Chapter title: Cowards cannot enter here

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‌Chapter title: Cowards cannot enter here‌

15 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code:

8709155

ShortTitle:

PILGR19

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

94

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

IT IS NOW BECOMING TOO MUCH. THE GOSSIPS ARE GOING RIGHT AND

LEFT. EVEN I HAVE STARTED SUSPECTING WHETHER I AM OLD OR JUST A WOMAN. PLEASE SAY SOME WORDS OF COMFORT.

Devageet, it is true; now it is becoming too much. I have just seen you five

minutes ago: neither are you old nor are you a woman. But gossips can affect.… If everybody is talking about it, even if it is a lie, it starts looking like a truth. So obviously you need some words of comfort.

First: a gossip is a gossip. It is not even a yawn, because:

... A yawn is at least an honest opinion. And if you start listening to all these gossips, there is a great danger.

... We can easily forget ourselves when no one knows who we are -- and you are included in those who do not know. In fact, whatever you think you are is nothing but a collective gossip called your personality. Because everyone agrees upon it, it becomes a truth.

Adolf Hitler based his whole philosophy on this simple maxim, that a lie repeated often is truth, and a truth not repeated often is forgotten. And the trouble is, the lie is going to be repeated often because it is consoling; it hurts nobody. It is at the cost of others, it costs you nothing. And truth is not even mentioned; it is one of the most unmentionable things in the world for the simple reason that it will disturb too many people.

It is not coincidence that many mystics became silent and remained silent -- because there were only two alternatives: either to say the truth and be crucified, or to tell a lie, which is consoling, comfortable, respectable. Certainly a mystic does not bother about respectability -- who cares to be respected by people who are absolutely unconscious and asleep? What they think is their problem.

But the trouble is, if we are also asleep, then who knows? -- they may be right. Because we don't know what we are, who we are, we are nothing but the public opinion... and then gossip becomes a very significant factor. The only way to get rid of it is to know yourself on your own. Then you are neither old nor young, neither man nor woman. You are simply a pure consciousness which has no age because it is eternal. And it has no genital differences; a woman does not have a different consciousness from a man.

At the height of consciousness all duality disappears.

So the best thing that I can say to you is, Discover yourself; otherwise you have to depend on other people's opinions who don't know themselves.

And you want a few words of comfort.…

In Germany there is a proverb: Many a good tune is played on an old violin. So don't be worried; just being old is not a condemnation. Many a good tune is played on an old violin. And there are things which become more precious as they become old. Just like wine or holy scriptures, they become holier as they become older.

You just wait. These gossipers are going to run to the logical conclusion. Soon they will say, "Devageet is ancient." But it may be that not many people are gossiping about you, just the few -- and mind has a tendency to exaggerate, to make everything big.

... Just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that you are not being followed. I am not saying that.

I am not saying that nobody is gossiping, but the number may not be so great. Because everybody is so concerned with himself, nobody has time for anybody else -- except people like me, who have nothing to do in the world.

From my very childhood my father used to remind me again and again, "Stop the way you are behaving, stop the way you are growing, because in the end you will become good for nothing." And he was right: I have become good for nothing.

I don't have a single thing to do in the world. And because I am not going to live in this world forever, why should I care? Sitting in a waiting room in an airport, who cares what people think about you? You should keep your ears alert when your airplane is leaving.

All these idiots will be left behind.

And as far as the question of being a woman is concerned, Socrates has tremendously solacing words for you -- and Socrates is a man of tremendous experience as far as women are concerned. He had the worst woman in the whole history of man. Her name was also as terrible as she was: Xanthippe.

Socrates says, "Once made equal to man, woman becomes immediately superior." Not to let her become superior, there is only one way: to keep her down, inferior. Equality is not possible at all; the moment the woman becomes

equal, she is already superior. The reality is that even in her being inferior, she knows perfectly who is superior.

In a small school a teacher asked the little kids, "Do you know of any animal who when he goes out of the house he goes like a lion, and when he comes back into the house he comes like a mouse?"

Little Ernie raised his hand. He was the last person to do something like that. The teacher said, "Good, Ernie. Do you know the animal?"

He said, "I know perfectly. He is my dad. When he goes out, then you see he looks like a lion, and when he comes in, then you see he looks like a mouse."

Every child knows it.

I have come across a tremendous statement:

... Man will be the last thing civilized by a woman.

The woman goes on civilizing from childhood; she tries to civilize the children, then she tries to civilize the husband, and this goes on. But man will be the last thing; he is almost impossible. Civilization does not suit his taste.

In case you are worried about what is going to become of you, you are going to become old and almost a woman. But I am saying, almost a woman.… So never worry about the future, it is certain. You are going to become old, and you are going to become almost like a woman: suspicious, jealous, irritable, annoyed for no reason at all.

Even the most beautiful woman turns out to be terrible -- terrific! It is a miracle of nature.

Just keep away! From the distance the woman looks divine, and as you come closer and open your eyes, you say, "My god, here is the devil!"

... Women are dressed but very few are clothed.

The case with men is just the opposite: men are clothed, but very rarely dressed. Simple differences, but of great psychological importance.

Devageet, there is nothing to be worried about, because love is as blind in old age as ever, but the neighbors are never blind -- so beware of the neighbors. Old age cannot disturb your blind love.

You have asked for some consoling advice... but

... A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.

... Advice is the only thing everybody gives and nobody takes.

In old age, Devageet, the past always looks better than it was. It is only pleasant because it is not there now; that is the beauty of old age. Youth looks golden; childhood looks almost diamond. Everything that is no longer there becomes a long history of beautiful experiences. When you were a child, you never enjoyed it. Every child wants to grow up as soon and as quickly as possible, because he can see that people who are grown up are powerful, are capable of doing anything they want to do, have all the money. Naturally every child wants to grow up faster. No child enjoys his childhood.

If a child can enjoy his childhood, he will be able to enjoy his youth and he will be able to enjoy his old age, and he will be able finally to enjoy even his death. Everything begins from the beginning.

But I have never come across a child who enjoys it. He is waiting for youth to come, when he will enjoy. And youth is a time of great turmoil: up and down... it is troublesome, no rest. Either chasing or being chased; either fighting or just preparing for fight... you cannot even sit silently.

Mulla Nasruddin was asking me, just as Devageet is asking, "What to do? The moment I utter any single word, my wife just grabs me and the fight starts."

So I said, "Why don't you sit silently? Why do you start even a single word?"

He said, "I have tried that. She grabbed that too, she immediately said, `Why are you sitting silently? What is the meaning of it? Are you trying to ignore me? I am here and you are sitting silent.'"

I said, "Then it is very difficult. You can only do two things: either you can be silent or you can speak. Then do one thing: agree with your wife -- just to avoid confrontation, whatever she says, agree."

He said, "Osho, you are unmarried, you don't know. The moment you agree with a woman she changes the subject. And if you go on agreeing with her, bankruptcy is not far away."

... When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up, people look. Then, if they like what they see, they listen.

It is impossible to create an equality between men and women. The whole women's liberation movement is an utter absurdity. It is a futile exercise which is not going to lead anywhere for the simple reason that they are unique, they are not equal. Nobody is superior; nobody is inferior. They are just two different species accidentally living together: they speak different languages, they belong to different kinds of minds. I have never seen a man and a woman having a nice conversation -- never!

If you want to have a nice conversation with a woman, there are a few requirements.

First, she must not be your wife. Secondly, she must be the wife of your neighbor. And thirdly, the conversation cannot be too long -- just a few minutes is perfectly good. The longer you stay together, the more difficult it becomes to have a nice conversation.

Women know only nice conflicts. In their own way they are warriors. They fight with different kinds of weapons; their strategy is different; their diplomacy is different. And man is always at a loss what to do, because he cannot understand the diplomacy.

Homosexuals all over the world are called gay people -- not without any reason, but because they understand each other, they are both happy, have nice conversations. In fact there is nothing else to do than have nice conversations. They enjoy each other's company

-- same mind, same species, same language. It happened in the second world war.…

For five years Adolf Hitler went on winning for the very strange reason that he never listened to his generals. He had brought astrologers from Tibet, and they decided the whole strategy of his war fronts. The generals were beating their

heads, "These idiots don't know anything about military science, and stars are no more interested in who wins or who is defeated."

But they themselves were amazed because Hitler went on winning. In the beginning they were shaky, but soon they understood that perhaps they are wrong, he is right. Perhaps stars have something to do with it, because he is winning, and nothing is a greater proof of being true than winning. And you will be surprised that all the generals of different countries who were fighting against Adolf Hitler were at a loss -- because whatever they expected, Hitler never did that, and what they never expected, he always did that. They were not aware that he was not functioning through military science.

And all those generals knew, from this side to the other side, the same science. They knew what any general is going to do: he is going to attack the weakest point of the enemy. So naturally the enemy will gather all his forces at the weakest point.… But Hitler was not being directed by generals. And he would direct, "Attack where the enemy is the strongest. If you can defeat him there it is finished. Then everything else can be defeated very easily." The argument was correct. He attacked the strongest points, but they had become weakest because of the military science. All the armies had been moved to the weaker points.

Finally, Churchill got the idea what was happening. And then from India astrologers were taken to England and told, "Now it is a question of a war amongst the stars. You decide; it is whatever you say." And the moment Indian astrologers started deciding, ordering the generals, that was the beginning of Adolf Hitler's fall, because Tibetan astrology is only a by-product of Indian astrology. It knows much less than Indian astrology knows.

Now it was a question between Indian astrology and Tibetan astrology, not a question between Germans and English and Americans and French. They were out of the game.

The game was being played by two different kinds of astrologies. But Tibetan astrology is simply a by-product of Indian astrology, just as Tibetan religion is a by-product of Indian religion. Tibet has nothing original to it; everything is borrowed from India. So the Indian astrologers were in a higher position.

Man always finds it difficult to understand women, and even the greatest poets have been writing poetry and saying that the woman is a mystery. It is not a

mystery; it is a question of two different species accidentally falling together. They don't understand each other's diplomacy, each other's tactics, each other's way of understanding. The husband thinks he is continuously misunderstood; the wife thinks she is continuously misunderstood.

It is a great chance for you, Devageet: you have been a man for so many years; now be a woman, so that you can know both the territories. Your experience will be far richer. And in fact, many people actually are changing their sex through plastic surgery.

Just today I was informed by Anando that billions of dollars are spent in America on plastic surgery alone. Almost half a million people every year are going through plastic surgery. In the beginning the age group that used to go through plastic surgery was when a woman... and it was confined only to women. When a woman started feeling old, she used to go through plastic surgery to remain a little younger, a few days more attractive.

But the recent development is that the majority of people in America who are going for plastic surgery are men, not women, because now they want to be young a little longer.

Deep down they will become older, but their skin will show the tightness of a young man.

And the most surprising thing in the report was that even a twenty-three year old boy has gone through plastic surgery to look younger.

America is certainly the land of the lunatics. Now if a twenty-three year old boy thinks that he needs to look younger, what about Devageet?

It is so ugly to go against nature.

It is so beautiful to go in tune with nature and whatever gifts it brings, childhood or youth or old age. If your acceptance and your welcoming heart is ready, everything that nature brings has a beauty of its own.

And according to my understanding -- and the whole of the Eastern seers are behind me, in support -- man becomes really beautiful and graceful at the highest point of his age, when all foolishnesses of youth are gone; when all ignorance of childhood has disappeared; when one has transcended the whole world of

mundane experiences and has reached to a point where he can be a witness on the hills and the rest of the world is moving down in the dark dismal valleys, blindly groping.

The idea of remaining continuously young is so ugly that the whole world should be made aware of it. By forcing yourself to be young, you simply become more tense. You will never become relaxed.

And if plastic surgery is going to succeed -- and it is going to become a bigger and bigger profession in the world -- then you will find a strange thing happening. Everybody starts looking alike: everybody has the same size of nose, which is decided by computers; everybody has the same kind of face, the same cut. It will not be a beautiful world. It will lose all its variety; it will lose all its beautiful differences.

People will become almost like machines -- all alike, coming from the assembly line like Ford cars one by one. They say every minute one car comes out of the Ford factory, similar to another following it -- in one hour, sixty cars... twenty- four hours it goes on.

Shifts of workers go on changing, but the assembly line goes on producing the same cars.

Do you want humanity also to be streamlined, assembled in a factory exactly like everybody else, that wherever you go you meet Sophia Loren? It will be very boring.

... The way to fight a woman, Devageet, is with your head: grab it and run.

... All would like to live long, but none would like to be old.

Why? -- because of the next stage. Nobody is really afraid of old age, but after old age is death and nothing else. So everybody would like to live as long as possible, but never to become old, because to become old means you have entered into the area of death. Deep down the fear of becoming old is a fear of death. And only those who don't know how to live are afraid of death.

Devageet, don't be afraid of anything. You have been with me... one of the most beautiful persons with a great sense of humor. I have loved Devageet so much that just to be with him I have allowed him to drill all my teeth.

I am rare in many ways -- I have told you. One of our sannyasins from England has just come, because my arm was hurting very much, and he is an expert. And his finding was that something, not exactly in the arm but somewhere else, is causing the trouble. So he asked me about my teeth.

I said, "About my teeth you meet Devageet." And when Devageet told him that I have gone through eight root canals, he freaked out! He said, "I have never seen a man with more than three root canals. Eight root canals? You have drilled all the teeth!"

I had to console him, "It is not his fault; it is my fault. I love his company; it is worth having one tooth drilled. Anyway one is going to lose all the teeth. These root canals are not his responsibility, it is my responsibility."

I like his dental chair and doing nothing in comfort. He has to do everything. And I must be the most difficult patient because I talk continuously while he is drilling. So something that can be done within fifteen minutes takes two hours! He has to stop again and again to listen to me, and then the work starts again.

"He is not at fault, don't be angry with him," I had to tell him. "He is also my sannyasin."

The English sannyasin said, "But this is too much."

I said, "Don't be worried; it is nothing, because there are still a few teeth left."

So whenever I feel in a good mood I will call Devageet. It is not for the pain in the teeth that I call him... when I am in a good mood! Then I say, "Now, let him drill."

... Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day. Old age is the cure.

You have passed through the whole fire test of life, and you have come to the point where you can be utterly detached, aloof, indifferent.

But the West has never understood the beauty of old age. I can understand, but I cannot agree. In the West the idea is:

... The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women, and so little

time.

That's why nobody wants to become old, just to stretch the time a little more.

But I say unto you: the trouble would be even worse if there was so much time and so few women. As it is, it is the perfect world.

Devageet, a very special advice for you:

... A man is known by the company he avoids.

So just you figure out where you are. If you avoid women, that will be decisive; if you avoid men, that will be decisive.

The old saying is:

A man is known by the company he keeps. The days of that proverb are gone. Now it is the company that he avoids. This is a little more subtle, and you will have to figure it out

-- whom you are avoiding and why.

... Women have a lot of faults. Men have only two -- everything they say, and everything they do.

... A man who expects comfort in this life must be born deaf, dumb and blind. Then there is no discomfort at all.

And the last gossip that I have heard -- and perhaps Devageet has not heard -- is that Devageet's underpants are now regarded as a noodle-free zone!

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

WHEN YOU WERE BEING SO BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR REPLY TO MILAREPA THIS MORNING I LONGED FOR YOU TO SAY THOSE SAME WORDS TO ME. I FELT THAT I CAN NEVER BE ONE OF YOUR MOST BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE.

SUDDENLY, I CAUGHT IT AT WORK: THIS JUDGING MIND. I SAW THE

FACE

OF MY UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN ALL ITS UGLINESS, AND I ALSO REALIZED

THAT THE PART OF ME THAT WAS WATCHING WAS SHINING WITH ITS

OWN UNIQUE BEAUTY.

UNCONSCIOUS, I CAN NEVER BE BEAUTIFUL; CONSCIOUS, I AM A BEAUTY

UNTO MYSELF.

My God, Devageet! Just now I have been saying that you are the most beautiful person and you ask me again the same thing. I will not say anything, but will tell you a beautiful joke.

The teacher of the six-year-olds in first grade was annoyed to find water on the floor in front of her desk, but chose to ignore it. When the same thing happened the next day, she asked the children about it, but nobody said a word.

On the third day it happened again. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, she said, "I know whoever did this must be feeling very shy about their little accident. So I have an idea! We will all close our eyes while the child who did this comes and writes his name on this piece of paper on my desk. Then we will forget all about it."

Everyone closed their eyes. After a couple of minutes a chair squeaked, footsteps were heard coming and going, and the chair squeaked again.

Delighted, the teacher told everyone to open their eyes. A second puddle of water could be seen on the floor and on the paper was scrawled: "The phantom pisser strikes again!"

Devageet, not only you, but anybody who has fallen in love with me is beautiful, is intelligent, is rebellious, is a hope for the future. Ugly people cannot be here with me, because ugly people are always moralists. What they are missing in beauty they try to substitute by morality.

Ugly women cannot come here. They will condemn everybody, "This is not what religion should be." Your so-called saints cannot come here for the simple reason that our fundamental approach to life is of love, is of understanding, is of not dominating anyone, and not allowing anyone to dominate you -- it is a teaching in absolute freedom and individuality.

Respectable people cannot come here. Just to be known that they have been here, they will lose all their respect in the outside insane asylum.

Cowards cannot enter this door. Only people who have guts to stand against the whole world can be here. And these are the most beautiful products of existence.

I told that one young man, Piyoosh, "You took twelve years to decide to become a sannyasin, and you took only twelve hours to start judging me, whether I am right or wrong." I have wasted my time on such idiots for so long that I am really tired of them, and I told him to leave the ashram. And I enquired whether he has left or not. He left, but two or three other Indians approached the office.…

There are a few Indian sannyasins here who have become sannyasins while I was not here. They don't know me, and they don't understand me. They entered the ashram and became sannyasins simply for free lodging, free boarding and they have done nothing.

Now they are in a trouble. Now I am here and I must be saying a thousand and one things against their prejudices. And my people have come, and will be coming more and more, and they all show their love by working, by being creative, by doing something. So the Indians are feeling inferior, because they have learned in these years while I was not here just to rest and enjoy.

Now it is work, enjoy and rest -- but first comes work. Work in both the senses: working in the outside, being a creative contributor to the commune, and work on yourself, because unless you are working on yourself, you are not a sannyasin.

Two or three Indians of that group reached the office saying, "This is not right what Osho did, that he told that man to go away."

Now those three people have to leave tomorrow morning. I don't want any kind of rotten apples here. They don't understand me. But Indians think they are born spiritual, they are all born enlightened, they know everything.

So tomorrow morning, remember: pack up your things, not other people's... and the gate you know perfectly... and anybody else who wants to go with them is welcome. Here will be only people who are in absolute tune with me. And to be in tune with me will confer all beauty and grace and blissfulness on you. You will not need anything more.

It is good that you leave on your own accord, because I have been enquiring who are the people who are simply trying to waste their time and other people's time, and you don't know any ABC of my approach. It is better they should go to their home, study my books, meditate, and if they feel that now they are ready and ripe, they will be accepted back. But they cannot be tolerated here.

It is so ugly that the people who are our guests are working, and the people who belong to this country are the hosts, and they are simply dodging, trying to escape from work. That Indian habit cannot be allowed in this place. That Indian habit has been the cause of two thousand years' slavery. And this is not an Indian commune, it is an international commune. So unless you can raise yourself to the standard of international consciousness, international creativity, international intelligence, it is better simply to leave this place.

Because of you the whole of India is condemned.

Every day reports come to me that Indians are not working: somebody has a headache; somebody has a stomach ache. Indians suffer from headaches for a simple reason: their spiritual halo is too tight. And they are continuously judging everybody, that they are not moral, that they are not religious -- and the definitions are their own. By religion they mean you should go every day to the monkey god, Hanuman's temple.…

My people are not such idiots.

If Charles Darwin had come to India, he would have been immensely happy. Seeing the monkey god he would have included it as a proof that man is born of monkeys: they are still worshiping their forefathers in India! Fortunately he never came; otherwise we would have been condemned forever. But he could have found the most coherent, rational argument. Everything that he has is guesswork, but this monkey god would have proved all his guesswork. Why should people worship a monkey unless monkeys are their forefathers? Somewhere, far away in the distant past, they departed from their fathers. And

naturally, they are still remembering them respectfully; that is their religion.

They can't understand that these people here are religious. They are not Hindus; they are not Christians; they are not Mohammedans. They cannot believe that nobody seems to be praying.

These people are not here to pray.

These are not beggars before a hypothetical God.

These are people who are trying to raise their consciousness to a point where they are themselves gods. Everybody's ultimate birthright is to be a god. Less than that means you have failed in your life.

Gautam Buddha is right that he will not allow any buddha to worship another buddha.

You are all potentially the highest peak that has ever been touched by humanity, and perhaps you may have a higher possibility in future. Perhaps past buddhas may become pigmies if you rise to your full height.

But that is not in their minds.

And because they have not been initiated by me, they have not lived these years with me, they have to do some homework. They have to try to understand what is happening here.

And if they feel judgmental, if they feel condemnatory, then I am not interested in converting them. They should go to their monkey gods, to their elephant gods

-- they have thousands of gods. In India in all there are thirty-three million gods. So they can go anywhere... and there are hundreds of Goenkas all around.

Just leave me alone with my people. This is a Noah's Ark.

Everybody is not needed here, nor have we the space for five billion people.

But these people have entered into the ashram without exactly knowing me, because I was not here. And they have not even tried to understand what they

have got involved in.

They were simply interested in having free lodging, free boarding.

When I came to India, the first thing one of my old sannyasins said was, "We are tired now. Unnecessarily we are collecting money to feed people in the ashram. The ashram is absolutely unproductive. It needs fifty, sixty thousand rupees per month just to keep those people living comfortably, feeding them enough."

I said, "You need not be worried now. When I am here my people will be coming from all over the world. Then fifty, sixty thousand rupees don't matter at all. Then think in millions of dollars -- not less than that."

I am never interested in small things. Millions of dollars will be coming -- they have started coming. Millions of people will be coming, and those who want to be here have to remember it: this is not a free house. In India that is the idea, that in an ashram people should be given food free, shelter free, and beads, so they can sit silently and repeat the name of Rama to save the whole world. We don't want any kind of nonsense here.

Our work is our prayer.

Our meditation is our religion.

Our declaration of freedom is our fundamental manifesto. We don't belong to any nation and we don't belong to any religion. We belong to the whole existence. That's why I say I am not interested in small things.

Just the other day I was informed that in Delhi the government is worried that we are going to take over Koregaon Park. In America they were worried we were going to take over Oregon, Wasco County. I am not interested in taking small things... Koregaon Park!

-- if I was interested to take over I would have taken over the whole world. I am not interested in taking over. But political idiots are a very special kind of idiots: India has so many problems... but their only problem is Koregaon Park.

The day I came here, within two hours I was given a notice that I should leave immediately: I cannot stay here because my stay here is, "dangerous for the peace of the city." Now I have been here almost one year. Now that police

commissioner should come and apologize. What peace has been disturbed by me? But they don't even have shame.

He should at least get transferred from here, seeing that what he did was absolutely under pressure of the government.

I have been here before -- we have never disturbed the peace. We are not interested at all what goes on in Poona. We are interested in a spiritual experiment on ourselves. And just because I refused to move unless they show me the cause, and unless they prove that before.… I have lived here six, seven years -- have there been any reports against me that I have disturbed the peace? I don't even go into this dirty town!

In the seven years before, I had only gone into the town three times, because three sannyasins have been in the hospital and dying. And this time I have gone only once, because my arm was in trouble. Otherwise, who cares?

We are enough unto ourselves. We are an island in this world.

But the next day the corporation passed a resolution -- because they were afraid that now we will make Buddha Hall again -- that no building can be longer than one hundred feet.

Now, in the whole of Koregaon Park there is no building which is one hundred feet long, except this Buddha Hall. Anybody of a little intelligence can understand who they are preventing by passing a law in the corporation. What will a residential place like Koregaon Park do with a one-hundred-foot-long hall? This ashram needs not only a one-hundred-foot-long hall, we are going to make two halls. This hall will be there, and we are going to make another hall of the same size as in the commune in America, where twenty thousand people can sit. And I will see who can prevent it.

We don't want to create any trouble for anybody, but we don't want anybody to interfere with us! There must be informers of the police here now. They should take the information back!

Devageet, the last joke for your consolation:

A man woke up one morning and saw that his male member was covered in purple stripes. He rushed to see his doctor who told him that immediate amputation was vital.

The distracted man rushed out of the door muttering that he wanted another opinion. The second doctor took one look at the candy-striped organ and told the man the same thing, It has to be amputated."

The poor man, not knowing what to do, went to seek the advice of a Chinese master of healing. The wrinkled old man said, "No need for surgery. In two weeks the problem will be solved."

The man said, "You mean I will be cured?"

"No," said the Chinese sage. "It will drop off by itself."

So don't be worried about all these gossips; they will drop off by themselves. You just remain silent, watching, enjoying. If people feel you are getting disturbed, then more and more gossips will come to your door. Don't be disturbed. On the contrary, enjoy and ask people, "Have you any gossip against me?"

Collect all the gossips, and it will become a beautiful collection -- far more beautiful than the gospel in THE BIBLE.

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #20

Chapter title: A graceful old age is your birthright

29 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code:

8709295

ShortTitle:

PILGR20

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

100

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

YOU HAVE NOT BEEN COMING FOR SO LONG THAT NOW THE GOSSIP HAS

CHANGED ABOUT ME: THAT I AM NO MORE OLD, I AM REALLY ANCIENT.

WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW?

Devageet, all these days that I have not been coming, I have been watching. An ancient tree, just by the side of my house, has been dancing in the rain, and its old leaves are falling with such grace and such beauty. Not only is the tree dancing in the rain and the wind, the old leaves leaving the tree are also dancing; there is celebration.

Except man, in the whole existence nobody suffers from old age; in fact, existence knows nothing about old age. It knows about ripening; it knows about maturing. It knows that there is a time to dance, to live as intensely and as totally

as possible, and there is a time to rest.

Those old leaves of the almond tree by the side of my house are not dying; they are simply going to rest, melting and merging into the same earth from which they have arisen. There is no sadness, no mourning, but an immense peace in falling to rest into eternity. Perhaps another day, another time they may be back again, in some other form, on some other tree. They will dance again; they will sing again; they will rejoice the moment.

Existence knows only a circular change from birth to death, from death to birth, and it is an eternal process. Every birth implies death and every death implies birth. Every birth is preceded by a death and every death is succeeded by a birth. Hence existence is not afraid. There is no fear anywhere except in the mind of man.

Man seems to be the only sick species in the whole cosmos. Where is this sickness? It should really have been otherwise... man should have enjoyed more, loved more, lived more each moment. Whether it is of childhood or of youth or of old age, whether it is of birth or of death, it does not matter at all. You are transcendental to all these small episodes.

Thousands of births have happened to you, and thousands of deaths. And those who can see clearly can understand it even more deeply, as if it is happening every moment.

Something in you dies every moment and something in you is born anew. Life and death are not so separate, not separated by seventy years.

Life and death are just like two wings of a bird, simultaneously happening. Neither can life exist without death, nor can death exist without life. Obviously they are not opposites; obviously they are complementaries. They need each other for their existence; they are interdependent. They are part of one cosmic whole.

But because man is so unaware, so asleep, he is incapable of seeing a simple and obvious fact. Just a little awareness, not much, and you can see you are changing every moment.

And change means something is dying -- something is being reborn. Then birth and death become one; then childhood and its innocence become one with old

age and its innocence.

There is a difference, yet there is no opposition. The child's innocence is really poor, because it is almost synonymous with ignorance. The old man, ripe in age, who has passed through all the experiences of darkness and light, of love and hate, of joy and misery, who has been matured through life in different situations, has come to a point where he is no more a participant in any experience. Misery comes... he watches.

Happiness comes and he watches. He has become a watcher on the hill. Everything passes down in the dark valleys, but he remains on the sunlit peak of the mountain, simply watching in utter silence.

The innocence of old age is rich. It is rich from experience; it is rich from failures, from successes; it is rich from right actions, from wrong actions; it is rich from all the failures, from all the successes; it is rich multidimensionally. Its innocence cannot be synonymous with ignorance. Its innocence can only be synonymous with wisdom.

Both are innocent, the child and the old man. But their innocences have a qualitative change, a qualitative difference. The child is innocent because he has not entered yet into the dark night of the soul; the old man is innocent -- he has come out of the tunnel. One is entering into the tunnel; the other is getting out of the tunnel. One is going to suffer much; one has already suffered enough. One cannot avoid the hell that is ahead of him; the other has left the hell behind him.

Devageet, your question is the question of almost every human being. Knowingly or unknowingly, there is a trembling in the heart that you are becoming old, that after old age the deluge -- after old age, death. And for centuries you have been made so much afraid of death that the very idea has become deep-rooted in your unconscious; it has gone deep in your blood, in your bones, in your marrow. The very word frightens you --

not that you know what death is, but just because of thousands of years of conditioning that death is the end of your life, you are afraid.

I want you to be absolutely aware that death is not the end. In existence, nothing begins and nothing ends. Just look all around... the evening is not the end, nor is the morning the beginning. The morning is moving towards the evening and the evening is moving towards the morning. Everything is simply moving into

different forms.

There is no beginning and there is no end.

Why should it be otherwise with man? -- man is not an exception. In this idea of being exceptional, in being more special than the other animals and the trees and the birds, man has created his own hell, his paranoia. The idea that we are exceptional beings, we are human beings, has created a rift between you and existence. That rift causes all your fears and your misery, causes unnecessary anguish and angst in you.

And all your so-called leaders, whether religious or political or social, have emphasized the rift; they have widened it. There has not been a single effort in the whole history of man to bridge the rift, to bring man back to the earth, to bring man back with the animals and with the birds and with the trees, and to declare an absolute unity with existence.

That is the truth of our being. Once it is understood, you are neither worried about old age nor worried about death, because looking around you, you can be absolutely satisfied that nothing ever begins, it has been always there; nothing ever ends, it will remain always there.

The idea of being old fills you with great anxiety. It means now your days of life, of love, of rejoicings are over, that now you will exist only in name. It will not be a rejoicing, but only a dragging towards the grave. Obviously you cannot enjoy the idea that you are just a burden in existence, just standing in a queue which is moving every moment towards the graveyard.

It is one of the greatest failures of all cultures and all civilizations in the world that they have not been able to provide a meaningful life, a creative existence for their old; that they have not been able to provide a subtle beauty and grace, not only to old age, but to death itself.

And the problem becomes more complicated because the more you are afraid of death, the more you will be afraid of life too. Each moment lived, death comes closer.… A man who is afraid of death cannot be in love with life, because it is life finally that takes you to the doors of death. How can you love life? It was for this reason that all the religions started renouncing life: renounce life because that is the only way to renounce death. If you don't live life, if you are already finished with the job of living, loving, dancing, singing, then naturally you need

not be afraid of death; you have died already.

We have called these dead people saints; we have worshiped them. We have worshiped them because we knew we would also like to be like them, although we don't have that much courage. At least we can worship and show our intentions. If we had courage or one day if we gather courage, we would also like to live like you: utterly dead. The saint cannot die because he has already died. He has renounced all the pleasures, all the joys; all that life offers he has rejected. He has returned the ticket to existence saying, "I am no more part of the show." He has closed his eyes.

It happened once that a so-called saint was visiting me. I took him into the garden -- there were so many beautiful dahlias, and I showed him those beautiful flowers in the morning sun. He looked very strangely at me, a little annoyed, irritated, and he could not resist the temptation to condemn me, saying, "I thought you were a religious person... and you are still enjoying the beauty of the flowers?"

On one point he is right, that if you are enjoying the beauty of the flowers, you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of human beings; you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of women; you cannot avoid enjoying the beauty of music and dance. If you are interested in the beauty of the flowers, you have shown that you are still interested in life, that you cannot yet renounce love. If you are aware of beauty, how can you avoid love?

Beauty provokes love; love imparts beauty.

I said, "On this point you are right, but on the second point you are wrong. Who ever told you that I am a religious person? I am not yet dead! -- to be religious the basic requirement is to be dead. If you are alive you can only be a hypocrite, you cannot be really religious."

When you will see a bird on the wing, it is impossible not to rejoice in its freedom. And when you will see the sunset with all the colors spread on the horizon -- even if you close your eyes, your very effort of closing the eyes will show your interest. You have been overwhelmed by the beauty of it.

Life is another name of love.

And love is nothing but being sensitive to beauty.

I said to that so-called saint, "I can renounce religion but I cannot renounce life, because life has been given to me by existence itself, and religion is just man- made, manufactured by the priests and the politicians; manufactured to deprive man of his joy, to deprive man of his dignity, to deprive man of his humanity itself.

"I am not a religious person in your sense. I have a totally different definition of being religious. To me the religious person is one who is totally alive, intensely alive, aflame with love, aware of tremendous beauty all around; has the courage to rejoice each moment of life and death together. Only a man who is so capable of rejoicing in life and death -- his song continues. It does not matter whether life is happening or death is happening, his song is not disturbed, his dance does not waver?"

Only such an adventurous soul, only such a pilgrim of existence is religious. But in the name of religion man has been given poor substitutes, false, phony, meaningless, just toys to play with. Worshiping statues, chanting man-made mantras, paying tributes to those who have been cowards and escapists and who were not able to live life because they were so afraid of death, and calling them saints, religion has distracted man from true and authentic religiousness.

Devageet, you need not be worried about old age. And it is even more beautiful that people have starting thinking about you as ancient. That means you have attained to the real transcendence, you have lived everything. Now it is your maturity. You have not renounced anything, but you have simply passed through every experience. You have grown so experienced that now you need not repeat those experiences again and again.

This is transcendence.

You should rejoice, and I would like the whole world to understand the rejoicing that is our birthright in accepting with deep gratitude the old age and the final consummation of old age into death.

If you are not graceful about it, if you cannot laugh at it, if you cannot disappear into the eternal leaving a laughter behind, you have not lived rightly. You have been dominated and directed by wrong people. They may have been your prophets, your messiahs, your saviors, your tirthankaras; they may have been your incarnations of gods, but they have all been criminals in the sense that they

have deprived you of life and they have filled your hearts with fear.

My effort here is to fill your heart with laughter. Your every fiber of being should love to dance in every situation, whether it is day or night, whether you are down or up.

Irrespective of the situation, an undercurrent of cheerfulness should continue. That is authentic religiousness to me.

A few sutras for you, Devageet...

An ancient man is one who wears his glasses in bed so he can get a better look at the girls he dreams about.

An ancient man is one who only flirts with young girls at parties so his wife will take him home.

The beauty of being ancient is that since you are too old to set a bad example, you can start giving good advice.

Only a really old man, well-versed in the wisdom of life, can say, "Puppy love is lots of fun but few men realize it is the beginning of a dog's life."

Women like the simple things in life -- for example, the old men. Once the women start liking you, it means you are finished. They are no longer afraid of you; you are perfectly acceptable.

Women have their own reasons, although women's reason is like eternity: it passeth all understanding.

Devageet, if you have really become old, then you are in a wrong place. The right place for you will only be a Catholic monastery, because a Catholic monastery is a home for unmarried fathers.

Devageet, if you are really old, start loving your enemies; it makes them so angry.

An old married man's best friend is his wife's husband. Get it? ... No. I have to give you some explanation.

A man was sitting with his best friend and told him, "My wife has escaped with my best friend."

The friend said, "What are you talking about? I'M your best friend." The man said, "No, no more."

For ancient ones there is a new thing in the world to do; its name is punk yoga. Punk yoga is where you stand on someone else's head.

Inside every older person there is a younger person wondering what happened.

And remember, Devageet, if you are not going all the way, why go at all? And don't be worried at all about your old age, your ancientness. At least as far as enlightenment is concerned, it does not care how you get there: young, old, ancient; man, woman, all are accepted without any exception, because the ultimate experience is welcoming everybody from every direction. One need not be concerned about these small matters; moreover, they are not facts. You are simply getting paranoid about gossips.

Naturally, here there are so many beautiful people, gossips are bound to happen. And what else will meditators do? -- you cannot meditate for twenty-four hours. Just to relax, just for a change... the best relaxation for a meditator is gossip. It hurts nobody and it gives you free entertainment.

The truckdriver pulled into the truck stop, went inside, and ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. Sitting next to him was a member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, who looked at him and said, "Hey man, I don't like you sitting next to me. Move over!"

The truckdriver did not say a word, so the Hell's Angel reached over and put his cigarette out in the driver's coffee. But still the truckdriver was silent and continued eating his cake. When he had finished he got up, paid his bill and left.

When he had gone, the Hell's Angel said to the waiter, "Man, that guy was a pushover.

Did you see what a coward he was?"

"Yes," said the waiter, looking out of the window, "a real coward. And a terrible

driver too. He just drove over some poor guy's motorcycle."

The English couple had not made love for years. The wife was very suspicious: What is the matter? Is he having an affair with somebody? The lady was surprised to see the maid very happy that day, wearing a beautiful new dress and preparing her bedroom as if she was expecting someone to come in the night.

So that evening she sent the maid to her mother's for the night and then climbed into the maid's bed herself and switched off the light. Soon a shadowy figure climbed in through the window, slipped into bed and made passionate love to the lady.

When he had finished she felt satisfied like never before, but still wanting revenge she snapped on the bedside light. "I will bet you are surprised to see me," she said triumphantly.

"I sure am," said the chauffeur.

It is perfectly okay for meditators -- they are involved in such a serious research

-- to relax once in a while, gossip, joke, laugh. It is not contrary to their meditations; it is immensely helpful. It takes away your seriousness, it gives you back your innocence, simplicity, relaxedness. It helps you to go back into the deeper realms of meditations.

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

HOW DID YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THE QUESTION WAS FROM AN

INDIAN?

Arup Krishna, it is very simple. The question does not arise out of the blue; the question arises in the heart of the questioner.

The question says so much about the questioner that if you don't start immediately figuring out the answer... which is done all over the world; people start searching in their memory for the answer.

I don't have any ready-made answers. When I listen to your question, I have to go deeper into the question to find you first, because unless I know the questioner, I cannot respond.

I am not a holy book; I am a living being. I am not a computer that you ask the question and the answer comes irrespective of who is asking the question.

I can answer you, not your question. Your question is secondary. So when I hear your question, my first search is for the person who has asked it. Without knowing the person who has asked it my answer is going to be irrelevant. It will answer the question, but it will not answer the questioner, who is the real problem.

I have to go to the very roots. And it is not very difficult to know whether the question has come from a German or from a Jew or from an Indian or from an American; whether the question has come from a Jaina or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. It is very simple because the question contains the questioner. It has come with all the colors and all the conditionings of the questioner contained in it. It is absolutely indicative about the personality.

You are wondering, "How did you know when you said the question was from an Indian?" That kind of question cannot be asked by anyone else.

I will give you a few examples. For example, if somebody asks, "What is NIGOD?" that question can come only from someone who belongs to Jainism, because even the word

`nigod' will not be known to anybody else. It is part of the Jaina philosophy and it is not part of any other philosophy in the world. In fact nothing parallel to it exists anywhere. It is almost impossible to translate the word `nigod' into any other language because no parallel words exist. The idea has never existed anywhere else; hence, there cannot be any word for it. I will have to explain to you what nigod is.

For Jainism it has been a problem, but for no other religion, because Jainism does not believe in God the creator. Then the problem arises: from where do souls go on coming?

The population goes on increasing... in Mahavira's time the population of India was only two million; today it is nine hundred million. If there is nobody

manufacturing souls, from where do these souls go on coming? God is out of the question.

Other religions can answer, "God goes on creating..." Jainism cannot answer it that way, because there is no God in its philosophical framework and there is no creation; hence, it has to create another hypothesis like God. That hypothesis is nigod. Nigod means there is an infinite number of souls dormant in existence. Out of that immense, infinite number of sleeping souls a few go on waking up. That is from where people continuously go on coming, and they will go on coming. And the source of their coming is inexhaustible. The name of that source is nigod.

If somebody asks a question about nigod, I can easily know the question can come only from a follower of Mahavira. It cannot come from anybody else -- the followers of Moses may not even have heard the word.

Nigod does not explain anything; it is as stupid as the idea of God. This is something to be understood, because you will come across such things again and again. Jainas refuse the hypothesis of God because it does not answer the question. The question is: Who created the existence? -- because without creating, how can the existence come into being?

All the religions have agreed on the hypothesis of a God as the creator except Jainism, because they say that if we accept God as the creator, then the question again comes up: Who created God? God cannot be the answer, because the question still remains relevant: Who created God? And if you say that God is not created by anyone -- he is self-sufficient, he is eternal, not created by anyone else -- then Jainism laughs and says that if God can be without any creator, why cannot the whole existence be without any creator?

What is the problem? Why unnecessarily create a hypothesis? And on that point they are right.

This is the scientific approach. Never accept any unnecessary hypothesis unless it explains something. Why go on burdening yourself with hypotheses?

So Jainism rejected the idea of God because it does not answer the question. Then they were in the same trouble. People started asking, "From where do the new souls go on coming?" The doors of God were closed; they had to find a new hypothesis, but it is as stupid as the hypothesis of God. That's the beauty -- that

nobody sees his own stupidity, but everybody is capable of seeing the stupidity of anybody else. Jainism says, "Souls go on coming from a dormant, infinite source, where billions and billions of souls are asleep.

As they go on waking up they start moving, finding wombs."

But no Jaina thinker asks, "Who created this nigod? From where came this infinite source of sleeping souls?" It raises as many questions as Jainism raises about God, but it never raises questions about nigod... from where did it come?

Secondly, if these souls are asleep, were they awake before or have they always been asleep from eternity? If they were awake before, then it is very dangerous, because those who are awake can fall asleep and get into nigod, for infinity. Nobody knows whether they will be awake again or not.

If you say that they have always been asleep from the very beginning, then what made them asleep? People need sleep when they have worked hard in the day; they are tired, and they go to sleep. Eternal sleep... Even to sleep twenty-four hours is very difficult --

after six, eight hours you start thinking about tea or coffee or some breakfast. These people have not taken even breakfast for infinity, and you still call them alive?

Even more important, the question arises: Why have a few of them suddenly become awake? What happens? Some mosquitoes disturb their sleep? Because millions of others are fast asleep, and suddenly one becomes awake -- you have to provide some reason why particularly this person and not somebody else. You cannot say that he was having a nightmare. He has never been awake, he knows nothing, he cannot dream. For dreaming you need some experiences of waking. About what will these people be dreaming?

People dream about things because those are the things they have missed when they were awake. People dream of beautiful women because when they are awake they have only their wife. It is the wife which is the cause of many saints: they renounce the world, because without renouncing the world they could not renounce the wife! The poor fellows had to renounce everything, just to escape from the wife.

Perhaps the proverb is true, that every great man has a wife behind him. Because

she goes on nagging and harassing him and finding no other way he goes on succeeding, becoming richer, climbing ladders. The wife goes on hitting: "Go on!"... she never allows any rest for the poor fellow.

What can they dream about? They have never been hungry, they have never eaten anything; they cannot dream about ice cream. And certainly they cannot have nightmares which can awaken them.

Aesop has a beautiful parable. A cat is sitting on a tree, giggling and smiling. And a dog looks up and asks, "What is the matter, you idiot?"

And the cat says, "I was just having a beautiful afternoon nap and I dreamed that it is raining, very fast, strong rain, and the most amazing part is, it is not water that is raining, it is mice."

The dog was very angry. He said, "You idiot. You will never grow out of your retardedness. In my holy scriptures there are instances when it has rained, but it has rained always cats, never rats!"

Obviously, a cat cannot think the way a dog can think, and they cannot agree. But if somebody is seeing rats and mice raining you can know that the person who is seeing the dream is a cat. There is not much logic involved in it.

An Indian went to Singapore to buy a video. He went into a shop and asked, "What is the price of this video near the window?"

The seller answered, "Sorry sir, we don't sell to Indians."

The Indian went back to his hotel and dressed in his best clothes. Back at the shop, again he asked, "What is the price of this video near the window?"

To his dismay, the seller replied, "Sorry sir, we don't sell to Indians."

The Indian went back to his hotel and dressed in Western-style clothes -- shorts, T-shirt, sunglasses. Returning again to the shop, the Indian was most upset to receive the same answer to his enquiry. In exasperation he asked, "How do you know that I'm an Indian?"

"Oh," said the seller, "that's easy. The machine near the window is not a video, it is a washing machine."

Paddy was convinced he was a cannibal. His wife finally persuaded him to visit a psychiatrist.

When Paddy returned home after his first visit, his wife asked, "So tell me, what is a fancy psychiatrist like?"

"Delicious," beamed Paddy.

If the man thinks himself to be a cannibal, then you can expect the answer that he has given.

You can expect the question, you can expect the answer. And from the question or from the answer, from both the sides, you can find out whose is the mind, of what kind of conditioning.

The Indian always asks questions about his repressed sexuality -- not directly that he is suffering from repressed sexuality, but in a very indirect way. He does not even think that in his question he is showing himself. He asks questions about other people who are not completely dressed; other people who are hugging each other in public; other people who are holding the hands of their girlfriends. He never thinks that all these questions show only one thing, that he is sexually repressed. These are not questions about other people; these are questions about his own unconscious.

Now, no American will ask that question. That is absolutely out of the question. People ask about things which they are missing.

Just a few days ago a therapist enquired of me, "I am at a loss, because so many Japanese sannyasins are coming to the groups, and it is absolutely impossible to work with them.

And the impossibility is that psychoanalysis and other sister systems of therapies have been evolved in the West. They are not applicable to the Far Eastern people. These people have a different conditioning, centuries old."

The therapist became afraid because Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis says that every child, if the child is a boy, wants to make love to his mother. And because the father goes on making love to his mother and he is not allowed, he hates the father. He is jealous of the father; he thinks and dreams of killing him. If the baby is a girl she wants to make love to her father, and

obviously the mother is the enemy, because the mother goes on making love to the father and the girl is never allowed -- not even allowed to think about it.

Sigmund Freud was very much condemned for his ideas, but there is some truth in them.

And after a struggle of one century, slowly, slowly Western society has accepted the idea.

Now there is no resistance against it. If you say to someone that you hate your father, that you wanted to make love to your mother, he will accept it.

But if you say that to a Japanese, either he will kill himself or he will kill you -- those are the only two alternatives. He will immediately challenge you to a fight because it is absolutely inconceivable to a Japanese that he has even dreamt of making love to his mother or he was jealous of his father; that he was antagonistic and hated his father, that he wanted to kill his father. Because the Japanese conditioning is that the very idea, even the idea of being disrespectful to your father is enough to feel so ashamed that you don't have any worth even to live a single moment more. Hara-kiri, suicide is the only way.

In Japan millions of people down the ages have committed suicide over such small matters that you cannot conceive. Rarely, once in a while, somebody commits suicide, but you can see that he has reasons: his business went bankrupt, his wife eloped, he was the richest man and now he has to live like a beggar on the street. It is so against his ego that he would rather kill himself.

But hara-kiri, suicide in Japan is inconceivable to anybody else in the whole world. You misbehaved, you were disrespectful towards your father; when it was expected of you to bow down to your father you did not. That's enough. Now if you have any dignity, you should commit hara-kiri -- nothing less than that!

So the therapists are in a difficulty because those poor fellows are talking whatever they have learned from Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler. And they think they are talking very sensible things, but to the Japanese... He immediately stands up saying, "Take your words back! What do you think of me?... I wanted to make love to my mother? I will kill myself, even if the idea happens to me. Even if I dream it in the night, in the morning I will finish myself. What nonsense are you talking?" Now the therapist does not know what to do.

In the beginning, when Japanese sannyasins started to come, I was at a loss, because they have a different symbology, different gestures, different from anybody else in the world.

Everywhere nodding your head up and down means yes. In Japan it means no. Nodding your head side to side everywhere in the world means no. In Japan it means yes.

So when I used to ask, I was at a loss. The person has come to be initiated into sannyas, and when I asked him, "Have you really thought about it? Do you really want to take sannyas?" he would say no. He was saying yes -- I was thinking he was saying no. He looked amazed -- I looked amazed. Finally, I had to make one Japanese sannyasin sit near me. I said, "You translate all these strange gestures because I cannot figure them out."

Conditions all over the world are different. Your question comes from your conditionings.

If somebody has a clarity and transparency of eyes, he can see from where the question has arisen. It is not difficult to know, Arup Krishna, that the question is from an Indian.

The Indian court was in session and the attractive blond took the stand. As the prosecuting attorney approached the girl he coughed nervously, and while fixing his tie asked, "Where were you on the night before last?"

"I was with a gentleman friend," she answered, looking down shyly. "And where were you last night?" continued the attorney.

"I was with another gentleman friend," she answered coyly.

Then, his voice very gentle and low, he asked, "Where are you going tonight?"

The defense attorney jumped to his feet and shouted, "Objection! I asked her first."

It is not difficult to know that you are in an Indian court where everybody is sexually starved.

Questions coming out of sexual starvation will indicate the religious conditioning against life. And India has suffered most; it has the deepest conditioning against life, that's why it also has the biggest ego of being spiritual. And it is sheer nonsense, because having such a deeply repressed sexuality and then the claim for being spiritual is just a contradiction.

You can be spiritual only when all sex is transformed, not repressed -- understood, transmuted. When there is no sex lurking in your mind somewhere, when the whole energy involved in sex has become luminous, only then can you be spiritual, because sex at the lowest point when it becomes aflame is the same energy as enlightenment at the ultimate point. At the alpha point it is sex; at the omega point it is samadhi, it is superconsciousness.

So whatever you ask, you show without knowing your unconscious. I have to look into your unconscious and only then I can answer you relevantly. Then my answer is no more academic, then my answer becomes intimate: the answer out of love and compassion, not out of knowledge and ready-made wisdom.

A pair of good friends, Frenchmen... Now even if the mention of Frenchmen is not made, looking at the whole episode you can conclude it is about Frenchmen.

A pair of good friends were strolling down the street in Paris one day when they spied two women approaching.

"Sacre bleu, Pierre," cried one. "There comes my wife and mistress walking towards us arm in arm!"

"Mon Dieu, Henri," cried the second, "I was about to say the same thing!"

But that can happen only in Paris, and that can happen only about the Frenchman. You cannot expect this happening in Poona.

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #21

Chapter title: Philosia... the path of the mystic

30 September 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code:

8709300

ShortTitle:

PILGR21

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

95

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

AM I A PHILOSOPHER?

Milarepa, philosophy is not the real thing, and to be a philosopher is just to go astray.

Philosophy only thinks but never experiences, and there are things which cannot be thought about: either you experience them or you don't. How can you think about truth, of which you have no experience? How can a blind man think about light and colors and rainbows and flowers and butterflies? Whatever he is going

to think is going to be wrong.

To know the colors, to know the light, to know the stars one needs eyes; not thinking.

And to have eyes is a totally different phenomenon than thinking. In fact, only blind people think. Those who have eyes see, experience.

Philosophy is a non-existential approach to existence; hence it never comes to any conclusion. It goes round and round but remains stuck in the same groove. One of the oldest professions of man is to be a philosopher, and it has always been praised very highly. But the reason for the praise was that the philosopher is thinking about ultimate values, while the whole world is concerned with the mundane. It is a world of blind people. And if one blind man starts thinking about light, other blind people are going to worship him. But there is no way to think about light.

There is no way to think about truth. There is no way to think about love. There is no way to think about beauty.

In fact, the moment you pinpoint some ultimate value for thinking, you immediately feel uneasy. For example, if somebody asks you, pointing to a beautiful sunset, "What do you think about it?" or to a beautiful rainbow, "What do you think about it?" obviously you are going to say, "It is beautiful," because you have never thought about whether you know beauty or not.

You have simply accepted others' opinions, and that accumulation of others' opinions is all that you have -- nothing of your own, everything borrowed. If it is insisted upon,

"What do you mean when you say a sunset is beautiful? What is beauty?", you will immediately feel caught in a difficulty. There is no way to define what beauty is. There is no way to define what good is. There is no way to define what love is.

You can love but you cannot define it.

You can be overwhelmed by love, you can be transformed by love, but still you will never be able to think about it. Thinking is a very low category, in fact the very bottom; you cannot go lower than that.

Being a philosopher is not something great, Milarepa. I hate the very word because it helps people to hide their ignorance. It never gives them a breakthrough into light, into life, into love, into existence. It blocks their path. It becomes a China Wall.

Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent -- not even a flicker of thought -- and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.

Last night it rained again very hard. It was so silent -- everybody must have been fast asleep. It was past midnight, but in the darkness of the night, in the serenity of the night, the dance of the rain was immensely beautiful. But you have to be receptive to it.

Philosophy is an aggression, and through an aggressive attitude you may become a scientist, but you will never go beyond matter. You can dissect matter, you can think about its constituents, you can put it together, you can even produce it, but matter is something outside you.

Beauty is something within you.

To see the beauty of a rose you need a beautiful heart.

Light is not just outside. To see the light you need receptive eyes. You may never have wondered that if the whole world suddenly goes blind would the sun still shine with its light? Ordinary logic will say yes, it does not matter; whether you are blind or whether you have eyes, the sun will rise. But those who have penetrated deeply into all these problems have come across very different conclusions. If everybody on the earth goes blind, there will be no light at all. The sun is only half of the phenomenon. Unless you have receiving eyes, there cannot be any light, nor can there be any darkness.

The moment you leave your room, lock the room, you are performing a miracle of which you are not aware. All the photographs in the room, all the clothes in the room, all the paintings, everything disappears. No color can exist without an eye to see it. The color is a response of an eye, so the moment you have locked your room, your room becomes colorless -- everything. The green is no longer green; the red is no longer red. But if you just look through the keyhole all the colors simply jump back in their place. Once the eye is there the missing link is no longer missing.

One cannot think about anything which is valuable.

This is the basic difference between the whole heritage of philosophy and my approach.

With great humbleness I want to say that all great philosophers are great blind men --

certainly great, because what they cannot see they manage to think about, what they cannot touch they manage to figure things about.

In the fables of Aesop you must have heard the most famous fable. Five blind men go to see an elephant. All five are philosophers, Milarepa, and naturally they start touching the elephant. Somebody touches the legs of the elephant and he says, "My god, the elephant is just like the pillars in a temple."

The other one who is touching the big ears of the elephant... Certainly the story must have been born in India because the African elephant does not have big ears. That's how you can find from where a story is coming. The Indian elephant has really big ears. The blind man who was touching the ears said, "You idiot! Stop all that nonsense about pillars in a temple. The elephant is like a big fan." Before electricity came into being, rich people used to have very big fans, and two servants standing by their sides were continuously moving the fans over them. Those fans are almost like the big ears of the elephant.

And so on and so forth; all the five blind philosophers argued and argued. One man was watching. Just a simple and ordinary man, not a philosopher but a man with eyes. He could not believe how these people are going to come to a conclusion. They are fighting, quarreling, arguing. He said to them, "You are all in a tremendously great difficulty.

Your arguments are not going to help. What you need are eyes, not arguments. Once you see the elephant, there is no question of thinking about it."

The word `philosophy' comes from two words: `philo' and `sophia'. Philo means love, and sophia means wisdom or knowledge -- love of knowledge. In the East we have nothing parallel to philosophy. In the East we have a totally different approach. It is not the approach of the philosopher; it is the approach of the mystic.

We don't have any system parallel to philosophy in the East. What we have is totally different. But continuously there has been a misunderstanding between the scholars from the West, from the East. They have all started calling it Eastern philosophy. There is no such thing in existence.

In the East we have a word `darshan', which means seeing not thinking; it means simply seeing. Darshan cannot be translated as philosophy. I have coined a word for it. I don't care about languages and I don't care about grammar, and I don't care about dictionaries and encyclopedias. My concern is existential not linguistic. I have coined my own word and that is philosia: love of seeing, not love of knowledge.

Milarepa, if you have decided to be something, be a lover of seeing the truth. Be a lover of experiencing the truth. Become part of the vast experience I am calling philosia.

Trust more in your eyes than in your mind.

Trust more in your heart than your thoughts. Trust more in your being, because it is the being which is going to experience the very center of the cosmos.

Avoid philosophy; it is a sickness of the soul. The moment you see the distinction between philosophy and philosia, you will be amazed that that small difference between two words takes you on different routes. Philosophy takes you deeper into the mind; it refines your mind. It gives you more systematic arguments. It can help you to make a perfect system of thought but it will be only hot air; it will not correspond to the reality.

Philosia will take you on a different path, the path of the mystic, whose whole search is to find a new way of looking at things. His search is for eyes. His search is for an open heart

-- to be receptive. His ultimate search is to come in tune with his being, with the existential heartbeat. When your heart is beating in synchronicity with the universal heart, you know without knowledge, you are wise without wisdom, because you experience without any explanation.

If you want to understand me, then you have to understand the distinction between these two words. Philosophy leads deeper into mind and that means deeper into mess. Philosia leads you beyond mind into a state of no-mind. Philosia is basically meditation. It is an opening of a third eye within you, as if... The third eye is only a new way of receiving the gifts of existence. I am using only a parable. Don't take it literally.

Philosophy is bound to be aggressive. One of the books of the great philosopher of the modern age, Bertrand Russell, is entitled, CONQUEST OF NATURE. That indicates the hidden aggressiveness of philosophy.

Philosia is not a conquest of nature, but on the contrary is a willingness to be conquered by nature. It is a deep trustfulness, openness, receptivity. The philosopher is bound to become serious. The deeper he moves into the paths of philosophy, the more serious he will become, because the farther away he is going from life, love, the farther away he is going from beauty, from celebration, from festivity, from laughter.

Just the opposite happens to the mystic. He comes closer and closer to a childlike innocence. He is full of smiles, bursting out into laughter looking at the miracle of existence all around. We are so blind that we never see the wonder anywhere. You sow a seed and the rains come, the seed disappears and dies in the soil, and two green leaves start sprouting -- and you don't see any wonder? You don't see the magic? Out of that small seed will grow a big huge tree with thousands of flowers and thousands of fruits.

Out of one seed the tree will give millions of seeds every year.

It is said by a scientist that just a single seed can make the whole earth green in time. So much miracle in a small seed! But we live in an attitude of "taking for granted." That is our blindness. Don't take anything for granted, and then you will be encountering on every step, every moment, miracles upon miracles.

The mystic becomes so overwhelmed by the majesty and the miraculousness of existence that he knows, but he does not reduce his knowing into knowledge. He

never becomes a philosopher. He always remains a seer.

Milarepa, you are a musician. That is far better and far higher than being a philosopher.

Perhaps you have not thought about it.…

Music consists of sound and silences. Philosophy is only so much prose, just words and words and words. The word is a secondary phenomenon. Sound is a primary phenomenon. You can listen to the music of a waterfall, you can listen to the music of wind passing through the pine trees... nothing is said, but much is understood. The wind passing through the pine trees has no words, but it has a sound.

In the fall when all the paths become full of falling leaves... have you walked in a forest?

Just by your walking you create sound, because the paths are full of old leaves. Just a little breeze comes and those old leaves start dancing and moving. Existence is full of sounds, but it never speaks a single word. The birds are singing but they are only making sounds. They are not saying anything, but their songs are immensely beautiful. They touch the very core of your heart.

Music is a higher system than philosophy, because music is something in between philosophy and philosia; in other words it is something between words and silence, perhaps just a midway overnight stay. If you fall back, you can become a philosopher. If you go ahead, you can become a mystic. Falling back means losing sounds and catching hold of words. Going forward means losing even sounds and just entering into silence because music consists of both the sound and silence. It is a rhythm, a dance, hand in hand between sound and silence.

A musician can easily become a meditator, he is very close. There is nothing closer to meditation than music -- wordless, meaningless, but tremendously significant. It says nothing but shows much, expresses nothing but brings to you a great splendor. From musician move towards the mystic. The day your music consists only of silence, you have arrived home.

This will not make you sad. Music is not serious; it is playfulness, it is song, it is dance. It has an immense beauty. It can move peoples' hearts. Entering into

music, don't remain stuck there. That's where modern music has got stuck. It has become too much sound and it has forgotten the silences in between. You have to change the gestalt.

If you know about gestalt psychology... it is a very specialized approach. The word

`gestalt' is worth understanding. In any book on gestalt psychology you will find a picture inside, just a sketch, a line sketch of a woman. If you look at it and go on staring, a moment comes... the woman becomes old. If you go on staring, again a moment comes...

the woman becomes young, very beautiful.

In those lines both are hidden; just your gestalt changes, your emphasis changes. You are looking at the lines in one way; it looks like an old woman. But because your mind cannot stay long with any experience -- it is continuously moving -- soon it changes its gestalt, and the same lines which were making an old woman suddenly create a beautiful young woman.

The strangest part is that you cannot see both together. You cannot see because obviously the same lines have to be used. Either you can see the old woman or you can see the young woman, but you cannot see them simultaneously, together, because there are not two.

The word `gestalt' means change of emphasis.

There is a great Sufi book -- I would like to call it the greatest book in the world because nothing is written in it; it is absolutely empty. It is almost twelve hundred years old, and the first man who purchased it was Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.

His disciples were very intrigued, very curious, because he never read that book in front of anybody. When all are gone he would close the door and pull out the book, which he used to keep under his pillow, and then he would read it. Naturally it was creating much curiosity, "What kind of mysterious book is it?" People tried in every possible way.

Sometimes a few disciples were found on the roof, removing tiles and looking underneath to see what Jalaluddin Rumi is reading, but they could not figure it

out.

The day Jalaluddin Rumi died, they were more concerned with the book than Jalaluddin Rumi... and they loved the man. They loved him as Sufis have never loved any other master. Mevlana means beloved master. That word is used only for Jalaluddin Rumi and for nobody else. In twelve hundred years in the world of the Sufis there has never been a more charming, more beautiful, more loving, more human being than Jalaluddin Rumi.

But even the disciples forgot that their master had died. They rushed and pulled out the book from underneath the pillow and they looked, and they were amazed

-- the book was absolutely empty! There was nothing to read. But those who were very close and intimate devotees, they understood the meaning.

Words have to be dropped. Only then can you have silence.

The whole teaching of the book is be silent. First let the words go, then the sounds, and there remains an emptiness, nothingness, just a pure space. That purity is what meditation is all about. For twelve hundred years the book has not been published because no publisher was ready to publish it. Obviously the publisher asked... there is nothing to publish in it. Finally one Sufi master published it himself. Now it is available -- but it is just empty pages. It is called THE BOOK OF BOOKS.

Move from sound to silence.

This way you will not become serious and dead like your saints. I have heard, Milarepa: A man once said to Doctor Johnson, "You are a philosopher, Doctor Johnson. I have tried too, in my time, to be a philosopher, but I don't know how to be one. You see, cheerfulness was always breaking in."

You cannot be a philosopher and retain your cheerfulness. It is better to drop all philosophizing and open all the buds of your cheerfulness. Sing just like the birds. Play on your guitars, but remember the gestalt should be on the silences. Dance to abandon, and you may be coming closer and closer to the reality because the reality is so festive. It is a festival of lights, day in, day out.

Just watch existence and you will be surprised. What do these poor trees have? --

no bank account, no houses to live in, no clothes to hide their nakedness. But just watch their cheerfulness; just watch their flowers, their fragrance. They don't have anything as possessions, but they have themselves. You may have many possessions, but you don't have yourself.

You are a house full of things, but the master is missing. Awaken the master. Be more alert, aware, receptive, and you will come to know immense mysteries surrounding you.

When one feels surrounded by mysteries, a deep gratefulness arises in the heart. That gratefulness is the only authentic prayer. All other prayers are false, manufactured by man. Only gratefulness that arises spontaneously is not manufactured by you. It is a happening just like love.

And once it starts happening, it starts growing wider, bigger. Soon it starts reaching to the faraway stars. Your whole life becomes nothing but a prayer. Your actions become prayer, your rest becomes prayer, your work becomes prayer, your sleep becomes prayer, you become a prayer. It is not something to do in a church or in a temple. It is something to be, wherever you are.

Milarepa, no one has ever heard of any philosopher coming to a conclusion. No one has ever heard about any philosopher becoming enlightened, becoming self- realized. It is as unheard of as anyone ever complaining of a parachute not opening. Philosophers are the most misguided people on the earth, and to follow them is to follow blind people.

Find someone who sees, who is a seer, who experiences... whose heart dances with the wind, the rain, the sun, whose innermost being has achieved a synchronicity with all that surrounds you, from the lowest grass leaf to the biggest star in the world. He is in tune with everything. He is no longer an outsider; he is an insider. The philosopher is an outsider. He stands away and thinks about things. The mystic takes a jump into existence, becomes an insider, has no need to think. He tastes, he smells, he sees, he loves, he lives.

Truth has to be lived, not known.

Life has to be squeezed to the last drop of juice. It is not something to be contemplated upon -- drink it.

The last words of Jesus to his disciples are significant. The last supper, the last

time when Jesus ate and drank with his disciples before being caught and taken to prison... He was aware that he is going to be caught; the rumor was all around. He was aware that it is possible he may be crucified. So after supper he spoke a few words to the disciples:

"Perhaps I may not be able to see you again. Just remember one thing: You have not been with me to listen to what I say; you have been with me to eat me, to drink me, to live me.

I may be gone, but you can continue to drink me."

Once you have known the secret of drinking and eating and absorbing, then the whole existence is available.

The master is only a small window into the universe. Once you have come to the master, the window disappears and you are facing the whole existence. The frame of the window should not become important. That's what has happened to millions of people: the frame of the window is being worshiped; nobody is looking through the window to the beyond.

The window is only an invitation to see to the beyond, but people are worshiping the windows: somebody worshiping Buddha, somebody worshiping Jesus, somebody worshiping Ramakrishna. These are all windows, but they are not for worshiping; they are to be transcended. They give you the vision, the philosia. Then leave them behind and go on moving into existence as deeply as possible. And that is possible only in silence.

Let your music slowly become more and more close to meditation. Philosophy is a kind of disease -- very dangerous, almost incurable. I would like you not to be a philosopher but just a dancer, a singer, a flute player, because they are very close to my world of meditation.

My emphasis is to increase your cheerfulness, your laughter, because this world is not for the miserable. This world is not for the people who have become too accustomed to anxiety, anguish. This world belongs to those who live moment to moment in utter ecstasy. Cheerfulness, nonseriousness, a sense of humor to me are very fundamental qualities of a religious being.

Solomon Rabinowitz went to his doctor to have a checkup. The doctor said, "For a man of eighty-seven you are doing well. Why a checkup?"

Solly explained that he was going to marry a girl of twenty. He would not be dissuaded, so the doctor's final advice was, "Then if you hope for a fruitful marriage, take a lodger as well."

When they met again after eight months the old man said, "Congratulate me, Doctor, my wife is pregnant."

The doctor paused for a moment, and then said, "Ah yes, so you took my advice and had a lodger as well?"

"Of course," grinned Solly through his toothless gums. "She is pregnant too." Just remain cheerful.

Existence loves nothing more than cheerfulness.

Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan are traveling in a plane together when Reagan says, "If I throw a one dollar bill out of the plane, I will make someone happy."

"Okay," says Gorbachev, "but if I throw out a one hundred ruble note I will make one hundred people happy."

"In that case," says Reagan, "I will throw out a million dollars and make a million people happy."

"Go ahead," says Gorbachev, "and then I will throw you out and make the whole world happy."

It was in the divorce court and the judge asked the husband, "So you have not spoken to your wife for three years -- why?"

The husband replied, "I did not want to interrupt her."

The priest was visiting the young widow who had just moved to his parish. After talking with her for a while he raised a questioning eyebrow and said, "Now let me get this straight. You say you have a child of two and another three years old, and yet you say that your husband has been dead for seven years."

"Yes," said the woman, "but I'm not."

A philosopher becomes enclosed within himself. He loses contact with the birds. Do you hear them? -- for no purpose, just out of sheer joy, just for being in existence.… Nobody has asked them to sing. The song is coming from an inner source of cheerfulness.

Nobody has asked the trees to give flowers so colorful and so fragrant. But the tree, just out of gratitude towards existence, brings all those beautiful flowers -- a silent prayer and a beautiful offering.

A man remains miserable if he becomes closed within his own mind and goes on and on just making sand castles -- words, theories, hypotheses. He loses contact with existence.

And to lose contact with existence is to be almost dead before death comes.

It is almost the average case that people die at the age of thirty and are buried at the age of seventy. For forty years what have they been doing here? -- just dragging themselves, and dragging towards the graveyard. These people go to the churches, go to the temples, go to the mosques, go to the synagogues, and because of these corpses, all synagogues, all churches, all temples have become utterly sad, serious.

In Israel just now there are riots among Jews themselves. They had to fight with the Mohammedans, who are surrounding them like a vast ocean, and Israel is just a small island surrounded by millions of Mohammedans; that fight continues. But a new fight has started which is more dangerous; it is coming from inside. Now Jews are divided into three sections in Israel.

The people who have been living there for centuries think they are the real Jews. They follow everything as traditionally as it has been followed since Moses, four thousand years ago. The second group has come from European countries. They are a little more progressive; they cannot follow dead routines. They have lived in a different atmosphere, in different cultures.

The worst problem is with the Jews who have come from America. And you will be surprised to know that on the Sabbath, on Friday evening, the orthodox Jews stop working -- everything. The American Jews have never thought that driving their car home from the office is work. The American Jews are being stoned; their cars are being damaged. They are beaten because they are driving cars. No work is allowed.

Now Israel is really in a terrible mess. Orthodox Jews are telling the European and the American Jews to go back, "You are destroying our religion, our culture, our tradition."

And naturally, the American Jew is a totally different species; just in name is he a Jew.

I have told you one story befor.…

Three American rabbis were bragging about their synagogue's progressiveness. The first rabbi said, "Nobody can beat me. In my synagogue people are allowed to smoke."

The second rabbi laughed and said, "That's nothing. In my synagogue we are really progressive. People are allowed to drink, bring their girlfriends, dance, are even allowed to make love."

The third rabbi said, "Drop all this crap. We are the most avant garde, most progressive people in the world. In my synagogue there is a board hanging on the door saying that on Jewish holidays the synagogue will remain closed."

This is real progress! Naturally the orthodox Jews in Israel who have always lived there and have not known anything about the world, are still with their conditionings from the past. They are serious people. They cannot conceive that in a synagogue you should laugh. In a synagogue even a smile is not allowed. You have to be serious; it is serious business.

But the whole existence is nonserious.

To me the only authentic temple is existence.

Learn from it. You don't have to become a philosopher, you don't have to become a saint, you don't have to become a wise man. Milarepa, it is perfectly good to remain OTHERwise. The so-called wise have tortured humanity so much that now my preference is for the OTHERwise.

Be more human. Don't betray the earth. Be more in love with the earth and with all the treasures that that the earth provides you with. It is our home. We are not renouncers, we are rejoicers. We want to participate in the dance of existence.

My people are not anti-life. My people are life affirmative. Except life there is no God.

And life is not something to be thought about, it is something to be danced, to be loved, to be celebrated.

A Frenchman staying at an English country house for the weekend was attracted to a beautiful society girl, and without much difficulty seduced her. Several months later they met by chance at a very select society ball. He stepped forward with outstretched hand, but she walked straight past him without acknowledgment. As soon as he could, the Frenchman cornered her and said, "Surely you remember me?"

"Of course I do, young man, but you are not to assume that in England a one- night frolic means that we have been introduced."

Life is so hilarious that to be serious is to be sick unnecessarily. A psychological health, a spiritual sanity, a possibility to remember that here you are not to be dead, that you have to live life in its totality, with intensity, to burn your torch of life from both ends together.

That is the only authentic philosia.

But don't be a philosopher; that is the original sin of man. I stand against all philosophies because all philosophies are poisonous. They poison your possibilities of humor, of playfulness, of cheerfulness. They destroy your songs. They make you crippled and stop you from dancing. All these philosophers with long faces have dominated humanity too long. It is time that their domination be completely eradicated.

A new era of the mystics is knocking on your door. Listen carefully and open your doors.

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #22

Chapter title: The sweetness of silence on your tongue

30 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code:

8709305

ShortTitle:

PILGR22

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

68

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

I HAVE OVERCOME THE GOSSIPS, PLEASE JUST GIVE ME SOME SUTRAS TO

MEDITATE UPON.

Devageet, it is next to impossible to overcome gossips, particularly in such a juicy, holy place! Gossips are so intrinsic to a cheerful life that they need not be overcome. They should be enjoyed. They also contain a certain fragment of truth. That should be discovered. No gossip is just a lie. It is a strange phenomenon that all gospels are simply lies; and no gossip is just a lie, there is some element, some fragment of truth in it.

The serious people are addicted to gospels. And if nonserious people start overcoming gossips, what will be left for you? Gospels you have overcome already; now all that remains for you is gossiping. Life has always been taken seriously, and that has produced a miserable mankind. Life should be taken as fun! Only then can we create a paradise on the earth.

Life is neither profane nor sacred; those are words used by the serious people. Either they condemn it, or they make it divine; either this extreme or that extreme -- but the truth is always in the middle, in the exact middle you are standing on the truth. Life is neither profane nor divine. It is simply a tremendous opportunity to rejoice. The moment you call it profane, you start feeling guilty. You become crippled on your own, you cannot dance -

- dance becomes profane and condemned -- you cannot sing, you cannot celebrate.

One Zen master, Ta-Kuan, was on his deathbed. He asked for some paper and his calligraphic brush. It has been a longstanding tradition in the world of Zen that masters when departing from life give their last statement, written. Ta-Kuan wrote on the paper a Japanese word which means dream. He laughed, closed his eyes, the brush dropped from his hand.

But before writing this last statement he had instructed his disciples, "Bury me just in the mud behind the temple, because I am part of the earth and the earth wants to reclaim me, to rejuvenate, to create me anew. I am tired and it wants to take me to rest. And don't mourn when I die, but celebrate. Don't make a monument on my grave, because I am going home. It is not a grave to me, it is only entering into eternal rest. So rejoice, sing, dance, celebrate and carry on your daily work as if nothing has happened."

People like Ta-Kuan understand that life, although it is a dream, does not need to be condemned. It is a beautiful dream. You can sing it, you can dance it, you can

make it more beautiful, you can decorate it.

To call it a dream is not a condemnation. He has instructed that they should celebrate and they should continue their daily work as if nothing has happened. The people who know never feel guilty about life and never put life on a high pedestal beyond their reach, so that they can only kneel down, lose their dignity, their pride and their self-respect and pray to a hypothetical divine life -- to someone who does not exist, far away in the stars.

All the religions have done both these things. On the one hand they have condemned your ordinary life, and they have created a tremendous sickness of guilt all over the world. For centuries man has been drowning in guilt. All his pleasures are poisoned. The condemnation goes so long and so deep that you cannot enjoy your food, you cannot enjoy your love, you cannot enjoy your clothes, you cannot enjoy at all. Something inside you goes on condemning: you are doing something wrong.

A small boy in the school was saying, "It took me twelve years to understand that `don't'

is not my name! Whatever I was doing -- `Don't do it!' Everything that I was doing was wrong, and everything that I had no interest in was right."

The impossible is made right and the possible and the real is made a sin. Between these two -- the sin and the virtue -- every man is crushed, sandwiched between two rocks. You don't see the naturalness, acceptability of whatever you are, without any ideals.

Devageet, nothing is wrong in gossiping; just gossip in an enlightened way. Beautify your gossips; let your gossips also be part of your understanding, of your love, of your compassion. Even your gossips will show who you are. They are your signatures.

Gossiping becomes evil when it is out of jealousy, meanness, violence, when it is just to pull somebody down, when it comes out of a revengeful mind -- but it is not the fault of gossiping. Gossiping can come out of a meditative mind. Gossiping can come out of love, out of peace. Gossiping is an art in itself. Everybody is not capable of gossiping. There are born gossipers!

Devageet, you cannot overcome it; it is intrinsic to your nature. You are a born

gossiper.

You gossip against yourself.

You are asking me for some sutras to meditate upon. Before I give you some sutras, it has to be understood that you can contemplate on them, but you cannot meditate on them.

That is the difference between contemplation and meditation. That is the difference between mind and no-mind. That is the difference between philosophy and philosia.

Contemplation needs an object. Without an object to contemplate on, you cannot contemplate -- contemplate on what? Some content, some object is needed for your mind to focus upon it; hence, contemplation never goes beyond mind.

Philosophy is contemplation. Science is concentration.

Religion is meditation.

But meditation means you don't have anything, any object to think about. You are just in a state of absolute aloneness. You don't have anything on which you can focus yourself --

not a sutra, not a mantra, not any great value of life, just pure space all around you. Then you are in meditation.

Meditation is never about something. Meditation is a state.

You can be in it; it is not something that you have to do -- not even thinking, not even contemplating.

There are beautiful ways of contemplation, and I will give you sutras to contemplate. But it has to be made absolutely clear that there is nothing in the world that you can meditate upon.

Meditation is simply going beyond mind, beyond the functioning of the mind, beyond all the fetters of the mind, and just entering into this silence, unmoving, unwavering -- just a pure awareness, a silent flame, a great joy... but nothing to see. A great clarity of seeing, a vast openness... the whole sky is yours, but nothing objects to you, nothing prevents you.

For the first time the nothingness has opened its doors to you. You simply are, utterly centered, without even a single thought flying across your mind. Then you are in meditation.

There are many moments here when you are in meditation in spite of yourself. I am not an orator, I speak only to create silence for you. I speak only so that between two words you can feel the gap... that between two words you can fall into the silence. The speaker, the orator, the philosopher, the teacher, they emphasize the words; I emphasize the silences between the words. They emphasize the lines; I emphasize between the gap between two lines. It is a change of gestalt from word to wordlessness.

If you make an effort, you miss the whole point, because making an effort your mind comes in. Perhaps nobody has ever spoken the way I am speaking to you. They had a message to give to you; I have an experience to share. They had a certain philosophy to convince you, to convert you; I don't have any philosophy, any nonsense. I have simply a device: I am not saying anything to you, I am just giving you chances of being in silence without any effort on your part. Once you have learned these moments and their beauty, and their benediction and their blessing, it will not be difficult to find the same spaces anywhere. Just the first experience is the most difficult.

An ancient Chinese proverb says, The first step is the only problem, because the whole journey is complete in the first step. You don't have to take another step.

For thousands of years there have been masters telling people to be silent, to go beyond mind. People have listened to them and they have tried also -- but they go on failing again and again, because effort will not lead you to it. The master's function is not to give you a certain technique. The master's function is to give you a glimpse, just a little taste: the sweetness of silence on your tongue. Then you will be able to find it on your own.

Meditation cannot be taught, it can only be caught.

I am meditation.

If you are available you can catch it.

It is just as contagious as any disease -- it is not a disease, it is a cure of all diseases; it is the ultimate health. But nobody has thought that health can also be contagious. The whole of medical science goes on thinking about infections, about diseases. Nobody bothers to make health infectious, to create healthy people who move anywhere and make other people healthy, just by their presence.

My own experience is -- I am not a physician, the body is not my world -- that spirituality, religiousness, is certainly contagious. I give you moments to feel the presence, to feel the nothingness surrounding you. This is meditation; it does not need any object.

But for your contemplation I can give you a few sutras.…

... An atomic war will not determine who is right, but who is left.

... A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right.

... Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.

... Say it with flowers, say it with sweets. Say it with kisses, say it with eats. Say it with jewelry, say it with drink. But always be careful not to say it with ink.

... Philosophy is the discovery that you might be worse off than you are.

... If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs... maybe you have not heard the gossip!

... Keep quiet and people will think you to be a great philosopher.

... A reformed politician is one who did not get enough votes.

... A neurotic is a person who worries about things that did not happen in the past, instead of worrying about something that won't happen in the future, like normal people.

... The difference between capitalism and communism: in capitalism, man exploits man; in communism it is vice-versa.

... Women are the kind of problem most men like to wrestle with.

... To have the last word with a woman -- apologize. Question 2

BELOVED OSHO,

WHEN YOU ARE TALKING EVERYTHING FEELS FINE, BUT WHEN YOU STOP, IT FEELS LIKE THE CARPET HAS BEEN PULLED FROM UNDER MY FEET.

PLEASE COMMENT.

Dhyan Anekant, that's the very purpose of my stopping: to pull the carpet from under your feet, to give you a chance to become aware what you are without me. So once in a while, I pretend to be sick. I have to; otherwise you start forgetting your reality. You start becoming more and more my music, my poetry, my painting, and I don't want that. You have to be your own music and you have to be your own poetry.

You have to be just yourself.

What happens when I stop speaking? You are saying, "Everything feels fine when you are talking, but when you stop it feels like the carpet has been pulled from under my feet." Suddenly you become aware of all the garbage that you had forgotten you are carrying within you. All that crap -- centuries old -- starts rising within your mind; it is really stinking. You forget all the fragrance I was talking about; you don't see any flowers anywhere. You don't see the beautiful sunrises, the beautiful sunsets; you don't hear anymore the songs of the birds. You are so full of your own garbage, you become completely closed to the world.

I open you, your windows, your doors, your eyes, your ears. I give you a chance to be unafraid, fearless, and open your doors.

The unknown is not your enemy.

The unknown is your friend. The stranger is your guest.

Allow the strange, allow the unfamiliar.

With me you gather courage, you open up; you start listening to the silences, you start seeing the beauties of existence. But left alone you immediately rush to close your doors and windows, and start hiding in your dark hole which you think is your security and safety.

It is not safety, it is not security, it is your grave -- although the grave has a certain kind of security. For example, you cannot die again. You can rest at ease, no death is ever going to disturb you -- but do you want that kind of security? The dead are so safe, they will not even fall sick, not even the common cold -- no problems, no anxieties, no responsibilities.

While you are alive, don't create a grave for yourself. As I see it, everybody is a gravedigger; he digs his own grave continuously, in search of security, safety, protecting himself from the unknown, the unfamiliar, the strange -- who knows what it is. It is better to live with your known sadness, misery, darkness -- but at least you know them, you have been with them long enough, you are acquainted.

So the moment you are not listening to me, you start listening to yourself. That is the problem. You have to come to a point when you don't have anything to say. Then without me you will have even greater experiences, even greater ecstasies, even greater moments of splendor.

I am simply showing you the path. It leads to faraway stars.

But when I am not with you, you have to understand that what starts surfacing in you is your reality -- and you have to get beyond it.

Two martians crash land their flying saucer in a piano shop. Dusting themselves off they approach a grand piano. Says one, "Take me to your dentist."

The other commands, "Wipe that grin off your face."

Now the Martians have their own understanding of things. They don't belong to your world. They are coming from a different world, different language, different ways of seeing things.

The little boy comes back from his first day at school.

His mother greets him and says, "Well, Tommy, did you learn much on your first day?"

"Not enough I guess," said Tommy sadly, "I have to go back again tomorrow."

Children have their own understanding. When you are alone, you speak your language; you speak from the space where you are, and you become frightened -

- what happened to great ecstasies? Only agonies are arising in you, miserable, tidal waves. What happened to all that was so beautiful? What happened to that music? You hear only noises --

maddening.

It was the first day of the factory football match and the polacks were playing the Italians.

Nobody managed to score, and at five o'clock the factory siren blew, so the Italians left the field and went home. Half an hour later, the polacks scored a goal.

Now, nothing can be done about it! You have to face your reality. Only by facing it and remembering those glimpses that you had with me, in communion, in a deep harmony with me, you have now a certainty that your reality is not the whole reality, that there is much more, that the real richness is missing. You are living at the minimum -- a poor life, spiritually. I drag you to the very sunlit peaks. But when I leave you, you immediately start rolling down, back into the valley in search of your security, because on the hilltop you feel so alone. In the valley is the whole crowd, all your friends, all your enemies.…

After two years in a salt mine in Siberia, Ivan was unburdening himself to his sweetheart.

"Oh, darling, how I have suffered without you these past two years!" he babbled.

"Nothing to do all day except dig salt... salt... salt. In all that time what do you think was on my mind?"

"Tell me, dearest," she breathed as she snuggled closer. "Pepper!" he answered.

Salt and salt and salt -- naturally, only one thing was in his mind, pepper. You have to face your mind.

You cannot just avoid it and escape from it. Wherever you go, you will find it; it is within you. It is you.

So this is my way of working. I will be with you and I will take you to unknown spaces.

But once in a while I will disappear, just to give you a sense of where you are and where you ought to be, and to know the distance.

And it is not difficult to bridge the gap, but you have to be aware. Once you know the gap, the bridge is not difficult. But people are not even aware of the gap; they think this is all that life is meant to be. It is not all.

Life is infinite.

Life is beyond your wildest dreams.

It is an eternal romance, a great love affair which begins but never ends.

A suave executive seemed disappointed after lunching with a gorgeous blonde. When his friend asked what went wrong, he replied, "She said yes."

"Yes sounds good to me!"

"Not," the other said, "when the question is, Àre you married?'"

When you are alone, watch what kind of questions are arising in you, and what kind of answers you are capable of giving to those questions -- because every question that arises in you has an answer somewhere within you. Without an

answer no question arises. So just watch. Dig deeper into every question and you will find your answer. It will be ordinary, mundane and you will feel hurt, wounded. But I want you to know where you are, because the journey begins from where you are.

I can give you glimpses of the faraway experiences, but you have to move from the space where you are. You have to go on a pilgrimage. Being with me you can either use this opportunity for your growth, or you can misuse it. If you are simply being entertained, you are misusing the opportunity. Unless you are becoming enlightened -- even if slowly and gradually but steadily -- then you are not using the opportunity to its fullest.

I am not here to entertain you. Other than your enlightenment, nothing will make me celebrate you. I would like to celebrate for all of you, but you have to blossom to your uttermost potentiality.

One evening in a bar in New York, a woman with a nasal, raspy voice was singing, "My Old Virginia Home."

An old man in the corner bowed his head and wept quietly. A lady leaned over to him and whispered, "Excuse me, but are you a Virginian?"

"No, lady," said the man, "I am a musician."

Jake Lavinsky decided to return to Russia, the land of his birth, after living in America for thirty-five years. "I want to help make a success of the workers' paradise," he gave as his excuse.

But he was back in the States three months later. "In the Soviet Union it is just impossible to do anything right," he complained. "If you arrive for work five minutes early, you are betraying your fellow workers. If you are five minutes late, you are betraying socialism.

And if you arrive on time -- God forbid -- the commissar calls you into his office and shouts, "So where did you get the watch?"

Here, it is a totally different situation: everything is right. Five minutes earlier, five minutes late, or at the right time -- nothing is wrong if you are just alert.

If you are going deeper in your alertness, if you are aware, and your awareness is

becoming more and more crystallized, everything will go on becoming more and more right. A moment comes when you cannot conceive how to commit a mistake; you cannot conceive how to be cruel, how to be unkind, how to be violent, how to be inhuman.

The day you cannot conceive all that is animal in you... then from your very mud the lotus has grown, has gone beyond the waters, has reached and opened its petals to the sun. The day of dance has arrived -- the moment of celebration.

We are all born in the mud, but there is no need to remain there. This place is not to condemn you for being born in the mud, but to provoke you, to challenge you, to invite you, to welcome you.Although you were born in the mud -- all lotuses are born in the mud -- you have the potential of becoming a lotus, the most beautiful flower in existence.

With me, drink your future as deeply as possible. I am your future. When you are alone, watch quietly and silently your present. From your present, from your muddy mess, will arise a flower. Where you are today, I was exactly there yesterday, so I know what a great future you have. Where I am today, you are going to be there tomorrow -- or at the most the day after tomorrow.

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #23

Chapter title: Knowledge is the corpse of knowing

1 October 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code: 8710010

ShortTitle:

PILGR23

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

93

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

I HAVE FALLEN SO MUCH IN LOVE WITH THIS GESTURE OF YOURS OF

SHAKING YOUR HEAD AT PEOPLE'S FOOLISH QUESTIONS THAT I AM

TRYING HARD TO WRITE ONE TO PROVOKE YOU TO DO SO AGAIN. BUT

THE PROBLEM IS THAT THIS DOES NOT SUIT A SERIOUS GERMAN DISCIPLE

LIKE ME.

ANYWAY, DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU ARE NOT ONLY THE MOST

BEAUTIFUL AND GORGEOUS MASTER, BUT ALSO THE MOST IRRESISTIBLY

CHARMING BEING MY EYES HAVE EVER SEEN?

Haridevi, it seemed difficult for you to ask a foolish question but you have managed. One need not make much effort to ask foolish questions; in fact, all questions are foolish! A mind that questions does not know how to live, does not know how to love; otherwise life itself brings all the answers, love fulfills all the questions.

The people who have been talking about God, about heaven and hell, about faraway things, are the people who cannot live herenow. Their questions show that their present is empty. They want to have contentment and fulfillment, but in the present they are almost incapable -- and the present is the only time that exists. There is no other time.

These are ways of postponing. Talking about God, nobody will think it is a foolish question; but it is, it is a way of avoiding life. It is a way to take yourself away from the present moment. All questions take you away from yourself. There is not a single question that brings you home. To be at home you will find no questions, no answers, but an eternal peace. In that peace you don't become knowledgeable, but in that peace your ignorance is transmuted into innocence. In that peace your questions go through a metamorphosis. They become your wonders. Your questions become your mysteries.

I say all questions are foolish because their basic root is... perhaps you are not aware of it, the basic root of all questions is that we want to demystify life. What are all questions for? You want to become knowledgeable, and the more

knowledgeable you become, the less mysterious life becomes. You start thinking as if you know. And even your greatest knowledgeable learned people know nothing. What do you know about even yourself? --

which is the closest thing to begin with. What do you know about your own consciousness?

You are it, but absolutely unaware of it. And if you cannot know such a close phenomenon, how do you think you can know the farthest star? But the farthest star serves a particular purpose. Your eyes become focused on faraway things and you can avoid the present moment. And to avoid the present moment is to avoid life itself.

Great philosophies have arisen, great theologies based on faraway questions, without your being aware that every question is a strategy of the mind to take away from this small moment... from this silence, from this heartbeat. The next moment is not certain, and all questions are postponement. Looked at exactly, all questions are escapist. And there have been people who are giving you answers and making you feel great because you have so much rubbish, you know so much. And you start thinking that just knowing so much, being so much informed, is a revolution.

Remember, information is never a transformation. On the contrary, all information that you collect becomes a barrier for your transformation. And all our universities and colleges and educational systems are simply doing the most harmful thing to you: they are giving you a false notion of knowing.

Knowing comes through living, not through books, not through teachers, not through saviors. It comes through your own intensity, aliveness -- and you cannot be alive tomorrow, you have to be alive this moment. You don't need questions and you don't need any answer, because no answer is going to satisfy your quest. You are thirsty... you need water, living water, to quench your thirst. You don't need the answer that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. The formula H2O* is not going to quench your thirst.

This is my existential approach.

Man has lived too long under the shadow of intellectual efforts to demystify existence.

Fortunately, he has not been able. The existence is as mysterious as ever, but unfortunately he has become burdened with great knowledge and a false feeling that he knows. This is the greatest danger -- to be addicted with a false notion of knowing.

Socrates, in his last days of life made one of the most significant statements ever made.

He said, "When I was a child I used to think I know everything. When I became a young man I became aware that the more I know, the more there is to know. My knowledge is not dispelling ignorance, but only making me aware of my ignorance, how little I know, and the immense and infinite that is waiting to be known.

"And now at a ripe age I can gather courage to say that which I could not say when I was young, that I know nothing. And this experience that I know nothing has unburdened me completely of all the knowledge that I have accumulated; it has fallen away. I am standing utterly naked, just as I was born. The same innocence has come with tremendous beauty, with great rejoicing."

There are only two men in the whole history of man -- Socrates is one -- who said, "I know nothing." The second man is Bodhidharma, who said it in a more dramatic way. He had a unique personality of his own. He was born in India, but was sent by his master to China to inform the people about Gautam Buddha. He went there, and nine years he lived there; and before leaving China he had thousands of disciples. But he chose four disciples and told them, "Before I leave, I want somebody to be my successor. Amongst you four is the one who will succeed me. I will ask you a simple thing, and whoever answers rightly will be the successor."

Naturally, it was a great moment of suspicion. Time suspended... thousands of disciples waiting... those four disciples standing... and Bodhidharma asked, "In a very simple statement, telegraphic, don't use a single word that is not necessary, state what was my purpose in coming to China from India."

The first one said, "You had come here to spread the transcendental wisdom of Gautam Buddha."

Bodhidharma looked with compassion and said, "You are right, but not enough. You have my skin."

And he moved towards the next, who said, "You have come here to give an experience of silence, of truth, of beauty, of blissfulness."

Bodhidharma again looked with deep compassion and said, "A little better -- you have my bones."

And he turned to the third disciple who said, "Your coming has been the greatest phenomenon in the history of China. Your purpose was to impart meditation."

Bodhidharma said, "You are not wrong, but not right either."

He turned towards the fourth. And the fourth started crying with tears flowing down, not out of any misery but out of tremendous joy. And he collapsed at the feet of Bodhidharma without saying a single word. Bodhidharma took him up, hugged him, and said to him, "You have said it. I don't know; you don't know either. You are going to be my successor. Spread this luminous ignorance as far and as wide as possible."

Luminous ignorance -- yes, that is the ultimate state of silence. That is the only living water which can quench your thirst. Questions won't do it. I allow you to ask questions --

it is just an indirect way of taking away all your foolishness. I don't answer your questions, I simply destroy them. If I can succeed in taking away all your questions my purpose is fulfilled and your destiny too. It is not that my answers are needed, it is that your questions have to be utterly, mercilessly destroyed. You are to be left without questions, and that is the answer.

Haridevi, you are saying, "Anyway, did you know that you are not only the most beautiful and gorgeous master...?" I don't even know that I am a master.

Just yesterday I saw your question, and for the first time in my whole life I looked seriously into the mirror. Because if Haridevi thinks that I am the most beautiful and gorgeous master, there is bound to be something wrong. I tried hard but I could not find anyone there in the mirror. I have been absent for almost thirty-five years.

Once I used to be... but for thirty-five years I have been just empty, a hollow bamboo. In the right hands that hollow bamboo can become a flute. I have allowed my hollow bamboo to bring to you any music, any song, any ecstasy

that existence wants to share with you. But on your part, perhaps listening to a beautiful flute player, you start looking at the flute, thinking perhaps the music is of the flute. The music is not of the flute. I am singing songs of existence. My gestures are not my gestures.

I am no longer a person, but only a presence. But perhaps that presence is giving you the idea of beauty. In fact you yourself have said, "I have fallen so much in love with you."

Love imparts beauty to anything. It is not my fault. If you have fallen in love with me, to you I will look as gorgeous as your love is deep. But that shows the heart of a disciple.

That shows the eyes of a devotee; that shows the feeling of a lover. It has nothing to do with me; it is all your experience. It is your own inner beauty projected on me. It is your own feeling projected on the screen which is empty.

You are also saying, "Not only you are the most beautiful and gorgeous master, but also the most irresistibly charming being my eyes have ever seen." Your eyes have remained closed to the whole existence. You have not fallen in love with trees and birds and animals. You have not fallen in love with the ocean and the mountains; otherwise you would have seen the same beauty millionfold. Let this be the beginning of a long pilgrimage. Don't stop at me.

The master has to be only a beginning, just a push on the way. But remember that these are your eyes full of love which are projecting. These eyes can make this whole existence beautiful. And the moment you can start seeing into rocks and into flowers and into stars, you will be amazed, overwhelmed what a great existence you have been missing. If the master can give you just a glimpse, that's enough; then you can go on your way.

Gautam Buddha is reported to have said, "If you meet me on the way again, cut my head immediately. "No authentic master would like you to become addicted to him. He would like you to move on. If you have seen the beauty in me, you are capable of seeing beauty.

Just here, you have opened your eyes in trust, in love. To the whole existence you remain closed in distrust, in doubt, in uncertainty; otherwise, this is the most perfect existence possible. And anyway, there is no other existence.

If the master can become your window and you can see through the window to the open sky, to the vast spaces, you will remain grateful to the master, but not addicted to him.

The fear of addiction is not unfounded: there are millions of people who are addicted to Gautam Buddha, millions of others who are addicted to Jesus Christ, millions of others addicted to Mohammed. They have forgotten that a master is only a window frame, and if you start becoming addicted to the frame of the window, you will never look through it.

Then the window becomes your worship, the object of your worship. Windows are not to be worshiped; windows are to be opened so that you can see beyond.

You are on the right track, Haridevi -- just don't go astray.

Once there were three men traveling in an airplane. Unfortunately, one fell out; but fortunately there was a haystack below him. Unfortunately there was a pitchfork in the haystack; fortunately he missed the pitchfork. Unfortunately he missed the haystack too!

So there will come moments when you are fortunate, when you are unfortunate. Life is not a straight line; it is very zigzag. The path goes in a zigzag way. It is a mountainous path and to go astray is very simple, because your mind is all for going astray. You have to be very alert that your mind cannot take you away from the reality, that your mind does not succeed in taking you astray.

Your mind is your most unfortunate thing.

"My wife is always asking for money, money, money," complained Hymie Goldberg to a friend. "Last week she wanted two hundred dollars. The day before yesterday she asked me for one hundred and fifty. And this morning she wanted one hundred dollars."

"That's crazy," said his friend. "What does she do with all that money?" "I don't know," said Hymie, "I never give her any."

Your mind will demand continuously: Do this, go this way. Don't listen to it. The moment a person stops listening to his own mind, he starts listening to the universal mind. He has come in the open. Your mind is an enclosure, very tiny,

and mind cannot help you on the way. It is your greatest enemy. All your questions come from the mind, and all the answers that have been given down the ages go into the mind.

I repeat again, I am not answering your questions. I love you enough... I am not your enemy and I cannot give you answers. I simply want to take away your questions.

Slowly, slowly you forget asking questions, you start just being here, enjoying. Nothing is to be asked. Nothing has to be enquired, but one has just to be. To be or not to be is the only significant decision. Be here and you will find that you are the answer.

Mind is full of questions and full of borrowed answers. You are the authentic answer, but then there is no question -- it is a very strange phenomenon. When you have questions, you don't have the answer. And when you come across the answer you don't have the questions.

Gertrude Stein was dying. She was a great poetess, perhaps the greatest woman poet who has existed on this planet. Her friends had gathered, and just before she died, she opened her eyes and asked, "What is the answer?" The friends were stunned. Has she gone mad?

-- nobody asks what is the answer. First you have to ask the question; otherwise how can it be answered? But they were in deep love and gratefulness to the woman who has ignited the flame in many of those who were present.

One friend asked her, "This is absurd. You are asking, `What is the answer?' but we don't know what the question is."

Gertrude Stein opened her eyes again and said, "Okay, then tell me, what is the question?" And she died.

There is no question and then suddenly you are the answer. Not that it comes from anywhere else... your answer is covered with your questions. Take away all the questions, and in that state when all questions have fallen down like dry leaves falling from the tree, and you are standing like naked branches against the evening sky, you will know. But it will be more a knowing than knowledge.

Knowledge is the corpse of knowing.

Knowing is alive; knowledge is dead.

In that moment when there is no question around you, there is an innocent opening to all the mystery of existence. Here, my effort is to make you somehow ignorant.

Socrates has divided man into two categories. The first category is of those who can be called "knowledgeable ignorant," and the second is of those who can be called "ignorant knowers." Certainly ignorance is being used by Socrates in the second category, and by me, as synonymous with innocence. Just don't be concerned with questions. Let them by and by disappear... and a moment certainly comes when you don't have any question.

At that moment is the explosion. You become luminous. Suddenly you don't know, and you know for the first time as an experience, the ultimate that quenches all your thirst.

The quest is over. You have come full circle back to your innocent childhood. It is going to happen to you, because there is no other way for man to know the ecstasies which are his birthright.

You are not born here to be miserable.

You are not born here to fulfill the requirements of the so-called contemporary existentialists -- meaninglessness, boredom, misery, anguish, anxiety, angst, agony. The whole existentialist philosophy of the contemporaries is so sick. And even those philosophers don't believe in it; otherwise they should have committed suicide. What is the point of living a meaningless life? What is the point of living an accidental life? What is the point of living in anguish which leads nowhere? What is the point... if death is going to be the end, then why go on unnecessarily torturing yourself?

I have asked this to many professors of philosophy in the universities who have become influenced with existentialism. I said, "Then you have to give a proof."

They said, "What proof?"

I said, "You have to commit suicide, because there seems to be no reason You

should return the ticket and get down from the train."

But these existentialists go on living to the very ripe age of eighty, ninety -- and this is not new.

In Greece, Zeno lived ninety years, and his whole life he was preaching exactly in different terms what existentialism is preaching now. It is said that thousands of his disciples committed suicide. He was a very convincing man, but he himself lived for ninety years. When he was dying one follower asked, "This seems to be very unbelievable. Thousands of people have committed suicide, convinced by your philosophy. Why did you go on living?"

He said, "I had just to convince people." He was saying that he is a martyr. He has sacrificed himself for ninety years -- continuously he has lived in misery, just to teach people and to help them to commit suicide.

I am not here to help you to commit suicide. I am here to help you to know the great splendor of life, the benediction of existence. Each moment is so full of joy and blessings that if you start living moment-to-moment, your life will be a constant dance.

I am really an authentic existentialist. I don't think that Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Soren*

Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Marshall and their whole company is truly existentialist.

They have not known even a single moment with their totality; otherwise, all boredom disappears, all meaninglessness disappears.

Life is so juicy, so full of flowers with so much fragrance. Just don't miss the moment.

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NO-MIND AND MY-MIND?

Milarepa, the difference between no-mind and my-mind is the difference between your mind and my mind.

Just drop the "my" and there is no difference between no-mind and mind. "My" mind creates the boundary. Take the boundary away, and mind becomes no- mind, infinite, unbounded. You are an imprisoned splendor. Just take the prison away... And the prison is not much; it is of I, my, mine. Just be without these words surrounding you, and no-mind will give you the whole existence as an inheritance. Mind has poisoned you, but it has been able to poison you because you have become identified with it. You start calling it my-mind. Drop the my and you are separate from the mind -- that was the bridge.

Separate who you are from the mind -- just a pure presence, an utter silence, unmoving stillness... and in this space happens all that deep down you are all looking for, knowingly or unknowingly.

Three mice walked into a bar, sat down and began some serious drinking. All three became thoroughly drunk and in due course, each began to boast about how brave he was.

"I'm going to tell that dumb Ronald Reagan in the White House about some of his policies," said the first mouse.

"That's nothing," sneered the second mouse. "I'm going over to the Kremlin and tell them just what I think about them."

They both turned to the third mouse who was sitting there dreaming. "Well, what are you going to do?" they demanded.

"Me, I'm going to screw the cat."

This is your mind. Just drop the identity with the mind and you will be surprised beyond your wildest expectations what a tremendous treasure you have, inexhaustible. And when I am saying this, I am not saying it within quotation marks. When I am saying this, I am saying this on my own authority.

I am not authoritative, remember -- one can get confused. The authoritative person is a person who wants to dominate. I am not an authoritative person, I have no desire to dominate; but what I am saying is with absolute authority. I am not quoting any scriptures; I am saying only what I have encountered within myself. The day I dropped the identity with the mind I became the no-mind. No- mind is the highest state of your consciousness.

Paddy and Sean were sitting in the bar when Paddy said, "You know, Sean, I have read so much lately about how smoking can ruin your health that I have finally decided to do something about it."

"So, you are going to give up smoking?" asked Sean. "Heavens no," cried Paddy, "I am going to give up reading."

So just be very alert. I am saying to drop the idea of my, mine -- the identity. But you can misunderstand me, because misunderstanding does not need much intelligence. You can go on being identified with the mind. Your mind is capable of giving you the sense that you have arrived, that this is no-mind. It is so easy to deceive yourself that you have to be alerted again and again not to deceive yourself.

Just the other day I have received again a letter from a German sannyasin. Now he is asking for my blessings because he has become enlightened. Germans are very strong people, and once they get an idea, it is very difficult to change them. And this is not the first case!

It has happened before with another German sannyasin, Gunakar. He became at least six times enlightened and finally he dropped it. Whenever he would go to Germany he would become enlightened and from there -- and he was rich, he had a beautiful castle in the mountains -- he would write letters to all the presidents, to all the prime ministers of the world, to all the members of the U.N., "I have become enlightened. If you need any advice I am available."

His letter would come to me also, "Osho, I thank you, you were right that enlightenment is our nature. I have become enlightened. I just need a recognition from you because nobody else believes in me."

So I had to call him again and again. And when he would come and sit in front of me, and I would say, "Gunakar, are you really enlightened?" he would say, "No." He would say,

"It is strange. When I come to you I become unenlightened, and when I go back to Germany I become enlightened again!"

This happened six times. Gautam Buddha became enlightened only once. In fact, people have never become enlightened even twice -- once is more than enough.

But mind is very cunning, it can give you all kinds of ideas. Beware of your own mind.

If you can remain alert and not allow the mind to disturb your silence, your peace, slowly, slowly the mind stops bothering you. And the day the mind feels completely frustrated that you are no more listening to it, it evaporates. Its whole life is the life of a parasite. If you get identified with it, you are giving life to it, you are giving nourishment to it.

Just get unidentified. Let the mind be there, but remember, you are not it. Just this simple remembrance: I am not the mind. Not that you have to repeat it -- because repetition will be done by the mind, that is the problem. Just a wordless awareness, I am not the mind...

and no-mind will start opening its doors to you. And that is the beginning of the transformation.

Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN OUR LANGUAGE?

TENNIS, MEDITATION, CHI-CHI, MANGOES, SUNTAN, WOMEN, PHILOSOPHY, EXOTIC BEACHES, CRICKET, INSTANT COFFEE, JAZZ MUSIC AND

SKINHEADS.

Milarepa, I know you are crazy, but if I answer your question truthfully it will also drive the police commissioner of Pune crazy, because none of these words you are mentioning have any importance.

In the past, before that German guy Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead, God used to be the most important word in our language. But when a German says something, you have to listen to it; otherwise there is trouble. Germans are like your wives: you have to listen to them, otherwise there is trouble. Nobody has ever heard such a thing, that God is dead, but by and by people started believing it. If it comes from a German guy it cannot be wrong --

at least you cannot dare to say it is wrong, otherwise you are bound for great trouble.

In his statement there was something more. When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," he also said, "Now man is absolutely free." God has certainly disappeared. It has become a phony word without any content, but the other thing has not appeared, the other part of the statement that man has become free. Freedom has not arrived.

On the contrary, a kind of licentiousness which looks like freedom has possessed the whole humanity. Perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche was not alive to what he was doing, not aware. Perhaps he was talking in his dreams and finally he had to enter into a madhouse.

He himself could not live without God. God was the hope, ancient hope. God was the opium, the consolation of all those who are in despair.

When Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead," he himself became utterly helpless --

no consolation, no hope, no meaning. He had to go through a long process of insanity.

Nietzsche seems to me to be the most important figure that has dominated the world in this century. Without any argument his statement has infiltrated into every mind. But he was not aware of the implications. I have no problem if God is dead. There is no need to mourn his death. The problem is that if God is dead, then you lose the most important word in your language and you will need a substitute. God was one end, one extreme, and when one extreme disappears from your mental vision, the necessary and inevitable is that you will fall to the other extreme.

And that's what has happened, Milarepa. Instead of God, `fuck' has become the most important word in our language. Even if Friedrich Nietzsche comes back, he will be surprised and he will try to resurrect somehow the dead God, because this is stupid. But you will need a whole report on it, a whole research.

One of the most interesting words in the English language today is the word

`fuck'. It is a magical word. Just by its sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. In language it falls into many grammatical categories. It can be used as

a verb, both transitive, "John fucked Mary," and intransitive, "Mary was fucked by John", and as a noun, "Mary is a fine fuck." It can be used as an adjective, "Mary is fucking beautiful."

As you can see, there are not many words with the versatility of fuck. Besides the sexual meaning, there are also the following uses:

Ignorance: Fucked if I know. Trouble: I guess I am fucked now!

Fraud: I got fucked at the used car lot. Aggression: Fuck you!

Displeasure: What the fuck is going on here? Difficulty: I can't understand this fucking job. Incompetence: He is a fuck-off.

Suspicion: What the fuck are you doing? Enjoyment: I had a fucking good time.

Request: Get the fuck out of here.

Hostility: I'm going to knock your fucking head off. Greeting: How the fuck are you?

Apathy: Who gives a fuck?

Innovation: Get a bigger fucking hammer. Surprise: Fuck! You scared the shit out of me! Anxiety: Today is really fucked.

And it is very healthy if every morning you do it as a transcendental meditation -

- just when you get up, first thing, repeat the mantra "fuck you" five times; it

clears your throat too! Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #24

Chapter title: The only way to be is not to be

1 October 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code: 8710015

ShortTitle: PILGR24

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

94

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

IN HAMLET'S FAMOUS SOLILOQUY HIS ULTIMATE QUESTION IS: TO BE OR

NOT TO BE?

BELOVED MASTER, MY ULTIMATE QUESTION IS: TO BE AND NOT TO BE?

Milarepa, Shakespeare is a great poet, but not a mystic. He has an intuition into the reality of things, but that is only a glimpse, very vague as if seen in a dream, not clear.

His question in Hamlet shows that unclarity. "To be or not to be?" can never be asked by a man who knows, because there is no question of choice. You cannot choose between

"to be" or "not to be."

In existential terms, not to be is the only way to be. Unless you disappear you are not really there. It looks a little difficult to understand, because basically it is irrational. But reason is not the way of existence; existence is as irrational as you can conceive.

Here those who think they are, are not. And those who think and realize they are not --

they are.

The idea that "I am" is just an idea, a projection of the mind. But the realization that "I am not" comes only as a flowering of meditation. When you realize, "I am not," only the I disappears and there remains behind a pure existence, undefined, unbounded, unfettered, just a pure space.

I is a great prison.

It is your slavery and bondage to the mind.

The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are -- but you don't have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.

The moment the soap bubble of your ego pops, you have become the whole existence.

Yes, something has disappeared... before you were just a dewdrop, now you are the whole ocean! You are not a loser. You were encaged in a very small, limited space, and that imprisonment is our misery, our pain, our anguish. From every side we are enclosed, from every side we are encountered by a thick wall -- we cannot move.

Have you ever experienced in a nightmare, in a dream... you know perfectly well that your eyes are open, but you want to move your hands and you cannot; you want to get up, but you cannot. A tremendous fear grips you as if you are paralyzed for the moment. That experience will explain to you our whole life as a dewdrop. Our intrinsic nature is to be oceanic and to force an ocean into a dewdrop is certainly to create anxiety, anguish, misery, agony.

Shakespeare's question, To be or not to be? is only intellectual -- and it is bound to be intellectual, because he was not a man of realization. He was very talented, perhaps there have been only a few poets of his caliber. But to be a poet is one thing -- and to know existence from inside, not from outside, is another.

The poet looks at the beauty of the flower, at the beauty of the sunset, at the beauty of the starry night, but he is always on the outside, an observer, a spectator; he is never an insider. That is the difference between a poet and a mystic. When the poet sees the rose, the rose is there outside the poet, and the poet is there outside the rose.

When the mystic sees the rose, he is the rose.

All differences, all distinctions, all distances have disappeared.

In such moments the seers of the UPANISHADS have declared: Aham brahmasmi -- I am God. It is not a declaration of ego; it is simply a declaration of the mystical experience of being one with the ultimate reality. But it is true on smaller scales too.

The mystic can say:

I am the rose, I am the stars, I am the ocean.

The poet cannot say that. He can say that the rose is beautiful, he can make an observation and a judgment about the rose, but he cannot melt and merge into the reality of the rose. He cannot get lost into it, he cannot become one, he cannot drop the duality.

Howsoever great his insight as a poet may be, it will remain based in duality. Certainly the poet sees more beauty than you see. He has clearer eyes, he has a more loving heart and he has a different approach than the scientist.

The scientist looks at the roseflower from intellect, from mind. The poet looks from the heart, from intuition. He is certainly deeper than the scientist. The scientist in fact cannot see the beauty of the rose; all that he can do is dissect the rose to find out where the beauty is. And the moment the rose is dissected, all beauty disappears... hence for the scientist there is no beauty, because the beauty cannot survive the dissection; hence for the scientist there is no life, because the moment you dissect a living being what you find are dead parts, you never find life.

The mystic is just the very opposite of the scientist. The scientist tries to know things by dissecting them, and the mystic tries to know things by dropping the distance, the gap between himself and reality. His approach is of the being. These are the three approaches.

The approach of the mind -- that is what the scientist is doing. The approach of the heart -

- that is what the poet, the painter, the artist is doing. And the approach of the being --

that is the world of the mystic.

Shakespeare is great in his poetic compositions, his intuition is deep. But he is not a mystic; otherwise he could not have made the statement: To be or not to be?

There is no choice; they are not two. The only way to be is not to be.

Disappear if you want real existence, authentic existence; merge into reality,

dissolve your ice-cube in the ocean and become one with it. Of course you will get lost as a separate entity, but you will become the whole. It is not a loss; it is a tremendous gain.

Milarepa, you are asking, "My ultimate question is: To be and not to be?" That is not a question. That is the only way you can find yourself. But first comes "not to be," and second comes "to be." That is the only change I would like to make in your question. You say, "To be and not to be?" -- "not to be" has to be first, then "to be" follows. You have just to give space. Throw out all the furniture that is filling your space. And the greatest block is the ego -- throw it out!

Let the temple of your being be utterly empty. That is the state of "not to be."

And you will be surprised... here you are trying "not to be," and from the back door comes a new realization of being, of "to be." But your effort should not be based in this order -- first to be and then not to be. That is against the natural process of enlightenment.

You have to attain nothingness first, nobodiness first.

This is the price you have to pay for attaining to the experience of authentic being. This is the sacrifice you have to make. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Unless you are born again, you will not enter into the kingdom of God." What does he mean when he says, "Unless you are born again"? He means, first you have to die, and after death is resurrection.

As the ego dies it allows space for your authentic being to blossom. On the grave of your ego blossoms the lotus of your being. But remember, you have to change your statement because in this statement your ego lingers. "To be" is your first desire. But if that is your first desire, then it will be very difficult, almost impossible, to allow "not to be." You will cling to your ego.

You are saying, "To be and not to be." One thing is certainly right, that both have to exist together... but which is to be the first? You cannot start from the wrong end. You have to start by being nobody, by simply being spacious. In that spaciousness the guest arrives.

But it is natural... the way you have put your question is natural to the mind. It

happened... A man came to Gautam Buddha with almost the same question that you have raised here. Gautam Buddha said to him, "First you have to drop your ego and then you need not worry; everything happens on its own accord, spontaneously."

The man said, "If that is the way to realize myself, then I will make every effort to drop the ego."

Buddha said, "You have not understood me. You are still trying to realize yourself. You are even ready to drop the ego, but the desire deep down is to find a truer ego, a more eternal ego; that's what you are calling the self. Forget about the self. There is nothing to be achieved! You have simply to drop your ego and wait."

There is no question of any effort to be made; no achievement is going to be there. What happens, happens on its own accord. You cannot claim that it is your realization. That's why Gautam Buddha is the first person in the history of man who has not used the word

`self-realization'. He came to know... so many people, under the disguise of the word

`self', are simply protecting their ego. They are calling it self-realization, but they really mean ego-realization. They have a disguised desire to make their ego permanent and eternal.

Seeing this cunningness of the human mind, Buddha simply dropped the words

`self',

`self-realization'. He stopped talking about what will happen when your ego is dropped.

He said, "That is not my business and that is not your business either. You simply drop the ego and wait and see what happens, but don't conceive it from the very beginning.

Don't make it a goal, an ambition. The moment you make it an ambition, the ego has come back from the hidden, secret door of your being."

Buddha was very much misunderstood. It was obvious, particularly in this land

where for thousands of years before him the religious people have been talking about self-realization. But Gautam Buddha had a far deeper and clearer insight than anyone who has preceded him. He saw behind this self-realization nothing but a deep ego.

He changed the whole language of spirituality. In the language he used to speak -

- Pali is its name -- the self is called atta. Buddha dropped the word completely and he started using a negative word, anatta. Atta means self; anatta means no- self. It was against the whole tradition, not only of this country but of all the countries. Nobody had ever heard about no-self, no-mind, no-realization.

Then people started asking him, "What is the point of all this effort, meditation, disciplines, fastings, austerities...? What is the point if finally we are going to be nobody?

-- it is a strange effort! Such a long journey, so arduous, just to find in the end that you are not."

They were logical. But whenever you encounter a man like Gautam Buddha, his love is far stronger than your logic can ever be. His presence is far stronger than your reason, your mind, your personality, your ambitions, your desires. His very presence is so powerful, so magnetic that people start -- against themselves, in spite of themselves -- on a journey which ends in no-self.

Just the other day I came to know about a child who was born in France. The mother had been working in an atomic research center. While she was pregnant she continued to work, so the radiation of atomic energy was surrounding her continually while she was pregnant. Just three or four days ago she gave birth to a child. The doctors were very interested to see what had happened to the child, because he had been exposed to radiation for nine months continually -- he may be blind, he may be crippled... is there going to be something strange?

The whole medical staff, all the surgeons and doctors were watching breathlessly as the child came out of the womb and the doctor put the child on the table. He was perfectly healthy -- not blind, not crippled. All their fears were negated. But something they never expected happened. On the table all the instruments of the surgeon and the doctor started moving towards the child. The child had become magnetic! The child will have to live a very strange life. Wherever he will go things will start moving towards him.

Now they are trying hard to de-electrify the child. They cannot even bring their instruments close to him; those instruments slip from their hands, because the child is such a magnetic force. The child is very healthy, very radiant -- they have never seen such a child -- but to touch the child is to get a shock. The nurses who are taking care of the child have to wear shockproof dresses because they are playing with a danger.

A man like Gautam Buddha has a certain magnetic attraction, very subtle. Things don't move toward him but souls move, consciousnesses move, life forces move. It is his presence that gives you the proof that not-being is not death, not-being is the ultimate in life.

But remember, Milarepa, not-being is the first thing; that is your meditation, that is your death. Out of this meditation, out of this death, out of this nothingness will arise your original face, your original being. So you will have to change just a little bit. Put not-being first. That has to be the priority. You need not be concerned about being, it comes.

It comes absolutely without any exception.

I am saying it on my own experience too. I had to disappear into nothingness -- and out of that nothingness a totally new, an utterly fresh, an eternal presence has arisen. It is not my doing. I cannot take any credit for it. At the most I allowed it to happen, because I was not there to disturb. Your not-being is necessary first so that you don't disturb when your being starts arising... just a little change.

Old Hymie Goldberg returned to the doctor to express his delight over the invisible hearing aid that his doctor had fitted for him.

"I bet your family likes it, too," said the doctor.

"Ah no," said old Hymie, "they don't know about it yet and I am having a great time. In the past two days, I have changed my will twice!"

Everybody thinks he cannot hear... and he can hear, so he is having a great time changing his will.

You also have to change your will. What you have put as secondary has to be primary, and what you have put as primary is not your concern. It will come, just as when spring comes, flowers come on their own accord.

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

RECENTLY RUDOLPH HESS, ONE TO THE LAST NAZI BIG SHOTS, DIED. HE

COMMITTED SUICIDE IN JAIL IN BERLIN, WHERE HE WAS IMPRISONED FOR

FORTY-SIX YEARS. HE WAS THE RIGHT HAND MAN OF ADOLF HITLER.

"I DON'T REPENT ANYTHING," HE SAID BEFORE THE COURT IN

NUREMBURG, "AND IF I COULD START FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, I WOULD DO THE SAME THING AGAIN."

BELOVED MASTER, CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT FORGIVENESS, EVEN FOR PEOPLE WHO SEEM TO BE UNWORTHY OF IT.

Deva Shanta, it is one of the most fundamental things to understand. People ordinarily think that forgiveness is for those who are worthy of it, who deserve it. But if somebody deserves, is worthy of forgiveness, it is not much of a forgiveness. You are not doing anything on your part; he deserves it. You are not really being love and compassion.

Your forgiveness will be authentic only when even those who don't deserve it receive it.

It is not a question of whether a person is worthy or not. The question is whether your heart is ready or not.

I am reminded of one of the most significant woman mystics, Rabiya al- Adabiya, a Sufi woman who was known for her very eccentric behavior. But in all her eccentric behavior there was a great insight. Once, another Sufi mystic Hasan was staying with Rabiya.

Because he was going to stay with Rabiya, he had not brought his own holy

KORAN, which he used to read every morning as part of his discipline. He thought he could borrow Rabiya's holy KORAN, so he had not brought his own copy with him.

In the morning he asked Rabiya, and she gave him her copy. He could not believe his eyes. When he opened the KORAN he saw something which no Mohammedan could believe: in many places Rabiya had corrected it. It is the greatest sin as far as Mohammedans are concerned; the KORAN is the word of God according to them. How can you change it? How can you even think that you can make something better? Not only has she changed it, she has simply cut out a few words, a few lines -- removed them.

Hasan said to her, "Rabiya, somebody has destroyed your KORAN!"

Rabiya said, "Don't be stupid, nobody can touch my KORAN. What you are looking at is my doing."

Hasan said, "But how could you do such a thing?"

She said, "I had to do it, there was no way out. For example, look here: the KORAN says,

`When you see the devil, hate him.' Since I have become awakened I cannot find any hate within me. Even if the devil stands in front of me I can only shower him with my love, because I don't have anything else left. It does not matter whether God stands in front of me, or the devil; both will receive the same love. All that I have is love; hate has disappeared. The moment hate disappeared from me I had to make changes in my book of the holy KORAN. If you have not changed it, that simply means you have not arrived to the space where only love remains."

I will say to you, Deva Shanta, the people who don't deserve, the people who are unworthy, don't make any difference to the man who has come to the space of forgiveness. He will forgive, irrespective of who receives it. He cannot be so miserly that only the worthy should receive it. And from where is he going to find UNforgiveness?

This is a totally different perspective. It does not concern itself with the other. Who are you to make the judgment whether the other is worthy or unworthy? The very judgment is ugly and mean.

I know Rudolph Hess is certainly one of the greatest criminals. And his crime becomes even a millionfold bigger, because in the Nuremburg trial with the remaining companions of Adolf Hitler -- who killed almost eight million people in the second world war -- he said in front of the court, "I don't repent anything!" Not only that, he also said, "And if I could start from the very beginning, I would do the same thing again." It is very natural to think this man is not worthy of forgiveness; that will be the common understanding.

Everybody will agree with you.

But I cannot agree with you. It does not matter what Rudolf Hess has done, what he is saying. What matters is that you are capable of forgiving even him. That will raise your consciousness to the ultimate heights. If you cannot forgive Rudolf Hess you will remain just an ordinary human being, with all kinds of judgments of worthiness, of unworthiness.

But basically you cannot forgive him because your forgiveness is not big enough.

I can forgive the whole world for the simple reason that my forgiveness is absolute; it is nonjudgmental. I will tell you a small Tibetan story which will make the point absolutely clear to you.

A great old master, worshiped by millions of people, refused to initiate anyone into disciplehood. His whole life, consistently, he was asked by kings, he was asked by very rich people, he was asked by great ascetics, saints, to be initiated as his disciples, and he went on refusing. He would always say, "Unless I find a man who deserves it, unless I find a man who is worthy of it... I am not going to initiate any Tom, Dick, Harry."

He had a small young boy who used to cook food for him, wash his clothes, fetch vegetables from the market. The boy himself had become slowly, slowly old and for his whole life he had been listening to the old man, who had lived almost one hundred years, and without exception the denial: nobody is worthy! "I will die," he said, "without initiating anyone, but I will not initiate anyone who is nondeserving."

People became tired, frustrated. They loved the man, the man had immense qualities, but they could not understand his very stubborn attitude -- no kindness, no compassion.

But one morning the old man woke up his companion, who himself had become old, and said to him, "Run immediately down the hills to the marketplace and tell everybody that whoever wants to be initiated must come soon, because this evening as the sun sets I am going to die."

His companion said, "But what about worthiness?... I don't know who is worthy and who is not worthy. Who have I to bring?"

The old man said, "Don't worry at all. It was only a device, because I myself was not worthy to initiate anyone, but it was against my dignity to say so. So I chose the other way round. I was saying, Ùnless I find somebody worthy enough, deserving enough, I am not going to initiate.' The truth is, I was not worthy to be a master. Now I am, but the time is very short. Only this morning as the sun was rising, my own consciousness has also risen to the ultimate peak. Now I am ready. Now it does not matter who is worthy and who is unworthy. What matters now is that I am worthy. Just go and fetch anybody!

Just go and make the whole village aware that this is the last day of my life, and anybody who wants to be initiated should come immediately. Bring as many people as you can."

The companion of the old man was at a loss, but there was no time to argue. He ran down the hill, reached the marketplace and shouted all over the village, "Anybody who wants to become a disciple, the old man is ready now."

People could not believe it. But out of curiosity a few thought, "There is no harm at least to see what is going on." The man had refused his whole life, and on the last day of his life suddenly such a great change. Somebody's wife had died and he was feeling very lonely, so he thought, "It is good. If he is going to initiate everybody, no question of worthiness..." Somebody was released from jail just the night before; he thought,

"Nobody is going to give me employment; this is a good chance to become a saint."

All kinds of strange people went to the cave of the old man, and his companion was feeling so embarrassed at the kind of people he had brought: one is a criminal, one's wife is dead, that's why he thinks, "It is better... now, what else to do?" Somebody has gone bankrupt and was thinking to commit suicide; now he thinks that this is better than suicide.

A few had come just out of curiosity. They had no other work; they were playing jazz and they thought, "We can play jazz tomorrow, but today there is no harm, let us see what this initiation is. Anyway, that man is going to die by the evening so we will be free to remain disciples or not. We can play jazz tomorrow -- there is no harm."

The companion of the old man was feeling very embarrassed, "How will I present this strange lot when that old man has refused kings, saints, sages, who have come with deep earnestness to be initiated? And now he is going to initiate this gang!" He was even feeling ashamed, but he entered and asked, "Should I call the people? -- eleven have come."

The old man said, "Call them quickly, because it is already afternoon. You took so much time and you could fetch just eleven people?"

His companion said, "What can I do? It is a working day; it is not a holiday. I could only get these. All are absolutely useless; even I could not initiate them. Not only that they are not worthy -- they are absolutely UNworthy. But you insisted to bring somebody; nobody else was available."

The old man said, "There is no problem. Just bring them in." And he initiated them all.

Even they were shocked. And they said to the old man, "This is strange behavior. All your life you have insisted that one has to deserve to be a disciple. What happened to your principle?"

The old man laughed. He said, "That was not a principle, that was only to hide my own unworthiness. I was not yet in the position to be a master. And I cannot cheat anyone, I cannot deceive anyone; hence I have taken shelter behind a judgmental attitude, that unless you are worthy, you will not get initiation."

Obviously nobody is worthy.

Everybody has his own flaws, weaknesses; everybody has done things that he never wanted to do. Everybody has gone astray. Nobody can say that he is absolutely pure; everybody is polluted. So when the old man insisted, "Unless you are worthy don't come back to me," nobody argued with him; he was right. First they have to be worthy!

On the last day, he said to those eleven disciples, "I bless you and initiate you. It doesn't matter whether you are worthy or not, but for the first time I am worthy. And if I am really worthy, just my presence is going to purify you. My worthiness of being a master is going to make you a worthy disciple. Now I don't have to depend on your worthiness.

My worthiness is enough.

"I am just like a rain cloud; I will shower all over the place -- on the mountains, on the streets, on the houses, in the farms, in the gardens. I will shower everywhere, because I am too burdened with my rainwater. It does not matter whether the garden deserves... I don't even make any distinction between the garden and the rocks. I will simply shower out of my abundance."

If your meditations bring you to the state of a rain cloud, you will forgive without any judgment out of your abundance, out of your love, out of your compassion.

In fact I would like to make the statement that the man who is unworthy deserves more than the man who is worthy. The man who does not deserve, deserves more, because he is so poor; don't be hard upon him. Life has been hard upon him. He has gone astray; he has suffered because of his wrong doings. Now don't you be hard on him. He needs more love than those who are deserving; he needs more forgiveness than those who are worthy.

This should be the only approach of a religious heart.

Your question was raised before Gautam Buddha, because he was going to initiate a murderer into sannyas -- and the murderer was no ordinary murderer. Rudolf Hess is nothing compared to him. His name was Angulimal. Angulimal means a man who wears a garland of human fingers.

He had taken a vow that he would kill one thousand people; from each single person he would take one finger so that he could remember how many he had killed and he will make a garland of all those fingers. In his garland of fingers he had nine hundred and ninety-nine fingers -- only one was missing. And that one was missing because his road was closed; nobody was coming that way. But Gautam Buddha entered that closed road.

The king had put guards on the road to prevent people, particularly strangers

who didn't know that a dangerous man lived behind the hills. The guards told Gautam Buddha, "That is not the road to be used. You will have to take a little longer route, but it is better to go a little longer than to go into the mouth of death itself. This is the place where Angulimal lives. Even the king has not the guts to go on this road. That man is simply mad.

"His mother used to go to him. She was the only person who used to go, once in a while, to see him, but even she stopped. The last time she went there he told her, `Now only one finger is missing, and just because you happen to be my mother... I want to warn you that if you come another time you will not go back. I need one finger desperately. Up to now I have not killed you because other people were available, but now nobody passes on this road except you. So I want to make you aware that next time if you come it will be your responsibility, not mine.' Since that time his mother has not come."

The guards said to Buddha, "Don't unnecessarily take the risk."

And do you know what Buddha said to them? Buddha said, "If I don't go then who will go? Only two things are possible: either I will change him, and I cannot miss this challenge; or I will provide him with one finger so that his desire is fulfilled. Anyway I am going to die one day. Giving my head to Angulimal will be at least of some use; otherwise one day I will die and you will put me on the funeral pyre. I think that it is better to fulfill somebody's desire and give him peace of mind. Either he will kill me or I will kill him, but this encounter is going to happen; you just lead the way."

The people who used to follow Gautam Buddha, his close companions who were always in competition to be closer to him, started slowing down. Soon there were miles between Gautam Buddha and his disciples. They all wanted to see what happened, but they didn't want to be too close.

Angulimal was sitting on his rock watching. He could not believe his eyes. A very beautiful man of such immense charisma was coming towards him. Who could this man be? He had never heard of Gautam Buddha, but even this hard heart of Angulimal started feeling a certain softness towards the man. He was looking so beautiful, coming towards him. It was early morning... a cool breeze, and the sun was rising... and the birds were singing and the flowers had opened; and Buddha was coming closer and closer.

Finally Angulimal, with his naked sword in his hand, shouted, "Stop!" Gautam Buddha was just a few feet away, and Angulimal said, "Don't take another step because then the responsibility will not be mine. Perhaps you don't know who I am!"

Buddha said, "Do you know who you are?"

Angulimal said, "This is not the point. Neither is it the place nor the time to discuss such things. Your life is in danger!"

Buddha said, "I think otherwise -- your life is in danger."

That man said, "I used to think I was mad -- you are simply mad. And you go on moving closer. Then don't say that I killed an innocent man. You look so innocent and so beautiful that I want you to go back. I will find somebody else. I can wait; there is no hurry. If I can manage nine hundred and ninety-nine... it is only a question of one more, but don't force me to kill YOU."

Buddha said, "You are absolutely blind. You can't see a simple thing: I am not moving towards you, you are moving towards me."

Angulimal said, "This is sheer craziness! Anybody can see that you are moving and I am standing on my rock. I have not moved a single inch."

Buddha said, "Nonsense! The truth is, since the day I became enlightened I have not moved a single inch. I am centered, utterly centered, no movement. And your mind is continuously moving round and round in circles... and you have the guts to tell to me to stop. You stop! I have stopped long ago."

Angulimal said, "It seems you are impossible, you are incurable. You are bound to be killed. I will feel sorry, but what can I do? I have never seen such a mad man."

Buddha came very close, and Angulimal's hands were trembling. The man was so beautiful, so innocent, so childlike. He had already fallen in love. He had killed so many people... He had never felt this weakness; he had never known what love is. For the first time he was full of love. So there was a contradiction: the hand was holding the sword to kill the person, and his heart was saying, "Put the sword back in the sheath."

Buddha said, "I am ready, but why is your hand shaking? -- you are such a great warrior, even kings are afraid of you, and I am just a poor beggar. Except the begging bowl, I don't have anything. You can kill me, and I will feel immensely satisfied that at least my death fulfills somebody's desire; my life has been useful, my death has also been useful.

But before you cut my head I have a small desire, and I think you will grant me a small desire before killing me."

Before death even the hardest enemy is willing to fulfill any desire. Angulimal said, "What do you want?"

Buddha said, "I want you just to cut from the tree a branch which is full of flowers. I will never see these flowers again; I want to see those flowers closely, feel their fragrance and their beauty in this morning sun, their glory."

So Angulimal cut with his sword a whole branch full of flowers. And before he could give it to Buddha, Buddha said, "This was only half the desire; the other half is, please put the branch back on the tree."

Angulimal said, "I was thinking from the very beginning that you are crazy. Now this is the craziest desire. How can I put this branch back?"

Buddha said, "If you cannot create, you have no right to destroy. If you cannot give life, you don't have the right to give death to any living thing."

A moment of silence and a moment of transformation... the sword fell down from his hands. Angulimal fell down at the feet of Gautam Buddha, and he said, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are, take me to the same space in which you are; initiate me."

By that time the followers of Gautam Buddha had come closer and closer. Seeing that now Gautam Buddha was standing in front of Angulimal, there was no problem, no fear, although he needed only one finger. They were all around and when he fell at Buddha's feet they immediately came close. Somebody raised the question, "Don't initiate this man, he is a murderer. And he is not an ordinary murderer; he has murdered nine hundred and ninety-nine people, all innocent, all strangers. They have not done any wrong to him. He had not even seen them before!"

Buddha said again, "If I don't initiate him, who will initiate him? And I love the man, I love his courage. And I can see tremendous possibility in him: a single man fighting against the whole world. I want this kind of people, who can stand against the whole world. Up to now he was standing against the world with a sword; now he will stand against the world with a consciousness which is far sharper than any sword. I told you that murder was going to happen, but it was not certain who was going to be murdered --

either I was going to be murdered, or Angulimal. Now you can see Angulimal is murdered. And who I am to judge?"

He initiated Angulimal.

The question is not whether anybody is worthy or not. The question is whether you have the consciousness, the abundance of love -- then forgiveness will come out of it spontaneously. It is not a calculation, it is not arithmetic.

Life is love, and living a life of love is the only religious life, the only life of prayer, peace, the only life of gratitude, grandeur, splendor.

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #25

Chapter title: Don't renounce the world, renounce the rubbish! 2 October 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code: 8710020

ShortTitle: PILGR25

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

117

mins Question 1

BELOVED MASTER,

AS I LOOK AROUND ME, AT THE PEOPLE THAT HAVE ANSWERED YOUR

CALL, MY SPIRIT FLIES WITH JOY WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THESE, MY

BROTHERS AND SISTERS, ARE SOME OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY

PEOPLE ON THE PLANET. SEEING THEM WITH THIS AWARENESS MAKES ME

DROP FROM MY HEAD TO MY HEART. FOR IN THE HEAT OF DEALING WITH

MY OWN STUFF I FORGET TO SEE THEM AS THEY ARE, AND NOT HOW I PERCEIVE THEM.

PLEASE COMMENT.

Michael Scott, it is one of the basics of human understanding that if you want to see the others as they are you have to be utterly empty, without any prejudices, without any preconceived ideas, without any judgmental attitudes.

Nobody ordinarily sees people as they are. They see them as they can. They see them through a thick barrier of their own mind, of their own conditionings. Unless you are capable of seeing... In pure seeing, philosia, you don't have anything to project from your side, you don't have any color to give to the object of your observation. Then only are you capable of seeing things, people, as they are in themselves.

One of the great German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, even dropped the idea that you can see things as they are in themselves, because he had no way of knowing meditatively.

He was a great mind -- but the greater the mind, the greater the difficulty of seeing clearly. Your mind grabs every information that reaches to you, screens it, sorts out whatever is adjustable with your existing knowledge, allows it, and whatever is going to disturb your mind -- anything new, unfamiliar, a stranger -- it rejects.

Science has discovered a surprising fact. Our mind used to be thought of in the past as a receiver of information from the world, and our eyes, our ears, our noses, all our senses as doors from where the existence can enter into us. This has been an ancient understanding prevailing for thousands of years. But just within these five years, science has become aware of a totally different situation. Your senses are not simple windows; your mind allows only two percent of information and discards ninety-eight percent of information. It is continuously on guard for what enters you. It should be in tune with your concepts, superstitions, ideologies, and if it is not, the mind is not going to get disturbed, to get in a chaos, by allowing a new idea which will not be fitting with you.

This makes things very different. It means your mind is not a vehicle of knowing, but a vehicle for preventing ninety-eight percent of the knowledge that was available to you.

And the two percent that is allowed in is worth nothing, because it adjusts to you; it means it is the same stuff of which you already have enough.

Only a meditator can know people, can know things, can experience beauty as it is in itself, because he does not interfere, he does not censor, he is not on guard, he has nothing to lose. He has already dropped all that could have been the cause of fear. It is utterly empty.

Once in a while you are empty. In this moment you can see things with a clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience.

You are right when you say, "As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet."

If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. These people are certainly extraordinary! I am against the whole past, I am against all conditionings, I am against all ideologies, all organized religions. So only very few people, who have the courage to drop the whole past in its entirety, can have the opportunity to be with me.

To be with me is risky. It is dangerous -- dangerous to your mind. To be with me finally means you will have to lose your mind. Of course it will not be a loss because you will be attaining something greater, something vaster, something unbounded. You will be attaining a state of no-mind.

Only a state of no-mind is an open door; without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you.

Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.

The great philosophers of the contemporary world, the existentialists, have lost all courage. They have lost their very nerve for the simple reason that they are the most refined, cultured, educated, rational minds. From their minds they cannot see any beauty anywhere, they cannot see any joy anywhere, they cannot see any hope anywhere. They are utterly in deep anguish.

But existence is celebrating. It goes on bringing new flowers, it goes on bringing new stars, it goes on bringing every moment something new. It is continuously renewing itself, and there is a song that surrounds the whole existence and there is a dance that you can see in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the

children, in the sages. But to see this you have to put your mind aside.

Sometimes it happens on its own. Listening to me, if you become too attentive, you slip out of your mind. Those few moments when you slip out of your mind, you will become aware of this extraordinary gathering of brothers and sisters.

These people have taken a tremendous step. They have risked their established mind to enquire into the unfamiliar and the unknown -- and ultimately, the unknowable. They have put aside all their explanations in favor of the miracle and the mystery of existence.

They have dropped their ambitions, their desires for money, power, prestige, respectability. Now their whole concern is simple and single: how to know, Who am I?

Without knowing yourself, all knowledge is futile; and if you know yourself, you need not know anything that is unnecessary. Knowing oneself, one comes to know the very innermost core of existence, the very center. Experiencing that center is so blissful, so ecstatic that there is no need.… You are no longer a beggar; suddenly you have become an emperor. The whole kingdom of God has become yours.

These people have taken a courageous stand against the whole world. It is not ordinary, it is absolutely extraordinary. To stand alone like a lion, and not to be a sheep in the crowd, is the greatest courage in existence. Very few people are able to get out of the mass psychology, of the collective mind. The collective mind gives a certain sense of false security. Naturally it gives you the idea that so many people -- there are five billion people on the planet -- cannot be wrong. Naturally there is no need for you to search for the truth individually. All these people have discovered it; it is easier and cheaper just to follow them... just to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a communist. It is very easy when a crowd surrounds you to feel warm and cozy.

Standing alone like a tall Lebanon cedar, utterly alone in the sky, far away from the earth, almost reaching to the stars... But the beauty of the cedars of Lebanon

-- their courage to go beyond the crowd, their courage to be alone...

Gautam Buddha used to call sannyas a lion's roar. So whenever I am in a gap, if you are in tune with me, you are in a gap. Then you will become aware that you are surrounded by a strange crowd. It is not the ordinary crowd of the

marketplace -- these are seekers, these are enquirers. These are people who are ready to sacrifice everything for the truth.

These are the people who have renounced all borrowed knowledge and are in search of something of their own, because that which is not yours, is not right. It may have been right for Gautam Buddha, it may have been right for Jesus Christ, but it is not right for you.

You are a unique individual in your own right.

You have to find the truth alone, not by following somebody else's footsteps. The world of truth is something like the sky where birds fly but don't leave any footprints. The world of truth also has no footprints of Jesus or Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu. It is the world of consciousness: where can you leave the footprints?

All followers, without exception, are wrong. They are following someone because they are not courageous enough to seek and search on their own. They are afraid that alone, "I may not be able to find anything. And what is the need when Gautam Buddha has found?"

But you never think that when Gautam Buddha drinks, his thirst is quenched -- but that will not help your thirst. Jesus eats, his hunger is gone, but that will not make you nourished. You have to eat, you have to drink; you cannot simply depend. So many great people have loved, what is the need for you to love? -- you can simply follow them. But that will not be love; that will be only a carbon copy. And to be a carbon copy in this world is the ugliest way of being.

The only authentic man is always original.

He is not a replica, not a repetition. He is a new song, a new dance, a new beginning, always and always.

But you are right, Michael Scott, that "seeing these extraordinary people on the planet, seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart."

That's a beautiful symbol. That is a great indication. If you can move from the head to the heart, you have attained something which society has been preventing. Society does not want you to be a man of heart. Society needs heads, not hearts.

I have never been anywhere... and I have been through many universities. I was visiting India's greatest university, in Varanasi, and one of the most famous scholars, Doctor Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, was presiding at the meeting I was going to address. He was the head and the dean of the faculty of arts. I asked him, "Have you ever wondered why you are called the head, and not the heart?"

He said, "You always ask strange questions" -- he was an old man, and now he is dead.

He said, "In my whole life nobody ever asked, `Why are you called the head and not the heart?'" But he considered that although the question is very strange, "you have something significant in your question. You make me also wonder why people are not called the heart of the philosophy department -- that will be more authentic, more essential -- but they are called the head of the department of philosophy."

Society is divided between head and hands. Have you noticed that laborers are called hands? Poor people working with their hands, manual workers, are called hands... and there are people above them who are called heads. But the heart is completely missing; nobody is called the heart.

It is immensely significant that you start feeling a stirring in your heart, because your heart is far more valuable than your head. Your head is all borrowed... it has nothing of its own. But your heart is still yours. Your heart is not Christian, your heart is not Hindu, your heart is still existential. It has not been corrupted and polluted. Your heart is still original, and it is a tremendously great quantum leap from the head to the heart.

Now one step more -- from the heart to being -- and you have arrived home, the pilgrimage is over. Nobody can come directly from the head to the being. They are strangers; they are not at all connected with each other. They are not even introduced.

Neither your being knows anything about the head, nor your head knows anything about the being. They live in the same house but they are absolute strangers. Because their functioning is so different they never come across each other, they never encounter each other.

Heart is the bridge. Part of the heart knows the head, and part of the heart knows the being. The heart is a midway station. When you are moving towards your

being, the heart is going to be an overnight stay. From the heart you will be able to see something of the being, but not from the head; hence, philosophers never turn into mystics. Poets turn, transform... painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians, singers are closer to the being.

But our whole society is dominated by the head, because the head is capable of earning money. It is very efficient -- machines are always more efficient -- it is capable of fulfilling all your ambitions. The head is being created by your educational systems, and your whole energy starts moving... bypassing the heart.

The heart is the most significant thing because it is the gateway to your being, to your eternal life source. I would like all the universities of the world to make people aware of the heart, to make them more esthetic, more sensitive... sensitive of all that surrounds us, the immense beauty, the immense joy.

But the heart cannot fulfill your egoist desires, that is the problem. It can give you a tremendous experience of love, an alchemical change. It can bring the best in you to its clearest and purest form, but it will not create money, power, prestige. And they have become the goals.

It is very significant that you go on slipping from your head to the heart. Just take a little more risk: slip from the heart to the being. That is the rock bottom of your life. But what happens to you? You are saying, "For in the heat of dealing with my own stuff, I forget to see them as they are, and not how I perceive them."

What is your own stuff? In the first place it is not yours. Just look at the stuff: it is all kinds of junk fed in by people, your parents, your society, your teachers, your leaders, your saints; nothing of it belongs to you. Your head has been used almost like a wastepaper basket -- anybody goes on dropping anything in. Your stuff is not yours: that is the first thing to be remembered, because it will change your vision. And the stuff is just an unnecessary burden, a luggage that you are carrying and are being crushed under it.

One sannyasin from Africa, Bhavani Dayal, had come for a pilgrimage of the Himalayas.

As he was climbing in the hot sun -- he was perspiring, his breathing was becoming difficult and he was carrying a bag on his shoulder -- just ahead of him he saw a girl not more than ten years old carrying perhaps her brother, a small

boy, but very fat, on her shoulders. She was also perspiring, and as Bhavani Dayal came close to the girl, just out of compassion he said, "My daughter, your burden must be killing you."

The young girl was furious at the sannyasin. She said, "You are carrying the burden --

this is my brother, it is not a burden." On the weighing scale both will prove to be burdens, both will have weight, but on the scales of the heart the small girl was right, and the old sannyasin was wrong. He himself has written in his autobiography, "I have never come across such a situation in which a small girl pointed to a fact which I had never thought about."

The head can think only of burden, responsibility, duty. The heart knows nothing of responsibility, although it responds spontaneously. The heart knows nothing of burden because it knows love. Love makes everything weightless. Love is the only force which is not under the control of gravitation. It does not pull you down. It gives you wings and takes you to the beyond.

Your stuff, Michael Scott, is nothing special; everybody is full of the same bullshit. We have to cleanse this whole stuff. Make your mind without any stuff... and with the stuff disappearing, the mind also disappears. The mind is nothing but a collective name for your stuff.

The teacher asked her little pupils to tell about their acts of kindness to poor animals.

After several of the children had told heart-stirring stories of kindness, the teacher asked little Ernie if he had anything to tell.

"Well," said Ernie proudly, "I once kicked a boy for kicking his dog."

What is your stuff? Just observe.… We get lost into the jungle of it. Stand aside and see.

The local ladies group had invited their new neighbor to lunch. After she had left, the other ladies sat around discussing her.

"Well," said Mrs. Finkelstein, "she seems very sweet, but, my god! -- yakkety yakkety yak -- I thought she would never stop."

"Do you suppose," asked Mrs. Rosenbaum, "that everything she says is true?" "I should say not," snorted Becky Goldberg, "there just is not that much truth."

Just watch your stuff. It is our unawareness that goes on collecting all kinds of rubbish.

This rubbish becomes so thick that it does not allow you to see things as they are; neither does it allow you to enter into your own innermost subjectivity.

The religions of the world have been telling people to renounce the world. I say, Don't renounce the world. The world has not done any wrong to you. Renounce this rubbish, this stuff that you are are carrying within you.

But people have, for centuries, renounced the world but carried the stuff. Wherever you will be -- in the Himalayas, in the monasteries -- your stuff will be there. You can renounce the world because the world is not in any way preventing you, but how are you going to renounce your mind? And if the mind has to be renounced, there is no need to go to a monastery, there is no need to go to the Himalayas; then wherever you are, you can renounce it. There is no need for all kinds of austerities that people have to force upon themselves.

I have heard about a Trappist monastery. The rule of the monastery was that you can speak only once in seven years. A young man entered, and the abbot of the monastery asked him, "Are you aware that it is a very austere life, and particularly that you cannot speak for seven years? In seven years only one chance is given to speak; then again for seven years you have to be silent. So are you ready? -- because that is the most difficult part."

But the young man was determined, fanatically determined. He accepted the rule and was initiated into the monastery. He got a cell and he saw the situation.… The bed, the mattress, was so dirty -- it may have been used for centuries -- it was stinking. And for seven years he cannot even say to the abbot or anybody, "Please remove this mattress. It will kill me.…" But there was no way to say, so he had to suffer that stinking stuff for seven years.

As the seven years were complete, he rushed to the abbot and said, "You have almost killed me. Remove that mattress immediately. It is so dirty it seems Adam and Eve have used it!"

The abbot ordered a new mattress. The new mattress came, but it was a little big for the small cell. So the workers somehow forced it in, and by forcing it in they broke one of the glasses of the window. But he could not say anything -- and now from that broken glass water started coming, rain would come, and on cold nights, ice would come in the cell.

He was in a more dangerous situation than he had been before. He had already become accustomed to that stinking mattress, but this was a more difficult situation. So much cold... he was shivering and it was always wet and no sun was reaching in the cell. He said, "My God, seven years... I hope that somehow things will become right. They have become even worse."

After seven years he again went to the abbot, and he said, "What kind of mattress have you sent? Those idiots have broken the window, and for seven years I have been suffering from cold, shivering day in day out, waiting just for when these seven years will end. It looked almost like eternity."

The abbot said, "Okay, the window should be mended." The window was mended, but in seven years of rain, snow, the mattress had become so rotten... but now there were again seven years to wait. That young man thought, "Now I cannot survive. Fourteen years have passed. I have come here to find truth, and what have I found? I had never dreamt about it. It is a nightmare." But finally all those seven years also passed. Now it was twenty-one years that he had suffered.

He went to the abbot and said, "This is a strange place. Twenty-one years and I am suffering the same thing in different forms."

The abbot was very angry. He said, "Since you have come, complaints, complaints, complaints... never a single word of appreciation! You are not worthy to be a monk. Get out of the monastery."

He said, "My God, twenty-one years unnecessarily suffering, and now you are throwing me out."

The abbot said, "We cannot allow such negative characters."

Just look at your stuff. It is absolutely unnecessary to suffer it, it can be thrown out. You should cleanse your mind. Why go on piling up garbage upon garbage? But because you call it "my" stuff, there has arisen an identity; it has become your treasure. So the first thing is: don't call it "my" stuff. It is stuff which has

been forced into you by all kinds of stupid people around you.

My father had a friend who was thought to be the wisest man around that area, and he used to take me to him just so that I could also learn some wisdom. I used to sit there with my fingers in my ears. My father said, "I have brought you to understand something and you are sitting with your fingers in your ears. Are you mad?"

I said, "I am not mad, you are mad. This guy is throwing all kinds of rubbish, and I am not ready to allow it in my head. It will be unnecessary trouble: first gather it, then clean it -- what is the point? I am perfectly clean."

That old wise man was very angry. He said, "You have to take care of this boy. He has to be controlled and disciplined. This is very disrespectful towards me. Never in my life has anybody done such a thing."

I said, "Never in your life have you come across anybody who had guts; otherwise, what you are doing is collecting garbage from the scriptures" -- his house was full of ancient scriptures -- "and then throwing all that stuff into other peoples' heads. You should be taken to the court. You need to be put in a jail, because you are the greatest criminal in this area. You have destroyed so many people's minds, and their whole lives they will suffer and they will think this is their stuff."

If you can keep a clear distinction what is your own experience and what is enforced on you, then whatever is enforced, borrowed, has to be discarded. That is the only thing to be renounced.

The world is perfectly beautiful. Just your mind has to be silent, empty, open, and you will have the clarity to see people as they are... not only to see people, but to see yourself as you are. This understanding brings a transformation in your being. The world becomes a totally different place -- from despair to dance, from darkness to light, from death to eternal life.

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEXUAL POWER AND SEXUAL

ENERGY?

Deva Agni, sexual energy is another name for your life force. The word sex has become condemned by the religions; otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. It is your very life.

Sexual energy is a natural energy: you are born out of it. It is your creative energy. When the painter paints or the poet composes or the musician plays or the dancer dances, these are all expressions of your life force.

Not only are children born out of your sexual energy, but everything that man has created on the earth has come out of sexual energy. Sexual energy can have many transformations: at the lowest it is biological; at the highest it is spiritual. It has to be understood that all creative people are highly sexual. You can see the poets, you can see the painters, you can see the dancers. All creative people are highly sexual, and the same is true about the people whom I call the mystics. Perhaps they are the most sexual people on the earth, because they are so full of life energy, abundant, overflowing.…

But sexual power is a totally different thing. Sexual power is politics. It is using your sex to dominate people. Domination can be done in many ways: somebody dominates because he has money, somebody dominates because he has more physical strength, somebody dominates because he has more knowledge, somebody dominates because he is clever enough to befool people and collect their votes, somebody can dominate through her or his sexual power. More often it is the woman's way to dominate.

The woman can dominate because of her sexual appeal, but it is ugly and mean. It is selling your body just to dominate.

One of the most beautiful women in the world was Cleopatra. She was a queen in Egypt.

Her country never went into war; whenever there was an attack, she herself would go and offer her body to the invader, to the leader of the armies -- and she had such beauty that she easily persuaded the general of the army. She seduced the general by giving her body.

She was using her power -- her sex, her beauty, her charm -- and she remained the queen of Egypt without ever taking her armies to fight with anybody. A very

strange woman...

But all women in different degrees dominate through their sex. They use it as a power. To use sex as a power is to degrade oneself, is to lose one's dignity and self-respect. It is pure prostitution.

The difference between British and French girls is this: they both know what men like, but the French girl does not mind.

Business was brisk for the pretty young prostitute in the bar.

"Bill," she said, "you can come over about seven-ish, and you, George around eight-ish, and Frank, I will have time for you about nine-ish." She then looked around the crowded bar and called out, "Anyone for tennish?"

Using your sexual energy as a profession, selling it as a commodity may give you a certain feeling of power, but you are destroying yourself by your own hands. Sexual energy is not to be used as a political means. Sexual energy is your potentiality for spiritual growth. You can become enlightened only because of your sexual energy.

I have been searching for almost thirty-five years, in all kinds of books, strange scriptures from Tibet and Ladakh and China and Japan -- India has the greatest number of scriptures in the world -- and I have been looking for one thing: has there ever been an enlightened impotent person? There is no incidence recorded anywhere. An impotent person has never been a great poet either, or a great singer, or a great sculptor, or a great scientist.

What is the problem with the impotent person? He has no life force; he is hollow. He cannot create anything -- and to create oneself as an enlightened being needs tremendous energy.

Never use your sex as a commodity, as a strategy to dominate, because you are committing suicide. You are destroying the power that can take you to the highest peak of consciousness.

Robert, an American, had been in Italy during the war and had made friends with Giovanni. A few years later he went back to Rome to visit his friend. As soon as Giovanni saw Bob, he could not do enough for him. He showed him the sights and then took him out for a beautiful meal of finest spaghetti. After the meal,

Giovanni insisted that Bob meet his sister. "Is she pretty?" asked Bob.

"Bella! Bella!" cried Giovanni. "Is she young?" continued Bob. "Si! Si!" cried Giovanni.

"And is she pure?" asked Bob.

"My god!" said Giovanni, "you Americans really are crazy!"

Sex has become a thing of the marketplace. On the one hand, religions have been repressing sexual energy and creating perversions which have culminated in the dangerous disease AIDS, which has no cure. The whole credit goes to religions, and if they have any sense of being human, then all the churches and all the monasteries and the Vatican itself should be turned into hospitals for the people suffering from AIDS, because these are the people who have created them. Theirs is the responsibility. They have forced men to live separately from women; they have insisted that celibacy is the very foundation of a religious life. But celibacy is unnatural, and anything unnatural cannot be the foundation of a religious life.

Because celibacy is unnatural, and religions have divided men and women into different monasteries, they have created the situation for homosexuality. They are the pioneers of homosexuality, and homosexuality has led to AIDS, which cannot be called simply a disease because it does not come in the category of diseases. It is death itself.

So on the one hand religions have created perversions; on the other hand they insisted on monogamy, which in fact means monotony. That has created the profession of the prostitute. The priest is responsible for the prostitute. It is so ugly and sick that we have created objects, commodities, things to be exploited out of so many beautiful women.

Even today, it is not understood exactly what sex is. It need not be repressed, because it is your very energy. It has to be transformed certainly; it has to be raised to its highest purity.

And as you start moving upwards... the name of the ladder is meditation... sex becomes love, sex becomes compassion, and ultimately sex becomes the explosion of your inner being, the illumination, the awakening, the enlightenment. But it is sexual energy... it can rot, it can go into perversions. But if it is to be understood naturally and helped through meditation to move upwards towards silent spaces, to pass through your heart and reach to the seventh center at the highest point in your body... you will feel grateful towards the energy. Right now you feel only ashamed.

This shame and guilt is created by the religious organizations, founders of religion.

Naturally the question arises, Why did they make sex a mess? And through making a mess of sex they have messed up the whole world and its mind and its growth. Why? --

because this was the simplest way to keep humanity in slavery. This was the simplest way to keep people guilty, and anybody who feels guilty can never raise his head in revolt. So all the vested interests wanted man to lose his dignity, self- respect, to feel guilty, ashamed. They have been condemning sex continuously, and their condemnation has lead the whole world into a very miserable, psychologically abnormal state. And they are still doing their work.…

Just the other day, one shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswati, has given a statement that no religious man can support family planning -- and all religions will agree with the Hindu shankaracharya. But I am puzzled. The Christian God has only one begotten son: if that is not family planning, then what is it? The Hindu God Shiva has only two sons: if that is not family planning, then what is it?

To say that no religious person can support family planning is simply madness. The world has already become overpopulated because of these religious people. By the end of this century almost half of humanity will have to die through starvation -- and who will be responsible for it? These religious people who are not in favor of family planning.

I would like to contradict Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati: without any exception, absolutely anyone who is religious is bound to support family planning. And those who don't support it are not religious; they are cunning

politicians. They want the world to remain poor, they want the world to be always in a state of begging, so rich people can enjoy donations and can make reservations in paradise by those donations. If there is nobody poor in the world, who is going to accept their donations?

The politicians want people to remain starving because starving people are very obedient; they don't have the energy to revolt, to be disobedient. Nobody is concerned with humanity; everybody is concerned with his own power. And still in this century, when things are coming to such a great crisis, a shankaracharya -- who is the equivalent of a pope to the Hindus -- declares that family planning is against religion. Then starvation and millions of people dying through hunger seems to be religious, seems to be the will of God, who is called love, who is called compassionate.

What kind of compassion is this? But these religious people are more interested in the numbers; Jayendra Saraswati is interested in numbers. Hindu society should not follow any birth control methods, because if they follow birth control methods then their number will shrink -- and Christians will go on growing bigger and bigger. It is politics of numbers.

Mohammedans insist that they should be allowed to have four wives, without any consideration that in existence there is a certain balance, an equal number of women and men. If a man is allowed to have four wives, what about the three men who will be deprived of women? They are bound to go to the prostitutes, they are bound to become homosexuals, they are bound to practice sodomy.

All these crimes are perpetuated by your so-called virtuous leaders, religious saints. But they have been doing this harm for thousands of years. Rather than helping man to sublimate his energies, to make them creative, they have only been able to force man to repress his energies. And repressed energies become a cancer, repressed energies create all kinds of perversions.

The teacher asked her children's art class to draw on the blackboard their impressions of the most exciting thing they could think of.

Little Hymie got up and drew a long jagged line. "What is that?" asked the teacher.

"Lightning," said Hymie. "Every time I see lightning I get so excited, I scream."

"Very good," said the teacher.

Next, little Sally drew a long wavy line. She explained that it was the sea which always excited her. The teacher thought that was excellent too.

Then little Ernie came up to the blackboard, made a single dot and sat down. "What is that?" asked the puzzled teacher.

"It is a period," said Ernie.

"Well," said the teacher, "what is so exciting about a period?"

"I don't know," said Ernie to the teacher, "but my sister has missed two of them and my whole family is excited."

This excitement has made the whole world a mad asylum, and it goes on growing so fast that it always defeats all scientific calculations.

Just forty years ago, when India became free, it had four hundred million people. Now, after only forty years, it has nine hundred million people. Five hundred million people have been produced in forty years; and by the end of this century, the calculations of the scientists are that it will be the biggest nation in the world for the first time -- up to now China has been the first -- it will go beyond one billion people. And Jayendra Saraswati is talking about no family planning, no birth control.…

Is this country capable of managing one billion people? -- their food, their clothes, their education, their medicine? It will not be even able to provide them with drinking water.

Food is impossible; even today, half the population of India sleeps hungry in the night because they cannot afford more than one meal a day.

I have seen people who have not been able to find even one meal a day. Then sleep is very difficult: your stomach is turning, asking for food, it is aching, it is painful. With my own eyes I have seen people putting a brick on their stomach and tying it around the waist, just to feel some weight, because inside the stomach there is nothing. These people suffering in misery are the responsibility of people like Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati -- these are the criminals.

When one thousand people were dying per day in Ethiopia, even then the pope was continuously talking about no birth control, Mother Teresa was talking about no birth control. You have to see the implications: Mother Teresa needs orphans; without orphans she does not have any qualifications to have a Nobel prize. But from where can you get orphans if birth control methods are applied? And strangely enough, they condemn birth control methods because they are not God's creation, but they don't condemn medicine, which is also not God's creation. At least there is no mention of medicine in those six days when he made the world.

Medicine has given man longer life. There are people in the Soviet Union who have passed their one hundred and eightieth year, and they are still young; there is every possibility that they will pass their second century. There are thousands who have passed beyond one hundred and fifty... and no religious leader condemns it, saying that medicine should be stopped from giving people health and longevity. No religious leader goes on saying that diseases should be allowed because they are God-created.

Medicine can be used; people can be made more healthy... and naturally when they are more healthy they are more sexually powerful. But birth control methods cannot be used because they will reduce the numbers of their congregations. It is a competition of numbers.

Catholics are six hundred million in number. It is the greatest religion in the world -- only because of the numbers; otherwise it is the most third-rate religion in the world, there is nothing much in it which can be called religious. But it is the biggest religion, the greatest religion, only on the strength of numbers. It cannot allow numbers to decline -- even if these numbers are going to kill the whole of humanity.

I am in absolute favor of birth control methods for two reasons: birth control methods will keep the world healthy, nourished; secondly, once birth control methods are used, sex loses its profanity -- or its sacredness. It becomes simple fun, it becomes just a joyful exchange of energies. According to me, the birth control pill is the greatest invention that man has made. It is the greatest revolution because it can make man and woman equal, liberated. Otherwise the woman is constantly pregnant, and because of her pregnancy she cannot be independent financially, she cannot be independent educationally, she cannot be independent from man's domination.

Once she is free from being pregnant compulsorily she will have as much time, as much energy to be creative. Until now half of humanity has remained uncreative... no great poets, no great saints, no great musicians, no great artists. Women have had no time. I was surprised to know that even the books on cookery are written by men, not by women.

And the best cooks are men, not women: in all the great five-star hotels you will find great cooks, always men. Strange... That has been the domain of the woman forever, but she has no energy left. Because of these religious people, she will never be liberated.

Sex energy has to be welcomed and transformed through the alchemy of meditation into higher states of being, into creativity in different dimensions, not only creating more and more children. Life has to be planned, it should not be accidental.

I have heard that when God was making the world, he called man aside and gave him twenty years of normal sex life. Man was horrified: "Only twenty years?!" he cried. But God would not budge. That was all he would give him.

Then God called the monkey and gave him twenty years. "But, God! I don't need that much," said the monkey, "ten is enough."

Man spoke up and said, "Can I have the other ten?" -- and the monkey agreed.

Then God called the lion and gave him twenty years. The lion, too, only wanted ten.

Again the man said, "Can I have the other ten?" The lion roared, "Of course!"

Then came the donkey. He was given twenty years, but he also only wanted ten. Man asked for the extra ten, and got them.

This explains why man has twenty years of a normal sex life, then ten years of monkeying around, ten years of lion about it, and ten years of making an ass of himself.

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #26

Chapter title: A glimpse of your own future

2 October 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium Archive

code:

8710025

ShortTitle:

PILGR26

Audio:

Yes Video:

Yes Length:

81

mins Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,

I HEARD YOU SAY THAT SOMEONE WHO IS NOT YET PREPARED FOR ENLIGHTENMENT MIGHT DIE FROM THE EXPERIENCE. I BELIEVE IT

IS

ALSO POSSIBLE THAT THE EXPERIENCE REMAINS A SHORT SATORI AND

THE PERSON COMES BACK TO HIS NORMAL STATE. THIS IS MY OWN EXPERIENCE. I WAS IN A STATE OF EXTREME HAPPINESS AND

PROBLEMLESSNESS, AND HAD A STRONG FEELING OF "I AM LOVE," AND

THEN I CAME BACK AFTER MAYBE HALF AN HOUR. CAN YOU PLEASE

COMMENT?

Veet Diti, you came quite soon! It is really unique -- just in half an hour! You made a great comeback. You had gone through the experience of problemlessness, of extreme happiness and of the feeling of "I am love." But what happened after half an hour? The problems must have come back, and the misery may have deepened. And what to say about the experience of "I am love"? Now who are you? -- I mean after half an hour.

You really did a great job! I am at a loss what to say to you, from where to begin? --

before half an hour or after?

Satori is not such a thing. Satori is a miniature experience of samadhi, but once you get into it, you cannot get out of it. That's the real test and the criterion. Anything that comes and goes is of the mind; it is imagination. Anything that comes and remains, even in spite of you, even if you want it to go it is impossible to get out of it... Satori is forever.

Samadhi is just like the total opening of the lotus, and satori is the beginning of the opening of the petals. Satori is the beginning, samadhi is the climax. But you don't get out of it. It is one-way traffic; nobody has come out of it.

But mind is capable of imagining anything. It can imagine that there are no

problems, but if you look deep down you will feel that you are uneasy about "no problems." Deep down you will find absolutely a feeling..."What has happened to me?" You will not feel blissful because there are no problems. You will feel very lonely because all your friends are gone, all your relatives... the whole family has disappeared, leaving you alone in darkness. You will make a problem out of this situation. This situation will not be a blissful state, but a state of deep anguish, anxiety, loneliness and a deep longing to be somehow out of it.

What you think is happiness is just a dream of your mind. Your mind is inherently capable of dreaming about everything. It can dream about satori, it can dream about samadhi, in a dream it can become the Buddha -- but the dream cannot last long. Even half an hour is too much!

But you seem to have fallen into the trap of the mind. You say, "I have heard you say that someone who is not yet prepared for enlightenment might die from the experience." You have heard it, but you have not understood it. You have not explored all the implications of it.

What I am saying is: Enlightenment can happen this very moment, even in your unpreparedness, because it does not depend on your preparedness. It is not something that depends on your efforts, readiness. It is a happening beyond you, beyond your reach. It can happen this very moment. It is not happening because this will be dangerous to your very life.

The experience of enlightenment is such a great shock to your body, to your mind, to your very system. It is exactly a lightning experience. Everything that you have been is simply shattered. The shock is so much you may forget breathing, you may forget that your heart has stopped.

Preparedness is needed not for enlightenment, but to absorb it. Preparedness is needed not to achieve enlightenment, but so that when it comes, you don't fall apart but you remain centered and silent and peaceful and let the great experience happen. But it does not destroy you. Your preparedness is necessary to save your life from the great experience, which is almost like fire.

Unless you are prepared, enlightenment and death are almost simultaneous. Many people have died because of sudden enlightenment. They were not ready for it, it was too much.

Their body, their whole system, was too fragile for the experience. They were

too small and the experience was too big.

So when people say to you, "Prepare for enlightenment," they really mean, "Prepare... not for enlightenment, it will not come by your preparedness; prepare so that you can welcome it without being shattered, without being killed by the great joy." Have you not heard of many people dying out of great excitement?

I have heard... a man was continuously purchasing every month a ticket for a million dollar lottery. He had been purchasing it for years, and all his friends and his family had become tired of telling him, "What is the point, why do you go on wasting money in purchasing the ticket? We have seen: almost thirty years have passed, nothing comes."

But the man had become so accustomed to the habit. The day he got his salary, the first thing he did was to purchase a ticket for the coming lottery. Then one day a telegram came. He was in the office, his wife received the telegram -- he has won the lottery, and by the evening the money will be delivered.

His wife became very much worried. They had been poor, they had lived in poverty; she knew that it will be too much for her poor husband -- one million dollars out of the blue!

He was not even expecting... Thirty years have passed; he had even forgotten why he goes on purchasing the ticket. He knew perfectly well that it was not going to happen to him. It is not his fate.

The wife suddenly remembered the Catholic priest -- they were Catholics -- "This is the moment I should run to the priest and ask his advice... `What to do? Because the moment he will hear it -- one million dollars -- I am afraid he will have a heart attack. You are a wise man and this is the time we need your help.'"

The priest said, "Don't be worried. I am coming with you. You need not convey the message; I will convey the message, and I will convey it in installments, so he does not get the shock so suddenly -- one million dollars! First I will say,

`You have got fifty thousand dollars.' When he has absorbed it I will say, `No, you have got really one hundred thousand dollars.' When he has absorbed that, and I am certain that he is still alive, I will go on. This way by a slow process he will be able to come to the point where he can accept one million dollars."

The wife said, "You are really great! You are certainly the wisest man around

and if you can save my husband's life I will donate fifty thousand dollars to the church."

The priest said, "What? Fifty thousand dollars?" -- and he fell down then and there. He never came back after half an hour! Fifty thousand dollars so suddenly... the poor priest, and he was not expecting it at all.

Enlightenment is the greatest experience in life. You cannot even conceive what it is -- no conceptualization is possible. You can think of pleasure, great pleasure; you can think of happiness, because you have known something of it -- a little bit. You can think,

"Perhaps there will be no problems." But these are not the real contents of enlightenment.

Because here you are constantly living in the atmosphere full of longings for enlightenment, your mind can start weaving, spinning dreams. But don't take those dreams seriously. You have done that. You say, "I believe it is also possible that the experience remains a short satori and the person comes back to his normal state." You don't understand what is your normal state.

Enlightenment is your normal state!

The state in which you are is abnormal! Coming back from satori to your so- called normal state is coming back from satori into insanity. It is simply not possible. Once you have seen the light you cannot become blind again. Once you have known love, hate cannot raise its head in your being. Once all problems are dissolved, from where can they come back again?

Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. He was getting tired of lying on his back, so he rolled over and sat on the edge of the scaffold. Looking down he noticed a little old lady praying in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Wanting to have some fun, he shouted down in a deep voice, "I am Jesus Christ, I am Jesus Christ! Listen to me and I will do miracles."

The old lady looked up, clasping her rosary, and shouted back, "You shut-up-a your mouth! I am-a talking to your mother!"

"The last time I met you," said the priest, "you made me very happy because you were sober. Today you have made me unhappy because you are drunk."

"True," said the drunk with a smile, "but today is my turn to be happy." Beware of your mind -- it can deceive you!

There is not anything in life which mind cannot hallucinate about, and when you are living in a special atmosphere like this, where meditation, enlightenment, blissfulness, ecstasy are in the very air, where everybody is thinking about these extraordinary experiences... This is not a common place. In the market people are thinking about money, about power, about respectability.

This is not a marketplace. This is a temple of silence.

Here everything is vibrating, and it is very easy to get caught into imagination. And particularly a woman is more capable of imagination than a man.

Veet Diti -- a man thinks, a woman feels. Feeling is irrational. A man finds it hard to imagine. A woman is very easily capable of imagining anything. Her center of functioning is feeling, emotion, sentiments; her eyes are continuously filled with dreams.

These dreams can be useful in poetry, in drama, but these dreams cannot be of any help --

on the contrary they are great hindrances -- on the path of truth. Truth is not your imagination, it is not your feeling.

Truth is your being.

But the woman is very easily persuaded... it is not her fault, it is her nature. These are the differences between man and woman. Men are basically skeptical, doubtful about everything, suspicious; hence they are more capable of scientific research.

For a woman it is difficult to be a scientist, very rare. But as far as imagination is concerned, if she is allowed -- but she has not been allowed for centuries -- then no painter can compete with her, no poet can compete with her, no musician can go higher than she can go, no dancer can come even close to her. She can prove

of tremendous help in creating a beautiful planet. She can fill it with songs, dances and love.

But unfortunately man has not allowed her freedom to stand on her own and to contribute to life. Half of humanity has been deprived of contributing, and perhaps... it is my understanding that this has been done out of fear.

Man is afraid of woman's imagination. He is afraid because once she is allowed freedom to be creative, man will not be able to compete with her. His superiority, his ego, is in danger. Because of this fear that his superiority will be destroyed, that all his great poets will look like pigmies, and all his great painters will look amateur, it is better not to allow the woman education, the opportunity to express her feelings and her heart.

But as far as enlightenment is concerned, man's problem is his reason and woman's problem is her feeling. Both are barriers to enlightenment. Man has to drop his reasoning, the woman has to drop her feeling. Both are at equal distance from enlightenment. Man's distance is of reasoning, of mind; woman's distance is of feeling, of heart -- but the distance is equal. Man has to drop his logic and woman has to drop her emotions. Both have to drop something which is hindering the path.

In various stages of her life a woman resembles the continents of the world. As a child she is like Africa, virgin territory, unexplored. In her youth she is like Asia, hot and exotic. In her prime she is like America, fully explored and free with her resources. In middle age she is like Europe, exhausted, but not without places of interest. And after that she is like Australia -- everyone knows it is down there, but nobody much cares.

Man has to drop his approach towards reality; he is always thinking and the woman is always feeling. Both are equally incapable of experiencing enlightenment, because one is filled with thoughts, the other is filled with feelings.

Enlightenment is possible only when you are utterly empty -- no thought, no feeling, just utter silence. Then what happens remains. It never goes away.

So the question is significant for all. In your longing, in your desire, in your passion you are vulnerable to hallucinate, to start thinking or feeling that which you would like to experience. But this is dangerous because it will become your

final block. You will never be able to reach beyond this barrier.

It is good to be alert from the very beginning. Never imagine! Remember all that you can do for enlightenment is a preparedness, a silent being, a serenity. Enlightenment will come at the right moment, whenever you are absolutely silent.

You don't have to imagine it, you don't have to even worry about what it is like. You don't have to find the definition of it, you don't have to be concerned about the description -- what qualities, what experiences are going to happen through it

-- because all that is dangerous. All that can give your mind beautiful opportunities to imagine, to think and to believe... and Diti has even mentioned the word, saying that she believes: "I believe it is also possible..."

The world of experience is not the world of belief: either you know or you don't know.

Belief is deceptive. An authentic religious person has nothing to do with belief. It is the unauthentic, the false, the phony who lives in systems of beliefs. These systems of beliefs make you Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans... they don't allow you to become simply and purely religious. And remember that unless you are simply religious, you are not religious at all.

It is not a question of your believing. It is a question of your experiencing.

And for the experience, get prepared! Become the right receptive host... the guest comes.

I am reminded of a beautiful story. Rabindranath has made a poem based on the story; his poem is named, "The King of the Night." There is a great temple, perhaps the greatest because there are one thousand priests in the temple. It is vast and has thousands of statues, and millions of people pass through the temple every day.

The high priest one night dreams that God has come into his dream. God says to him,

"You have been preparing the temple every day for thousands of years with

flowers, with fragrance and you are waiting for me. I am sorry that I could not come before, but tomorrow I am coming."

Just the idea that God is coming tomorrow... in the middle of the night the priest woke up. He was in a very great dilemma -- whether to tell the other priests or not, because nobody is going to believe it. They will laugh, they will say, "You have got old and senile. God has never come. It was only a dream after all, and dreams don't come true.

Dreams are dreams! So don't be worried about it, nobody is going to come."

But then he was also afraid. If it turns out to be true and God comes, then the temple will not be perfectly ready for him. So much work has to be done -- the garden has to be cleaned, the path has to be made clean, the whole temple has to be washed, delicious food has to be made -- the great guest is going to come. He thought, "It is better to be thought to be mad, senile, but it is dangerous to take the risk of not telling others." Alone he cannot do it -- the work is vast and the time is short. Tomorrow -- who knows at what time -- maybe in the morning, maybe in the afternoon, or by the evening certainly he will be coming.

So he woke up all the priests, one thousand priests. They were all angry that he is talking nonsense in the middle of the night. They said, "You just go to sleep. You have become too old. Thinking and thinking continuously for your whole life that God will come one day, now you have convinced yourself. This is just a dream managed by your own unconscious. You simply go to sleep!"

He said, "I will go to sleep, but I don't want to take any chance. What is the harm if we clean the whole temple? It is good -- it has not been cleaned thoroughly for centuries.

There is no harm; even if God does not come it is good to clean the temple, to clean the garden, to clean the road as if he is coming. And who knows, he may come!"

The other priests also thought that it was not good to take a chance, so the whole garden was cleaned, the whole temple was washed, all the statues were washed and so much incense, so much fragrance, so many flowers... The whole day they were waiting with delicious food prepared, but they could not eat unless the guest had come. And when it was afternoon and he had not come, doubt started arising and a few priests started saying,

"It is all nonsense! We have been unnecessarily tortured the whole day; now it is afternoon and he has not come."

Slowly, slowly, more and more skepticism, more and more doubt, and by the evening almost everybody -- except the high priest -- was against waiting any longer. They said,

"You simply managed to torture us. We have been starving the whole day; now it is enough. The sun is setting and the day is complete. Now we should eat, we should be allowed to eat. And we want to go to sleep early; we are tired." Unwillingly the high priest agreed; they ate and they went to sleep.

In the middle of the night a golden chariot comes to the doors of the temple. The noise that the wheels of the chariot make reaches the priests in their sleep.

One priest says, "It seems he has come, because I can hear a strange noise which can only come from the great wheels of a chariot."

Others say, "Shut up and go to sleep! There is no chariot, nothing; it is just the clouds in the sky.…" (A SUDDEN BURST OF FIRECRACKERS) You listen to the clouds -- it feels like he is coming!

And finally the chariot stops at the gate. He steps down; he climbs the marble steps up to the main gate. Somebody says, "I hear his steps, he has come. I have even heard a knock on the doors."

But many others shout, "You idiots, will you allow us to sleep or not? We are tired, the whole day waiting and cleaning and working, and now somebody hears the chariot, somebody is hearing the footsteps. Nobody has come, it is just the wind that is knocking on the doors. Just go to sleep!"

In the morning when they opened the door, they were shocked: the chariot had come, because there were, on the dirt road coming to the temple, the marks of a chariot. They could see on the steps some footprints.

They were all silent. Their eyes were full of tears and the high priest said, "You did not listen to me! For centuries this temple has been waiting, and now the King of the Night has come. And we forgot completely that the temple was known as the temple of the King of the Night. Naturally the King of the Night will come in the night, not in the day.

We waited in the day, and we went to sleep when it was time to be awake and alert and to watch and to wait. We missed the opportunity."

All that you need is a waiting consciousness.

In absolute silence -- aware, conscious -- God, enlightenment, truth, whatever you name it, comes.

It has always come, whenever somebody was ready; it has never been otherwise. In your readiness is the guarantee, the promise, that the ultimate is going to happen to you. You are not to think about it; you have to drop all thinking. You are not to have any feeling about it; you have to forget all feeling.

You have to be just a silent waiting with deep trust, with great love, with infinite gratitude.

Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

DURING THE DAYS YOU WERE NOT SPEAKING, I WAS IN A TOTAL

EMOTIONAL AND MIND CRISIS. I GOT SO MUCH LOVE, JUICE AND ENERGY

FROM SITTING TWO TIMES A DAY IN DISCOURSE -- AND AFTER YOU

STOPPED SPEAKING MY ENERGY BROKE DOWN. IT SEEMED THAT ALL THE

DIRT AND MIND CAME OUT EVEN STRONGER THAN BEFORE. PLEASE

COMMENT.

Deva Shikha, it is going to happen to you -- it is natural. But you have to learn to transcend it. I cannot be always with you. I would love to, but existence does not allow it.

Existence gives only so much rope, and it is good; otherwise you will start

taking me for granted.

One day I will not be amongst you. It is good that once in a while I am absent, so you can start learning that what happens in my absence is your reality. When I am with you, you become overwhelmed with me. You forget yourself.

And you have not to forget yourself!

You have to remember yourself, because only through remembrance you will be able to transform yourself.

It is natural; hence I am not condemning it. But you are in search of something beyond --

beyond the normal, the natural -- something transcendental. You have to learn the way, and the way has to be traveled alone.

I cannot come with you. I can show you the way, I can show you the moon. But my fingers are not the moon, and I cannot continue to show you the moon. Sooner or later you have to forget my fingers and you have to look at the moon yourself. You have to follow the path alone.

Naturally when I was not coming daily, morning and evening, to be with you, you started feeling a kind of breakdown. It was not a breakdown; it was simply that your reality was surfacing. It had not been getting the opportunity to surface. I was so much with you that you had gone into the shadow, into the background. I had become more real to you than yourself.

When I was not coming, in my absence your reality was exposed to you. It is good, because unless you know what you are, where you are, your pilgrimage cannot begin. So those days were of great importance.

Remember: whatever you find within yourself, however much rubbish it may be, it is your reality. It can be cleaned, it can be dropped; you can move away from it. But before anything can be done about it, you have to know it. That is the first and the most significant thing.

A farmer, plowing with one ox, kept crying out: "Giddup, Joe! Giddup, Alexander!

Giddup, Henry! Giddup, Ronnie!"

A man passing by asked him, "How many names does that ox have, anyway?"

"Only one," the farmer replied. "His name is Pete, but he does not know his own strength.

So I put blinkers on him, yell a lot of names, and he thinks there are half a dozen other oxen helping him."

That's what I have been doing with you. You are alone, but I go on shouting, "Giddup, Joe! Giddup Alexander! Giddup, Henry! Giddup, Ronnie!" And you feel relaxed... you are not alone, so many people are on the path.

But the truth is that everybody is alone. And it is good to understand that you are alone. It will make you aware of your own strength. You have enough strength to complete the pilgrimage; in fact you have more strength than any pilgrimage needs. You are just not aware of it.

When you are with me, you are not with yourself -- it is perfectly right. But once in a while you have to be with yourself too, just to get the comparison -- the comparison between what you are and what you can be. Otherwise you don't have any sense of direction, you don't know where to move, what is the right dimension for you. You don't know your potential.

If my presence can make you aware of your potential, your possibilities, your blossomings, then I have done my work. I have given you a glimpse of your own future.

But remember, it is your future not your present.

Once in a while you have to be reminded of your present too; otherwise you will start living in a euphoria of the future and you will forget all about your reality in the present.

That reality in the present has to be changed: you have to go beyond it. You have to attain that euphoria and make it real. But it has to be your own -- not mine, not anybody else's.

The false teacher is one who never gives you a chance to know that his euphoria

has become slowly, slowly your euphoria, that his experience and his presence has become a kind of drug. You feel good, but a drug cannot be the source of ultimate transformation.

The authentic master goes on continuously giving you glimpses of the beyond, but always reminds you about the earth you are standing upon. He goes on telling you about the flowers and the spring that is going to come, but he never allows you to forget your roots and your reality. Your spring has not come yet. It is possible to experience my fragrance and get into a delusion that it is your fragrance, your peace, your silence, your love.

I am not your enemy and I will never do such a thing. I am your friend, and I would like you always to remember your reality -- side by side with remembering your ultimate potential. What you are and what you can be, both have to be remembered. Then, and only then, the transformation.

The understanding between me and you is not always exactly the way I would like it to be. But I never expect anything impossible from you; in fact I don't expect anything from you. I share my experience, knowing perfectly well all the possibilities of misunderstanding. So I go on making you alert about the misunderstandings that are possible. They can be avoided if you are alert.

All communication is a difficult process, because I want to say something which cannot be said, and yet I have to say it -- and I have to say it in words which are absolutely impotent to convey it. I say something, you hear something else. But I know this is natural, and particularly in those sannyasins who are new, who will only listen to my words and interpret those words according to their own prejudices. Those who are old enough, who have lived long enough with me, know perfectly well my ways of working.

A girl said to her date, "You remind me of the sea."

"You mean," he said, "because I am so wild, magnificent, and romantic?" "No," she said, "because you make me sick."

Human communication is a difficult problem!

Walking down the street in New York, Hymie Goldberg said to his wife Becky, "Hey, did you see that pretty girl smiling at me?"

"That's nothing," said Becky. "The first time I saw you I laughed out loud."

Paddy complained to his friend Sean, that he had seen his wife going into a movie with a strange man.

"Did you follow them inside?" asked Sean.

"No way," replied Paddy, "I had already seen the movie."

A hotel night clerk was surprised to see a guest walking through the lobby in his pink pajamas.

"Hey there," he shouted, "what do you think you are doing?"

The guest woke up and apologized. "I beg your pardon," he said, "I am a somnambulist."

"Well," said the clerk, "you can't walk around here like that, no matter what religion you belong to."

Farmer Jenkins had two cows, Daisy and Tinkerbell. One day he borrowed the bull from the next farm and instructed his farmhand, Jake, to watch and make sure that the bull did his job properly.

That afternoon the local priest came round for tea and just as the farmer's wife was pouring it, Jake came rushing into the room and shouted, "Mister Jenkins, the bull just screwed the hell out of Daisy."

Jake's face fell when he saw the priest, and the farmer was furious. He took Jake into the other room and said, "Look, I want to be kept informed of the bull's progress, but this is too much. Next time use the word `surprised', not

`screwed'."

Twenty minutes later Jake came running in again and said, "Boss! Boss! The bull just...

the bull..." but seeing the priest he could not say another word. The farmer got up and said, "Jake, did the bull surprise Tinkerbell this time?"

"Surprise Tinkerbell? I will say he did," cried Jake enthusiastically. "He screwed

the hell out of Daisy again!" Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here Chapter #27

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