
Scientists say that man's body has the capacity at least -- that is the minimum -- to live three hundred years. But why does man not live so long? Perhaps man does not know how to live; perhaps man does not know how to use his body, how to use his mind.
Sagarpriya, you have to understand two things very clearly: first, mind is a great miracle.
Existence has not been able to create anything higher than your mind. Its function is so complex that it baffles the greatest scientists. It manages your whole body, and it is such a complex system. Who manages that a certain part of
your blood should go to the brain?
Who manages that only a certain amount of oxygen should reach to the brain? Who manages what part of your food should become bones, should become blood, should become skin? Who manages that part of your skin should become nails and part of your skin should become eyes and part of your skin should become ears?
Certainly you are not managing it, and I don't see any other manager around. So first you have to be grateful to the mind. That is a first step to go beyond mind, not as an enemy but as a friend. Listening to me continually saying that you have to go beyond mind, you can fall into a misunderstanding. I have tremendous respect for mind. We are obliged so much by the mind, there is no way to return our gratitude.
So the first thing is: meditation is not against mind, it is beyond mind. And beyond is not equivalent to against.
That misunderstanding spreads the more people talk about meditation, particularly people who don't understand meditation -- those who have read about it, those who have heard about it, those who know the techniques... And techniques are simple; they are available in many scriptures, you can read them. And now there are books on how to do anything --
car mechanics, electric engineering, anything -- you ask, and the bookseller is ready to give you a book about how to do it.
My people in Europe have been thinking to make a book with a cassette. The book will give all the background of the meditation and the cassette will give all the instructions, so you need not go anywhere. Just sitting in your room with your tape recorder and you have a master! Gautam Buddha is no longer needed.…
A master will never become irrelevant for a simple reason: who will teach you to love the mind and yet go beyond it? to love your body, to respect your body? to have gratitude towards your mind, its tremendous, miraculous functioning? That will make a great friendship, a bridge between you and the mind.
With this friendship deepening, whenever you are meditating, the mind will not disturb because your meditation is not against it. It is in fact its own fulfillment,
it is its own ultimate flowering. Going beyond it is not an antagonistic attitude, but a friendly evolution.
So this should be the background of all meditators: not to be a fighter. If you fight you may be able to make the mind quiet for some time, but it is not your victory. The mind will come back, you will need it. You cannot live without it; you cannot exist in the world without it.
And if you can create a friendly relationship with the mind, a loving bridge, rather than being a hindrance to meditation it starts becoming a help. It protects your silence because that silence is also its own treasure, it is not just yours. It becomes a soil in which the roses of meditation will blossom, and the soil will be as happy as the roses. When the roses will be dancing in the sun, in the rain, in the wind, the soil will also rejoice.
My approach is totally different from the approach that has been taken up to now. For thousands of years, all the religions have been teaching something against body, against mind.
And just today I came to know that there are even idiots who are teaching against meditation. The parliament of Israel has passed a law that meditation in private or in public is a criminal act. You cannot believe it!
And these politicians don't know even the ABC of the mind, what to say about meditation. But why are they so much worried? One of their worries is me, because out of my sannyasins fifty percent are Jews. Sooner or later I am going to take over Israel, there is no problem about it -- before the Palestinians take it over, I am going to take over.
Why should the politicians be concerned? And if they are concerned they should consult people who know what meditation is. To make it a criminal act is an unbelievable thing; nowhere ever...
Religions have taught against the body. That was so ridiculous -- you have to live in the body, you have to nourish the body; you have to keep it healthy, it is your home. They have been talking against mind. Now this is the latest thing -- Israel has done a pioneer work! The parliament of Israel seems to be consisting of really first-class idiots.
I don't think they know even anything about meditation, but the fear.… Jews are
afraid, Mohammedans are afraid, Hindus are afraid, Jainas are afraid -- they are all afraid of meditation. Even though they talk about meditation they are afraid of it. They talk because without talking about meditation their religion seems to be incomplete, but they are basically against it because a man who becomes a meditator simply slips out of any organized religion. He is no more a Hindu and he is no more a Jew and he is no more a Mohammedan. He cannot go on believing in all kinds of superstitions and stupidities that every religion is full of.
Jews think that they are the chosen people of God. Now, no meditator can do that. To think that "Only we, the Jews, are the chosen people of God, and the whole humanity is in some way inferior to us"... But it was not only the Jews who have committed that sin.
They have suffered much for it; they are still suffering. They will continue to suffer, because the very idea is so stupid that it creates antagonism, particularly in a world where Nordic Germans think that they are the chosen people, where Hindus think that they are the chosen people, because their holy book is the most ancient and first God-written holy scripture. They cannot tolerate any ideas like Moses telling his people that "You are the chosen people of God; you have a basic right to be superior to everybody else." Who can tolerate it? Hindus think they are superior to everybody.
Jews and Hindus are the only two religions in the world which don't believe in conversion, because how to convert inferior people into a higher religion? And because they cannot convert, they are absolutely against Christianity, Mohammedanism, who are after converts continuously.
Now, because of the fear that the number of Mohammedans and Christians goes on growing and Jews and Hindus go on shrinking, there are small trends among Jews... and there is a small group of Hindus called the Arya Samaj, who have introduced conversion.
But it remains a very half-hearted thing. Deep down they know what they are doing: they are bringing inferior people into their fold. It is just out of sheer necessity; otherwise those inferior people will outnumber -- they have already -- the superior people.
Now Christians have the greatest numbers in the world; second are the Mohammedans --
and these two are the converting religions.
The fear of meditation has roots. In the law passed by the Israeli parliament it has become exposed, but it is there in every religious mind: if people start meditating, if people start loving their bodies, loving their minds, and out of love peacefully transcending towards a state of no-mind, they will not belong to any stupid ideology.
And all ideologies are so full of stupid things that it is almost impossible to count how many superstitions, and what a variety of superstitions. Some day when humanity has become one, we will need great museums to collect all the superstitions to remember our forefathers by. Just the way Darwin thought of monkeys as his forefathers, the coming generations of man will remember you and your forefathers in the same category.
I would like you to be reminded of a few superstitions... just samples, because the whole lot is too much.
Jainas think that unless your earlobes touch your shoulders you cannot become enlightened. Now I cannot see what the relationship can be between the earlobes, which are almost dead parts of your body... have you ever noticed? Can you do anything with your earlobes? Can you wave them? They are just hanging there, not doing anything. You cannot do anything with them because there is no nervous system; they are just pieces of flesh without nerves, pure flesh. And without nerves you cannot turn them up or down, here and there.
I have come across only one person -- and I have been around the world -- and strangely enough he was my classmate in first grade when I entered school. Now he is a doctor in the same town. He is the only man... some freak! He can make his earlobes move this way, that way, back, forward. He was a miracle; for some accidental reason his earlobes have grown nerves inside. Just as a few people are born with six fingers, a few people are born with three eyes, a few people are born with two heads -- just freaks -- he has really big earlobes.
I have been watching to see when he becomes enlightened. He is just a poor doctor -- he knows nothing about meditation, nothing about enlightenment. And because he is an ayurvedic doctor, patients don't come to him. Only his children go on growing, and he goes on growing poorer and poorer. Each time I have seen him I have seen him reduced, thinner, more worried. I said, "What is the
matter? You are supposed to be enlightened!"
But stupid ideas... and it is not one religion but every religion. And they cannot tolerate each other.
Mohammed went to heaven sitting on his horse; the horse also went -- without wings.
Neither Mohammed had wings nor the horse, but they flew to heaven. This was happening for the first time. Jesus left his donkey here, Francis left his donkey here; only Mohammed was able to take his horse. Mohammedans think it was because he was the real prophet.…
Now everybody is claiming -- Mohammedans claim that the KORAN, their holy book, is the only authentic, God-written book; all other books are man-written.
And the KORAN
is not even worth being considered as literature; it is just third-class. Because Mohammed was uneducated, he did not write it; whatever he was saying has been collected by people, but every sentence shows his uneducatedness, his unculturedness.
But Mohammed claims to be the last prophet of God: after him there will be no prophet because God has sent his final message through him, and that is the KORAN. All old messages are canceled -- THE BIBLE, the VEDAS, are all canceled, because when the new message has arrived it cancels all the old. It is the most developed, the most evolved message; it is so perfect that there is no need of anybody else to bring a message to the world.
Now, all these religions are claiming such things. Mohammedans say that when Mohammed used to move in Arabia -- which is a desert and really becomes burning hot when the sun comes to the middle of the sky -- God used to send a beautiful white cloud which used to move just over Mohammed's head, keeping him under shadow... a divine umbrella!
If meditation becomes more prevalent, then you will get free from all these prejudices; hence no religion wants meditation, although they may talk about it.
To me, neither God is important nor heaven nor hell nor angels -- all those are just hypothetical. To me, meditation is the very soul of religion. But it can be
attained only if you move rightly. Just a single step in a wrong direction... And you are always moving on a razor's edge!
Begin with love of the body, which is your outermost part. Start loving your mind -- and if you love your mind you will decorate it, just the way you decorate your body. You keep it clean, you keep it fresh; you don't want your body to smell horrible to people, you want your body to be loved and respected by others. Your presence should not be simply tolerated but welcomed.
You have to decorate your mind with poetry, with music, with art, with great literature.
Your trouble is, your mind is filled only with trivia. Such third-rate things go on through your mind that you cannot love it. You think of nothing which is great. Make it more in tune with the greatest poets; make it in tune with people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Turgenev, Rabindranath, Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy; make it filled with the greatest heights that mind has reached.
Then you will not be unfriendly to the mind. Then you will rejoice in the mind; even if mind is there in your silence, it will have a poetry and a music of its own, and to transcend such a refined mind is very easy. It is a friendly step towards higher peaks: poetry turning into mysticism, great literature turning into great insights into existence, music turning into silence.
And as these things start turning into higher peaks, beyond mind, you will be discovering new worlds, new universes which we don't even have a name for. We can say blissfulness, ecstasy, enlightenment, but no word really describes it. It is simply outside the power of language to reduce it into explanations, into theories, into philosophies. It is simply beyond... but mind rejoices in its transcendence.
That's what my unique contribution is to you. With absolute humbleness I want to tell you that I am far ahead of even Gautam Buddha, for the simple reason that he is still fighting with the mind. I have loved my mind, and through love I have transcended it.
It is a totally new beginning. Naturally I have to be condemned; my people will be condemned. Many will come to me but will not be able to walk along with me even for a few steps, because soon they will find that their prejudices are
preventing them from going with me.
Their prejudices are ancient, and naturally -- I can understand -- they cannot think that anybody can go beyond Gautam Buddha, just as the contemporaries of Gautam Buddha could not believe that he has gone beyond the VEDAS and beyond the seers of the UPANISHADS, just as contemporaries of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu could not believe that they have gone far beyond Confucius.
And if just out of humbleness I don't say the truth, I will be committing a crime against truth. I don't care about such humbleness; I want exactly what is the case to be explained to you.
My approach towards meditation is absolutely new, absolutely fresh, because it depends on love -- not on fight, not on war. Mahavira I have left twenty-five centuries behind. His name was not Mahavira -- mahavira means `the great warrior'. His name was Vardhamana, but people changed his name because he was a great warrior. A warrior against whom? -- against his body, against his mind. And I don't think that anybody who is against his body and against his mind is capable of reaching the beyond.
Only love is the path.
Sagarpriya, make your mind as beautiful as possible. Decorate it with flowers. I am really very sad when I see that people don't know THE BOOK OF MIRDAD, that they have never looked into the absurd stories of Chuang Tzu, that they have never bothered to understand the absolutely irrational stories of Zen.
I cannot conceive of how you can live beautifully if you don't know Dostoevsky's books... BROTHERS KARAMAZOV to me is more important than any BIBLE. It has such great insights, that THE BIBLE should not be counted at all, even for comparison.
But THE BIBLE will be read -- and who is going to bother about BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV, in which Dostoevsky has poured his whole soul? or ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy, or FATHERS AND SONS by Turgenev, or OFFERING
OF SONGS by Rabindranath?And these are only a few names; there are
thousands who have reached the finest flowering of mind.
First let your mind be decorated. Only beyond this perfumed garden of the mind will you be able to go silently, without any fight; mind will be a help, not a hindrance. I have not found it to be a hindrance; hence I can say with absolute authority: it is not a hindrance.
You just don't know how to use it.
It is beautiful, Sagarpriya, that when you come here you feel meditative. At least these few gaps, these few days, will slowly start becoming stronger, deeper. One day you will be gone and these moments will be with you even in the marketplace, and that will be a day of great rejoicing.
But it takes time. I have to say to people that it can happen instantly. Not that it is untrue -
- it can happen instantly, but where to find the genius who can understand it instantly?
When I say it can happen instantly, people simply think, "This is impossible for us." If I say to them it can happen in a few lives' time, they feel, "That seems to be perfect,"
because that gives them the time to do all their stupid things meanwhile. It is a question of a few lives, so what is the hurry? First take care of your boyfriend, your girlfriend; first go to see all kinds of ruins in Rome, in Greece, in India; first do every foolish thing that is expected of you by the whole crowd. And as far as enlightenment is concerned it is not going to happen now, it will take many lives, so what is the hurry? You can go on postponing.
That's why people love all these religions which talk about many lives -- not because they understand the significance of it, but because they want to use that as an excuse.
It can happen this very moment, but it will not happen. The reason is not in its nature; the reason is you. It will not happen because you don't want it to happen right now.
Just think for a moment: if I were going to make you enlightened this very
moment, you would start thinking, "But I have not asked my husband. What about my children? I have to get my daughter married. And I have just met my girlfriend, my god! and this is going to happen just now? he cannot wait? -- just let me finish my honeymoon." Thousands of thoughts will arise in your mind: "My god, I have started a new business, invested everything in it. If he had told me before, I would not have got involved in all this mess."
Everybody, without exception.…
I have told you the story of a great Ceylonese master who had millions of disciples, and who had been telling them for nearabout fifty years only one thing: Meditate. The day of his death came and he announced, "After seven days I am going to leave my body, so let all my disciples gather so that I can see them one time more, because I will not be coming back again."
So all the disciples gathered; it was a great gathering. And before dying, the old man said,
"I have always told you to meditate, but you have not listened. I give you another chance.
This time you have not to do anything. I am going to die, I can take you with me. Is anybody ready to come with me?"
Everybody looked at each other: "You have been long enough with him, you can go."
People looked at each other, whispered, "What are you doing? All your children are married, everything is finished, nobody needs you.…" But nobody was standing up.
He said, "Just stand up, and I will take you with me."
There was great silence and people were looking downwards -- how to face this old man?
It is so embarrassing. But they were all unmoving, because he may misunderstand even the movement -- he may see that somebody is moving and say, "Get up!"
Finally one man raised his hand. He said, "First please understand this: I am not standing, I am just raising my hand to ask you a question."
The old man said, "Fifty years I have been answering your questions and still you are asking questions? And this time I am giving you the opportunity to come with me."
He said, "I'm sorry. Some day I will come. Just tell me the secret of how to come and find you."
He said, "What have I been telling you for fifty years?" The man said, "Just one time more..."
It is possible in this very moment to drop all your prejudices, cleanse your mind. It simply needs absolute decisiveness, ultimate trust, and a love that knows no bounds.
But if it cannot happen this moment, I don't want anybody to become sad and fall into a state of despair. It can happen tomorrow. You can relax, there is no hurry. But please understand the process clearly: Love your body -- against all the religions. Love your mind, refine your mind -- against all the religions.
And I say to you that fight is not the way; love is the way. Love your body, love your mind, and that very love will create the energy, the atmosphere to transcend the mind, to create what I call meditation or the state of no-mind. It will come. It has to come. Nobody has to go from this temple empty-handed.
But you will have to understand one thing: that I don't represent any old tradition, I don't represent any old religion; I don't represent any Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Mohammed or Jesus or Moses -- I simply represent myself.
And if you can love and trust a stranger who does not belong to any orthodox organization, then with me, meditation will be happening... and soon, without me also it will be happening. It will take a little time. It will take a little time because it needs to grow roots.
So, Sagarpriya, whenever you can find time, come. And don't be concerned with what happens outside; that is just rubbish. What happens here, count only that as your real life.
The moments that you are with me will be with you even after your death, and the moments you are wasting in the world are simply gone down the drain.
But there is no need to be worried. If even a few moments of meditation start becoming seeds in you, start growing roots in you, the day is not very far away when you will have the first flowers of your consciousness growing within you.
And I understand you, Sagarpriya; I understand you and your trust and your love. Very few people have that much love and that much trust.
But drop all antagonism towards the mind. There is some streak of fighting with the mind, maybe unconscious -- mind is just a poor and beautiful thing.…
Modern police departments are beginning to use computers to help fight crime. One night a man telephoned the police and said, "Police, come quick! There is a burglar downstairs and he is putting all our valuables in a sack."
The voice on the other end said, "Keep calm. Keep calm, sir, hang up the phone, stay where you are and a police car will be right over... right over... right over "
A computer can go wrong any moment. And mind is nothing but a computer, but created with such perfection by nature. But you have not valued it at all.
The enormous computer took up all of the huge room, completely dwarfing the two tiny mathematicians standing before it. A sliver of paper had emerged from the computer and one mathematician, after studying it gravely, turned to the other and said, "Do you realize that it would take four hundred ordinary mathematicians two hundred and fifty years to make a mistake this big?"
There are many people in the world who are becoming interested in meditation, but ninety-nine percent are in the wrong hands, and if you say this it hurts them.
Just today I have received a letter. The letter says, "The other night you spoke of Goenka's Vipassana. You blamed Goenka for being a businessman and professionalist of Vipassana. Osho, I have experienced Vipassana here at the Poona ashram, and also Goenka's Dhammpeeth at Igatpuri. I think your comment is wrong."
And this is from a man, Anand Piyoosh, who has just become a sannyasin two days ago.
In another letter before this, he says, "Due to uncertainty and indecisiveness of mind I have taken sannyas after twelve years. Due to this inability of mine I have suffered much.
How can I get freed from it permanently? -- Anand Piyoosh."
It took him twelve years to decide to take sannyas, and it took him only twelve hours to find that I am wrong in what I have said about Goenka -- no indecisiveness about this.
And if Goenka was right, then what is the need of coming here? If Goenka can teach you meditation, then why are you wasting your time here, and my time and my people's time?
And if you have such an understanding that you can simply call me wrong, then this is not the place for you.
What do you understand about meditation?
The difference between Goenka's meditation and the meditation that is happening here is immense, and for you it will take at least twelve lives to understand the difference!
Goenka is only a technician. I am not a technician. I have never followed anybody, I have simply searched on my own. It was difficult, it was dangerous, but I went on searching my path alone, finding my own ways to reach to my being.
Goenka is just a poor follower of a twenty-five hundred year old tradition of Gautam Buddha. In twenty-five hundred years -- carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies! Do you want to compare me with these carbon copies?
And if Goenka had understood meditation, he would have come here. His meditation would have shown him that something far higher than Gautam Buddha is in existence.
Igatpuri is not far away from here... but the coward has no guts.
And if you are so clear about my statement being wrong, then you don't
understand anything of what is happening here.
Here, all the meditations are just preparing the ground, just taking out the weeds, the grass roots, the wild growth, the stones -- just cleaning the garden for me to sow the seeds. The people who are teaching meditation here, different kinds of meditation, are just preparing the ground. I am the gardener.
Goenka can prepare the ground, but from where is he going to find the rosebushes? He does not have the experience: he is not enlightened or awakened even in the ancient sense of Gautam Buddha. Just go to him and ask -- has he the courage to say that he has the same consciousness as Gautam Buddha? And I say to you that I have left Gautam Buddha twenty-five centuries back.
My therapists, my people who are preparing meditations for you, are just doing the primary groundwork. They are just preparing the ground. The ultimate and final touch I have to give.
I have my own ways to sow the seeds in you: through my words, through my silences, through my eyes, through my gestures -- just through my silence, just through my presence; it has a living field of energy.
And unless you have a living awakened being amongst you, all your therapies and all your meditations are just futile exercises; they won't help much.
For Piyoosh I would like to say, Go back to Goenka. This is not the place for you. And you have to leave right now. I am tired of idiots of all kinds. For thirty years I have suffered from idiots and I have tolerated them, but now I have decided no idiot will be allowed here.
You took twelve years to decide to take sannyas; I don't need even twelve seconds to take it away. You are no more a sannyasin. Return your sannyas papers, and you perfectly know the door. Just get out this very night, and never come here again. Go to hell -- with anybody, Goenka, or find some other idiot. There are many in India.
I exist only for those who can understand me and who can be totally with me. A man who knows nothing about me, who just within twelve hours of his sannyas starts finding that what I am saying is wrong, certainly cannot be allowed to be here. A single rotten fish can destroy the whole lake. So you will be very compassionate to all these people by leaving this place forever.
And I am always surprised... if you have found Goenka to be right, then why are you here? When somebody finds something that is helping his growth, he remains there. And if you have found Goenka to be right and still you have not remained with him, how are you going to remain with me, whom you find wrong just within twelve hours?
No, don't waste time. I am not interested in collecting crowds and retarded people. Just go to Goenka and tell him everything that I have said. And if he has guts, bring him here, so I can show you that he knows nothing about meditation as far as experience is concerned, that he knows nothing at all of what enlightenment is. All that he knows is a poor technique. But a technician is a totally different thing.
A technician can work with electricity, but that does not mean that he is Edison, that he has discovered electricity. Don't ask the poor technician about electricity
-- don't ask any question about its intrinsic character; don't ask of what it consists
-- he is not an Edison.
But he can do perfectly well: you don't need Edison when one of your bulbs goes out; just any idiot can do that.
The same is the situation about meditation. There are technicians and there are realized people. Unless you find a realized being, all your efforts are in vain.
Three French youngsters, respectively six, seven and eight years old, were skipping along the street.
The six year old who was in front, looked in through an open window he was passing, stopped, and waved excitedly to the others: "Come, come quickly," he said. "A man and a woman are fighting in there."
The seven year old, coming up, looked in and said, "No, you fool, they are making love."
The eight year old came up, looked in and said, "Yes, and what a terrible technique."
... Feel this peace, absorb that silence. And as you absorb it, it becomes deeper... it starts touching your heart.
There is no movement, but you will feel a dance. There is no word, but you will feel a song.
It is as if there is nobody, but a tremendous oneness... all personalities gone and only one consciousness, throbbing in synchronicity with each other.
Just to end up this beautiful moment.… I always like to leave you laughing, singing, dancing. This is just an indication that the day when I ultimately leave you, I would like you to sing, dance and celebrate.
In fact, no man in the whole of history would have received such a celebration when he dies as I am going to receive. A few have received celebration only from enemies, because when one dies, enemies celebrate. The friends mourn.
I am the only person... in my death my friends will celebrate, my enemies will celebrate.
In my death they will come together in celebration. There has never been such a man before.
A black lady in New York received a phone call from the school that her little boy Leroy attended. The head teacher wanted to see her as soon as possible about her son's behavior.
"Your boy, Leroy," began the teacher, "is a disruptive influence." "Just like his father," said the black lady.
"He steals from other children," continued the teacher. "Just like his father," said the mother.
"He is always getting into fights," continued the teacher. "Just like his father," replied the mother.
"He chases the little girls and makes them cry," said the teacher.
"Just like his father," said the black lady, "and, Lordy, am I glad I never married the man!"
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #14
Chapter title: A very delicate and complex affair
13 September 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code:
8709130
ShortTitle:
PILGR14
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
89
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
IS TAKING THE ROLE OF A THERAPIST DANGEROUS TO MY OWN
SPIRITUAL GROWTH?
IS IT POSSIBLE TO HELP PEOPLE AND STILL LET MY OWN EGO DISSOLVE
AT THE SAME TIME? I FEEL THAT A SUBTLE FIGHT GOES ON INSIDE ME
BETWEEN ONE PART THAT IS CLEAR AND ANOTHER PART THAT WANTS
NOTHING TO DO WITH CLARITY.
UNDER YOUR GUIDANCE I HAVE LEARNED NOT TO DOMINATE OTHERS
WHEN I USE MY CAPACITY TO SEE, BUT AM I STILL DOMINATING MYSELF?
Sagarpriya, the role of a therapist is a very delicate and complex affair.
First, the therapist himself suffers from the same problems that he is trying to help others with. The therapist is only a technician. He can manage to pretend and to deceive himself that he is a master -- that is the greatest danger in being a therapist. But just a little understanding, and things won't be the same.
First, don't think in terms of helping others. That gives you the idea of being a savior, of being a master -- and from the back door the ego enters again. You become important, you are the center of the group, everybody is looking up to you.
Drop the idea of help. Instead of `help' use the word `sharing'. You share your insight, whatsoever you have. The participant is not someone who is inferior to you. The therapist and the therapee are both in the same boat; the therapist is just a little more knowledgeable. Be conscious of the fact that your knowledge is borrowed. Never for a moment forget that whatever you know is still not your experience, and this will help the people who are participating in your group.
Man is a very subtle mechanism. It works on both sides: the therapist starts becoming the master, and rather than helping he is destroying something in the
participant, because the participant will also learn only the technique. There will not be a loving, sharing friendliness, an atmosphere of trust, but "You know more, I know less... By participating in a few therapy groups I will also know as much as you know."
The participants slowly, slowly start becoming therapists themselves, because there is no degree required -- at least in many countries. In a few countries they have started to outlaw all kinds of unaccepted therapies; only a man who has a university qualification in therapeutics, in psychoanalysis, in psychotherapy will be able to help people in therapy groups.
This is going to happen in almost every country of the world, because therapy has become a business, and people who are unqualified are dominating it. They know the technique, because technique they can learn; by participating in a few groups they know all the techniques, then they can make a concoction of their own. But there is no way of controlling.…
But remember: the moment you play the role of a helper, the helped is never going to forgive you. You have hurt his pride, you have hurt his ego. That was not your intention...
your intention was just to inflate your own ego, but this can happen only if you hurt other people's ego. You cannot inflate your ego without hurting others. Your bigger ego will need more space, and the others have to shrink their space and their personality to exist with you.
From the very beginning an authentic loving person... and I make it an absolutely necessary point that there is nothing more therapeutic than love. Technique can help, but the real miracle happens through love. Love the people who participate in therapy and be one amongst them, with no pretensions of being higher or holier.
Make it clear from the very beginning: "These are the techniques I have learned, and a little bit is my experience. I will give you the techniques, and I will share my experience.
But you are not my disciples; you are just friends in need. I have some understanding, not much, but I can share it with you. Perhaps many of you have their own understanding coming from different areas, different directions. They can also share their experience and make the group richer."
In other words, what I am saying is a totally new concept of therapy. The therapist is only a coordinator. He just tries to make the group more silent, serene; he keeps an eye that nothing goes wrong... more of a guardian than a master.
And you have also to make it clear: "I am also learning while I am trying to share my experience. When I am listening to you, it is not only your problems; they are my problems too. And when I am saying something, I am not only saying it, I am listening also."
Emphatically make it clear that you are nobody special. This has to be done in the beginning of the group, and this has to be carried on as the group goes deeper, exploring.
You just remain an elder, who has gone a few steps ahead; otherwise you will not be able to help people. They will learn the technique and they will become therapists on their own. And there are enough fools -- five billion fools -- on the earth; they will find their own followers.
It is a human weakness that when people start looking up to you, you start thinking,
"There must be something great in me if people are looking up to me." They are in trouble, they are suffering from human frailties. But you are also human, and to err is absolutely human. Without any condemnation, with great love, help them to open themselves -- and this is possible only if you open yourself.
I have come to know a strange fact: strangers tell each other things that they can never say to people they know. In a railway train you meet somebody; you don't know his name, you don't know where he is going, from where he is coming, and people start sharing. I have been traveling for twenty years non-stop in the whole country, watching a strange phenomenon: that people give their secrets to strangers, because the stranger is not going to exploit it. Just the next station comes, and the stranger is gone; perhaps you may never see him again. And he is not concerned to destroy your reputation or anything.
On the contrary, sharing your secrets, your weaknesses, your vulnerabilities makes others more confident and more loving and more trusting in you. Your trust provokes their trust in you, and when they see you are so innocent and so open and available, they start opening up: it is a chain reaction.
But if you become a master... a few idiot therapists from this commune have become masters. They know nothing about their own being, they know nothing about any mystery of existence; all that they know is a certain mind game. That mind game can be of help, if ultimately you are under the guidance of a man who has arrived. A little clarity, a little less confusion a therapy group certainly can create.
But a therapy group is not the end. It is only the beginning.
It is a preparation for meditation, just as meditation is a preparation for enlightenment.
If you understand things in their simple arithmetic, you will not find it difficult -- and you will enjoy the group more, because the group will be able to go deeper with you. You will not be only a teacher in the group; you will be also a learner.
Kahlil Gibran's prophet Al-Mustafa has a beautiful statement. When somebody asks,
"Tell us something about learning..." he says, "Because you have asked I will speak. But remember -- I am speaking and I am also listening with you."
I am here on the podium and I am also sitting amongst you. I am not in any way special.
That brings people close. Any bragging of speciality creates distance, any ego fulfillment destroys the atmosphere of love. And I repeat again: There is no therapy which is greater than love.
Love the people who have become participants in your group. Love them as they are, not as they should be. They have suffered their whole life from all kinds of religious, political, social, theological, philosophical leaders who would love them if they follow, who would love them if they become just images according to their idea. They will love you only when they have killed you completely, demolished you and put you together according to their idea.
All the religions have done that to humanity.
Nobody is left undamaged.
And these people have been thinking that they are helping, consciously. They were giving you ideals, ideologies, principles, commandments with the certain fixed attitude that they want to help you; otherwise you will go astray. They cannot trust your freedom and they cannot respect your dignity; they have reduced you so badly -- and nobody even objects.
When Jesus told people, "You are the sheep and I am the shepherd..." certainly those people must have been sheep, because not a single one stood up and said to Jesus, "This is too much! You are putting yourself on such a high pedestal, and you are calling us sheep; you are degrading us even from human beings."
And Jesus said, "I am the savior, I will save the whole humanity. The only condition is that they should believe in me." But that condition destroys all that is beautiful in you, all that is your right to grow into a beautiful unique being.
I have had suspicions always that Jesus was not saying any revolutionary things, neither was he in revolt against Judaism. But the problem has haunted me: Then why was he crucified? His whole emphasis without exception was, "I am a Jewish prophet, son of a Jewish God" -- a prophet, a messiah for which the Jews have been waiting. Their scriptures were telling them: Soon the messiah will come, the last messiah who will save you all. And on your part only a very small thing has to be done: just believe in him.
My suspicions why Jesus was crucified are not just suspicions; they have enough evidence and proof and argument behind them. Socrates was certainly poisoned for his revolutionary thoughts, for his lifestyle which the Greeks could not allow him. Certainly his influence over the Greek youth was immense, and the older generation was absolutely afraid: soon they will be gone and the whole country will be under the influence of a man who is against tradition, who is against God, who is against heaven and hell and all other nonsense, who insists only on one thing: truth. And that truth is within you, not in the scriptures, not in any savior, not in any messenger.
Socrates was certainly poisoned by the society because he was a tremendous revolutionary -- a man in revolt. Of course, whatever he was saying was for the benefit of the whole of humanity, but it went against the past. Anything that is going to enhance your future, make it richer, more beautiful, more humane, is
bound to be against the past.
The past is barbarous, ugly, condemnable. But Jesus was not doing any such thing. Why was he crucified? He was fully in agreement with the old past, he accepted all that Judaism proposed as fundamentals.
My understanding is: Jesus was crucified because people finally became fed up hearing that they are just sheep and he is the shepherd. He hurt so many people's egos, he destroyed so many people's self-respect, a certain dignity of being human beings. That was the reason of Jesus' crucifixion; otherwise he was utterly innocent. He had not committed any visible crime.
But this crime is far more murderous, although it is invisible, it does not appear on the surface, you cannot catch hold of it. But you can understand: you cannot forgive anybody who pretends to be higher than you, holier than you. He is the only begotten son of God and you are all orphans? -- bastards? What are you? If God is the father of all, then who is this man who pretends to be the only begotten son? The emphasis is on only; he takes away the whole humanity's right to nourish his own ego.
Otherwise whatever he was saying and doing would have been ignored. There was nothing special in it. He was simply repeating the old prophets of the Jews; he was quoting old prophets of the Jews -- and not even correctly, because he was not educated and he could not read. He had never been under a rabbi -- and the Jews had a long tradition of thousands of years of learning. They had a great university in Jerusalem, where people devoted their whole lives to studying. They were very rich as far as knowledgeability is concerned.
Jesus was not a man of knowledge, and certainly he was not a man of experience either, because a man of experience will not talk such nonsense as, "I am the only begotten son of God." God is simply a hypothesis, and I have never heard that hypotheses produce children. Only Indians do that, not hypotheses; hypotheses are absolutely barren.
The idea that somebody else has to save you, hurts you; he does not allow you even the freedom to save yourself. Jesus has to be understood very clearly: he is one of the men who is against all freedom for man. He talks sweetly, just like any salesman, but the intention is to take away your basic fundamental birthright of growing as an individual, unique -- not a carbon copy of somebody else, but
just yourself.
He did not accept people as they are and insisted that they should be according to his teachings. He did not allow them even to doubt or argue; you cannot argue with the son of God -- what he says is truth. But it accumulated just in three years.… He was not a teacher in the world for more than three years. People could not tolerate him; it was becoming too insulting, too humiliating.
The reason for Jesus' crucifixion is not -- as Christians go on telling to the world
-- that he was a great revolutionary. The reason is that he was one of the anti- humanitarians, and people crucified him as a revenge. It was becoming too heavy on their heads. Just an uneducated carpenter's son who has been cutting wood and dragging logs to his father's shop, suddenly becomes the savior... and savior of each and everyone with his simple cheap condition -- that you believe in him.
He does not give you even the freedom to think, the freedom to meditate, the freedom to search, the freedom to seek... no freedom at all. He has created the greatest slavery in the world -- Christianity. Now half of the world is Christian, and the responsibility for all these slaves -- Catholics or Protestants, it does not matter... he is responsible. But his slavery is very subtle and very psychological.
Now the reality is that he could not save himself, and he pretended to save the whole humanity. And when asked before his death, "How long will it take for you to come back and save humanity?" he said, "Don't be worried, I am coming soon." Two thousand years have passed. I don't think... I can also stretch `soon', but not that much! Two thousand years is just such an exaggeration.
And still there is no sign.… We don't see where there is a Virgin Mary; at least before he comes, a Virgin Mary should appear. The carpenter Joseph should appear; he should get married to Virgin Mary, and before he can consummate his marriage, the Holy Ghost should appear: it is a simple case of the rape of a virgin girl. Then with all these difficulties will come Jesus Christ -- and how can he save you?
I am reminded of one statement of a great doctor who is my friend. I don't know whether he is still alive or not, I have not heard anything about him for these last six years. He was the most prominent doctor in the city where I lived before I moved to Bombay and then to Poona.
He said to me, "My whole life's experience is that the function of the physician is not the cure of the patient. The patient cures himself; the physician simply gives a loving atmosphere, promising. The physician simply gives the confidence and revives the longing to live longer. All his medicines are of secondary help." But if the person has lost the desire to live, his whole life's experience was that no medicine, nothing, helps.
The same is the situation for the therapist. The therapist is not the person who is going to cure people's psychological troubles. He can only create a loving atmosphere, in which they can open up their repressed, unconscious imaginations, repressions, hallucinations, desires, without any fear that they will be laughed at, with absolute certainty that all will feel compassion and love for them. The whole group should function as a therapeutic situation.
The therapist is only a coordinator. He brings psychologically sick or disturbed people together, and just watches that nothing goes wrong. And if he can support them with some idea, some insight, some observation, he should always make it clear that "This is only my knowledge, not my experience" -- unless you have the experience.
If you are sincere and truthful and honest and authentic, you will never fall into the trap of becoming a master, a savior -- which is very simple to fall in. The moment you become a master and a savior... and you are not -- you are not even helping those people, you are simply exploiting those people, their weaknesses, their troubles.
The whole psychoanalysis movement around the world is the most exploitative experiment that is going on. Nobody is helped; everybody is exploited tremendously.
And nobody is helped because the psychoanalyst, psychotherapist Psychology
has bifurcated in many branches, but they all do the same work: they reduce you into a patient and they are the physicians.
And the trouble is that they themselves are suffering from the same diseases. Each psychoanalyst goes to another psychoanalyst almost twice a year to be helped. It is a great conspiracy. Listening to all kinds of insanities, unless you are beyond mind and its problems, you are going to be insane yourself. You are going to start suffering from the same problems your patients are suffering from.
Rather than making them cured, they are making you sick. But the responsibility is yours.
Bring love, openness, sincerity.… Before they start opening the doors of their heart -- they are keeping them tightly closed so that nobody knows their problems -- the first function of the psychotherapist is to open his heart and let them know that he is also as human as they are. He suffers from the same weaknesses, the same lust, the same desire for power, the same desire for money. He suffers from anguish and anxiety, suffers from the fear of death.
Open your heart totally.
That will help others to trust you -- that you are not a pretender. The days of saviors and prophets and messengers and tirthankaras and avataras are completely gone. None of them will be acceptable today. And this time, if any of them reappears, people are not even going to stone him to death. People are just going to make fun of him. People are simply going to tell him, "You are stupid. The very idea that you can save the whole humanity is mad. First save yourself, and we will see your light and we will see your grandeur and we will see your splendor."
And trust comes on its own accord. It is not to be asked.
It comes just like a fresh breeze from the mountains, a tidal wave from the oceans. You have to do nothing for it. You have just to be available at the right time, in the right place.
Nobody can save you except yourself.
I say unto you: be a savior unto yourself.
But help is possible, with a condition: that it comes with love, that it comes with the gratitude that "you trusted me and opened your heart."
The function of a therapist, Sagarpriya is certainly very complex -- and idiots are doing it! The situation is almost as if butchers are doing surgery; they know how to cut, but that does not mean they can become brain surgeons. They can kill buffaloes and cows and all kinds of animals, but their function is in the service
of death. The therapist is in the service of life. He has to create life-affirmative values by living them himself, by going to the silences of his heart.
The deeper you are within yourself, the deeper you can reach into the heart of the other. It is exactly the same... because your heart or the other's heart are not very different things.
If you understand your being, you understand everybody's being. And then you understand you have also been foolish, you have also been ignorant, you have also fallen many times, you have also committed crimes against yourself and against others, and if other people are still doing it there is no need of condemnation. They have to be made aware and left to themselves; you are not to mold them in a certain framework.
Then it is a joy to be a therapist, because you come to know the interiority of human beings -- which is one of the most secret hiding places of life. And by knowing others you know yourself more. It is a vicious circle; there is no other word -- otherwise I will not use the word `vicious'.
Allow me to coin a word: it is a virtuous circle. You open to your patients, participants, and they open themselves to you. That helps you to open more, and that helps them to open more. Soon there is no therapist and there is no patient, but simply a loving group helping each other.
Unless the therapist is lost in the group, he is not a successful therapist. That's my criterion.
Sagarpriya, you are saying, "Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?" They are not two things. Domination is domination, whether you dominate others or you dominate yourself. If you are dominating yourself, then in some subtle way you will dominate others too. How can it be otherwise?
The first domination that you have to drop is not over others... because it is not certain that they will accept your domination. The first domination you have to drop is over yourself. Why become yourself a prisoner, with great effort create a prison around yourself, and then carry it wherever you go?
First learn the utter joy of freedom, of a bird on the wing in the vast sky. Your very freedom will become a transforming force for others.
Domination is so ugly.
Leave it to the politicians, who don't have any sense of shame at all. They live in the gutters and they think they are living in palaces. Their whole life is a life in the gutters --
they will live there and they will die there. They are prime ministers, they are presidents, they are kings, they are queens.…
One of the most significant Egyptian poets was asked once, "How many kings are there in the world?" At that time... he said, "There are only five kings. One is in England, and four are in playing cards." Now it can be changed: there are five queens, one in England and four in playing cards But they don't have anything
more. They are just trying to achieve more and more power simply to fill their inside which they feel is empty.
Looking from the outside, the inside is empty. Looking from the inside, the whole world is empty.
Only your inside is overflowing, but the things that are overflowing are invisible: the fragrance of your being, the love, the blissfulness, the ecstasy, the silence, the compassion -- nothing can be seen with eyes. That's why if you look from the outside it seems everything is empty. And then a great urge arises... how to fill it? -- with money, with power, with prestige, by becoming a president or prime minister... do something and fill it! One cannot live with an emptiness inside, a hollowness inside.
But these people have not gone inside; they have looked from outside. And this is the problem: from the outside you can only see objects, and love is not an object, bliss is not an object, enlightenment is not an object, understanding is not an object, wisdom is not an object. All that is great in human existence and life is subjective, not objective. But from the outside you can see only objects.
That gives a tremendous urgency to fill your hollow inside with any rubbish. There are people who are filling it with borrowed knowledge; there are people who are filling it with self-imposed torture -- they become saints. There are people who are beggars to become the prime minister, to become the president. Everywhere the hollow people are in tremendous need to dominate others. That gives them the feeling that they are not hollow.
A sannyasin begins by enquiring into his subjectivity, from within, and he becomes aware of tremendous treasures, inexhaustible treasures. Only then do you stop dominating yourself, and you stop dominating others. There is no need at all. From that moment your whole effort is to make everybody aware of his individuality, of his freedom, of his immense, inexhaustible sources of bliss, contentment, peace.
To me, if therapy prepares the ground for meditation, therapy is going right... ground for the patients and ground for the therapist, both. Therapy should turn at a certain point into meditation. Meditation turns at a certain point into enlightenment. And to have such tremendous potential and just remain a beggar...
I feel so sad sometimes when I think of others. They are not beggars, but they are behaving like beggars, and they are not ready to drop their begging -- because they are afraid that is all they have got. And unless they drop their begging, they will never know that they are emperors and their empire is of the within.
Sagarpriya, if you have stopped dominating people but you are suspicious that perhaps you have started dominating yourself, then nothing has changed. You misunderstood the whole message.
Becky and Solly Feigenbaum are in bed. "Listen, Becky," says Solly, "do me a favor and close the window, it is cold outside."
"And if I close the window, will it be warm outside?" Becky asked. Try to understand me correctly.
Little David, who was six years old, was beginning to ask embarrassing questions that his Mom and Dad could not get themselves to explain. So they asked their older boy, Martin, to explain to him about the birds and the bees.
That night in bed Martin gave David his first lesson. "Look, David, do you know what it is that Mom and Dad do at night in bed?"
"Sure, I do," said David.
"Well," said Martin, "it is just the same with the birds and the bees."
It is human to err, to misunderstand. But Sagarpriya is an intelligent woman and can manage the new idea of therapy. She can become a pioneer therapist. But there are so many idiots all around: you just start any stupid thing and you will find followers are coming.
Just a week before in Rajasthan an eighteen-year-old girl became a widow -- perhaps she may have been married six months before, or a year before -- and she jumped into the funeral pyre to perform the ancient Hindu ritual of being a sati. The word sati is beautiful; it means òne who can die for truth'. It comes from sat, and sat means truth. The connotation is that she loved the man so much that the man has become her god; without that man life is meaningless. But it is really committing suicide openly.
It is against the Indian constitution, it is against Indian law. But millions of people are going there, and already a big village has become established. Tens upon tens are coming to worship, because the woman has done a great spiritual act. And rather than creating some legal action against the family, the government is making arrangements for the millions of people that are pouring in. Shops have opened, restaurants have opened, hotels have opened, caravanserais have opened. Soon it will become a big city, a memorial city, because an uneducated, highly conditioned young girl committed suicide, following ideals which are simply stupid.
There is no spirituality in it. If there was spirituality in it, then why in ten thousand years has not one single man jumped into the funeral pyre of his wife? And these men are writing in the scriptures that this ritual is a great spiritual act -
- but only for women?
It is not a spiritual act. It is a very cunning strategy to dominate. The man watches his wife continuously, keeps her a slave while he is alive. He is afraid... when he is dead, who knows? -- the wife may fall in love with somebody and he will not be able to do anything. It is better to create an ideology so that the wife also jumps in the funeral pyre; then that fool feels immensely contented because now there is no fear.
And I am surprised... newspapers report it, the government officials are making arrangements, and nobody is bothered that it is illegal, it is unconstitutional, it is illogical.
It is male chauvinist ideology. It is a domination beyond conception. You even want to dominate when you are dead! But misunderstanding goes on and on.…
A little girl was in the park crying when an old gentleman asked her why.
She said, "I want one of those things like my brother's got, that sticks out, then lays down and then sticks out again."
The old gentleman began to cry too.
One night a man is stopped on a dark street by a ragged looking figure, clutching something in his hand.
"Please sir," the figure mumbled, "please spare a few dollars for a poor man who has lost his job, his wife, his home, everything." Then lifting his hand he added, "And all I have got left is this gun."
Sagarpriya, try to understand yourself as deeply as possible. Therapy comes second. And unless you have refined your being through meditation and silences... I am not saying, stop the work; I am saying, transform its quality. Make it real work. Open your heart, tell them your weaknesses, tell them your problems, ask their advice -- can they help you?
And once the participants understand that the therapist is not an egoist, they will come with absolute humbleness, opening their hearts. Then you can help them.
But always and always remember: therapy in itself is incomplete. Even the perfect therapy is just the first step. Without the second step it is meaningless.
So leave the patients on the point from where they start moving towards meditation. Your therapy is complete only when your patients start enquiring about meditation. Create a great longing in their hearts for meditation, and tell them that meditation too is only a step -- the second step. In itself that too is not enough, unless it leads you to enlightenment; that is the culmination of the whole effort. And I trust in you, that you are capable of it.
A Jew from Odessa was sitting in the same compartment as a Czarist Russian officer who had a pig with him. To annoy the Jew, the officer kept calling the pig Moishe. "Moishe!
Keep still! Moishe! Come here! Moishe! Go there!"
This went on all the way to Kiev. Eventually the Jew got fed up and said, "You know, Captain, it is a great shame your pig has a Jewish name."
"Now why is that, Jew?" smirked the officer.
"Well, otherwise it could have become an officer in the Czar's army." There is a limit to everything!
Make it a point that the limit of therapy is where meditation begins, and the limit of meditation is where enlightenment begins. Of course, enlightenment is not a step to anything: You simply disappear into the universal consciousness, you become just a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. But it is the greatest experience.… It makes life finally meaningful, significant. It allows you to become part of the universe from which your ego has separated you. And it is so easy, as easy as this silence.…
Nobody can think that there are thousands of people sitting here.…
You just have to move in the right direction. A sense of right direction, and everything can become a steppingstone towards higher states of consciousness. I have been using everything, but the direction is the same. I have used many kinds of meditations. On the periphery they look different. There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation.
They look very different from each other, and you may think, "How can all these different methods lead to meditation?"
But they lead... Just as a thread running through a garland of flowers is not seen, you see only the flowers, those one hundred and twelve flowers have a running thread: that thread is witnessing, watching, observation, awareness.
So help the patients as much as you can to understand their problems, but make them clear that even if these problems are solved, you are the same person. Tomorrow you will start creating the same problems again -- perhaps in a different way, with a different color.
So your therapy should become nothing but an opening for meditation. Then
your therapy has a tremendous value. Otherwise it is just a mind game. Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #15
Chapter title: Man is born to celebrate
13 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive
code: 8709135
ShortTitle: PILGR15
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
103
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
I AM VERY OUTRAGED THAT PEOPLE ARE GOSSIPING ABOUT ME.
Devageet, you need not be worried about the gossip. The difference between gospels and gossip is whether you are telling it or hearing it; it is not much... and whatever is gossip today will become gospel tomorrow.
Just thinking about your question, I remembered a report that has come to me today about a man I have always respected. He is a great scientific mind, a genius; he has worked his whole life with a total energy and intelligence. His name is John Lilly.
Just today in a press interview it was asked of him -- he is seventy-five years old
-- he was asked that if he finds himself on a small island, nobody else is there, and for miles and miles there is no sign of human life, what he would like to have with him. And he said, "I would like the five most sexy women of the world." At the age of seventy-five...!
This man must be crazy.
So if people are gossiping about you, that you have become old, don't be worried about it.
Gossip has a way of functioning of its own.…
... Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
Gossip does not need thinking. It is a very strange fact that nobody ever doubts gossip; even the very skeptical minds simply believe in gossip. People have to be forced for centuries to believe in the gospel, but gossip... people are just waiting to hear something, something juicy. And you should be proud that you have become almost a hero; everybody is deep down jealous of you. Your old age is going to go down in history. It will be remembered for ages to come that "Once upon a time, Devageet became old --
and not only once, but twice within two days!"
Here is a commune of absolutely free people. The only difficulty is:
... When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Please, Devageet, don't feel in the gutter. Everyone is in the gutter. At least you are looking at the stars -- that's what is making people think you are becoming old, because only old people stare at the stars. At the age of seventy-five, John Lilly, a man of tremendous intelligence, is still in the gutter -- not looking at the stars.
Devageet, it is creditable that you have become old earlier than you should have; you have done a fast race from young age into old age. This is what I call a "quantum leap."
And remember:
... Those who try to serve both God and women soon discover there is no God. And about your outrageousness... I am also outrageous, because the principle is:
... Whenever in doubt, be outrageous. What else can you do?
Perhaps the gossip is right. I hope it is right! -- because to me, it is very creditable to become old so soon. It is the beginning of wisdom. I am waiting for the day when people start talking about you, saying that you have become ancient. Old age is nothing compared to being ancient.
... Truth is stranger than fiction, and also harder to make up. So naturally people make up gossips; it is easier -- very easy!
Bernard Shaw used to say, "I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using this earth as their lunatic asylum." And I agree with that old man, George Bernard Shaw. He was, in this century, one of the men who had tremendous insight into human foolishness.
Once when he was in America for the first and last time -- because he never went again...
When the federal judge told me that I cannot enter America for five years, I said, "Why bother about years? I am not going back ever! One time is enough." And that's what happened with George Bernard Shaw.
He went once on invitation to America. In the first meeting he was addressing the people who had invited him -- very well known people, respectable people, rich people -- and he said, "Looking at you I can almost take it for granted that fifty percent of the people in America are idiots." Of course the whole gathering was outraged: "We are here to welcome you, we have invited you, you are our guest -- this is not the way to start!"
There was silence, but great anger in people's eyes. Bernard Shaw said, "Forgive me, I just said the opposite of what I was going to say."
People relaxed. He said, "I was going to say that fifty percent of people in America are very intelligent, but now I have to change my statement. That was my first impression.
And this is my last impression, it is final: one hundred percent of the people are idiots."
Bernard Shaw had a certain insight into our so-called sane humanity. He was not right only about America, he was right about the whole earth: it is a mental asylum.
But still... a few sutras will be good, either for now or tomorrow when you will be getting older again. Now it is very difficult to say when you will be young and when you will be old. It is going to be up and down, up and down... That's what some sannyasin was complaining about: "Whoever I meet and I ask how things are, they say ùp and down'...
everybody says the same thing: up and down!" But nobody is going up and down so much as Devageet.
... Old age is when a girl gets on your nerves rather than on your lap. Just so you can figure out where you are:
... Middle age is when you can feel bad in the morning without having fun the night before.
... Intuition is what enables a woman to put two and two together and come up with an answer that suits her.
So beware of women's intuition -- particularly in old age!
... A really old man is a man who tries never to stand between a dog and a lamppost.
I am just giving you some hints. If you start behaving like that, you are old!
... An old man is a man who knows tomorrow why the things he said yesterday did not happen today.
His wisdom is as bogus, as hollow as his old age is.
Just to encourage you, Devageet... you are in the dumps:
... The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Don't be worried! You have got a new idea that you are old. You will be thought a crank until you really succeed to be an old man. Then all this gossip will disappear.
I don't think you are that old, but I certainly think that you are old enough... But still you will see the time, if pollution continues, when walking on water will no longer be a miracle; anybody will be able to do it. And if you can see this happening, this miracle of everybody walking on water, what more do you want? Old age or young age, you have seen the last miracle on the earth.
But I hope that people will go on gossiping about you. They are finding... they are almost researching about you!
Devageet's old Jewish mama... I never knew that he is a Jew! People are really doing an in-depth search.… Devageet's old Jewish mama met an old friend who she had not seen for years. "And how is your son getting on?" asked the friend.
"Oy veh," said his mama, "don't ask. He has grown his hair down to his shoulders, he never shaves from one year to the next, he left the university and all day long he is doing nothing but transdental medication."
"Ah well," said her friend, "what is the use of worrying? Transdental medication is fine.
It is better than sitting around all day doing nothing." And here is a question from Devageet:
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
WHEN YOUR CHEEKS GROW ROUND WITH LAUGHTER AND YOUR EYES
ARE BRIGHT WITH MISCHIEF, MY HEART TRIES TO BURST FREE FROM THIS
POOR CHEST. I USED TO WONDER AT THE AMAZING ACCURACY OF YOUR
ANSWERS, TREMBLING LIKE A VIRGIN AS YOUR SEEDS FELL INTO MY
WAITING HEART. NOW I TREMBLE EVEN MORE AWAITING YOUR
QUESTIONS TOO. SITTING SILENTLY, THE JOKE COMES AND MY NOODLE
VAPORIZES ALL BY ITSELF.
Devageet, this is the sign that you are passing old age and entering into ancient age. You have even forgotten poor Basho's haiku. You are saying, "Sitting silently, the joke comes and my noodle vaporizes all by itself."
If Basho hears it, he will hit you so hard that neither you nor the noodle will be ever able to rise again. You are not supposed, just in old age, to forget the haiku, one of the most famous and one of the most beautiful things ever uttered. In ancient age it is of course okay, because one goes senile.
Basho's haiku... I have to remind you again, because it is the very foundation of all meditation:
Sitting silently, doing nothing
The spring comes
And the grass grows by itself.
As far as I know, Basho may have never heard about the word `noodle'. These strange things are brought here by Sarjano. He is feeding people noodles, spaghetti and all kinds of creepy things.… Avoid that fellow! God never made -- as far as I know, in any description in the whole BIBLE -- noodles, spaghetti, pizza. It is absolutely the devil's invention.
Just come back down to where you really are; don't believe this gossip. And if the gossip continues, I will manage to bring you down again and again.
A beautiful woman and a young man both went for the same lion tamer's job at the zoo.
The manager said he would give them both a chance, and told the girl to go into the cage first.
The girl, wearing a long fur coat, did so. A huge lion immediately started to charge at her.
Suddenly, she opened her fur coat and stood there completely naked. The lion stopped dead, spun around, and went meekly back into the corner.
The manager was amazed. He turned to the young man and said, "Well friend, do you think you can do better than that?"
"I would like to try," the young man replied. "Just get that crazy lion out of there first."
Question 3 BELOVED MASTER,
THIS MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT, THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL
QUESTION OF MY WHOLE LIFE. MY LONGING FOR FREEDOM IS SO DEEP, SO
STRONG, MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE I KNOW. IN FACT MY WHOLE LIFE
ENERGY IS GIVEN TO THIS MATTER. BUT SOMEHOW I'M NOT CLEAR IN IT.
DO I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING FOR FREEDOM? IS MY LONGING FOR FREEDOM JUST A MIND GAME?
PLEASE, BELOVED OSHO, TELL ME WHAT FREEDOM IS.
Antar Dharmesh, it is certainly the most important and the most fundamental question one can ever ask. I have been talking to you about freedom continuously -- from every possible angle, every possible implication It seems
you are hearing me but not listening to me.
You are saying, "My longing for freedom is so deep, so strong, more than anything else I know..." and I have been telling you, there are things which you cannot desire, which you cannot make an object of your longing.
Freedom is your intrinsic nature -- svabhav. It is your very nature; you don't have to attain it. You don't have to make any effort for it. You don't need even to desire or long for it -- it is already there.
You are born free, but you are living in chains. Those chains you have accepted, and you have accepted them very willingly, very joyously, because those chains are made of gold.
Those chains are made of power, prestige, respectability; they are covered with beautiful flowers. So not only have you accepted them, you go on desiring more and more because you think they are ornaments. You think they are the very aim of your life, the very meaning and significance.
This is the trouble: freedom is not a problem such that you have to achieve it; the problem is how to get rid of the chains. And the first thing you have to encounter is to recognize chains as chains not as ornaments, a prison as a prison not as a home, a marriage as a bondage and not love. And there are a thousand and one chains all around you.
You are dragging them; your life has become a drag, a burden, somehow hoping to reach to the graveyard. Each moment seems to be so long, one wants relief and rest. And it seems in this world you can find relief and rest only in the grave
-- anywhere else you will find yourself again in the chains, in the prisons. The names will be different, the shape of the chains may be different, the forms may be different, almost opposite to what you used to have.… A Christian becomes a Hindu, a Hindu becomes a Christian; they only change jails -- nothing changes, no transformation in being and no freedom of the soul. They have only changed old chains for new chains.
And remember: new chains are more dangerous than the old, because the old can be broken more easily than the new. The new are more sophisticated, more technologically perfect. The old were not so perfect, they had loopholes; you could have easily slipped out of them. But the new, the imprisoners who are your parasites, have closed all possibilities, all windows, all doors. Even the small cracks from where you can see the open sky... everything seems to be absolutely closed. And you go on suffering.
It is so strange to think that man, who is born to celebrate, lives only to suffer. Even trees are more fortunate, wild animals are more blissful, birds in the sky are more ecstatic.
Only man goes on dragging his heavy chains, and every day the load goes on becoming more and more heavy.
Freedom is not the problem at all.
Don't ask how to attain freedom; that will give you a wrong direction. You will start thinking what efforts to make for freedom -- you are asking from a wrong direction. Ask how we have lost our freedom. You were born free -- then how did you become a slave?
You were born just as a human being -- then how did you become a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian?
One of the most important novelists of America has asked me a question: "Osho, what do you think about the Jewish and Arab conflict in the Middle East? What is the solution, and what are the implications for the future?"
I had to write to him saying, "Before I can specifically answer your question, I
would like to give you my bird's-eye view of the whole human situation, because what is happening in Israel between Jews and Arabs is nothing new. It is happening all over the world, in different names -- between Hindus and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews...
just the names are different, but the same violence, the same murder, the same suffering.
And people are clinging to their suffering "
So I told him a few significant points. First: as long as there is a God, man cannot be at peace. It is God who is dividing man. He is the ultimate enemy of humanity; otherwise what is the difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian and a Jew? --
just their idea of God. And that idea is nothing but an idea, just an empty hypothesis.
There is no God anywhere; there is no evidence anywhere, there is no proof. And if somebody says he has seen God, he is simply a madman. He is deluded; he has been hallucinating and he needs psychiatric treatment. If we had treated our saints through psychiatry, humanity would have been in a peaceful state.
Now God is your greatest chain. Are you ready to throw it away?
Your holy scriptures are dividing you, because every scripture demands that it be the only holy scripture. That necessarily creates conflict: Hindus cannot believe that THE BIBLE
is holy... great competition. The VEDAS are holy because they are the ancientmost scripture in the world; God himself wrote them. It is so stupid to talk this way.
I have talked with learned Hindu scholars and asked them, "Have you ever thought about your VEDAS, which you claim that God has written? Just look at the content the very content shows that it cannot be written by God; there is an
intrinsic impossibility." And I was surprised -- great scholars like Omkarnath Maharaj, who was thought to be the authority on the VEDAS, were shocked by my question. He said, "I have never thought about it."
I said, "You are the greatest authority. Open the VEDAS anywhere, at any page. I don't insist on a certain page -- open it at random and read the content. The content will give you the proof that it cannot be written by God."
He had a copy of RIG VEDA by his side. He opened it at random, and what was the content? He was so shocked. The content was: "A brahmin is praying to God..." Now, how can God write it? -- "A brahmin is praying to God, saying, Ì pray so much, but you don't listen; there is a limitation to patience. This year you have proved it: just let your clouds rain on my fields, and not on the fields of my enemies.'" This kind of rubbish is written by God? It is intrinsically an absolute proof that some stupid brahmin is writing it.
But even after that he continued. After two years I saw him again. I said, "You have not stopped."
He said, "To encounter you... I feel such a deep fear in me."
I said, "Why should you be afraid? Just because you have been preaching nonsense..."
THE BIBLE is full of pornography, five hundred pages of pornography. And when I said it, immediately ten Christian associations forced the magistrate of Kanpur to issue an unbailable arrest warrant. I have my people everywhere to fight for me; they immediately took a stay order from the Allahabad high court. It is absolute nonsense; the judge should first see THE BIBLE -- and I am ready to point out the exact five hundred pages which are pornographic.
But strangely, Christians and Jews both go on calling the Old Testament a holy scripture, written by God. It seems... is God just a pornographic writer, just on the board of editors of PLAYBOY?
These are the problems. Every prophet, every messiah, every avatara, every tirthankara is claiming that only he is the right one. You think only ordinary people are competing with each other? -- that is not true. Your so-called great men are so ugly in their competition, you cannot believe it.
In the times of Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago... Mahavira and Buddha were both contemporaries, and there were six others; eight people were contending that they were the twenty-fourth tirthankara of Jainism. Even Gautam Buddha was one of the candidates. And because Mahavira proved to be
more orthodox, more in tune with the Jaina ideology of self-torture and masochism, he won the battle. Even Buddha lost the election. Frustrated because he lost the election and Mahavira was accepted as the twenty-fourth tirthankara, he started a new religion.
If you look without prejudice, you cannot believe it -- why are there so many wars, why is there so much lunacy, why is there so much insanity? Even your great peaks, your highest suns behave like children.
Jesus goes on declaring that he is the only son of God. Naturally, he cannot accept Gautam Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu or Basho or Bodhidharma -- not even as cousins. The family is very closed, and a very strange family at that!There is no woman in the family. And in fact the woman is the very center of a family; without a woman you can have a house but not a home. Strange company: God the father, Jesus Christ the son, and a strange fellow -- nobody knows who he is, whether he is male or female -- the Holy Ghost. These three people go on dominating the whole world. This is their trinity.
For centuries intelligent Christians have been asking, "At least give one place to a woman," but such is the macho male mind that he will not allow it. Even the mother of Jesus is not allowed in the holy family. A woman cannot be accepted high on the ladder of hierarchy.
Christians cannot accept Mahavira or Buddha as people of real religious importance.
These are the problems that have been dominating humanity for centuries. In particular in Israel the problem has become a very burning issue, because the whole of the Middle East is Mohammedan. But Mohammedanism is only fourteen hundred years old, Christianity is two thousand years old. So before Mohammed was born, Jews had already entered the Arabic world, and they had their own settlements. Then Christians came and they started making their own settlements.…
The problem is this special rock, which is said to be the central piece of the great Jewish Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the anti-Jewish elements long ago. Only the rock which was the central piece remains; it is called the "Rock of the Dome."
Now, Jews claim that it is their holy place, because it is the site of their great
temple. And Christians claim that this is the place where Jesus was crucified, so it is their holy place --
not Jewish but Christian. And then comes another contender, and in a very strange way...
Six hundred years after Jesus, Mohammed established a new religion -- because the Arabs had no religion of their own. They were a nomadic race, wanderers; they had no organized religion. Mohammed collected those Arabs under the name of Mohammedanism. He himself was an Arab, and naturally had great influence. For his whole life he was fighting -- war and war, not a single day of rest -- and on his sword was his message: "My message is peace." It was written on his sword!
George Bernard Shaw is not wrong: this world seems to be dominated by lunatics of all kinds. If peace is your message... and certainly he believed that peace was his message, but it had to follow his conditions: if the whole world becomes Mohammedan there will be peace. But how is it possible? He has named his religion... Mohammedanism is not the name given by him to his religion; the name that he has given is Islam, and Islam simply means peace. A strange kind of peace! -- the prophet of peace fought his whole life, murdered and butchered.
And he left the ultimate problem behind him -- the story is really hilarious -- when he died. Many prophets, many saviors, many avataras, many tirthankaras, many buddhas have died before, but he found his own style. He died not in an ordinary way. In fact, he never died. He simply went to heaven alive -- and not alone, but sitting on his horse! And just as he was going towards heaven, sitting on his horse, just to take a little rest he descended on that rock. He could not find anywhere else to rest.
So now that rock has become the contention of three religions. Judaism claims it as theirs. Jews are ready to kill and die for it; millions of Jews have died for it. Christians have been sending crusades, having religious wars continually, to take possession of the Rock of the Dome. And the whole area is an ocean of Mohammedans, who claim that this is their holy rock because Mohammed stayed there to take some rest before he left finally, with his horse, towards heaven.
For these fourteen hundred years it has been war almost every day. And at the end of the first world war Britain and America, both Christian countries, played the most ugly game against the Jews.… Jews are one of the races which have suffered most. Of course, they have their part and their contribution in their suffering. They have suffered most because they were the first to claim, "We are the chosen people of God, and it is our basic right to rule over the world. Other human beings are inferior human beings."
Because this idea irritated everybody, without exception, Jews have been continually murdered, butchered. Adolf Hitler alone killed six million Jews, and it goes on.… But the ultimate meanness has been committed by America and England -- and even Jews could not understand the strategy.
After the second world war, the American and British forces were in control of Jerusalem, where the rock is, and the small country of Israel which had never before been in existence. For many centuries Mohammedans had lived there; it was part of the country of Palestine. But after the second world war, Jerusalem and Palestine were under the control of American and British forces, and America played the ugliest politics that you can conceive. It created, under an armed force, a new nation for the Jews. It called the new nation Israel, for the Jews.
It had not been in existence for many centuries. Once it had been a land for the Jews, in the days of Moses, then it was lost to Mohammedans for centuries. Christians had been trying to recover it but they could not, neither were the Jews successful -- they could not be! Only six percent of the land belonged to the Jews and ninety-four percent of the land belonged to the Mohammedans. How can you make Israel a sovereign nation? But under pressure of arms they managed to create a new land. It was great strategy, and perhaps nobody else has pointed it out.…
I find myself standing alone in many situations; sometimes I think I should not unnecessarily bother about things when nobody is even thinking about them.
My understanding is that America and Britain conspired to create the Jewish state so that now Jews will be in trouble for eternity. This is a very sophisticated diplomacy. And the Jews were happy; they thought that America and England were helping them, that they were favorable to them, that they were giving them the homeland for which they had been hankering for centuries.
And America had killed two birds with one stone. In America, Jews are among the richest people, so they have great power over the American congress. They have a lobby of their own, and because politicians depend on contributions from rich people for their elections, they cannot avoid the Jews. They cannot ignore them; their presence is too important -- they have cash money. So this was a good chance to have their money contributed to American politicians.
The American politicians managed to create the state of Israel for the Jews, but the state was forcibly imposed on the Mohammedans. Now, they cannot tolerate it --
Mohammedans are very fascist, and this insult they cannot tolerate -- so there is continuous war.
Israel has to purchase war materials from America, and American Jews continuously have to send millions of dollars for the survival of Israel. In this way, America has destroyed more Jews than Adolf Hitler -- and has created not just a single-blow slaughter, but a continuous situation that will go on and on for centuries till not a single Jew is alive in Israel.
And any day the American politicians can pull out their support. They have done that in Taiwan. They were supporting Taiwan against China, and Taiwan depended absolutely on American support -- but for how long?
Taiwan is a small island. It was the private property of Chiang Kai-shek, who was the dictator before Mao and the communists took over China. The old name for Taiwan was Formosa; Chiang Kai-shek had made it his holiday resort, a private property. And as the communists took over China, Chiang Kai-shek, with his family and friends, escaped to Taiwan and changed its name from Formosa. They created a new nation with the help of America -- Taiwan. America helped, and with billions of dollars and new factories, it became a nation.
But how long can you manage against mainland China, the biggest country in the world?
Finally, you have to give up. America dropped Taiwan and joined hands with mainland China -- because that was China's condition: "Unless you stop supporting Taiwan, China is not going to support you." They needed China's support immensely -- because China and Russia together could become such a great force, it was a beautiful and necessary step for America to bring China
towards them. But Taiwan was lost, and Taiwan is very angry.
But what can you do? Now China is making every effort to absorb Taiwan back into China, and Taiwan cannot fight, it has not the power. The same is going to happen to Israel, any day.
It has happened the same way in Iran: it was American support that kept the shah of Iran in power. He had no hold on the people; the people are fanatic Mohammedans under the control of Ayatollah Khomeini, but because of American support, American army bases...
Ayatollah Khomeini was living in France and directing his people in Iran to be ready any moment, because how long can America support the shah? Sooner or later it becomes a burden.
One day it did become a burden. And the moment America left Iran to itself, the shah of Iran had to run away, because he knew that he could not survive. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran with flags flying, and Iran is now in the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Mohammedan priests. They have created in Israel a hell for the Jews, and with such beautiful tactics that even the greatest Jews like Martin Buber could not suspect it.
I am the one-person majority who wants to say to the world that this is cunning politics.
America and England are not favorable to the Jews, and the proof for it is that the Vatican pope has not accepted Israel as a sovereign nation; they have not given their recognition.
So on the one hand Christianity gives no recognition to the nation; on the other hand they created the nation in a place where they are surrounded from all sides by Mohammedans, and they will be killed and crushed.
Just for crucifying one man, Jesus, for two thousand years millions of innocent Jews have been crucified -- just as Jesus was innocent but killed by his contemporaries. Now these people, after two thousand years, have nothing to do with those people who crucified Jesus. But they are being tortured in Russia, they are being tortured in Germany; they have been tortured everywhere, wherever they have been. And now Israel is the ultimate strategy: they will keep being tortured for eternity until Israel disappears again.
So I have given my answer to Tom Robbins, because he is going to write a book and he wants my opinion. I know he must be surprised, because nobody has ever said this, that Israel is a strategy of Christian politics to destroy Jews -- not directly, but by creating a situation so that Mohammedans can do the job and Christians can keep their mask that they have been so helpful, even to the enemies. They have followed Jesus' philosophy: Love your enemies. They have been pouring money and help in the form of outdated arms -- armaments which are of no use, which have to be thrown out, either into the ocean, or in Israel.
And at the same time American Jews go on helping American politicians because they are helping Israel. So the American politicians exploit their money, they exploit their support.
Just by chance, yesterday when I dictated my letter to Tom Robbins, I received the message... We were fighting in the Supreme Court of Oregon to prove that our commune in Oregon had been destroyed absolutely illegally, and that the government had taken control of the land without any reason or rhyme. And we have won the case in the Supreme Court: the Supreme Court has specifically made it clear that the government has been absolutely illegal in restricting the use of the commune's land, its other properties.
So now it is again in our hands.
I have said to Tom Robbins that my suggestion is that if you want to help the Jews, Oregon should be given to them as a new Israel. Move the Jews from Israel and give Israel to the Mohammedans; it belongs to them, it is ugly to keep their land.
And as for me and my people, we offer our commune land as a beginning. It is enough for at least one hundred thousand people. We give all our assets -- all our houses, hotels, roads, dams, fields -- everything that we have in Rancho Rajneesh we give them as a friendly gesture, without taking any money for it, with the condition that Rancho Rajneesh should be the capital of the new Israel.
And let America show its real face. If they want to help them... half of the state of Oregon is already owned by the federal government, and it is very sparsely populated so there is no problem. Half the land already belongs to the federal government; give that land to the Jews.
And Jews are in a new trouble in Israel. There were a few Jews who have
remained in Israel forever, since the days of Moses, so they are very orthodox -- utterly orthodox.
They have not seen the outside world, they are still four thousand years back; their mind is of that type. The second layer has come from European countries. That layer is a little different, because it is no longer so orthodox. It has seen the developed countries of the twentieth century; it has forgotten all the old traditional ways. And the third layer, which has completely forgotten what Judaism is, has come from America.
Now they are fighting amongst themselves. Full-scale riots are going on in Israel amongst the Jews themselves. Mohammedans are killing them from all around, and Jews are killing other Jews because the orthodox Jews say to the European and American Jews,
"Go back! You are no longer Jews."
For small reasons... for example, on the sabbath every week, the orthodox Jews stop working by the evening on Friday. They want the new Jews who have come from Europe and America to close their discos, their restaurants, their movie houses, on Friday night.
They cannot conceive it. I have heard:
Three rabbis were talking about whose synagogue was the most advanced. One rabbi said, "Of course it is my synagogue. We allow smoking inside the synagogue; we allow drinking, drugs, anything, in the name of God."
The second rabbi said, "That's nothing, forget all about it. You are still old- fashioned.
These things we have been allowing for centuries. We allow you even to bring your girlfriends; we don't even ask whether the woman is your wife or not. Bring your girlfriends; the synagogue is just a religious kind of movie theater where you will not find people with their wives. If they have to be with their wives, then what is wrong with their house?"
Those movie houses... and do you know why it becomes dark? It is not for the film, it is because so many stories go on inside the movie hall. All those stories are possible only in darkness.
So the second rabbi said, "We allow girlfriends and dancing, and if people want to make love, they can even make love. We ignore it, we don't create any interference."
The third rabbi said, "You are both idiots. You don't know. In our synagogue we are living in the twenty-first century."
They said, "What more can you do?"
He said, "What more? On our synagogue there is a signboard: Òn Jewish holidays the synagogue is closed.'"
This is the ultimate form of religiousness!
So those three layers of Jews are cutting each other's heads.
My suggestion is not just to make a joke of American help; I mean it! I am sending the message to Israel: "You enter into the commune; let that be your beginning. And tell the American government -- and you have every right to ask because you have been giving all those politicians money, they are all paid servants to you -- that you want a New Israel in the New World."
And why bother about a rock? Make a beautiful Temple of Solomon again! The new is always better than the old. Why should you bother? Do you think religion is like wine, that the old is better than the new? Don't condemn religion that way. Just fresh, new, with modern architecture -- make a great temple, the greatest in the world. Once it was the greatest temple in the world, but why unnecessarily get into trouble which cannot end? --
there is no possible way.
And then you will know America's real face. Then you will know how friendly they are to Israel and how friendly they are to the Jews. They are fundamentalist Christians.
Ronald Reagan is a fascist Christian; he will not allow it. This will be a good test of their friendship.
I don't believe in any religion, but I certainly believe that people should not be put into unnecessary misery, slaughter, massacre, every day trembling with fear.
And now it has become much more dangerous, because Jews are fighting with Jews, and Mohammedans from all around have become terrorists; they are destroying in every possible way the very foundation of the Jewish state. And just see: the Vatican has not even given formal recognition to the sovereignty of the state of Israel; that shows the real Christian mind.
But this is our world. Perhaps my people are the only people who are free from chains.
God is your chain, religions are your chains; the idea of sin, the idea of virtue are your chains.
Freedom consists in a single thing, and that is your awareness. Act out of awareness and you will be acting out of freedom -- and without interfering in somebody else's freedom.
Freedom knows how to respect others' freedom.
You don't have to do anything, Dharmesh, to attain freedom. It is already there within you. Just drop the chains.
And those chains are such that you have started loving them; you have become accustomed to them. It will be a little painful to depart from your miseries, a little painful to depart from your old sufferings, familiar friends, and enter into a new area of freedom, awareness. But except that, there is no hope for humanity.
All that is needed is just a little intelligence. You have been deprived even of that.
And the pope is angry with me, the shankaracharyas are angry with me, the imams are angry with me, for the simple reason that I want you to be intelligent. They want you to be absolutely fools, idiots, retarded, so you can be enslaved, tortured, harassed, sacrificed, and you will not revolt against it.
Paddy goes into a pub one day and sees a very well-dressed man sitting in the corner. But what he notices most are his beautiful shoes. So he goes over and asks about them and the man tells him they are crocodile shoes.
But Paddy has never heard of a crocodile, so he goes over to his friends and asks them.
They tell him that it is a very dangerous animal that lives in the swamps of the Amazon jungle.
Paddy is determined to have a pair of these shoes, so he sells his house, his car and his wife, and sets off for South America. Once he is there he eventually finds a man with a boat, who is willing to take him up the Amazon.
After many weeks they reach the heart of the jungle and Paddy sees a crocodile, swimming around in the swamp. So he immediately dives in and has a terrific fight with the beast. They are thrashing about in the water for over an hour until, tired and bleeding, Paddy manages to haul the dead crocodile into the boat.
With his last strength, Paddy turns the crocodile over onto its back, takes one look at it and shrieks: "My God! It has got no shoes on!"
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #16
< Previous | Contents | Next >