Osho
The Hidden Splendor
Talks given from 12/03/87 pm to 26/03/87 am English Discourse series
27 Chapters
Year published: 1987
1
Trust is the bridge between you and existence 2
2
Just be indifferent to the mind 13
3
Don't make life a question-answer game 23
4
Who is preventing you? Join the dance! 37
5
This moment is more than enough 49
6
Only fools choose to be somebody 61
7
Preparing for the last world war 70
8
The taste of your being 80
9
Papal politics: organized superstition 89
10 Enlightenment is not an experience 99
11 A noah's ark of consciousness 109
12 Life itself is a miracle 121
13 Truth is not divisible 130
14 No time left for any device
141
15 This is the last dance 151
16 Love is always an emperor 160
17 Watchfulness... your gift to yourself 170
18 Inside you god is hidden 181
19 At the maximum you disappear 189
20 Your longing is the seed 199
21 The greatest misfit in the world 207
22 What more do you want? 219
23 Love... not a relationship but a state of being 229
24 All our doings are disturbances 239
25 The watcher is always in the now 248
26 Life's aim is life itself 257
27 Harmony is your reality 268
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence 1 Trust is the bridge between you and existence
12 March 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
A CIRCLE SEEMS TO BE COMPLETE. I FEEL MYSELF ARRIVING AT A PLACE I HAD LEFT IN MY CHILDHOOD, LIVING AN INNOCENT, POETIC, ECSTATIC LIFE.
THE WHOLE UNIVERSE WAS MY FAMILY. THEN -- FIRST OUT OF TRUST, THEN
OUT OF FEAR -- I ALLOWED SOCIETY TO TAKE OVER. NOW ALL HAS PEELED
OFF. I HAVE WALKED THROUGH THE PAIN, THE FEAR IS GONE, THE AMBITION
IS GONE. KNOWING ABOUT THIS WHOLE JOURNEY WITH OPEN EYES I AM
SITTING UNDER THE SKY
DRINKING THE SWEET SPLENDOR; DAY AND NIGHT. OSHO, THERE
SEEMS
TO BE NO DARKNESS, NO END, SOMETIMES NOT EVEN ME.
Deva Pratito, it rarely happens that one attains his childhood again. It should happen more.
It should happen to everybody because without its happening, your life remains incomplete.
You go on missing something -- something that you had known but you have forgotten -- a faded memory, a lost remembrance. And the gap is not only a gap, it is a wound. It hurts, because you had brought something with your birth into the world and you have lost it somewhere. And it seems impossible to find it in this crowded universe. But unless it happens, your life has been in vain, a misery, a suffering, a futile longing, a meaningless desire, a thirst that you know cannot be quenched.
Deva Pratito, you are blessed. And remember always to pray to the existence that everybody should be blessed in the same way.
You are saying, "A circle seems to be complete." It is complete -- don't say it seems to be complete. "I feel myself arriving at a place I had left in my childhood, living an innocent, poetic, ecstatic life. The whole universe was my family. Then -- first out of trust and then out of fear -- I allowed society to take over."
This is the greatest crime that society commits against every child. No other crime can be greater than this. To spoil a child's trust is to spoil his whole life because trust is so valuable that the moment you lose trust, you also lose your contact with your own being.
Trust is the bridge between you and existence. Trust is the purest form of love, and once trust is lost, love also becomes impossible.
But every child's trust is being exploited. He naturally trusts his parents and because of his trust, they go on giving him beliefs which are poisonous, a personality which is false, an ego which will deprive him of his own soul; beliefs, thoughts, scriptures, which are going to hinder his intelligence, which are going to prevent his search for truth, which are going to make him part of
some stupid, organized religion. Osho - The Hidden Splendor
2
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence I call every organized religion stupid, because true religion can never be organized. True religion is always individual, it has nothing to do with the crowd. A Jesus can be religious but not the Christians. The Christians are only carbon copies. They have forgotten their own originality, their own individuality.
Jesus was not following anybody. He was not imitating anybody. That was his fault, that he did not allow the society to exploit his trust. He did not allow the crowd to reduce him into a false personality. He remained an individual.
He risked his life but he did not compromise with the society. It was better to die on the cross than to live as a hypocrite. At least on the cross he was true, authentic -- himself.
In the crowd, he would have lived, but not his own life. He would have been a cog in the machine -- without any individuality, without any intelligence of his own, without any realization of truth, significance, beauty and the immense grace of existence.
He could have saved his life but in fact, that would have been crucifixion. He accepted being crucified -- that was saving his life -- fearlessly, trusting in existence, without any anger against the crowd. Even at the last moment on the cross, he was praying for the crowd:
"Father, forgive them. They know not what they are doing. They are unconscious people. One cannot expect from unconscious people anything more."
He was only thirty-three; a long life was ahead of him. But this is the beauty of the man, that he sacrificed that long life which would have been meaningless, false, pseudo, for something authentic, real -- without any complaint, without any grudge against anybody.
First, the parents exploit the child because he cannot even conceive that they will be deceiving him -- and it is not that the parents deceive the child intentionally.
They are unconscious. They have also been deceived by their parents.
Every generation has been corrupting every new generation. The parents don't know whether God exists or not, but they pretend before the child as if God exists; they take him to the church, or to the synagogue, or to the temple. Neither they know nor their rabbis and their bishops and their priests know.
It is a very mad world. Blind people are leading other blind people. And nobody raises the question: where are we going and why?
From the very beginning I refused to believe in anything unless I was convinced.
Everybody was irritated with me -- and I was not doing any harm to anybody. They wanted me to go to the temple. They wanted me to touch the feet of somebody they thought was a saint.
I said, "I don't have any objection. I can touch his feet. I can even touch his head, but at least I must know why I am doing it. What qualities has this man got?"
And the replies I got were so ridiculous... "Because this man has renounced the world."
So I said, "That simply proves this man is a coward. He's an escapist. And if he has renounced the world then what is he doing here? This too is the world!
"He may have left his house but now he's staying in somebody else's house. He has simply renounced his responsibilities. He has left his wife and his children. The children will become beggars, the wife will become a prostitute, and who is responsible for it? And this man has become a parasite, because he is not doing anything. His whole job is to let people touch his feet."
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 3
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence My father stopped taking me. But I would follow him and he would say, "Listen, you are not to come with me."
I said, "I am not coming with you. And this road does not belong to you. I don't
know where you are going and I don't even want to know. Neither do you need to be worried about me. It is just coincidence that you happen to be ahead of me and I happen to be behind you."
He would stop. I would stop. He said, "This is not good, creating unnecessary fuss in the marketplace."
I said, "you are creating, I was walking silently. I have not raised a single question. Why have you stopped? And if you can stop without my permission, why can't I stop without your permission? It is a government road."
And finally I would reach wherever he was going, and as we were coming near the temple, or near the place where some saint was staying, he would start persuading me, "Okay, you have come but keep quiet."
I said, "If I see something stupid, I cannot keep quiet. I need honest answers."
He said, "It seems I will have to stop going to the temple, going to the saints -- just because of you!"
I said, "It does not matter, I can go without you. And I will create more trouble because these people you are worshiping are the ugliest people I have seen."
The Hindu saints have such big bellies that one has to decide whether the man has the belly or the belly has the man. And these are the people who have renounced the world! So I used to ask: "What is the matter with his belly, is he pregnant?"
The simple fact is, the people who renounce sex start eating more and more, as a substitute. Food becomes their obsession. These big bellies of Hindu saints are nothing but symbolic of repressed sex.
And you are worshiping these psychologically sick people. I don't see any light in their eyes, I don't see any grace in their faces. I don't see any authority in their words. They quote scriptures. Their whole "being" is within inverted commas -- they don't know anything on their own.
Gautam Buddha may have known, but to repeat his words does not mean that you are also a knower. Those words can be repeated by a parrot, too. But the parrot cannot become a buddha.
I would go with my grandfather to the temples, and I would see people worshiping dead, stone statues -- what kind of humanity have we created -- just because somebody has said that
"This statue is the statue of God."
Nobody has seen God. No photographer has even taken a single photograph. How have these sculptors managed to make these statues? Just pure imagination.
Gautam Buddha died twenty-five centuries ago, and his first statue was made after his death, five hundred years later. There was not even an eye-witness alive. And you will be surprised to know that it was at the time when Alexander the Great came to India, and all Gautam Buddha's statues have the face of Alexander the Great!
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 4
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence Alexander was a beautiful man, young and powerful. He attracted the painters, the sculptors, and he became the prototype for Gautam Buddha, for Mahavira, for the twenty-four teerthankaras of the Jainas. None of them have the Indian face; the face is Greek.
But my grandfather would say, "Don't talk such things. If somebody hears, they will think that I have brought you basically to create trouble."
I said, "You are wrong. You have not brought me, you have come with me. I was coming myself. From where have you got the idea that you have brought me? And unless somebody proves to me that these statues are of Buddha, or Mahavira, why should I be expected to worship them? In fact, they should be removed! They are statues of Alexander the Great, one of the maddest men the world has known -- who had the ambition to conquer the whole world.
"And these people -- Buddha and Mahavira and others -- were against ambition, against desire. They renounced their kingdoms, and what a strange fate: instead of their own statues, statues of Alexander are being worshiped in all the temples of India."
But naturally parents are powerful, more knowledgeable, and children are
helpless, innocent. You can go on stuffing into their heads any nonsense. And by the time they mature, that nonsense will have become so deep-rooted that they will be ready to fight for it, they will be ready to kill for it or be killed for it.
What are religious wars? People are fighting about such fictions -- "God." None of them has known God, neither the Christians nor the Mohammedans, but they are fighting that their god is right and your god is wrong.
Simplified, they are saying, "We are right. You are wrong." And that would be far more clear, that it is a fight of egos, it is not a religious war. It is not a crusade. Everybody wants to prove his ego to be right, and that can be proved only if he proves that everybody else's ego is wrong. Then he attains to a superiority, he becomes higher, holier.
So first, it is the simple trust of the child. And second... your observation, Pratito, is absolutely correct. Second, it is fear.
The parents can punish you; they can deprive you. Teachers can punish you. You have to accept whatever is being said by those who have power of some kind. In this way, everybody has been distracted, derailed from his natural path. And he has moved in a direction which was not meant for him.
That's why there is always anxiety, anguish and a deep sadness. This sadness is existential: unless you can be your natural self, the spring will never come to you, the flowers will never blossom in your being, love will never grow.
You will never know the glory of life and the splendor of consciousness.
You are saying, "Now all has peeled off." This is my whole work here -- just peeling the onions. Peeling to the point where nothing remains -- just spaciousness and silence.
Because an onion is nothing but layers and layers and layers, and when the final layer is taken off, your hands are empty.
In those empty hands descends the whole glory, the whole kingdom of God.
You have not to be standing in the way, you have to give way so that God can enter in.
You have to open the windows and doors so that fresh winds can come in and the life-giving sun rays can dance inside and the room becomes alive.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 5
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence Your beliefs, your traditions, your scriptures, your religions -- all are closing your being from all sides. No fresh air, no sun rays, no fragrance coming with the air, no life dancing inside you with the sunrays -- how can you be happy? How can you be blissful? You have carved a grave for yourself. Alive, you are living inside the grave. Anybody who is a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Buddhist, is living in a grave. He is no more alive.
It is good that you were courageous enough to drop all the layers of the onion.
"I have walked through the pain." Yes, there is pain because all those beliefs, thoughts, philosophies, have become so much part of you that it is not like taking your clothes off -- it is something like taking your skin off. It is painful.
But this pain is worth it. It is almost the pain of a surgery, to remove the cancer from your soul. And once you have passed through the pain, the fear is gone, the ambition is gone.
Pratito, your observation is immensely significant for everybody, because all ambition is out of fear. All ambition is out of an inferiority complex, because you are afraid to be yourself.
You want to be somebody else -- a president of a country, a prime minister of a country, the richest man... and people find different ways because so many people cannot be the president, cannot be the richest, cannot be the prime ministers. Then they create a Rotary Club.
Man's stupidity knows no limits. In a Rotary Club, the presidents go in rotation. Everybody becomes the president, everybody's ambition is fulfilled. But the Rotary Club chooses only the topmost people from every profession. What about others? They create a Lions Club! And there are many other clubs. Their whole function is to give you some solace, that you are a president, that you are a secretary, that you are not just nobody.
The Hindu shankaracharyas, who are equal to the Christian popes, call themselves "world teachers" -- jagat guru. I used to live in a place -- Raipur. And I was surprised that a man in that city called himself Jagat Guru, the "world teacher." And he was not a shankaracharya.
Even the shankaracharyas are not jagat guru, because the whole world does not recognize them as masters. Even the pope, who has the greatest number of followers in the world --
seven hundred million people -- cannot call himself a world teacher. And this man was living just close by my house. So one day, I went there.
He was having a massage session; one of his disciples was massaging him. So I asked him,
"I heard so much about you; just one problem has been puzzling me. How did you become the world teacher, Jagat Guru?"
He said, "It is a long story."
I said, "Howsoever long it is, you tell it."
And it turned out to be the shortest story I have heard! The whole story was that the man who was massaging him, was named Jagat. And this was his only teacher, and he was his only disciple, so somebody suggested, "Why don't you call yourself Jagat Guru?" And the idea was really very fulfilling! He started calling himself Jagat Guru.
I said, "This is absolutely logical. In fact, the shankaracharyas are not Jagat Guru, you are.
But you were saying the story is very long -- the story is so short, only two persons!"
Man is in search of being somebody.
He cannot allow himself just to be himself. Just to be himself means nobody.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 6
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence I was a professor in a university, and just near my quarter lived the head of the economics department. And I was wondering: he was an Indian but his name was Doctor Gilbert Shaw.
This is a strange name because in India...Gilbert Shaw?
Finally, I introduced myself to him. And I asked him, "Just one enquiry I have, that's why I have come to you. How come you have got such a strange name, Dr. Gilbert Shaw?"
He became serious. But I said, "You will have to tell me. Otherwise, I am going to come every day and I will make it known to everybody else in the university: 'Ask how this man has become Gilbert Shaw.' So you simply tell me."
He became afraid -- he said, "You don't tell anybody because I have been here for two years and nobody has enquired. The reality is, my name used to be Gither Sahai. But when I went to London for my Ph.D., I changed to Gilbert Shaw. And when I came back... it looks more prestigious. Just the name seems to be impressive to people -- Gilbert Shaw. Gither Sahai... there are so many Gither Sahais." Gither is one of the names of Krishna, and Sahai is his caste.
Seeing thousands of people, I have come to know such sick minds. Even changing the name, giving it some color so that it looks Western -- as if he is the son of George Bernard Shaw, or at least some faraway relative.
People want to be somebody. But it is out of fear. The fear is that nobody knows you; whether you exist or not makes no difference to the world. Whether you have been here or not, nobody will remember.
People are not interested in living but being remembered. What use is it to be remembered when you are dead?
"... Knowing about this whole journey with open eyes I am sitting under the sky drinking the sweet splendor day and night. Osho, there seems to be no darkness, no end, sometimes not even me."
There is no darkness. Darkness is only less light.
Our eyes are not capable, but there are animals, owls, who can see in the night -- it is their day. In the morning comes their night, because their eyes are so delicate that they cannot open their eyes in the hot sun rays. So the whole day long, they are in darkness and the whole night they are in light. The difference between darkness and light is only of degree.
It is the same as the difference between coldness and hotness: the same thermometer can show you how much is the temperature. Is it cold or is it hot? -- the difference is only of degrees. Wherever you see opposite things, remember: the difference is only of degree. There is no opposition anywhere. There is nothing contradictory.
And certainly there is no end, because there is no beginning. Existence has always been there, is there, will be there, and we are part of it. Forms may have changed, but the essential reality remains the same.
And you say, "Sometimes not even me." What is happening sometimes will soon become a permanent recognition that you are not. Only existence is.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 7
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence But the first glimpses have started coming to you. You are right, the circle is complete.
You are again becoming innocent, full of wonder. This is the rebirth Jesus used to tell of --
"unless you are born again, in this very life, you will not attain the kingdom of God."
Before death comes, everybody has to become a child again. Then there is no death; then you die consciously, knowing perfectly well that only the body which has become old and useless, is being renewed. You are moving your house.
The only problem in attaining to your childhood again is that what, because of trust and because of fear, you have accepted from the family, from the society, from the church, from the school -- all that has to be dropped.
It needs courage.
But what you drop is meaningless, and what you gain is so tremendous in its truth, in its beauty, in its joy, that it is worth it to drop everything and become an innocent child again.
My definition of sannyas is: the struggle to become a child again. Of course, the second childhood has a great difference from the first childhood: the first childhood was ignorant, and the second childhood is innocent. The demarcation point is very difficult. But once understood, it is simple.
The ignorant child looks innocent but he will lose his ignorance soon. He will have to become knowledgeable. As he grows, he will have to attain all kinds of knowledge just to survive in the society.
But the second childhood comes after you have known everything and known the futility of it and have dropped it. It is not ignorance -- it is just a totally different kind of consciousness.
It is awareness.
You will not fall again into the trap of knowledgeability. The first was only negative; the second is something positive.
Ignorance means absence of knowledge. And innocence means presence of wonder.
A young woman is going to marry a Greek man. The night before the wedding, her mother takes her aside. "Now look," the mother tells her daughter, "Greeks are a little strange. If he ever tells you to turn over, I want you to get out of bed, pack your clothes and come back home to me."
So the couple get married and everything is fine for the first two years.
Then one night, while they were in bed, the man says to the woman,
"Sweetheart, roll over now."
She gets very upset, gets out of bed, puts her clothes on and starts packing her suitcase. As she's ready to leave, the confused man says, "Darling, wait a minute. What is the matter?"
Holding her tears back, she says: "My mother told me that you Greek men are strange, and that if you ever told me to roll over I was to get my clothes on, leave you and go home to her."
"But honey," says the man, "don't you want children?" Osho - The Hidden Splendor
8
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
AGAIN, YOU INVITE US TO KILL THE BUDDHA WHEN WE MEET HIM ON THE
PATH. YOU SAID THAT THE MASTER IS THE LAST ATTACHMENT AND YOU
WANT ME TO DROP THIS TOO, IN ORDER TO BE TOTALLY FREE. OH MY
BELOVED, THE PROBLEM IS NOT THAT I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH: I CAN KILL
YOU OUT OF LOVE, WITH NO PAIN AT ALL. BUT THE REAL PROBLEM IS, THAT I LIKE YOU TOO MUCH! I LIKE YOUR EYES, I LIKE YOUR HANDS, I LIKE YOUR
BEARD, I LIKE YOUR FACE, YOUR PROFILE. AND I LIKE THE WAY YOU WALK, THE WAY YOU TALK, THE WAY YOU LAUGH. I LIKE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU, OSHO -- EXCEPT FOR YOUR WATCHES, OF COURSE. FOR ALL MY LIFE I'VE BEEN
IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY: I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
WOMEN AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MEN IN THE WORLD, BUT NEVER, NEVER
HAVE I COME ACROSS A BEING WHO CONTAINS BOTH: THE FRAGILE BEAUTY
OF A WOMAN AND THE AUSTERE GRACE OF A MAN. HOW COULD I POSSIBLY
KILL YOU, IF I LIKE YOU MORE THAN ANY SUNSET, ANY TEMPLE, ANY
PAINTING, ANY POEM, ANY WOMAN, ANY RIVER, ANY SCULPTURE; MORE
THAN ANYTHING I HAVE EVER SEEN? AND YOU MUST KNOW MY HIDDEN
SECRET TOO: FOR I KEEP COMING BACK IN THE BODY TO PLEASE MY EYES
ONLY. HOW IN HEAVEN COULD I DEPRIVE MY EYES OF THE VISION OF YOU, OF
THE ULTIMATE GRACE OF FORM, IN THIS UNAESTHETIC WORLD?
Sarjano, your question is not a question. It is a statement. The only thing questionable in it is about my watches. So I can say to you, if I meet you on the way, take away my watch.
That will be enough. Moreover, they are not mine, they belong to sannyasins who want me to use them while they are here. And then they can take them back, and they become something precious to them. I don't own anything -- even my dresses are not my own. They are also made by sannyasins.
And I agree with you, I don't like these cheap watches myself. But where to find richer people than sannyasins? If you have some idea, either you can inform me
or if you can manage, you can bring the right watch, one that you like. You are an Italian Sarjano, so especially for you I have a joke here.
An Italian ship has been out at sea for months and all the crew is missing the delight of female company. Everyone is becoming more and more irritable. Everyone, except the captain.
The crew begin to notice that the captain does not seem to suffer from the same frustrations that they do. So they decide to spy on him and find out his secret. That night, they creep down to his cabin and look through the keyhole. They see him enjoying himself with a beautiful and very lifelike inflatable doll.
So when the captain is not in his cabin, they all take turns to go down and enjoy the favors of this magnificent piece of modern engineering.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 9
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence When the ship docks in Amsterdam, the captain goes back to the shop in the red-light district where he bought the doll. "Good morning, captain," says the attendant. "Are you satisfied with our product?"
"Ah, yes," replies the captain, "She is magnificent! And she is so lifelike that I even got gonorrhea from her."
Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,
CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE IN THE QUALITY OF
SILENCE BETWEEN MELTING WITH YOU, MELTING WITH MY BELOVED AND
MELTING ALONE?
Anand Michael, melting with your beloved is the easiest because it is very superficial and very momentary. It is mostly physical. Your mind remains chattering inside and your being remains uninvolved in it. Just a peripheral melting, you can call it.
Melting with your master is more difficult. Because it is not melting between two peripheries but between two centers. It is melting of two consciousnesses. It is melting of two souls in one organic whole. The ego has to be completely dropped. The mind has to be utterly silent. And it is not something momentary.
Once you have melted with your master, you have melted. There is no going back.
And the third is, melting alone. That is the most difficult -- almost impossible. Because melting alone, you don't even have an excuse.
Melting with your beloved, there is an excuse -- you love her. And melting needs the other. Melting with the master is difficult but not impossible; the other is still there, and you are melting with the consciousness of the other.
But alone, what will you be melting in? I am saying it is the most difficult -- or perhaps impossible. There is only one possibility and that is, if you know how to melt with the master, you and your master's consciousness will become one. Then you are alone. Then you cannot say, "We are two." There is no "I", there is no "thou".
If you mean by "alone" this state of oneness, then melting is possible. Then melting will be with existence itself.
But one should start learning melting with the beloved. One should always learn from the easiest. If you are going to learn swimming, swim in shallow water. Don't immediately jump into the ocean.
When you are capable of melting with your beloved in love, then it is possible for you to melt with the master in trust. Trust is the higher quality of love.
And if you become capable of melting with the master, then the master becomes a door to the whole existence. Then you can try to melt alone.
Then, too, you are not melting alone; it only appears to you that you are melting
alone.
You are melting into the universe itself. Because the existence is not present as the other -- as your beloved or the master -- it seems you are alone. But you are never alone. The existence is Osho - The Hidden Splendor
10
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence surrounding you from everywhere. You are almost like a fish in the ocean. The ocean is invisible, but you can try to understand it: you are breathing every moment, existence, in and out. Every cell of your body is breathing existence in and out. Every pore of your body is inhaling, exhaling.
You are eating food, which is your nourishment, without which you are going to die. In the food, you are eating the sun rays, the moon rays, the faraway stars and their effects, the earth.
In all that is coming in fruits, in anything that you are eating, you are eating existence. You are breathing existence.
You are not alone. Because all this is not visible, you can think you are alone.
And once you have experienced the joy of melting into the master, heart-to- heart, center-to-center, then this third step is also possible, even though I call it impossible.
The impossible also can become possible if you go in the right way -- step by step.
Hence I am not against love between a man and a woman. I want it to be as deep and as total as possible because that will prepare you for the second step, the melting with the master.
One who has never been able to melt in love with a woman or with a man, will be incapable of melting with the master. He does not know even the language of melting. He does not know even the most superficial experience of it. So start from the simplest.
The master is almost in the middle between you and existence. If you can melt
with the master in total trust, in absolute surrender, you will find inside the master there is no one, but pure nothingness, a golden absence. A soundless music. A silence which is not of the graveyard but of a garden.
This will prepare you. The master and the merging in him is the greatest discipline in the world. It will prepare you to melt with existence itself. It will give you encouragement and it will give you a small taste... because the master appears from the outside as an individual but as you melt in him, you find that there is nobody. He was just a window into existence. Now the impossible can become possible.
You can melt alone. You can simply close your eyes and melt with existence -- with the sun, with the rain, with the wind, with the trees, with the birds. You can simply spread yourself all over the existence.
There is a difference of quality in all these three silences. There is also some similarity.
Two lovers melting have a faraway echo of the ultimate melting with the universe. Melting with the master, you have come very close; the distant sound is no longer distant. And as you melt in existence, you are melting in that distant music itself.
So there is a similarity and there is a difference, but the difference is not of quality. The difference is only of degree.
All the religions of the world have been telling humanity that there is a difference of quality, that when you love a woman and when you love a master and when you love God, there are differences of quality. I reject the whole idea, categorically. There is only a difference of degree.
Because the old religions believed in a qualitative difference, they wanted you to renounce the wife, the husband, because unless you renounce, you cannot attain to a different quality of silence.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 11
Chapter 1 - Trust is the bridge between you and existence I don't say to you to
renounce anything. I simply say that these are three steps to the same temple. Even the lowest step belongs to the same temple, and is as absolutely necessary as the second step, as the third step. With the third step, you have entered into the temple.
Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be deepened.
Everything has to be experienced as totally and as intensely as possible.
A Hollywood movie queen who had been married many times was to get married once again and went to her doctor to ask for a face lift. The doctor was not keen on doing it.
"I am sorry madam, you have had it done so many times that I do not think you should have it done again."
"Ah, please doctor, I am getting married again and he is much younger than me. I must look my best at the wedding."
"Alright, I will do it but it is definitely the last time!
After the operation she looked in the mirror, "That's funny, doctor. I never had a dimple before."
"That is not a dimple madam, that is your navel. If I was to lift your face again, you would have to shave."
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 12
Chapter 2 - Just be indifferent to the mind 2
Just be indifferent to the mind
13 March 1987 am in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
OVER THE PAST TWELVE YEARS SINCE I MET YOU, AS FLOWERS OF JOY
AND MEDITATION HAVE OPENED IN MY HEART, I'VE ALSO BEEN AWARE OF A DARK SHADOW WAITING BY THE SIDE, READY TO STRANGLE MY GROWTH, AND IMPRISON ME IN IT'S COLD GRIP. SOMETIMES IT HAS BEEN ONLY
HALF-SEEN, SOMETIMES ALMOST ABSENT. NOW, IN THE LAST MONTH, IT HAS
LEAPED WITH COLOSSAL FORCE TO THE FRONT OF MY CONSCIOUSNESS AND
REVEALED ITSELF AS MY JEALOUSY AND RESENTMENT. I AM SO JEALOUS
AND RESENTFUL OF THE PEOPLE AROUND ME WHOM I SEE AS CLOSE TO YOU
AND MORE PRIVILEGED THAN ME. I FEEL LIKE I'M DROWNING IN THIS
DARKNESS. IF I CAN KEEP IT BACK IN THE DAY, IT COMES IN THE NIGHT.
PLEASE, OSHO, KICK ME OUT OF THIS SPACE. MY OWN LIGHT FEELS SO SMALL
AND HELPLESS.
Prem Christo, the shadow is your old personality. It happens to almost all
meditators: a point comes when you have to depart from your personality and recover your individuality, your authentic being.
But associations are very old. The personality may have been there for many, many lives.
And to have a divorce from the personality... the personality feels hurt, and for a time it follows you in the hope that you will again get identified with it.
But it is only a shadow. It cannot strangle you; it can only give you threats. So don't be taken in by its threats -- tell it to strangle you!
Neither can it drown you, but it is making a last effort before it will disappear completely.
Up to now it was trying mildly; now it is becoming more and more terrible. It is coming in front of you and giving some meaning to itself. It is creating feelings of jealousy and resentment, which are absolutely absurd.
Here, nobody is closer to me than anybody else. There is no question of jealousy, resentment -- against who?
I will read your question: "Over the past twelve years since I met you, as flowers of joy and meditation have opened in my heart..."
This shadow comes only when there is a fear of its being dropped. The non- meditator never feels it. The non-meditator is totally identified with it; he thinks he is it. It is only because meditation has opened your heart and flowers of joy have blossomed in your being, that the personality is feeling immensely afraid. The time of its death is very close, and it will struggle for survival. Even shadows try to survive.
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And it has been with you for so long that it makes you feel guilty: now that you are being happy and joyous and meditative, you are leaving her! And when you
were in misery, in anguish, in anxiety, you used her -- naturally there is anger, resentment, jealousy.
Those are the old strategies of the ego. They used to work in the past, but now that flowers of meditation have blossomed in your heart, those old strategies cannot work.
"I have also been aware of a dark shadow waiting by the side..." It is no one other than your discarded falseness, your discarded hypocrisy, your discarded past identity. "... ready to strangle my growth and imprison me in its cold grip. Sometimes it has been only half-seen, sometimes almost absent. Now in the last month it has leaped with colossal force to the front of my consciousness and revealed itself as my jealousy and resentment. I am so jealous and resentful of the people around me whom I see as close to You and more privileged than me."
The shadow is impressing you. There is nobody who is closer to me than anybody else, and there is nobody who is more privileged. You have just to understand a simple thing: one thousand people cannot sleep in my room; otherwise I will have to get out!
And not to give anybody the idea that somebody is more close to me, I sleep alone.
Nobody sleeps in my room. Naturally, a few people who bring my food will appear to you as closer to me, but it is only appearance. Those who love me are equally close to me and equally privileged. And it is just functional that a few people will be doing things -- somebody will be cleaning my room. Now, one thousand people cleaning my room will make it more dirty. Too many cooks cannot be allowed in the kitchen; otherwise they will kill me.
So you have to be a little more rational and see that your old identity is putting wrong ideas in your head. If you get impressed by those ideas, then there is a possibility that the old shadow will take back its place.
You have to drop jealousy and resentment. Just being my sannyasin, you are so privileged that the whole world can be jealous of you. Just being in meditation, you can create jealousy in others.
That's what happened in the commune in Oregon, in America. Five thousand people being so happy, so blissful, continuously singing and dancing -- it made
the whole gang of American politicians antagonistic, because people started asking them: "These people have nothing but a desert, a vast desert, one hundred twenty-six square miles. In that desert, for forty years nobody had even tried to grow something..."
It was for sale for forty years, for three generations, and nobody had even bothered to purchase it, at any price. What you are going to do with a desert? And even when our sannyasins purchased it, the topmost real estate agent wrote a letter to me, saying that
"Perhaps your people are not aware that a desert cannot support you. You cannot become self-sufficient. There is still time -- stop them from purchasing it."
And he wrote in the letter, "This is for the first time... I am a real estate agent. My work is to persuade people to purchase things, but I can see that you are getting into great trouble. The fight with the desert will be ongoing, neverending."
But we made even the desert an oasis. The first day I entered the commune, there was not even a single bird anywhere, not a single deer. And that whole part of Oregon is full of deer --
but what will they do in the desert? Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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But as our people started working and creating reservoirs for water, planting trees, cultivating -- within five years so many birds started coming on their own, and the population of deer became so thick... and they understood perfectly well that these people were nonviolent.
In America, ten days every year are allowed for shooting deer. In those ten days all the deer surrounding the desert would enter the commune. That was a safe place, because we did not allow any hunter to enter the commune.
And once a deer had come in and found people who were nonviolent, they
became so friendly that sometimes they started creating trouble. You would be driving and they would stand just in front of your car. You could go on honking your horn and they would behave just like your wife -- they were not going to move. They knew that you would not hurt them, even by hitting them with the car. You had to get out and push them to the side.
But the politicians of Oregon became very much disturbed, because people who had the same kind of land had lived for centuries in poverty. They could not believe what kind of miracle had happened that we were working so hard, and still we had energy enough in the night to dance and sing and enjoy.
My attorney in America, Niren, is here. Just the other day he told me that now the politicians who destroyed the commune illegally, without any reason, are repenting. They are repenting because... the attorney general of Oregon, Frohnmeyer, was the number one enemy of the commune. He was supported by the whole state of Oregon just because he was opposing us, and the stupid fellow could not understand that once we were gone his support would also be gone. Now he has been defeated.
The governor of Oregon, Atiyeh, was also getting support from people because he was against us. As far as I am concerned, I will say they were amateur politicians. They did not understand a small thing: they should have continued harassing us, but not destroyed the commune. The whole of Oregon's population would have been behind them.
Now Atiyeh is gone. These two men destroyed the commune, and the day the commune was destroyed and closed, I told people: "These politicians will repent because they are in power because of us. Once we are gone, their power will be gone too."
Frohnmeyer, the attorney general, was hoping to become governor; there was so much support. Now he is not even the attorney general. Somebody else has defeated him. And when we were there a very competent man -- far more educated in law, has many degrees, Ph.D.'s and D.Litt.'s in law -- was defeated by Frohnmeyer only on one point: because that man was not against us. He made a political mistake by making a statement that "I don't see why these people should be harassed. They are not doing any harm to anybody." And that became the cause of his defeat. Against that man, Frohnmeyer was nowhere close -- the man was an authority on law. But Frohnmeyer was victorious in the election.
And now they are all gone. It is a very strange world.
In Oregon there is a law that if somebody lives there for twenty days, he becomes able to participate in the voting. They were afraid of us, so they were changing the law, which for more than a hundred years they had never thought of changing. For that, seventy-five percent of the peoples' signatures were needed.
When we were there, they had collected almost fifty thousand signatures. But as the commune disappeared, nobody was interested in giving them signatures. The campaign had Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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been going very well. But it was going well because of us -- that, they could not understand.
Once we were not there, people said, "What is the need? The law has been there for years and there has been no trouble and the people you were afraid of are gone."
They were so much afraid -- as if we were going to take over Oregon! Because just jokingly I had said, "We are going to take the whole universe. What about Oregon? -- I am not interested in small things."
Now those politicians who had become great leaders have fallen back into the nobodies.
Now they must be repenting, and remembering...
Niren was saying that there is a possibility: "If you want to come back we can get the commune again, because the defeated politicians will support us. And now everybody understands that our presence is necessary for people who are in power to remain in power."
But I said, "Now, to start again in that desert from ABC -- I am not interested."
I feel compassion for Frohnmeyer, and for Governor Atiyeh -- poor fellows. They proved to be retarded, not understanding the ways of politics. I am not a
politician but I can see it clearly: in politics you should not destroy your enemy completely. You should go on threatening him -- that's enough -- because by his presence, there is immense support to you, from all those people who are afraid.
Prem Christo, it is just a political strategy of your personality, of your old mind -
- which you are discarding, and getting into a new space, a new consciousness. The old mind will try in every way to imprison you. This is its strategy, to create resentment, jealousy. Once you get caught in jealousy and resentment, soon you will be back in the old prison.
And this is the last effort. Your old mind is putting everything at stake, so you have to be very alert.
Nobody is closer to me than anybody else. And there is no need for you to feel resentment against those people, who functionally have to be in my house. Or if you want me to start cleaning the house and the bathrooms, taking care of the library, taking care of the garden, I can do that. But then I will not be able to come in the morning to meet you, or in the evening to meet you.
In these mornings and evenings, if your heart rejoices with me, you are as close as anyone can be.
And you all can be as close as existence allows. There is no need to feel resentful about anybody. It only hurts you, not the person to whom you are resentful.
Don't hurt yourself. And this shadow is going to disappear, you just have to be a little courageous, intelligent, alert.
You are lucky to be here. In the whole world there are five billion people. Out of five billion people, a few people are fortunate to be again in the golden atmosphere of a living master, of a Gautam Buddha.
I will tell you a small joke.
Marty was walking down the street when he saw his friend and yelled to him, "John, how are you?" John replied, "Don't call me John. Call me Lucky."
"Why should I call you lucky?"
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John proceeded to tell him that he had been standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue, when he stepped off the curb just as a two-ton safe fell from the twentieth floor. It landed right where he had been standing an instant earlier.
Marty said, "My God, you certainly are lucky! That will be your name from now on."
A few weeks later they bumped into each other again, and Marty said, "Lucky, how are you?"
To which came the reply, "Don't call me Lucky. Call me Lucky Lucky."
Marty said, "Tell me now, why I should call you Lucky Lucky?" and he was told that Lucky had been bumped from a flight to Miami that was later hijacked to Cuba.
Marty agreed, "You certainly are Lucky, Lucky."
The next time they met, Marty shouted, "Lucky Lucky, how are you?" to which he replied,
"Don't call me Lucky Lucky. Call me Lucky Lucky Lucky." Marty said, "Why?"
Lucky Lucky Lucky said, "Just last week I took my girlfriend to a hotel room for a martini, and we made such a commotion that the chandelier over the bed came down and landed right in her lap."
Marty said, "But what's so lucky about that?"
To which came the reply, "Ten seconds earlier, it would have cut off my head!"
Prem Christo, you are lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky -- four times lucky. Don't feel jealous, don't feel resentful.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
MY MIND, THE MONSTER, DISTRACTS ME EVEN WHEN I'M SITTING IN
DISCOURSE. IT SIMPLY TAKES OVER AND THINKS ALL SORTS OF SILLY
THOUGHTS AND BY THE TIME DISCOURSE IS OVER I GET THE FEELING I MISSED ANOTHER GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO BE WITH YOU, DRINK FROM
YOU, TUNE IN WITH YOU. THIS LEAVES ME VERY, VERY SAD. WHAT CAN I DO?
Nishigandha, everybody has cultivated his mind for so long, for centuries, that it has got deep roots in you. You cannot destroy it in one day, it will take a little time.
And if you become depressed that you are losing the opportunity then it will take even longer. What is missed is missed.
Never look backwards. Nothing can be done about it. If you miss a train, the second train will be coming. There is no point in crying and weeping and making a fuss because you have missed the train. One understands that what has happened, has happened: now be more alert so that you don't miss the second train. And also be alert that you don't catch the wrong train.
I have heard... three professors were standing on the platform and got involved in a deep philosophical discussion, and then they suddenly realized the train had left. So they ran -- two Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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of them managed to enter the last compartment. Only one was left behind, who was standing there with tears in his eyes.
A porter was watching all this. He came to the third man and he said, "Many times people miss -- I work here -- but there is no need to cry. Within just half an hour another train will be coming. You can catch that train."
He said, "You don't understand the situation. Those two fellows had come to see me off!
In a hurry they got into the train -- and they have taken my luggage too! What am I going to do with the train that is coming? First I have to get the luggage...
"And those two must be crying inside the train. They were not going anywhere; they had just come to see me off. But it was all such a hurry, so sudden, that everybody forgot who had come to send off and who was going... we all belong to the university's philosophy department."
It happens almost to everybody, so take it naturally.
You say, "My mind, the monster..." Don't call it "monster," because that creates a hate relationship.
Just as there are love relationships, there are hate relationships. People are not aware about their hate relationships.
I am reminded: In the freedom struggle of India, Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were arch enemies. Jinnah was asking for a separate country for Mohammedans, Pakistan, and Gandhi was insistent that the country should remain one: "Mohammedans and Hindus and Christians and Jains have always lived together -- there is no need for Mohammedans to have a separate country. And why cut the country into parts?"
But Jinnah was very stubborn and he said, "Unless you agree to the separation, India will never become free, because Mohammedans will not agree to that freedom."
And finally, in 1947 Gandhi had to agree, seeing that either you remain a slave forever or you divide the country: "It is better to divide the country; at least both countries will be independent." The country was divided and in 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was shot, assassinated
-- of course by a man from Poona. Poona is a fertile land for murderers.
I am telling this because Jinnah was sitting in his garden in Karachi, Pakistan, talking to his secretary about some official work and suddenly a friend came running in and told Jinnah what had happened: "Gandhi has been assassinated!"
Nobody had seen tears in the eyes of Jinnah in his whole life. He was a very strong, stubborn, very logical, very rational man. The shock... his friend and his secretary could not believe it. He should be happy; his arch-enemy is dead -- but there were tears.
He stood up, went inside the house, and told the friend, "Now I will not be living much longer either. Only today I realized how much I was related with Mahatma Gandhi. Without him, the whole world seems to be empty. We have been fighting our whole lives, and I never recognized that this fighting has also created a deep relationship. Without him I am almost half dead. All my joy for living is finished."
Up to that day Jinnah never used to have bodyguards, because he could not believe that Mohammedans, for whom he had been fighting his whole life, could make an attempt on his life.
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The next day, Karachi was surprised: he had four people with loaded guns around him wherever he went. And somebody asked him what happened, because he used to go alone even in the market. There was no need even for a single bodyguard. He said, "If Hindus can kill Mahatma Gandhi, who has been fighting for them his whole life, what is the difficulty?
Mohammedans can kill me.
"I am already half dead, and now I cannot trust Mohammedans. Gandhi, who was loved and worshiped as a great soul, as a mahatma, has been killed by Hindus themselves. I was never loved as a great soul, as a mahatma. In fact Mohammedans have never thought that I am a proper Mohammedan," because he never used to do the five prayers every Mohammedan is supposed to do. He never used to go to the mosque. He was a very ultra-modern man.
He was never in any way a man who can be considered a Mohammedan. He was educated in the West. He was not interested in the holy KORAN -- he was just born into a Mohammedan family, that was all. And strangely enough, just within one year, he died.
He started dying the same day Gandhi was assassinated. Hate is also a relationship, just as love is a relationship.
And psychology is now absolutely certain that the energy of love and hate is not different.
It is the same energy: standing upside down it becomes hate, standing right side up it becomes love -- it is the same energy. That's why it is not very difficult -- a friend turning into an enemy, an enemy turning into a friend.
Psychology has become aware of one more very significant thing: that you hate the same person you love. So there is a constant change: in the morning you love, in the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love, in the night you hate -- just like a pendulum of a clock, your mind goes on moving between love and hate.
Don't call your mind the "monster" because you are creating a hate relationship. And relationship is relationship, whether it is love or hate.
Just be a silent watcher.
"The mind distracts me even when I am sitting in discourse."
So let him distract; you simply watch. You don't interfere. You don't try to stop, because any kind of action on your part is going to give energy to the mind. So whenever you can manage, you listen, and whenever mind wanders and takes you away, go easily with the mind.
There is no harm.
It will look strange to you that I am saying go with the mind easily. Just be watchful --
without condemning the mind, without abusing the mind -- just be watchful that the mind is going somewhere else. And you are in for a great surprise.
It will take a little time, but slowly, slowly the mind will not wander so much. You will have a few gaps to listen to me; then those gaps will become bigger. And because you are not creating any relationship with the mind -- of love or hate -- you are becoming indifferent to mind.
Gautam Buddha has made it a meditation. He called it upeksha -- indifference. Just be indifferent to the mind, and it won't be a disturbance for long.
And it is worthwhile to wait and not be in a hurry, because the very hurry will make your mind more stubborn. If you want to push it away, it will come back with force. You just let it Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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do whatever it wants to do. It is none of your concern, this way or that. Suddenly a watchfulness arises. It takes a little time.
It depends on you, how much indifference you can create towards the mind, how much you can be watchful. The mind will become slowly, slowly rejected. It will stop doing its things, because now nobody is interested. For whom to do all the circus?
Just a few days before... my sister is here; her son had come. Now he is married and has children. The moment I saw him I remembered. It must be twenty years ago... they used to live in Kanva.
The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was also from Kanva. He wanted to meet me and he invited me to have dinner with him, so my brother-in-law took me in his car. And this boy was very small, he may have been five years old. He also went with us. He was sitting on the front seat by the side of his father; I was in the back seat. My brother-in-law got out of the car and told me, "I will go and look, and make arrangements, and inform him that you are here, so he can come out and welcome you."
It took a long time. The minister was phoning somebody in the capital of Bhopal. The little boy fell asleep and struck his head on the steering wheel. I saw it, I heard it, but I started looking out of the window. He looked at me. I did not give any attention to what had happened. He tried two or three times to look at
me: whenever he would look at me, I would look out of the window, so he thought: "It is useless."
When we went back home, after two hours, as he got out of the car he started crying. I said, "What has happened? Why are you crying?"
He said, "It happened two hours before! I had hit my head on the steering wheel. But you are strange: whenever I would look at you for some consolation, you would not look at me. So I thought, what is the point of crying? This man will not even say anything, and even if I cry or weep, my father is out. Now we are back and my mother is here. Now I can cry."
"But," I said, "two hours ago?"
But I could see his argument, it was right. If there is nobody to pay attention to you, what is the point in crying? At home everybody is going to pay attention. Then to make a fuss and cry... although now he is not hurting; it had happened two hours before.
And just a few days ago he was here, and I remembered. Now he has a child of the same age.
Mind is nourished by your attention, for or against. You just be indifferent; look out of the window.
"It simply takes over and thinks all sorts of silly thoughts and by the time discourse is over I get the feeling I missed another golden opportunity to be with You." Don't call them "silly"
thoughts. These adjectives are dangerous: "monster" mind, "silly" thoughts. You are taking great interest in it. Maybe you are against it, but the interest is there.
Be utterly indifferent. It is a golden key. And slowly, slowly the mind will start remaining silent.
And afterwards you repent that "I have missed another opportunity." Never repent about the past because that is again wasting the present. First you wasted the past; now you are wasting the present.
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If you have wasted the golden opportunity to be with me, now don't waste the golden opportunity to be with the sun, to be with the moon, to be with the trees. It is the same opportunity.
The whole thing boils down to one single point: be silent. And everything becomes a golden opportunity.
But you are taking attitudes. You are saying, "This makes me very, very sad." You are in a vicious circle. First the mind takes you away; it is a "monster," all its thoughts are "silly." And when you are leaving here, you become sad, and you start condemning your mind.
There is no need to be sad: it is mind's nature, and what has gone is gone. What is available herenow, don't make it sad for that which is dead. On the contrary, make it so joyful that you can take revenge for the past too. Dance and sing so that what has been lost in the past moments is gained in the present. By sadness you cannot gain it, but by being joyous you can gain it.
And a few days or a few months are nothing much. In the long, long eternity they are just like small seconds.
Nishigandha, a Frenchman staying at an English country house for the weekend was attracted to a debutante, 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 acknowledgement. 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 constitutes an introduction."
In a way she is right. Just a one-night frolic cannot be an introduction. The reality is that you may be living with your wife for thirty or forty years -- even then you are strangers, you are not introduced to each other yet.
You have lived with the mind for centuries, for many, many lives, yet you are not introduced to it. You don't know its workings, you don't know its strategies. The repentance afterwards is also part of your mind; the sadness afterwards is also part of your mind. So you are moving in a vicious circle: first you miss the opportunity, then you abuse the mind, call the mind names: it is a "monster," the thoughts are "silly," then you become sad. And this whole game is of the mind.
You have to detach yourself and be a witness. Let the mind do whatsoever it is doing, but don't get identified with it. It is not you. You are pure awareness.
You are just awareness.
If you can remember only this much... Gautam Buddha has used the words samma sati --
right remembrance -- and the mind will disappear with all its silliness, sadness, monstrosity. A single thing you have to keep: a remembering that "I am not the mind." You are not to say to yourself, "I am not the mind." The moment you say it, it becomes part of the mind, because language belongs to the mind. You have to remember it without any language, just a feel: I am not the mind.
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I am using words because I have to tell you, but you are not to use words. You have just to be aware and remember without using language.
The mind will go. It has always happened. You cannot be an exception. Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho.
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Don't make life a question-answer game
13 March 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
YOU TOOK MY HEART AND NOW IT IS TOO LATE; I AM ENJOYING
ALONENESS AND LAZINESS SO MUCH THAT SOMETIMES I THINK THERE MUST
BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME. I FEEL I AM AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW
JOURNEY, AND THERE IS A QUESTION THAT KEEPS ON COMING UP: WHAT IS
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A WATCHER, AND THE FEELING OF "I AM
NOT THAT"?
Prem Anugraho, it is not true that I have taken your heart. You have given it to me. If I had taken it, it would not be too late; because you have given it to me, it is certainly too late!
The master takes nothing from the disciple. The disciple gives everything, including himself. The master gives an opportunity for you to give. And it is a joy and a bliss to give your heart. Nothing can be more precious a present, and there is no other way to show your gratitude.
But in any case, your heart is gone!
And you are saying, "I am enjoying aloneness and laziness so much that sometimes I think there must be something wrong with me." There is.
Enjoying aloneness is perfectly right, but enjoying laziness is not right. Laziness is a negative state. One should be overflowing with energy. One should be at ease, but not lazy.
One should be relaxed, but not lazy.
Laziness and easiness look so alike that it is very easy to misunderstand which is which. If you are enjoying your aloneness, it cannot be laziness because laziness always feels a certain guilt, a certain feeling that "I am doing something that I should not be doing," that "I am not participating in existence." Laziness means you have dropped out of the creativity of the universe -- you are standing aside while the universe goes on creating day in, day out.
You are misunderstanding laziness for easiness.
My whole teaching is: take everything with absolute relaxation, with ease. Whether you are doing something or not, that is not the point. You must be overflowing with energy even when you are not doing anything. These trees are not doing anything, but they are overflowing with energy. You can see that in their flowers, in their colors, in their greenery, in their freshness, in their absolute naked beauty in the sunlight, in the dark night under the stars.
Life is not a tension anywhere except in the minds of humanity. To take life with ease, without any tension, without any hurry -- that is not laziness, that is easiness.
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I am reminded of one of the very learned scholars of Bengal. His name was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. He was going to be awarded the highest prize that the British Empire had in India, for his scholarship.
But he used to live in a very simple way, and his friends forced him -- "It won't look right standing before the viceroy in the Parliament House, before all the members of the parliament and all the other dignitaries. We will make a beautiful dress for you, we will bring you good shoes." He was reluctant, but they were
insistent, so finally he agreed.
But there was uneasiness in his mind; in his heart, there was not total acceptance. To change your style of life just because you are going to receive an award from the hands of the viceroy looked to him like a compromise. It was against his pride.
Tomorrow it was going to happen, and he was walking on the sea beach with a disturbed mind: whether to follow the advice of his friends or just to go the way he always lives?
At that very moment he saw a man come running. And just in front of him, a very rich Mohammedan was also walking on the beach -- the man said to the rich man... which Vidyasagar heard; he was just four feet behind him. The man said, "What are you doing here?
Your palace is on fire!"
The rich man said, "Okay," and he continued to walk with the same ease, as if nothing had happened.
The man who had brought the news said, "Have you heard it or not? Your palace is on fire, everything is burning, and there seems to be no way to save anything."
He said, "I have heard; now you go and do whatsoever you can. First I will have to finish my evening walk, and then I will be coming."
Vidyasagar could not believe it. His whole house was on fire -- and he had the most beautiful palace, rich, with many antiques. He was a lover of paintings and statues, and his palace was almost like a museum. People used to come to see it, to visit it. And just to go around his palace inside used to take hours, because there were so many art treasures to be seen. Everything is on fire, and the man says that he will first finish his evening walk!
And he continued at the same pace. There was no hurry, there was no tension. Vidyasagar could not believe his own eyes, and the thought arose in him: Here is a man who knows how to live in utter ease. Whatever happens in the world is not going to change him even a little bit. And here I am -- just for an award from the viceroy, I am going to change my whole lifestyle. They are going to cut my hair, put it in shape, cut my beard and put it in shape, and I have agreed! No, I
am going to be just as I am."
And he thanked the rich man. "You have saved me." The rich man said, "I don't understand -- how have I saved you?"
Vidyasagar explained. "I was going to change my whole dress, shave my beard and cut my hair... and just to be respectable, to look rich, just to take an award. And your house -- I have been many times in your palace. Your whole life's collection of great paintings and other art pieces are on fire, and you are not disturbed at all.
"That's why I say you have saved me: I am going tomorrow just the way I am. You have taught me the greatest lesson of my life: that one can take everything easily, one just needs a certain acceptance that whatever is happening is happening, and whatever people can do they are doing. What more can I do?"
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The man completed his evening walk, and then he went towards his home, but with the same pace. Vidyasagar followed him just to see what else would happen. There was a big crowd; almost everything was burning. All their efforts had failed.
The rich man also stood in the crowd, just as others were standing. Others were very tense, in great anxiety, in a great hurry -- what to do? how to save? -- and he was standing there, just a witness, as if it were somebody else's house and somebody else's art collection that was burning.
This is not laziness. This is a tremendous centering of being, such a groundedness that you can take everything at ease.
There is no need to think that "there must be something wrong with me." Just change that word "laziness" and everything is right with you.
Words mean much. Just a few days ago, I was informed that in the Soviet Union there are many Mohammedan countries... and religion is banned by the
communist party of the Soviet Union. Each child is taught atheism from the very beginning. So the Mohammedans have been in trouble -- what to do?
The month of ramadan comes, when for thirty days they fast in the day and eat in the night.
To do it will be a sure indication that you are acting against the government -- you are still following a religion. They have simply changed the name; they call it "the month of dieting,"
and now there is no problem. Dieting is not prohibited. Fasting is prohibited.
A Mohammedan is expected by his religion to pray five times a day. And his prayer is such that it looks like an exercise: he bows down, gets up, bows down, touches the earth, gets up again, and inside he is reciting his mantra. Now they are still doing it; now they call it
"exercise." It keeps your body and mind fit -- the soul you cannot talk about; just the mind and body. In the Soviet Union the soul does not exist, it is against the policy of the government, but nobody can prevent you from doing exercises. Even if you do them five times a day, it is not a criminal act, and it is not religious. And it is good for the body and for the mind.
Just changing words... And you will see that every word has a certain connotation with it.
Laziness has a very negative, condemnatory connotation. But to be at ease is a beautiful phenomenon -- relaxed, at home, centered, without any tension and without any anguish. Just because of that word "laziness" the idea is arising in you: "there must be something wrong with me." Nothing is wrong with you.
"I feel that I am at the beginning of a new journey and there is a question that keeps on coming up: What is the difference between being a watcher and the feeling, 'I am not that'?"
The difference is great, but very subtle. When you say, "I am not that," you are not a watcher in that moment. These are the two alternatives: "I am that" -- a thought passes in your mind and you say, "I am that." This is a thought. Or you say, "I am not that." That too is a thought. Just because it is negative makes no difference.
But there is a watcher beyond both: "I am that"... "I am not that"... both are watched by a consciousness which is beyond.
The watcher is simply a mirror.
It does not say anything, it simply reflects.
The watcher knows no language, knows no concepts. It is pure awareness, it is just seeing.
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Just think of a newly born baby: He will also see the light in the room, the beautiful colors on the walls. He will also see the doctor, the nurses, the father, but he cannot say, "This is light, this is a beautiful color; this is red, this is green, this is the doctor, this is the nurse, this is my dad." But he is seeing all. He is purely a watcher.
But he cannot name anything, he cannot verbalize anything. How can he say, "This is red"? because he has never known it before, and nobody has told him that this is red. How can he think that this is light? because he knows nothing about light or darkness. And how can he make a difference between the doctor and the father, and how can he make any difference between men and women? These differences have to be learned.
But his eyes are open, and he has the freshest eyes that he will ever have in his life, the best clarity. They are just mirrors, reflecting everything that is around. There is no word, no explanation, no language, no mind.
The same is the situation of the watcher. You again become a newly born child. At the innermost core of your being you are always a watcher.
So you can say, "I am not that" -- the watcher is lost. You have come back to the mind.
Only mind speaks in you. Except mind, nothing speaks in you.
Your heart does not speak, your being does not speak. Only the mind speaks. Your heart feels, your being knows, but there is nothing to be said.
But Anugraho, questions will go on coming. In the mind, questions arise just as new leaves come out of trees. One question disappears, another question comes up. Mind is a factory for producing questions.
If no question arises, then the question will be: "What is happening? No question is arising, something must be wrong."
You have to be aware that mind is the question. What form it takes is immaterial. And if you follow behind the question you will be moving on the path of philosophy. You will find answers, and each answer will bring ten more questions. And this will go on spreading. The philosophical mind never comes to any conclusion. His whole life he thinks -- question after question -- and every time he finds some answer. But the moment the answer arises, it brings more questions with it. There is no end to questioning.
This is the place where philosophy and authentic mysticism take separate paths.
Philosophy goes after questions, answers, and never reaches any conclusion. Mysticism simply drops the mind, because it is nothing but a question-creating mechanism, and moves into silence. And the most amazing thing in life is that then, when there is no question, you have found the answer.
There may be thousands of questions, but there is only one answer, and that answer is your awareness. It is not in the form of an answer, it is in the form of an experience: suddenly a great silence descends upon you. Everything becomes calm and quiet. And without any words, without any knowledge, there is knowing. Knowing that you have arrived home, that now there is nowhere to go.
If you look at the history of man... from the very primitive man, the same questions have been asked. Answers have become more and more sophisticated, but no answer destroys the question. The question has an immense capacity to survive all answers: it comes back again in a new form.
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You ask who created the world. Your organized religions say God created the world, and the mind immediately asks who created God -- the answer is nullified.
And if somebody says, "Number one god created the universe; number two god created number one god; number three god created number two god... that will be ludicrous, because finally the last god will have the same question: who created him? The question has an immense capacity to survive all your answers, howsoever sophisticated.
The path of the mystic is totally different from the path of the philosopher. The mystic does not try to find answers for the questions. He simply understands one thing: that until he goes beyond mind, questions will continue; no answer can help. But the moment you are beyond the mind, all questions disappear, and in that disappearance you have found the answer -- without words, without language, you have become a knower. You have become knowing itself, not knowledge. This state is the state of the watcher.
So don't say, "I am not that." There are schools which teach that -- when you see something in the mind go on saying, "I am not that. I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am not the heart; I am not this, I am not that." But the watcher is beyond all your negations, just as he is beyond your positive assertions.
Remain silent; don't say anything. If some thought floats in the mind, let it float. The way you allow a cloud to float in the sky -- you don't start shouting, "I am not that." Your mind is also a sky, a screen. Things pass. You simply watch.
As Adam wandered about the Garden of Eden he noticed two birds up in the tree. They were snuggled up together, billing and cooing. Adam called to the Lord, "What are the two birds doing in the trees?" The Lord said, "They are making love, Adam."
A little while later he wandered into the fields and saw a bull and cow going at it. He called to the Lord, "Lord, what is going on with that bull and cow?"
And the Lord said, "They are making love, Adam."
And Adam said, "How come I don't have anyone to make love with?"
So the Lord said, "We will change that. When you awake tomorrow morning things will be different."
So Adam lay down beneath the olive tree and fell asleep. When he awoke, there was Eve next to him. Adam jumped up, grabbed her hand, and said, "Come with me. Let's go into the bushes." And so they went. But a few moments later Adam stumbled out, looking very dejected, and called to the Lord, "Lord, what is a headache?"
You cannot end questions. Something or other is going to be there -- if nothing else, then a headache. Since Adam asked this -- "What is a headache?" -- The Lord has disappeared, saying, "This idiot is not going to allow me even to rest. He will be coming again and again --
'Lord, what is this? Lord, what is that?'" Since then, nobody has known where the Lord is!
Don't create an unnecessary headache for yourself. Just be a silent, relaxed watcher. The headache will disappear -- and the head too! And you will find such a freedom and such a spaciousness, as if the whole sky has become available to you.
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Chapter 3 - Don't make life a question-answer game Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME THE SAYING: "ALL THAT YOU PUT INTO THE
LIVES OF OTHERS COMES BACK INTO YOUR OWN. "IT HAS BEEN WITH ME
EVER SINCE, AND I FEEL IT TO BE TRUE. CAN YOU PLEASE TALK ABOUT THIS?
IT KEEPS COMING UP A LOT FOR ME.
Prem Kendra, the saying is true. All that you put into the lives of others comes back into your own, for the simple reason that the other is not so "other" as you think. No man is an island; we are all joined together.
On the surface both my hands seem to be separate. But if I hit my right hand with the left hand, do you think the pain is going to be just confined to the right hand? The left hand is not separate. If the right hand suffers, sooner or later the left hand is going to suffer too. It is not possible to hurt someone and remain unhurt, because the other is not so other as he appears.
Deep down in the roots we are one. So when you slap somebody's face, you are slapping your own face.
People like Jesus, when they say, "Love your enemy just as you love yourself," are not just teaching ordinary morality. They are stating a very fundamental truth: the enemy is also part of you, as you are part of the enemy. Love the enemy as you love yourself.
Gautam Buddha used to say to his disciples, "After each meditation when you are feeling blissful, full of joy, peace, silence... shower and share your silence, your peace, your blissfulness with the whole of existence -- with men, with women, with trees, with animals, with birds -- with all that is, share it.
"It is not a question whether someone deserves it or not. The more you share it, the more you will get it. The farther your blessings reach, the more and more blessings will shower on you from all directions. Existence always gives you back more than you have given to it."
One man who was a very great admirer of Gautam Buddha raised his hand and said,
"There is one question. I can share my blessings, my joy, with the whole existence. Please just allow me one exception: I cannot share with my neighbor. He is so disgusting -- the very idea of sharing my joy with him makes me sick." And he said, "Just one exception I am asking. I am ready to share with all the
animals, all the insects, all the birds, all the trees, everything --
just that one neighbor who is so nasty. You don't know about it; otherwise you yourself would have said, 'You can have a few exceptions.'"
Buddha said to the man, "You don't understand what I am saying. First you have to share your joy with your neighbor; only then you will be able to share your joy with the whole existence. If even your neighbor is not your neighbor, then how can the birds and the animals and the trees can be your friends and your neighbors? So you first practice just that exception
-- forget about the whole universe. If you can succeed in sharing your joy with your neighbor, there is no problem. You are already ready to share your joy with everybody else.
Perhaps in the same situation, Jesus may also have said, "Love your neighbor just as you love yourself." It looks very strange that he makes these two statements: "Love your enemy just as yourself," and "Love your neighbor just as yourself." George Bernard Shaw joked about it and said, "It is because they are not two persons; they are the same person, the enemy Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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and the neighbor. There is no need to make two statements. One statement will do, because they are not separate persons."
Kendra, this is the essential of all religiousness: that we should be able to share unconditionally all that grows in our being, all the flowers and all the fragrance. To be miserly about it is dangerous. In the ordinary world, the economics is that if you give something to someone, that much less will be with you. And if you share everything with everybody, you will be a beggar. But in the higher economics of life, just the opposite law functions: if you hold things to yourself, you will destroy them. They are delicate. They need freedom. They need wings and they need to be allowed to go into the sky.
The more you give your love, your compassion, your blessing, your joy, your ecstasy, the more you will find that the whole existence has become so generous
to you that streams of love and joy are running towards you from all directions. And once you have known the secret
-- that by giving you don't lose, but you get more, a thousandfold more -- your whole life structure goes through a transformation.
But even in our so-called religious and spiritual life, people are as miserly as they are in the ordinary life. They don't know that the laws of ordinary life are not applicable to the higher dimensions of being.
A famous story about a Zen nun is: She had a beautiful golden Buddha, a very artistic, aesthetic statue of Buddha, made of pure gold. And the nun used to carry the Buddha wherever she would go. Buddhist monks and nuns have to go on moving for eight months in the year, except the four months of rain. So from one temple, from one monastery to another...
She was staying in one of the temples of China -- she had gone to travel to Chinese temples and monasteries and that temple has ten thousand statues of Buddha. It is a unique temple in the whole world. Ten thousand statues... almost the whole mountain has been cut into statues and made into a temple; perhaps it has taken centuries to build it. She was staying there.
And this had been her constant worry: Every morning when she worships her golden Buddha, she puts flowers, sweets, burns incense -- but you cannot depend upon the wind, upon the breeze. The fragrance arising out of the burning incense may not reach the golden Buddha's nose, it may move in any direction.
In that temple there were ten thousand other Buddhas, and the fragrance was going to other Buddhas' noses. And this was intolerable; this was too much. She was feeling very hurt, that her own poor Buddha is not getting any incense, and all these vagabonds... "And my Buddha is golden and they are just stones. And after all my Buddha is MY Buddha."
This is how the mind functions: it is so possessive, it cannot even see that they are all statues of the same man. Which nose is getting the incense does not matter -- it is reaching the Buddha. But "MY Buddha" -- the old possessive mind continues.
So she devised a small method: she brought a bamboo, a hollow bamboo, and cut it into a small piece. She will burn the incense, and put the bamboo on top of
it. One side will take the incense smoke in, and the other side she will put on the nose of her golden Buddha -- almost like making him smoke! But that created a problem: her Buddha's nose became black. That disturbed her even more.
She asked the high priest of the temple, "What should I do? My poor Buddha's nose has become black."
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 29
Chapter 3 - Don't make life a question-answer game He said, "But how did it happen?"
She said, "I feel very embarrassed to say, it is my own doing." And then she explained the whole thing.
The priest laughed. He said, "All these are Buddhas here. One Buddha, ten thousand Buddhas -- to whom it reaches does not matter. You should not be so miserly, so possessive.
Buddha cannot be yours and cannot be mine. The nose of the Buddha has become black because of your possessiveness."
And the priest said to her, "We are making each other's faces black because of our possessiveness. If we could give without even thinking to whom it reaches... Because to whomever it reaches, is part of the same existence as we are part of -- it reaches to us."
Kendra, don't go on thinking about it as a proverb that is true. You are saying, "It keeps coming up a lot for me." It is not something to contemplate; it is something to do and to experience.
Just make somebody joyful and see -- your heart immediately becomes light. Let somebody laugh, and something of the laughter enters in you, becomes part of you. Let somebody be blissful... help somebody to enjoy life more totally, and immediate is the reward.
Existence is always cash. It does not depend on checks, drafts -- it is always
cash. Here, you do something and immediately comes the reward or the punishment.
Rather than thinking about it, whether it is true or not, try it. It is one of the truest axioms for transforming your life.
In giving small things, people think of a thousand things. You just look at the beggars. If you are alone, moving on the road, the beggar will not ask you for anything, because he knows you are alone; your respectability is not at risk. He will catch hold of you in the marketplace, where you cannot refuse. If you refuse, everybody will say, "Don't be so unkind, don't be so cruel."
Even the beggar knows the psychology: if the man is alone, he will give you a lesson, rather than giving you something: "You seem to be young, you seem to be healthy. You should be working -- not begging."
The same man in the society will immediately give, and give more. He will feel resentful, but he wants to impress the people around him that he is a very generous man, and the beggar knows. The beggar also knows that he has befooled you: you have not given to him or to his poverty, you have given to your respectability, to your generosity.
People say "We will give only to worthy people, to deserving people." These are strategies for not giving. Otherwise who is unworthy? If existence accepts him, and the sun does not deny him light, and the moon does not deny him its beauty, and the roses do not deny him their fragrance... if the existence accepts him, who are you to think whether he is worthy or unworthy?
His being alive is enough proof that existence accepts him as he is.
Any conditional giving is not a giving at all. Every giving has to be unconditional. And every giving has not to ask even gratitude in response. On the contrary, the giver should feel grateful that his gift has not been refused. Then giving becomes a tremendous ecstasy. This is how your heart grows, how your consciousness expands, how your darkness disappears, how you become more and more light, more and more close to the divine.
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Anything that appeals to you, don't let it remain in the mind; let it come into your actions.
Only the action will give you the proof whether it is right or wrong. Arguments can prove what is wrong as right, what is right as wrong.
In Greece, before Socrates, there used to be a great school of thinkers called sophists. They were strange people. Their ideology was that there is nothing true, nothing untrue, nothing good, nothing bad -- it all depends how sharp is your argument. Sophistry was the art of argumentation.
These sophists used to move from town to town in Greece to teach people the art of argumentation. And they were so certain, that they used to take half of their fee before, in advance, and half they would take when you won your first argument with someone.
Zeno, one the very sharpest minds the world has known, went to be a disciple in the school of sophists. He deposited half of the fee and said, "The other half I will never give."
The master said, "You will have to give the other half -- because how are you going to find out whether you have become really argumentative or not?"
He said, "I am not going to argue with anybody. But that is not a question right now. First you teach me."
Two years of teaching and the master could see that Zeno was a genius, far ahead of the master himself. His teaching was complete, and the master said, "Now you can go and argue with someone. Challenge anybody, and your victory is sure."
But Zeno said, "I am not going to argue with anybody. Even if somebody says in the day that it is night, I will say, 'Yes, it is night.' I am not going to argue, because if I win in any argument, then I have to pay half the fee to you. That I am not going to do."
Almost a year passed and he did not argue with anyone. The master even sent many people to provoke him to argumentation, but he would always be willing
to accept whatever you said.
You say, "God exists" and he says, "Yes, God exists." You say, "God does not exist." He will say, "God does not exist, I am in absolute agreement with you. The question of argument does not arise."
Finally the master, who himself was a great arguer, thought of a strategy: he should bring him to the court, sue him, because he has not paid his half fee. His idea was, "If I win, he will have to pay the fee. If he wins, then outside the court I will say, 'Now give me my fee; you have won your first argument.'"
But Zeno was also his disciple. He thought, "If he wins, I will tell the court that this was the agreement, that when I won my first argument, then I would pay him. Now I have lost my first argument: according to our agreement he has won the case, but I cannot give him the fee.
"And if by chance I win, I know that outside the court he will ask, 'Give me the fee.' And I will say, 'Come inside the court, because I cannot go against the law of the country. It will be a contempt of the court; the court has given me victory.'"
And the very thing happened. Zeno argued very well. And the master wanted him to win, so he argued in such a way that Zeno would win. The court decided that Zeno was victorious.
Outside the court the master said, "Now give me my fee." Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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Zeno said, "Then come inside the court: I will give you the fee if the judge says that I have failed in arguing. And I cannot go against the court -- that will be a criminal act, a contempt of the court." Zeno never paid the half fee.
Zeno himself became a great teacher in his own right, but he used to take the full fee in advance! He said, "I cannot commit the same mistake my master committed."
Don't make life a question of argumentation, or truth a question of arguments, or love a question of arguments, or joy a question of arguments. Live, experience, because that is the only way to know. Argument is not the way to know.
Knowing is only through experiencing.
A nun dies and goes to heaven. St. Peter says to her, "I'm sure you have led a virtuous life, Sister, but before I can let you into heaven, you must answer one question. The question is: what were Eve's first words to Adam?"
"Boy," says the nun, "that's a hard one." "That's right!" says St. Peter.
Don't make life a question-answer game. Make it more authentic, and anything that feels right to you, try to experiment with it. There are millions of people who know what is right, millions of people who know what is good, millions of people who know what has to be done.
But they just know, they never try to transform their knowing into action, into actuality.
And unless your knowledge becomes your actual experience, it is simply a burden and not a freedom. It keeps you loaded with good thoughts, but good thoughts are useless. Unless they grow within you, they have roots in your heart, they are part of your being, they are simply wasting your time and your life.
Don't be like the crowd that exists on the earth. They all have beautiful theories, beautiful dogmas, great philosophies, magnificent theologies, but all in their heads. They have not tasted anything, and they will die without actually knowing anything. Their whole lives will be simply a long desert where nothing grows, where nothing happens, where nothing is realized.
And I say unto you: Unless God is realized, your life has been a wastage. And that is your capacity, your potential -- the realization of the divineness of existence. Just a little taste and your whole life will become full of such glory, such ecstasy, such splendor that you cannot even dream about it.
Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
IN NATURE, SPRING COMES, SUMMER FOLLOWS, AND THEN AUTUMN AND
WINTER. EACH TIME THEY ARE DIFFERENT, NEVER THE SAME; BUT THE
PHENOMENON OF THE SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN AND WINTER IS ALWAYS
COMING REGULARLY. THE SUN ALWAYS RISES IN THE MORNING... BELOVED
OSHO, ARE THERE ALSO BASIC PHENOMENA IN THE WORLD OF TRUTH WHICH
OCCUR REGULARLY? IF SO, CAN YOU PLEASE TALK ABOUT THEM?
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Shantidharma, it is true about nature: "Spring comes, summer follows, and then autumn and winter. Each time they are different, never the same; but the phenomenon of the spring, summer, autumn and winter is always coming regularly. The sun always rises in the morning...
"Are there also basic phenomena in the world of truth which occur regularly?" No. Nature is autonomous, more mechanical than the world of consciousness. In nature there is no freedom, no choice. The sun cannot say, "I am going for a few days' holiday." Everything has to move absolutely mechanically. That's why the sun goes on rising from the east. Otherwise, in millions of years, it must have become tired and bored. It may have thought sometimes to rise from the west, or from the south, or from the north -- or not to rise at all.
Nature is following a fixed routine. Consciousness is, intrinsically, freedom. So in the world of consciousness there is no regularity.
Sometimes it happens at one point of history that there are a dozen enlightened people. For example, it happened at the time of Gautam Buddha. Just at the same time there was Lao Tzu in China, and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu; in Greece, there were Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plotinus; in India, Mahavira and eight other teachers of the same status. And perhaps in other countries... in Iran there was Zarathustra.
That was twenty-five centuries ago. Suddenly a tremendous spring came -- so many enlightened people, such a cool breeze, such calmness, such consciousness. The earth was so fragrant that in India we called that age "the golden age." Never before or after has man reached to such a peak of consciousness. And then for centuries it was just a dark night.
Then in the middle ages, again there was an explosion: Kabir, Dadu, Nanak, Farid, Mansoor, Jalaluddin Rumi, and many others in China and Japan of the same quality of enlightenment. And then again the spring did not come. There seems to be no regularity.
On the contrary, there seems to be one thing: that whenever there is one enlightened person, then many people's consciousness is triggered. One person's enlightenment becomes an evidence and a proof of your hidden splendor, of which you were not aware. But that man's splendor makes you confident about yourself -- because you are also a human being, belonging to the same state of consciousness. He has discovered himself, while you have remained asleep. He has become awakened, while you have not been alert that it is dawn and time to wake up.
One thing is certain: that whenever one person is there, then in many places, many people
-- perhaps in faraway places; it does not matter whether those people are close to that person --
wherever there are boundary cases, people who are just lightly asleep, a small shaking and they will wake up. So whenever there is one enlightened person, many people around the world start waking up. He triggers a process in the whole universe.
But there is no regularity. It is not that in every century there will be so many people enlightened, or every year there will come a season when people will
become enlightened.
There is no season, no spring for enlightenment. One can become enlightened any time.
But if somebody is already enlightened, your enlightenment becomes very easy. He has already broken the ice, he has already made a footpath. All that you need is a little courage to go alone, leaving the crowd behind.
The crowd is fast asleep, and I think it will remain asleep forever. Sleep is comfortable, dreams are beautiful -- why bother to be awake? Because with awakening comes Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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responsibility, with awakening comes freedom. With awakening, suddenly you find yourself alone with the whole world condemning you.
It happened in the beginning of this century, an actual case: In Mexico, in a faraway part of the mountains, there lived a small tribe of three hundred people who were all blind. It was very strange. Not a single person had eyes; all were blind.
One young scientist heard about the tribe and went there to find out the reason. And then he was even more surprised, because every child was born with eyes -- not blind -- but within three or four months' time, he would become blind.
The young scientist discovered that there was a fly in that forest, and its bite was making young children blind. And that fly was so common a fly, that it was almost impossible to keep your eyesight. But the poison of that fly was able to make a person blind only before he was six months of age. After that he was strong enough, and the fly could not affect his eyes, but six months were enough.
So, for six months some babies remained with eyes -- a few for five months, a few for one month, a few for a few days -- but by the sixth month, almost all the babies went blind. The scientist had discovered the fly, he had found the poison, and while he was discovering all this, he was trying to make people understand that they were blind. And they all laughed --
because he was such a minority, one man, and they were three hundred, and they all said,
"You are hallucinating, you are dreaming. Eyes don't exist."
While he was working with the tribe, he fell in love with a blind girl. She was so beautiful, but neither she was aware of her beauty, nor anybody else was aware of her beauty. Although she was blind, still the young man fell in love with her, and he proposed to be married to her.
But the society refused.
The society said, "We can allow our daughter to be married to you if you become blind, just as we are blind. We will have to take your eyes out. So you can think it over, and tomorrow you can tell us your decision."
The young man was very much in love with the girl, but still he thought, "This is a strange bargain, to become blind -- because these eyes are what has made me aware of her beauty.
Losing these eyes, it does not matter whether she is beautiful or not. And I have come here to convince these people that their eyes can be cured, because they were born with seeing. Just a certain poison has destroyed their vision; perhaps we can find some antidote and they can be able to see again."
Rather than being ready for that... they were not ready to go to the city, out of their mountains. They were asking that the young man should become blind. In the night, he escaped.
The crowd is blind. And to have eyes in this crowd is to be condemned, is to be crucified.
The greatest crime in the eyes of the crowd is somebody becoming enlightened. That man disturbs your peaceful sleep; he starts trying to wake you up. He starts destroying your superstitions; he starts fighting against your ideologies, which are keeping you asleep; against your beliefs which are covering your eyes; against all kinds of your religious, social, and political dogmas, which want you to remain as you are because it is in their favor to exploit you, to enslave you.
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Enlightenment is possible for everybody, but the crowd prevents it. Only a few daring people, courageous of spirit, follow the path alone into the unknown. They need somebody --
at least the footprints of somebody, that somebody has gone ahead of them; at least somebody calling from the peaks of consciousness: charaiveti, charaiveti. That was Buddha's word --
keep on coming, keep on coming. Don't stop. So once in a while...
But the phenomenon is not regular, and cannot be regular. About consciousness, nothing can be mechanical. Everything is spontaneous.
Man's sleep is such that sometimes it is unbelievable. His unconsciousness is such that one wonders how he can go on being so unconscious. Because of this unconsciousness he suffers all kinds of misery, anxiety, fear, slavery, exploitation. He loses all his dignity, all his humanity. He misses all the joys of life, all the songs and all the dances.
And he goes on doing things which he knows are not right, but he seems to be almost incapable of getting out of the routine. You know anger is not right, you know it is simply torturing yourself for somebody else's fault. There is no logic in it, and you have suffered so much -- but again you will do it.
Unconsciousness is very deep. And consciousness is a very small part, so unless you have great courage to use that small part of consciousness to transform the whole of your unconsciousness, it seems almost impossible to become enlightened. But seeing one man becoming enlightened creates a longing in you, a thirst in you, a trust in you that it is possible
-- a challenge to your sleeping humanity, that "you have slept long enough and it is time to know what awakening is." What Gautam Buddha experienced or Socrates experienced, is your birthright too.
Eunice and Frank were marooned on a small island in the middle of the ocean, the only two survivors of a shipwreck. Eunice was a virgin and a strict Catholic, but after a couple of months, Frank convinced her that they were never going to be rescued. Eunice finally relented and gave up her virginity.
After two years, Eunice became so ashamed of what she was doing that she killed herself.
A couple of years after she died, Frank became so ashamed of what he was doing that he buried her.
How you are going to respond to a situation is unpredictable. In a way that is a privilege, a prerogative of human beings, that they are unpredictable. But in a way it is a very dangerous privilege.
Still, it is good that man does not become mechanically enlightened, because then enlightenment will not be your glory but just a season. The season comes and people become enlightened; next year, again, when the season comes, people will become enlightened. But it is not your glory.
Your glory is in your effort to attain the ultimate truth. Your glory is to know your being on your own.
The only thing in life that is unpredictable is enlightenment. Everything is predictable: when you are young you will fall in love, when you are old, you will die. Almost everything that happens to everybody will happen to you. Enlightenment is the one thing that does not Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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happen to everybody, although everybody is capable -- but very few people use the opportunity.
Blessed are those who use the golden opportunity of becoming enlightened, because they prove everybody's birthright and everybody's ultimate growth, ultimate flowering.
Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho
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Who is preventing you? Join the dance!
14 March 1987 am in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
OF MY MANY FEARS, THE ONE OF WHICH I AM MOST AWARE IS THAT OF
INTIMACY. I AM LIKE A HIT AND RUN DRIVER IN MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH
PEOPLE. COULD YOU SPEAK TO ME OF MY FEAR OF INTIMACY?
Ramaprem, everybody is afraid of intimacy. It is another thing whether you are aware of it or not. Intimacy means exposing yourself before a stranger. We are all strangers -- nobody knows anybody. We are even strangers to ourselves, because we don't know who we are.
Intimacy brings you close to a stranger. You have to drop all your defenses; only then, intimacy is possible. And the fear is that if you drop all your defenses, all your masks, who knows what the stranger is going to do with you?
We are all hiding a thousand and one things -- not only from others but from ourselves --
because we have been brought up by a sick humanity with all kinds of repressions, inhibitions, taboos. And the fear is that with somebody who is a stranger -- and it does not matter, you may have lived with the person for thirty years, forty years; the strangeness never disappears --
it feels safer to keep a little defense, a little distance, because somebody can take advantage of your weaknesses, of your frailties, of your vulnerability.
Everybody is afraid of intimacy.
The problem becomes more complicated because everybody wants intimacy. Everybody wants intimacy because otherwise you are alone in this universe -- without a friend, without a lover, without anybody you can trust, without anybody to whom you can open all your wounds. And the wounds cannot heal unless they are open. The more you hide them, the more dangerous they become. They can become cancerous.
Intimacy is an essential need on the one hand, so everybody longs for it. But he wants the other person to be intimate, so that the other person drops his defenses, becomes vulnerable, opens all his wounds, drops all his masks and false personality, stands naked as he is. And on the other hand, everybody is afraid of intimacy -- with the other person you want to be intimate with, you are not dropping your defenses.
This is one of the conflicts between friends, between lovers: nobody wants to drop his defenses and nobody wants to come in utter nudity and sincerity, open -
- and both need intimacy.
Unless you drop all your repressions, inhibitions -- which are the gifts of your religions, your cultures, your societies, your parents, your education -- you will never be able to be intimate with someone.
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But if you don't have any repressions, any inhibitions, you don't have any wounds either. If you have lived a simple, natural life, there will be no fear of intimacy, but tremendous joy --
of two flames coming so close that they become almost one flame. And the meeting is tremendously gratifying, satisfying, fulfilling. But before you can attempt intimacy, you have to clean your house completely.
Only a man of meditation can allow intimacy to happen. He has nothing to hide.
All that was making him afraid that somebody may know, he himself has dropped. He has only a silence and a loving heart.
You have to accept yourself in your totality -- if you cannot accept yourself in your totality, how can you expect somebody else to accept you? And you have been condemned by everybody, and you have learned only one thing: self- condemnation.
You go on hiding it. It is not something beautiful to show to others, you know ugly things are hidden in you; you know evil things are hidden in you; you know animality is hidden in you. Unless you transform your attitude and accept yourself as one of the animals in existence... The word "animal" is not bad. It simply means alive; it comes from anima.
Whoever is alive, is an animal.
But man has been taught, "You are not animals, animals are far below you. You are human beings." You have been given a false superiority. The truth is, existence does not believe in the superior and the inferior. To existence, everything is equal -- the trees, the birds, the animals, the human beings. In existence, everything is absolutely accepted as it is; there is no condemnation.
If you accept your sexuality without any conditions, if you accept that man and every being in the world is fragile... life is a very thin thread which can break down any moment. Once this is accepted, and you drop false egos -- of being Alexander the Great, Mohammed Ali the thrice great -- if you simply understand that everybody is beautiful in his ordinariness and everyone has weaknesses... They are part of human nature because you are not made of steel.
You are made of a very fragile body. The span of your life is between ninety- eight degrees temperature and one hundred and ten degrees temperature: just twelve degrees of temperature is your whole span of life. Fall below it, and you are dead; go beyond it and you are dead. And the same applies to a thousand and one things in you.
One of your most basic needs is to be needed. But nobody wants to accept it, that "It is my basic need to be needed, to be loved, to be accepted." We are living in such pretensions, such hypocrisies -- that is the reason why intimacy creates fear.
You are not what you appear to be. Your appearance is false. You may appear to be a saint but deep down, you are still a weak human being with all the desires and all the longings.
The first step is to accept yourself in your totality, in spite of all your traditions, which have driven the whole of humanity insane. Once you have accepted yourself as you are, the fear of intimacy will disappear. You cannot lose respect, you cannot lose your greatness, you cannot lose your ego. You cannot lose your piousness, you cannot lose your saintliness -- you have dropped all that yourself. You are just like a small child, utterly innocent. You can open Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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yourself because inside, you are not filled with ugly repressions which have become perversions.
You can say everything that you feel authentically and sincerely. And if you are ready to be intimate, you will encourage the other person also to be intimate. Your openness will help the other person also to be open to you. Your unpretentious simplicity will allow the other also to enjoy simplicity, innocence, trust, love, openness.
You are encaged with stupid concepts, and the fear is, if you become very intimate with somebody, he will become aware of it.
But we are fragile beings -- the most fragile in the whole existence. The human child is the most fragile child of all the animals. The children of other animals
can survive without the mother, without the father, without a family. But the human child will die immediately. So this frailty is not something to be condemned -- it is the highest expression of consciousness.
A roseflower is going to be fragile; it is not a stone. And there is no need to feel bad about it, that you are a roseflower and not a stone.
Only when two persons become intimate are they no longer strangers. And it is a beautiful experience to find that not only you are full of weaknesses but the other, too... perhaps everybody is full of weaknesses.
The higher expression of anything becomes weaker. The roots are very strong, but the flower cannot be so strong. Its beauty is because of its not being strong. In the morning it opens its petals to welcome the sun, dances the whole day in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, and by the evening its petals have started falling. It is gone. Everything that is beautiful, precious, is going to be very momentary.
But you want everything to be permanent. You love someone and you promise that "I will love you my whole life." And you know perfectly well that you cannot be even certain of tomorrow -- you are giving a false promise. All that you can say is, "I am in love with you this moment and I will give my totality to you. About the next moment, I know nothing. How can I promise? You have to forgive me."
But lovers are promising all kinds of things which they cannot fulfill. Then frustration comes in, then the distance grows bigger, then fight, conflict, struggle, and a life that was meant to become happier becomes just a long, drawn out misery.
Ramaprem, it is good that you are aware of your greatest fear, that it is of intimacy. It can become a great revelation to you, and a revolution, if you look inwards and start dropping everything of which you feel ashamed. And accept your nature as it is, not as it should be. I do not teach any "should." All shoulds make human mind sick.
People should be taught the beauty of isness, the tremendous splendor of nature. These trees don't know any ten commandments, the birds don't know any holy scriptures. It is only man who has created a problem for himself.
Condemning your own nature, you become split, you become schizophrenic --
and not just ordinary people, but people of the status of Sigmund Freud, who contributed greatly to humanity, about mind. His method was psychoanalysis, that you should be made aware of all that is unconscious in you. And this is a secret, that once something unconscious is brought to the conscious mind, it evaporates. You become cleaner, lighter. As more and more unconscious is unburdened, your consciousness goes on becoming bigger. And as the area of the unconscious shrinks, the territory of the consciousness expands. That is an immense truth.
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The East has known it for thousands of years, but to the West, Sigmund Freud introduced it -- not knowing anything of the East and its psychology; it was his individual contribution.
But you will be surprised: he was never ready to be psychoanalyzed himself. The founder of psychoanalysis was never psychoanalyzed.
His colleagues insisted again and again: "The method that you have given to us -
- and we all have been psychoanalyzed -- why are you insisting that you should not be psychoanalyzed?"
He said, "Forget about it." He was afraid to expose himself. He had become a great genius and exposing himself would bring him down to ordinary humanity. He had the same fears, the same desires, the same repressions.
He never talked about his dreams; he only listened to other people's dreams. And his colleagues were very much surprised -- "It will be a great contribution to know about your dreams" -- but he never agreed to lie down on the psychoanalyst's couch and talk about his dreams. Because his dreams were as ordinary as anybody else's -- that was the fear.
A Gautam Buddha would not have feared to go into meditation. That was his contribution
-- a special kind of meditation. And he would not have been afraid of any
psychoanalysis, because for the man who meditates, by and by all his dreams disappear. In the day he remains silent in his mind, not the ordinary traffic of thoughts. And in the night he sleeps deeply, because dreams are nothing but unlived thoughts, unlived desires, unlived longings in the day.
They are trying to complete themselves, at least in dreams.
It will be very difficult for you to find a man who dreams about his wife, or a woman who dreams about her husband. But it will be absolutely common that they dream about their neighbors' wives and their neighbors' husbands. The wife is available, he is not suppressing anything as far as his wife is concerned. But the neighbor's wife is always more beautiful; the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. And that which is unapproachable creates a deep desire to acquire it, to possess it. In the day you cannot do it, but in dreams at least, you are free. Freedom of dreaming has not yet been taken away by the governments.
It won't be long -- soon they will take it away, because methods are available, already available, so that they can watch when you are dreaming and when you are not dreaming. And there is a possibility some day to find a scientific device so that your dream can be projected on a screen. Just some electrodes will have to be inserted in your head. You will be fast asleep, dreaming joyously, making love to your neighbor's wife and a whole movie hall will be watching it -- and they used to think that this man is a saint!
This much you can even see; whenever a person is asleep, watch: if his eyelids are not showing any movement of his eyes inside, then he is not dreaming. If he is dreaming then you can see that his eyes are moving.
It is possible to project your dream on a screen. It is also possible to enforce certain dreaming in you. But at least up to now, no constitution even talks about it, that "People are free to dream, it is their birthright."
A Gautam Buddha does not dream. Meditation is a way to go beyond mind. He lives in utter silence twenty-four hours -- no ripples on the lake of his consciousness, no thoughts, no dreams.
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I have heard about one actual incident. Three great Russian novelists -- Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy -- were just sitting on a bench in a park and gossiping... and they were great friends. All were geniuses; all created such great novels that even today, if you want to count ten great novels of the world, at least five will be from the Russian novelists -- before the revolution. After the revolution, they have not created a single novel which has the quality of genius. Now, it is under government instruction. The government is the only publisher; the government scrutinizes, and the people who scrutinize know nothing of art. They are bureaucrats.
The police commissioner of Poona was just asking that before my lectures are published, he should scrutinize them -- and what does a police commissioner have to do with meditation?
-- but that is happening in Russia, and because of that, in seventy years' time after the revolution, they have not been able to produce a single great novel. But before the revolution, Russia was at the top in creativity. These three people are still to be counted as great novelists.
Chekhov was telling about the women in his life. Gorky joined; he also said a few things.
But Tolstoy remained silent. Tolstoy was a very orthodox religious Christian... you will be surprised to know that Mahatma Gandhi in India has accepted three persons as his masters, and one was Tolstoy.
And he must have been repressing so much... he was one of the richest men in Russia -- he belonged to the royal family -- but he lived like a poor beggar, because "blessed are the poor and they shall inherit the kingdom of God," and he was not willing to give up the kingdom of God. It is not simplicity, and it is not desirelessness -- it is too much desire. It is too much greed, it is too much instinct for power. He is sacrificing this life and its joys because it is a small life... and then for eternity he will enjoy paradise and the kingdom of God. It is a good bargain, almost like a lottery, and certain.
He was living a very celibate life, eating only vegetarian food... he was almost a
saint.
Naturally, his dreams must have been very ugly, his thoughts must have been very ugly, and when Chekhov and Gorky asked him, "Tolstoy, why are you silent? Say something!" he said,
"I cannot say anything about women. I will say something only when one foot is in the grave. I will say it, and jump into the grave."
You can understand why he was so much afraid of saying anything -- it was boiling within him. Now, you cannot be very intimate with a man like Tolstoy.
Intimacy simply means that the doors of the heart are open for you, you are welcome to come in and be a guest. But that is possible only if you have a heart which is not stinking with repressed sexuality, which is not boiling with all kinds of perversions, which is natural -- as natural as trees, as innocent as children. Then there is no fear of intimacy.
That's what I am trying to do: to help you unburden your unconscious, unburden your mind, to become ordinary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be just simple and ordinary.
Then you can have as many intimate friends, as many intimate relationships as possible, because you are not afraid of anything. You become an open book -- anybody can read. There is nothing to hide.
Every year, a hunting club went up into the Montana hills. The members drew straws to decide who would handle the cooking and also agreed that anyone complaining about the food would automatically replace the unlucky cook.
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Realizing after a few days that no one was likely to risk speaking up, Sanderson decided on a desperate plan.
He found some moose droppings and added two handfuls to the stew that night.
There were grimaces around the campfire after the first few mouthfuls, but nobody said anything.
Then one member suddenly broke the silence. "Hey," he exclaimed, "This stuff tastes like moose shit -- but good!" He is not complaining. In fact, he is appreciating!
You have so many faces. Inside, you think one thing; outside, you express something else.
You are not one, organic whole.
Relax and destroy the split that society has created in you. Say only that which you mean.
Act according to your own spontaneity, never bothering about consequences. It is a small life and it should not be spoiled in thinking about consequences here and hereafter.
One should live totally, intensely, joyously and just like an open book, available for anybody to read it. Of course you will not make a name in the history books. But what is the point in making a name in the history books?
Live, rather than think of being remembered. You will be dead.
Millions of people have lived on the earth and we don't know even their names. Accept that simple fact: that you are here for only a few days and then you will be gone. These few days are not to be wasted in hypocrisy, in fear. These days have to be rejoiced.
Nobody knows anything about the future. Your heaven and your hell and your God are most probably all hypotheses, unproved. The only thing that is in your hands is your life --
make it as rich as possible.
By intimacy, by love, by opening yourself to many people, you become richer. And if you can live in deep love, in deep friendship, in deep intimacy, with many people, you have lived rightly, and wherever you happen to be... you have learned the art; you will be living there, too, happily.
I am reminded of one English philosopher, Edmund Burke. He was very friendly with the archbishop of England. Whenever Edmund Burke used to deliver a talk in the university, the archbishop used to come and listen to him. It was worth listening -- each of his statements was coming with his wholeness, with great authority.
But he never went to listen to the archbishop on Sunday in the church. The archbishop said, "At least you should come one time. I always come to listen to you."
Edmund Burke said, "You come to listen to me because whatever you know is not your knowledge -- it is all borrowed, and you are not certain of it. Whatever I say is my experience, and I give every evidence and proof and argument for it. I can stake my life for my statements.
You are just a parrot. But because you have asked, I will come next Sunday."
So the archbishop prepared a really beautiful sermon, thinking that Edmund Burke will be present, so the sermon has to be as great as he can make it. But he was surprised. Edmund Burke was sitting in the first row but there was no emotion on his face. He could not judge whether he liked it, disliked it, agreed with it, or disagreed with it. He was very much puzzled.
As the sermon ended, Edmund Burke stood up and he said, "I have a question to ask, a very simple question. Your whole sermon was, in a condensed form, that the people who live a virtuous life according to your Christian ideology, and believe in Jesus Christ, will go to Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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heaven after this life. Those who do not believe in Jesus Christ and live the life of a sinner, will fall into eternal hell after this life.
"My question is," said Edmund Burke, "that if a person is virtuous but does not believe in Jesus Christ, what will happen? He is good. His life is a life to be praised but he does not believe in Jesus Christ -- where is he going to be? Or, a man who believes in Jesus Christ but is a great sinner -- where is he going to be? You missed mentioning two very important points; your sermon was half. And I
was waiting to see whether you were aware of these two possibilities or not."
The archbishop thought for a moment -- the question was really dangerous. If he says the good people are going to heaven whether they believe in Jesus Christ or not, then Jesus Christ and the belief in him become superfluous, non-essential. And if he says those who believe in Jesus Christ -- even if they are sinners -- will go to heaven, then sin is being approved by the church itself.
He was in a very muddled situation. He said, "Your question needs some time for me to think it over. Just give me seven days. Next Sunday, I will answer it."
For seven days, he tried all the scriptures, tried this way and that way, but... the question was simple... and he was caught in a dilemma. He could not sleep those seven days, because how is he going to face Edmund Burke and his congregation? And whatever he says seems to be wrong: either it goes against Jesus Christ or it goes against a virtuous life. He repented that he ever invited that fellow to come to the church!
He went early in the morning to the church, before the congregation came. He still did not have any answer. He thought, "In the early morning, when there is nobody in the church, I will pray to Christ himself to just show me the light, give me the answer. Because not only my prestige is at stake, his prestige is also at stake."
Seven days, continuously worrying, not sleeping... he was bowing down before the statue of Jesus Christ. He fell asleep, and he saw a dream. Naturally, because for seven days only one thing had been in his mind, the dream was also connected with it.
He saw himself sitting in a train, and he asked, "Where are we going?" Somebody said,
"This train is going to heaven." He had a great relaxation, and he said, "That's perfectly good.
Perhaps this is Jesus Christ's doing, so that you can see for yourself who goes to paradise and who does not go."
As he reached the station of paradise, he could not believe -- it looked so rotten. He entered inside paradise. The people he met were almost corpses, walking. He
recognized a few saints and he asked them, "I want to ask one question: where is Gautam Buddha? because he never believed in Jesus Christ or in God, but he was one of the most moral men you can conceive of."
The saint said, "He is not here."
"Socrates? He was also not a believer in any god, but was a man of great virtue." "He is also not here."
And he said, "Why does this whole paradise look like a ruin? And saints look like the dead; there seems to be no joy. I used to think that angels go on singing with their harps. I don't see any angels, any harps, any song, any dance -- just a few dull and dead saints are sitting under the trees."
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And whoever he asked, said: "Don't bother us. We are tired."
Just an idea came into his mind at that moment that perhaps there is a train going to hell, also. So he rushed back to the station, and the train was standing at the platform, ready to leave for hell. He entered the train, and as the hell started coming closer, he was even more puzzled. The wind was fragrant with flowers. There was so much greenery, lush green. The station was so beautiful -- he had never thought that a station could be so beautiful. And people looked so happy, so joyous. He said, "My god, is there something wrong or what?"
He enquired, "Is this really hell?"
They said, "It used to be. Before Gautam Buddha, Socrates, Epicurus, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, people like these came here, it used to be hell. But now they have transformed the whole place."
He entered hell and he could not believe -- it was sheer joy! The very air was full of blissfulness. And there was dancing and there was singing, and he asked somebody, "Where is Gautam Buddha?"
They said, "Do you see in the garden, he is watering the roses." "And where is Socrates?"
And they said, "Socrates is working in the field." "Where is Epicurus?"
They said, "He just passed by you. The man who was dancing and playing on the guitar was Epicurus."
At that very moment, the shock was too much -- he woke up. He said, "My god! What a dream!"
And people had started arriving -- particularly, Edmund Burke who was sitting in the front seat already, waiting for the answer.
The poor archbishop said, "I have not been able to find the answer. But I have seen a dream which I will describe to you, and you can conclude the answer from the dream."
He described the dream. Edmund Burke said, "Now you conclude also! The conclusion is clear: that wherever good people are, there is paradise. It is not that good people go to paradise
-- wherever good people are, it becomes paradise. And wherever stupid people and idiots are
-- they may be great believers in God and Jesus Christ and the HOLY BIBLE, it does not matter -- even paradise becomes a ruin. It becomes a hell."
I have loved this incident very much because this is my approach, too. If you are simple, loving, open, intimate, you create a paradise around you. If you are closed, constantly on the defensive, always worried that somebody may come to know your thoughts, your dreams, your perversions -- you are living in hell.
Hell is within you and so is paradise. They are not geographical places.
They are your spiritual spaces. Ramaprem, cleanse yourself. And meditation is nothing but a cleaning of all the rubbish that has gathered in your mind. When the mind is silent and the heart is singing... just listen to these birds.
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You will be ready, without any fear but with great joy, to be intimate. And without intimacy, you are alone here amongst strangers. With intimacy you are surrounded by friends, by people who love you. Intimacy is a great experience. One should not miss it.
But before you can become unafraid of intimacy, you have to be totally clean of all the garbage that religions have been pouring into you, all the crap that for centuries has been handed over to you. Be finished with it all, and live a life of peace, silence, joy, song and dance. And you will transform... wherever you are, the place will become paradise.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
EVERYBODY AROUND IS BLISSING OUT AND THIS IS THE FIRST TIME IT IS
NOT HAPPENING TO ME. I WANT TO FEEL YOU AGAIN AND GET LOST. RIGHT
NOW, THE CONNECTION IS LIKE A FRAGILE, THIN THREAD FELT IN SOME RARE
SILENT MOMENTS OR SHOWN BY MY TEARS. I'M STILL FULL OF FEAR AND
ALSO GETTING OLDER. YOU GAVE ME THE NAME PRAVIRA -- DO I STILL HAVE
A CHANCE THIS LIFETIME?
The chance to be transformed remains with you to the very last breath of your life. But the problem with you is that you are more concerned that others are being so blissful, that so much is happening to them, and you are comparing.
Comparison always brings misery, and misery becomes a great hindrance for anything to happen to you. So the first thing is: if it is happening to many people, drop the old habit of comparing and being jealous. On the contrary, make it a point that "If it is happening to so many people, it is going to happen to me also. Because they are just like me."
We are all human beings. Nobody is superior and nobody is inferior. If it is not happening to you, you must be creating barriers so it cannot happen. The first barrier is comparison.
The second barrier is... you say, "I want to feel you again..." The moment you start desiring something, desperately longing for something, your very desiring and longing becomes a barrier.
It is something to be understood by everybody: when people come to me for the first time, they don't have any expectations, and things are very easy. Miracles are triggered in their being. But the next time they come to me, they come with expectations. Now the whole psychological set-up has changed: first they had come without any expectations, just available, just to see whether something happens or not. Now they come with a determined desire that it should happen. It has happened before, why is it not happening now?
It has happened before because you were in a totally different space. You were not desiring it; it happened in your innocence. Now you are no longer innocent -- you are full of desire, full of wanting. And with desire and wanting there is comparison on the side, that "It is happening to others." So you are creating misery around yourself.
There is no need to compare, for one thing. You should rejoice that it is happening to so many people. They are also part of us. If it is happening to them, you should join the dance.
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Rather than being in competition and hiding in a corner with tears because it is happening to everybody; everybody is dancing... who is preventing you? Join the dance!
And if you want to cry, let the tears be of joy that so many people are happy -- even if you are not happy, then too, it is something to be rejoiced. Rejoice for others.
And drop the idea that it should happen to you again. The moment you drop the idea, it will start happening because you are again innocent.
It is something that perhaps almost everybody must have felt: There are times when you remember somebody's name but you cannot say it. You say, "It is just on the tip of my tongue!
I know him, I know his name. I know that I know..." But what is the problem? Then why don't you say it? You say it is just on the tip of the tongue -- just push it out a little! But the more you try, the more it becomes difficult. It can drive you crazy because you know... you know that you know, it is on the tip of the tongue and my god, what has happened?
But tired with the effort, you go into the garden, start watering the plants and suddenly it is there. When you were trying, it was not there. When you forget all about it and start doing something else, suddenly it is there. There is a deep psychological fact in it: When you are tense and trying hard to remember something, your consciousness becomes very narrow. And in that narrow space, the name that you want to remember... you feel it is there but it is being hindered by many other things, other memories. And the passage has become so narrow that it cannot get out of that passage.
You forget about it; you start doing something else. Your consciousness relaxes. It becomes wider, the narrowness is gone. And with a wide consciousness, the name can find a way out. With a narrow consciousness, it is very difficult -- so many other memories, so many other names are hindering the way.
The same happens with blissfulness, silence, peace, joy. You have known it, and
because you have known it, you want to know it again. Now it has become a desire, and you are tense that it is not happening and everybody else is enjoying. So you are full of tears, you think something has gone wrong.
Nothing has gone wrong; you just have to understand. Drop the desire, so that you are again back in the same space in which it happened before -- there was no desire -- and join the dance, join the song.
Blissfulness is very contagious.
If you join the people who are joyous, you will suddenly feel that your own joy, which was asleep, has awakened. And then tears are not wrong -- you can dance, you can sing, and you can have tears of joy.
But tears of misery... and particularly in this place -- you can go to any church. Whenever you want to be miserable, the churches are basically meant for that. Entering a church you suddenly become sad. You cannot laugh in the church, you cannot dance.
And look at poor Jesus, hanging on the cross. Just seeing him and his long, British face... I have always wondered why he was born in Judea. England was the right place! I don't think that he ever laughed in his life, he was so serious...
And naturally, you cannot expect a man to laugh when you are crucifying him. Even the sculptors and the painters cannot paint him laughing, otherwise it will look so absurd -- "Is it a Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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joke? Is it a real cross?" So he is, poor fellow, keeping his face very serious -- in tune with the cross. The whole atmosphere in the church is created by Jesus and his crucifixion.
So whenever you want to be miserable... once in a while, one enjoys being miserable, it feels good. Go to some Catholic church. Weep and cry -- that is allowed. Just don't laugh in between. Don't even smile.
Because the American government is pressuring the Indian government that
sannyasins from other countries should not reach me, I have told my sannyasins, "Use all the colors. It was only a device; it has worked. In five years we made the movement international. Now there is no need."
But whenever you apply for a visa, be very serious. Be Catholic! You can even have Jesus Christ on the cross hanging around your neck -- they will not suspect that you could be my sannyasin. But if you look joyous, smiling, happy, blissful
-- feeling great that you are going back to your master -- they will prevent you. Just pretend a little bit.
You are saying, Pravira, "I am still full of fear, and also getting older." In getting older, there is no problem -- everybody gets older. Since the day you were born, you have been getting older. It is not a new problem.
Just understand one thing: getting older is a natural phenomenon. Let it happen -
- you cannot prevent it. Grow up. That is not natural; that needs your conscious effort to be silent, to be peaceful, to be joyful. Then getting older is one thing, and growing up is a different thing.
Getting older is horizontal and growing up is vertical.
And I have given you the name "Pravira". Pravira means one who is very courageous. And the greatest courage in life is to live totally, in spite of all the priests and all the people who want you not to be joyous, not to be living totally.
And as far as you are asking, "Do I still have a chance this lifetime?" I cannot say anything about this lifetime but I can say you have the chance just now. Why postpone it for the lifetime? Because the older you get, the less is the possibility of being dead. Have you ever thought about it? At the age of ninety, very few people die. At the age of a hundred, even less people die. At the age of a hundred and twenty, nobody dies. So getting older is not a problem. People die at seventy, seventy-five, and then the number starts getting less and less.
By the time they have made the century, then they don't die.
So don't be worried about getting older. Just be concerned with this moment, and this space that is being made available to you.
And I still say you are courageous enough to take the jump. Drop your desire,
drop your competition. Start singing and dancing, and suddenly you will find the climate has changed.
The spring has come to you.
But it always comes when you are not asking for it. Existence gives you everything; just don't ask.
It gives only to the emperors, not to the beggars.
There are three big game hunters in the jungle in Africa: an American, an Italian and a Polishman. Suddenly they are captured by cannibals and brought before the chief.
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The chief tells them, "By tribal custom, I am required to allow each of you a chance to escape. And I have to give you any weapon of your choice. However, I must warn you: If we catch you, we are going to skin you and make a canoe out of you."
Before they even get a chance to get their breath, the chief points to the American and asks, "You are first. What do you want?"
The American says, "I want a gun."
The chief hands him a gun and the American takes off into the jungle. Well, pretty soon the gun runs out of bullets and the natives catch up to him. They shoot him with poison darts and within five minutes they skin him and make a canoe out of him.
The chief points to the Italian. "You are next. What do you want?" The Italian says, "I want a horse."
The chief looks at him and says, "Well, that's not really a weapon but if you want
a horse, I will give you a horse." So the Italian rides off into the jungle. However, he is very quickly surrounded by a thousand natives on all sides. The natives shoot him with poison darts, skin him and make a canoe out of him.
Finally, the chief looks at the Polish guy. "What do you want?" The Polish guy says, "I want a fork."
"A fork?" asks the chief. "What do you want a fork for?"
"Look," said the Polish guy, "you said I could have anything I wanted. Now give me a fork, alright?"
"Okay, okay," says the chief, "here is a fork."
Immediately the Polish guy takes the fork and starts stabbing himself all over. The chief stares at him and exclaims, "What are you doing?"
The Polish guy laughs at him and says, "You are not going to make a canoe out of me!"
Just a little intelligence... and that much intelligence you can find even in a Polack. And I certainly believe that you are not a Polack. You must have more intelligence.
Don't destroy yourself unnecessarily because others are happy, because so much is happening to them and you are tense because something has happened to you before and you want it to happen again.
Something much more beautiful will happen to you if you can drop this tension and this desire and this competition.
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
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This moment is more than enough
14 March 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
IS IT POSSIBLE THAT FOR SOME, MELTING WITH THE MASTER COMES FIRST, AND ALL ELSE FOLLOWS? OR ARE YOU AFTER ALL MY BELOVED AS WELL AS
MY MASTER -- EVEN THOUGH I AM NOT SLEEPING IN YOUR ROOM!? JUST WITH
A MOVE OF YOUR ARMS, FIRE SPREADS FROM DEEP WITHIN MY BODY AND
GIGGLES OF PURE DELIGHT, LIGHTNESS AND JOY FOLLOW LIKE RIPPLES IN ITS
WAKE. SOMETIMES A MOMENT OF YOUR SILENCE, OR THE IMPACT OF JUST A FEW OF YOUR WORDS, CARRIES ME STRAIGHT INTO INFINITE SPACE. OSHO, I FEEL THAT ANY MELTING THAT I HAVE KNOWN SO FAR IS OUT OF MY
MELTING IN YOUR LOVE -- AND THAT MELTING WITH YOU IS EASIER FOR ME
AND MORE POSSIBLE THAN MELTING WITH ANY OTHER MAN HAS BEEN. I HAVE NEVER MELTED IN A TOTAL ORGASM WITH A MAN, HOWEVER
BELOVED. YET YOU SAY THIS HAS TO COME FIRST, BEFORE ANY MELTING
WITH YOU. BELOVED MASTER, I AM SCARED TO EXPOSE ALL THIS, BUT TELL
ME: HAVE I NOT KNOWN ANY MELTING AT ALL?
Prem Arup, the physical world has definite laws without any exception. But the spiritual world has no laws as such, because there are always exceptions. That is part of the freedom of the spiritual area of our being. So whatever I say about the spiritual growth, always remember: there are exceptions, because it is a freedom of consciousness.
It is freedom from laws, too. When I use the word law in the spiritual realm, I simply mean that generally, it happens that way. But that does not mean that it only happens that way. What is the first step to one person may not be the first step to another person. What is the second step to one person may not be the second step to another person. Spirituality recognizes your individuality and your uniqueness. In the physical world, there are no exceptions because there is no consciousness and there is no freedom. Trees are not struggling for freedom, the stars are not struggling for freedom -- they are not even conscious about the phenomenon. Not even the whole of humanity is striving for spiritual growth. Millions of people are not even aware that there is much more to life than they can ever imagine or can ever dream. They go on living as if they are under a physical, mechanical law.
My whole effort here is to break the ice for you, to make a space available for you so that you can see: you have every possibility to go beyond laws, rules, regularities. And no two persons' spiritual growth is going to be the same, because no two persons are in any way the same. They are all unique individuals. And as you become more and more alert, you will also become more and more unique. At the highest peak of consciousness, you are absolutely like yourself alone. There has never been anybody like you before, nor will there be anybody afterwards. Existence does not repeat.
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Many people have wondered why, after twenty-five centuries, millions of
Buddhist monks
-- who have been striving hard, sincerely, honestly -- have not been able to produce a single Gautam Buddha. And it is not only true about Gautam Buddha; the same is true about Socrates, the same is true about Kabir, the same is true about Jesus, the same is true about Nanak.
You can, at the most, imitate. You can act the role in the drama of life -- but it will not be an authentic and existential growth in you, but only a parrot-like repetition. The reason why there has never been another Socrates, another Buddha, another Chuang Tzu, another Kabir, is not that people have not strived.
People have strived; millions of people have strived hard. And I want to say to you: it is because of their striving that they missed being themselves. They never became Buddhas, they never became Meeras. They never became Kabir, they never became Nanak. On the contrary, because they were trying to become somebody, they missed becoming what they were destined to be.
This whole world would have been tremendously beautiful if we had accepted a simple phenomenon -- that each individual is unique. Hence, there can be no organized religions.
Religion is of the individual, absolutely private, absolutely personal. It is a dialogue between the individual and existence, without any mediator.
You cannot become anybody else but yourself. And there is no need. If you grow and bring your whole potential to become actual, you will produce flowers which have never been known before. You will produce a fragrance for the first and last time, a fragrance of its own kind. You will be a historical phenomenon. Each individual has that capacity, but because all cultures and all teachings are driving people to become somebody else, they are destroying humanity. This whole humanity lives in such misery for the simple reason that nobody is allowed to be himself. Nobody is accepted just as himself and respected. Everybody is being humiliated.
You may not have thought of it this way: to tell you to become a Jesus is to humiliate you.
It is insulting. To tell you to become a Gautam Buddha is to destroy your dignity, is to take away your pride of being a human being. You are being forced to be
carbon copies.
When you have the right and the potential to be the original, why should you be a carbon copy? But all the organized religions and your so-called leaders have been misleading you.
And because you cannot become yourself, life becomes nothing but misery and anguish.
Just think of a rose bush: If the roses are condemned and the rose bush is asked to produce lotuses, you will create insanity in the rose bush! It cannot produce lotuses, it is not in its potential. It is not in its seed, it is not meant to be.
But fortunately, there are no priests corrupting the rose bushes, no political leaders, no educationists trying to impose ideals on the rose bushes. That's why rose bushes are still happy, still have a dance, still bring beautiful flowers, great fragrance. And the rose bush is not jealous at all of any lotus. There is no question of any jealousy. A lotus is a lotus. A marigold is a marigold, and they are all needed.
Existence would be very poor if everybody were a Gautam Buddha. Just think for a moment: everybody has become a Jesus Christ, carrying his own cross on his shoulders. Then everything else will stop! You have just to carry your cross all your life. In fact, it will be difficult to find a Judas because he himself will be carrying his own cross. It will be difficult Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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to find the priest to crucify you; you will have to manage it yourself. There will not even be a crowd to see it, because they have to do their work. They have to dig the ground, put their cross up, and crucify themselves. Perhaps people will make contracts with each other: "You crucify me, help me to arrange my crucifixion, and I will help you with your crucifixion." Or there may be some agencies who do the work.
But it will be a very poor world where everybody is alike. The variety makes it rich, and the variety should be respected.
Prem Arup, you need not be worried. If things are happening differently to you, it is perfectly right. All I want is that things should be happening. Which step comes first and which comes last in your journey does not matter.
All that matters is that we all reach our home, that our wandering stops, that our anguish and anxiety, our tensions disappear. All that matters is that we come to the center of our being where we can be utterly relaxed -- in joy, in peace, in blissfulness and in great gratitude towards existence. I know no other prayer.
All your prayers are false -- there is only one prayer which is authentic, and that prayer is when you have arrived home and you feel tremendous gratitude towards existence that it not only gave you life, it gave you love, it gave you meditation. It gave you fellow travellers, it gave you masters, it gave you directions, dimensions to move in, and it gave you the courage and the intelligence. Only gratitude is the right prayer. If you are asking something, you are complaining. It is not prayer.
Prem Arup, you are asking, "Is it possible that for some, melting with the master comes first -- and all else follows?" Yes, it is absolutely possible.
You are saying, "I feel that any melting that I have known so far is out of my melting in Your love." The question is not in whose love the melting happens; the important thing is that the melting happens, so that the ego dissolves and you are left alone with your unique consciousness. In melting, your truth does not melt -- only the false. So who becomes the excuse is absolutely non-essential and unimportant. What is important is that your ego dissolves. You are, and there is no sense of I-ness.
So if it is happening, you need not be worried, need not be concerned that perhaps something is growing wrong because you are not following the steps in the sequence I talked about. In the world of consciousness, the deeper you will enter, the more you will be an exception.
The problem comes from the mind, which has been conditioned and is always waiting to raise questions to disturb your peace, to disturb your silence. And man has lived in such insanity -- and goes on living in the same insanity...
Just the other day, I was telling you a joke which I knew was crude... but man is far more crude. The joke was about a Catholic nun and a man who find themselves on an island, shipwrecked. They are the only survivors.
For two years, they wait for someone to rescue them, but nobody comes. Then finally, the man pursues the nun, saying: "Forget all about the world. Forget all about your vows of celibacy and this and that. Let us start living, because there is nobody coming to rescue us."
So they started making love. A bit reluctantly, the nun finally agreed. After all, a nun is also a woman. His idea finally entered the heart of the woman, because all your religion is Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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only in the head; it never reaches to your heart. It never reaches to your body, it never reaches to your biology.
They were making love for two months and then the woman started feeling very guilty, because her conditioning was such that she has betrayed Jesus Christ, she has betrayed her religion. A nun is a bride of Jesus Christ, and this ugly fellow... but she is stuck with him on this island. She felt so bad about it that she committed suicide.
Two months after her death, the man started feeling that what he was doing was very bad.
He was making love to the dead woman. He felt so bad... but a man is after all a man, and he was not a religious man. He buried the woman. Out of feeling bad, he buried the woman.
One of my friends informed me that it was a very crude joke. And just today, I received a press clipping: In Pakistan, a man has been caught red-handed -- he has pulled out a dead woman from the grave and he was making love to her.
Now what do you say? And that man is not an exception. It is a fact recorded by history that Cleopatra -- perhaps one of the most beautiful women, at least mythologically; but she was a historical person -- was raped after she died. And she was raped not by one man but by many men. According to custom, for three days, the body had to remain outside the grave. In those three days, she was attacked again and again in the night by a group of people and raped.
She was dead.
My joke may seem crude to you but in fact, I am trying to tell you actual facts about your inhumanity to other human beings, your barbarousness, your ugliness. In a joke, you think, "It is just a joke." I am trying my best to make it as little crude as possible. But it is a strange world...
Holland has denied me entry on one ground: that I have been speaking against homosexuals, and that hurts the feelings of homosexuals. My entry is refused by the parliament of Holland and the reason is that I have been speaking against homosexuals. One cannot even speak against perversions!
Just now, a few governments have informed how many people are suffering from AIDS.
Not all the governments of the world -- for example, the governments of the East are completely silent, because before you can declare it, you will have to test millions of people.
India has a population now of nine hundred million people who would have to be tested.
But from those few governments who have given the numbers of people who are suffering from AIDS, the total is ten million. And their doctors have said that by the end of this century, there will be one hundred million people suffering from AIDS. If ten million people are suffering from AIDS, then what do you think? How many people will be involved in homosexuality?
And when I had said for the first time that two thirds of humanity will die from AIDS, all the journalists laughed about it. Now the doctors are saying that at least seventy percent of people in some areas of the world could die from AIDS. That is a bigger percentage than I had predicted. My prediction was only two- thirds; that was sixty-six percent. They are talking now of seventy percent. But everybody is taking a very hopeful and optimistic attitude -- and there are hundreds of other countries which are not exposing themselves, not reporting how many homosexuals they have and how many people are suffering from AIDS.
There may be no need of a nuclear war. AIDS may finish the whole humanity. But I was prevented from entering Holland because I have spoken against
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homosexuality is also a religion. Now, religious feelings are hurt; I have been sued again and again in courts because I have been hurting people's religious feelings. Soon, I think homosexuals will be suing me through the courts. People who are suffering from AIDS will be suing me through the courts, saying that "This man is hurting our feelings." So rather than saying simple facts and data, I try to indicate through my jokes, the reality. Don't take my jokes non-seriously!
You can take everything else that I say non-seriously, but not my jokes. They contain something which cannot be said directly. It will hurt you.
Just the other day, American Catholic priests have come up with an idea. I was telling you that Mohammedans in Russia are calling their fast "dieting" because fasting is against the communist government. And fasting is a religious thing so they have changed it to "dieting."
They are calling their prayers, "physical exercises."
But this is nothing compared to what the American Catholic priests have come up with: they have declared that "Celibacy does not prevent us from homosexuality -- celibacy includes the idea that we should remain unmarried." That is the meaning of celibacy according to their spokesman: "Celibacy means that we will remain unmarried. At the most, celibacy means we will not make sexual contacts with women, but there is no idea that celibacy prevents monks and priests from homosexuality."
These are your religious leaders! And on these religious leaders you have depended for centuries, to guide you to spirituality.
Everywhere Catholic priests have been caught abusing small children. Homosexuality is rampant. In one monastery in Europe, half the monastery is homosexual, so they have divided the monastery in two parts. They have raised a wall: the homosexuals are separate, and those who are backward and don't understand human freedom... homosexuality is part of human freedom.
A few of my sannyasins have come to me. They belonged, before they came to me, to the women's liberation movement and they told me, "The women's liberation movement is very much against you because you have been condemning lesbianism, and you are converting many liberation women into sannyasins." And their liberation consists in hating men! Rather than being in love with a man, they will be in love with women only. The man has to be boycotted. And if you say anything, it hurts their feelings. They are angry.
It seems almost impossible to say anything significant. That's why I find jokes an indirect way of telling you things, because nobody can sue me in the court for telling a joke. A joke is after all, a joke.
A man decides that he wants to become a monk. So he goes to the monastery and is informed that before he can become a monk, he must pass two tests: "First," says the head monk, "We will put you in a cell for six months. You will have nothing to eat or drink but bread and water. And each entire day must be spent reading THE BIBLE.
"Then," he continues, "should you pass the first test, you will be ready for the second test.
For this, we put you in a room and take off all your clothes. We then tie a little bell to your male member and then we walk a nude nun through the room. Should that little bell make any sound at all, I am afraid you will be deemed unfit to join the monastery."
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So they put him in a cell with nothing but bread and water and he does nothing but read THE BIBLE for six months. At the end of this time, he is once again brought before the head monk.
"Are you ready for the second test?" asks the head monk. "I am," says the man.
He is taken into a room and stripped down. They put the little bell on him, then they walk a nude nun through the room.
Well, right away his bell starts ringing.
The monk says to him, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you must leave."
"Wait a minute," says the man. "Are you going to tell me that every priest in this monastery has passed this test?"
"Every one," says the chief monk.
"Before I will agree to leave," says the man in defiance, "I demand proof. I want to see ten monks pass this test."
"All right," says the head monk. They get ten monks in the room, undress them, line them up, and put bells on them.
The nude nun then walks through and there is nothing but dead silence. Except of course for the first man's bell, which is ringing like crazy. As a matter of fact, it rings so hard that it falls off. When the man bends over to pick it up, all the other ten bells ring.
Now there are governments who are making laws against homosexuality but no government is daring to make celibacy a crime -- which is the root cause. Homosexuality is only a symptom. Make celibacy a crime and then homosexuality will disappear on its own accord.
But rather than making celibacy a crime, celibacy is still thought to be holy and spiritual.
Homosexuality has to be condemned as a crime, because of the fear of AIDS. But by declaring anything criminal, have you ever been able to stop it?
Your jails go on becoming bigger, their number goes on increasing. Your crimes go on increasing. As your laws increase, more than your laws, your crimes increase. And it has been the idea in the past that if you punish a criminal, then other people will be prevented from committing the same crime -- which has been found to be psychologically nonsense, because nobody is prevented.
In England, in the middle ages, they used to beat thieves in the middle of the town, naked
-- a hundred lashes, two hundred lashes, until they would fall unconscious. Their whole body covered in blood... and thousands of people would come to see it; it was free entertainment.
But England's parliament finally decided to stop it. And the reason why they stopped it was: they were punishing a thief and because the crowd was so much involved and so much concentrated on looking at the man being beaten -- naked, blood flowing out from all over his body -- and there were at least a dozen people who were cutting their pockets! So the whole idea, that beating a thief will prevent other people from stealing, was absolutely nonsense. In fact, they were using the opportunity to cut people's pockets.
And you send people to jails. When they enter, they are amateur; when they come out they have graduated from the university. All that your laws and your jails teach the criminals is one Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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thing: that committing a crime is not a crime, but being caught is a crime. So just be more alert, more artful, more articulate so that you are not caught. And jails are perfect universities, where there are very experienced and seasoned criminals who will train you, who have been there for their whole life, coming and going.
When I was put in the first jail in America, in that area there were six small cells, each cell for two persons. And the man who was the sheriff of the jail had read me, and was very careful: he took every care that was within his capacity to make my three days in his jail as comfortable as possible. He removed all the people from the cells who were smokers. He brought into all the cells, people chosen from six hundred inmates in the jail -- the best people, the most understanding ones, intelligent, educated. He cleaned all those six cells, because he knew that I am allergic to smell.
I enquired of those inmates -- "You seem to be very at ease here." Somebody was very old, sixty years; somebody was fifty... nobody was below thirty. They all said "Outside life is difficult, a constant struggle. And because people know
we are criminals, employment is difficult. Even our families don't want us back because they lose respectability because of us.
So whenever we are released, we commit a small crime in such a way that we can be caught immediately. So back we are in the jail! And the jail is the perfect place -- no worry about employment, food is supplied on time, medical care is available, clothes are available.
Everything that is needed is given and all our friends are here. outside we feel alone.
"Our society is totally different, and here we have such experienced criminals, so wise that just to sit with them and learn is a great education. Once a person enters jail, he comes out a seasoned criminal, graduated. He has learned many things that he had never known before and now it becomes more difficult to catch him."
Condemning homosexuality as a crime will drive homosexuals underground. Right now, it is better not to make homosexuality a crime, because people are ready to go for the test. Once it is a crime, people will stop going for the test or they will start bribing the doctor. They may have AIDS and they will bribe the doctors. In that bribe, they are saved and the doctor is also saved because no doctor wants, in his hospital, patients suffering from AIDS. But then those people are free in the society, spreading the virus -- which spreads like wildfire.
But I was amazed that a cultured country like Holland should prevent me from having just a tourist visa because I had been speaking against homosexuality and AIDS and celibacy.
Man is more barbarous than you ever conceive him to be. And man has done to other men such cruel acts that are unbelievable -- and in the name of beautiful words: God, religion, nation, race.
My effort here is to make you aware, in every possible way, what kind of humanity we have -- and how to transcend it, because it is not only outside you, it is also inside you. You have been brought up by this mad society so they have given all kinds of mad ideas to you.
And nobody seems to bother that man's life can be such a joy, and it is going down the drain every day -- from bad to worse. But at least for my people, I
would like you to remember: if you can do only one thing, everything else that is ugly will disappear from your life and everything that is beautiful will come on its own. And that simple thing is: learning to be silent, learning to be meditative, being a watcher, being natural and yet alert and conscious of whatever you are doing, of whatever you are thinking.
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Consciousness and nature -- and just be easy and relaxed and you can get rid of this whole madness, in which man is rushing so fast that it seems it won't take much to destroy life on this planet. Perhaps this is the last century. We may not be able to see life after this century.
This beautiful earth will become just a dead graveyard.
So remember: whatever I say, don't think that it is something like an absolute law. I am saying it in a very general way; then you have to adjust it to your individuality. You have to make out of it your own discipline, your own religion, your own path.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
SOMETIMES, REMEMBERING YOU, IT FEELS THAT YOUR LONGING FOR ME
IS MUCH BIGGER THAN MY LONGING FOR YOU. SOMETIMES, SAYING HELLO
TO A TREE OR LOOKING AT A MOUNTAIN OR A STAR, IT FEELS THAT THEY ARE
WHISPERING: "DON'T FORGET THAT WE LOVE YOU." AM I IMAGINING, OR IS IT
TRUE THAT ALL EXISTENCE WANTS OF ME IS TO OPEN MYSELF TO ALL
DIMENSIONS OF ITS LOVE?
Deva Parigyan, rather than being concerned whether what you are experiencing is imagination or reality, you should enjoy each moment with totality and intensity, not holding anything back. You are not doing that. If you were doing that, the question would not have arisen. I will read your question so that you can understand: "Sometimes, remembering You, it feels that Your longing for me is much bigger than my longing for You."
Why should my longing for you be bigger than your longing for me? I don't have any longing at all -- for you, or for anybody else. This idea is arising out of your ego. You want it that way: my longing should be bigger for you than your longing is for me. But you are not aware that this is the game of the ego and you are being befooled by it. I don't have any longing at all. All that is past, far away. All longings have disappeared. Your longing for me will also disappear, and only then is there a possibility of meeting. Longing is a barrier, desire is a barrier.
I don't have any longing. That does not mean that I am hurting you, don't misunderstand me. It has nothing to do with you; it is just explaining to you my situation. In my heart, there is no longing. It is completely fulfilled. If I die this very moment, I will die in utter contentment because nothing is left which is incomplete.
I have nothing special to do tomorrow. I have not postponed anything.
For thirty years continuously I am living in the moment, neither looking backwards nor looking forwards. Just this very moment is enough. It is so much, so overwhelming that I am absolutely grateful to existence for this moment, and I don't have time to think about the next moment.
When the next moment comes, I will live it. Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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But your ego must be telling you that my longing is bigger than your longing for me. I want your longing also to disappear, so we can meet with each other without any longing, without any desire, without any expectation.
The meeting with the master happens only when there is nothing else between them -- just a pure meeting of two consciousnesses, of two flames. For no reason at all -- just for the sheer joy.
You are saying, "Sometimes saying hello to a tree or looking at a mountain or a star, it feels like they are whispering, 'Don't forget that we love you.'" Again, your ego seems to be the center. Just as my longing has to be bigger than your longing, even the mountains and the stars and the trees are telling you, "Don't forget that we love you." It is not that you love them.
Your ego is feeling very nourished. You are saying, "Am I imagining?"
This question would not have arisen at all. It arises only when you are imagining. Do you ever think that you are imagining this meeting here? Do you ever think you are imagining these lights here? Do you ever think you are imagining my words, my being, my presence?
No, the question arises only when you are imagining.
And it is certainly imagination that mountains and rivers and trees say to you, "Don't forget that we love you." That's how you distort everything. I have been telling you: love the mountains, love the trees, love the stars, because by loving, your consciousness will expand.
But you are doing just the opposite: you are imagining that the whole existence is in need of you. They are all begging you, "Don't forget us. Without you, what will happen to us? The whole existence will become a widow."
The rivers will cry, the mountains will mourn, the stars will commit suicide.
Again, you are saying: "Is it true that all existence wants of me is to open myself to all dimensions of its love?" But you are not saying even once that you have to
love the existence.
Again, you are saying that "Existence wants me to open so that it can love me." The ways of the ego are very subtle. But howsoever subtle they are, if you are a little alert, a little intelligent, you can catch hold of the ego.
You were not here; the existence was here and perfectly happy. The stars were not missing you, neither the mountains nor the rivers. And one day, you will not be again and the existence will continue its celebration, its dance, its song. It will not miss you. But don't feel hurt. You have not done anything that you should be missed.
The existence misses Gautam Buddha even today, the existence misses Socrates even today. The last words of Socrates to the judges were, "When I am gone, then you will miss me. And your names will be remembered only because of me. Otherwise, nobody will remember even your names. But right now, you are deaf and blind."
Love the existence so much that certainly when you leave, the whole existence misses you.
But what have you done to be missed? You have been only exploiting existence. You have been only destructive to existence. Do you think you have contributed to the beauty of existence a little bit more?
Have you made its music a little deeper? Have you joined in its dance and made it a little juicier? What have you done? Have you added your silence to the silence of existence? Have Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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you raised the consciousness of humanity by raising your consciousness? Then certainly, it will miss you.
But to raise your consciousness, you will have to drop this ego and you will have to drop all this imagination and you will have to drop this mind which is playing tricks with you.
Mind is so tricky and plays such games, so convincing to you. That's why the whole humanity goes on living in misery.
Two Jews meet on a train. One asks the other if he has the time. No answer.
Again he asks. Again, no answer.
Eventually, he taps him hard on the knee and almost shouts his question, and the other at last tells him the time.
"And why did it take you so long, if I may ask?"
"Well, it is like this. We will get talking. We will become friendly. When we get to Vienna, I will ask you to come home with me to have a bite to eat and you will meet my daughter. She is beautiful and you are a nice-looking chap and you will fall in love and you will want to get married and quite frankly, I don't want a son-in-law who has not got a watch."
Such long range thinking! But everybody's mind is doing such things.
Beware: imagination is not going to help. Howsoever beautiful it is, it is just a soap bubble.
Deva Parigyan, meditate more. First get in touch with your own being, then only you have the right to say hello to the trees. Then only you know the language of how to talk with the mountains and the clouds and the stars and the rivers. Because their language is silence, and unless you know that language, how can you talk with them?
And in silence, there is no talking involved but still a dialogue happens, a deep understanding without words, a transfer of energy without language. Trees will not say anything and you will not hear anything but between you and the being of the tree, there will be a transfer of energy -- not of language. And only then you will know that you have to love if you want love to be showered on you.
Yes, mountains can love, rivers can love, trees can love, clouds can love. But before they love you, you have to learn how to love -- how to love this whole existence, how to respect life, how to have a reverence for all that is.
To me, this is authentic religion: reverence for all that is. And then certainly, you will be showered with flowers which nobody will see, but you will understand. And certainly you will find you are needed.
And it is one of the greatest joys in existence: to be needed by existence, to know that you are fulfilling something essential by being here.
But don't start with imagination -- start with meditation. Begin with meditation, and let your meditation make you so silent that you can join with existence in its eternal silence.
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There are experiences which are beyond words. Don't try to imagine those great experiences, because your imagination can become a barrier. Only silence is the bridge.
The mind is the barrier. The no-mind is the bridge. Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
WHAT IS MEANT BY A SPIRITUAL EGO? IS SPIRITUAL GREED ONE OF ITS
SYMPTOMS? IS IT CURABLE?
Anand Tarangini, the spiritual ego is not something different from the ordinary ego.
Somebody feels his ego because he has money, somebody feels his ego strengthened because he has political power. Somebody feels ego because he has great respectability. But the ego is the same. Somebody feels that he is spiritual -
- he's a great saint, holier than you -- that is also the same ego. You can call it "spiritual ego" but spiritual ego is a contradiction in terms.
I have heard a story. There were three monasteries in the mountains. And one day, three monks, from each of the monasteries, just by chance met on the road.
One of them said, "You have beautiful monasteries. But as far as our monastery is concerned, you cannot compete with us in our austerity."
The second said, "We know your monastery; its discipline is arduous, your austerity is great. But nobody can compete with us as far as learning is concerned. Our monastery is full of scholars, great scholars." Both looked at the third man. He said, "You are both right. One monastery is very perfectionistic in its disciplines, austerities, and the second is certainly full of great scholars. But we are the tops in humbleness."
"Tops in humbleness..." You can see the contradiction. There is no such thing as spiritual ego. Yes, there is such a thing that ego can exploit any direction of life: it can be religious, it can be spiritual, it can be financial, it can be political. It can be scholarship, it can be beauty, it can be physical strength. Ego is capable of exploiting anything. But spiritual ego is simply an impossibility because spirituality arises in you only when the ego dissolves. Either you are an egoist or you are in the world of the spirit, you can't be both together. They don't have any coexistence.
And you are asking, "Is spiritual greed one of its symptoms?"
Any greed -- material or spiritual -- is simply greed. Greed means you want more and more and more; there never comes a time when this continuous hankering for more, stops. So whether you are in search of more spirituality or more money or more power, it does not matter.
But in fact, about spirituality, you should understand that the same contradiction again arises: you become spiritual only when this desire for more and more disappears, when you are utterly satisfied and contented as you are, when there is no "more" goading you... because the "more" creates the future. "More" means tomorrow is needed.
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For the spiritual person, this moment is more than enough. He is utterly grateful for whatever is allowed to him. His contentment cannot be disturbed by any desire for more.
And you are asking, Anand Tarangini, "Is it curable?" It is a very strange question. Do you want to get rid of the ego or do you want to cure it? If you want to cure it, then you are in a wrong place. Here, we simply chop the head off! We know only one cure: a simple surgery.
What do you mean by "curable"? Do you want your ego to become more healthy?
stronger? more powerful? But that will be destructive to your spirituality. That will be against your inner growth.
The ego is your enemy, not your friend. The enemy has to be destroyed -- completely destroyed. Not to be cured, but killed!
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
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15 March 1987 am in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
PRIME MINISTER RAJIV GANDHI IS GOING TO HOLD A NATIONAL DEBATE
ON THE NEED FOR SEPARATING POLITICS FROM RELIGION. WE WOULD LOVE
TO HEAR YOUR VISION ON THIS QUESTION.
Anand Maitreya, politics is mundane -- the politicians are the servants of the people.
Religion is sacred -- it is the guide for people's spiritual growth. Certainly, politics is the lowest as far as values are concerned, and religion the highest as far as values are concerned.
They are separate.
Rajiv Gandhi wants religion not to interfere with politics; I want politics not to interfere with religion. The higher has every right to interfere, but the lower has no right.
Religion has been raising human consciousness for centuries. Whatever man is now, whatever little consciousness he has, the whole credit goes to religion. Politics has been a curse, a calamity; and whatever is ugly in humanity, politics is responsible for.
But the problem is that politics has power; religion has only love, peace and the experience of the divine. Politics can easily interfere with religion; and it has been interfering all along, to such an extent that it has destroyed many religious values which are absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity and life on this earth.
Religion has no mundane power like nuclear weapons and atom bombs and guns; its dimension is totally different. Religion is not a will to power; religion is a search for truth, for God. And the very search makes the religious man humble, simple, innocent.
Politics has all the destructive weapons -- religion is absolutely vulnerable. Politics has no heart -- religion is pure heart. It is just like a beautiful roseflower: its beauty, its poetry, its dance makes life worth living, gives life meaning and
significance. Politics is like a stone, dead, but the stone can destroy the flower and the flower has no defense. Politics is aggressive.
Rajiv Gandhi is putting things upside down. He wants religion not to interfere with politics. Politics should have the whole monopoly to enslave humanity, to reduce men to slaves, to destroy their freedom, to destroy their consciousness; to convert them into robots so that the politicians can enjoy the power and the domination.
Religion is the only problem for the politicians. It is beyond their reach and beyond their understanding. Religion is the only area where politics should not interfere at all, because religion is the only hope.
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Politics, for centuries, has been just killing, destroying people -- the whole history of politics is the history of criminals, murderers. In three thousand years, politicians have created five thousand wars. It seems that inside the politician, the barbarous instinct is very powerful; its only joy is to destroy, to dominate.
Religion creates a problem for it, because religion has given the world its highest peaks of consciousness -- a Gautam Buddha, a Jesus, a Chuang Tzu, a Nanak, a Kabir. These are the very salt of the earth. What has politics given to the world? Genghis Khan? Tamerlane? Nadir Shah? Alexander? Napoleon? Ivan the Terrible? Josef Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Benito Mussolini? Mao Tse-tung? Ronald Reagan? -- these are all criminals. Rather than being in power, they should be behind bars; they are inhuman.
And they are spiritually sick people. The will to power and to dominate arises only in the sick mind. It arises out of the inferiority complex. People who are not suffering from an inferiority complex do not care about power; their whole endeavor is for peace, because the meaning of life can be known only in peace -- power is not the way. Peace, silence, gratitude, meditation -- these are the basic constituents of religion.
Religion cannot be allowed to be dominated by stupid politicians. The situation
is as if sick people are trying to dominate the physicians, directing what they should do and what they should not do. Accept it -- the sick people are in the majority, but that does not mean that the physician should be dominated by the majority. The physician can heal the wounds, can cure the sicknesses of humanity. Religion is the physician.
Politicians have done enough harm, and they are leading the whole of humanity towards a global suicide. And still Rajiv Gandhi has the nerve to say that religion should not interfere --
when the whole of life on this planet is in danger! Not only man, but the innocent birds and their songs, the silent trees and their flowers -- everything that is alive.
Politicians have managed to create enough destructive power to destroy life from the earth; and they are continuously piling up more and more nuclear weapons. In fact, three years ago there were enough nuclear weapons to destroy every man seven times, to destroy this whole earth seven times, or to destroy seven earths. A man dies only once; there is no need to accumulate so much destructive power.
The whole of politics depends on lies.
Just the other day -- I could not believe that any man who is sane can make such a statement -- Ronald Reagan made a statement. He was denying before the Senate, continually, that any weapons were being given to a few countries. And now investigation has shown that he was lying -- lying for two years continually. Destructive weapons have been given to poor countries -- and not in a small measure, a great lot. Now the facts are there and Ronald Reagan had to make a statement, and the statement he has made, made me laugh -- so ridiculous.
He said, "In my heart, I still know that whatever I said was the truth. But the facts that have been discovered say that it was a lie. I still believe in my heart that I have been speaking the truth." He is accepting the facts, and still, simultaneously, saying, "I still believe in my heart that whatever I was saying was true, although the facts are proving it wrong."
Politicians live on lies; politicians live on promises -- but those promises are never fulfilled. They are the most unqualified people in the world. Their only quality is that they can manage to befool the poor masses -- or, in poor countries,
they can purchase their votes. And Osho - The Hidden Splendor 62
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once they are in power, they forget completely that they are servants of the people; they start behaving as if they are the masters of the people.
What do they know about the inner world of man? What do they know of blissfulness, of godliness? Still, they want religion not to be allowed to interfere with politics. What about them? They should be allowed to interfere with religion? Is the lower going to dominate the higher? Is the mundane going to dominate the sacred? That will be the ultimate misfortune for humanity.
As far as I can see, all politicians should be meditators, should know something of the inner world. They should be more conscious, more compassionate, should know the taste of love. They should know the experience of the silence of existence, and the beauty of this planet, and the gifts of existence. And they should learn to be humble and grateful.
Religion should be the teacher of all the politicians. Unless politicians have something of religiousness, there is no future for humanity. Religion has to interfere with the politicians.
Without religion interfering with the politicians... the politicians are blind, they don't have eyes, they are deaf; they don't have a silent mind to listen to the truth.
But why is Rajiv Gandhi concerned that religion and politics should be separated? Politics is a small thing. Religion is man's whole evolution. Politics should be only a minor part of the vastness of religious experience. There is no need for any separation. But the politician, as he is in power, becomes so egoistic that he cannot think of going to those humble, simple, but wise people.
The problems go on increasing; the politicians have proved impotent to solve them. But they will not go to the people who can give them direction, who can give them advice because they have the clarity.
I am not a politician. I have never voted in my life and I am not going to vote -- ever --
because what is the point of choosing between two chimpanzees, just because they are holding different flags? just because they have different symbols? Chimpanzees are chimpanzees.
They need a deep respect for religion, for religious people, because one thing is certain: religious people are not going to fight the elections -- no religious person is going to beg for votes. Basically, he has no desire to fulfill his ego and to cover up his inferiority complex. In his silence, in his peace, in his blissfulness, he has known the ultimate superiority. Now there is nothing more than that, nothing higher than that. He has become a temple; his god is within his being.
The politician lives on war, lives on creating riots, lives on disturbance -- these are his nourishment. Adolf Hitler has written in his autobiography: "Unless you have enemies, you cannot become a great leader. Even if you don't have enemies, create the fiction that your country is in danger, because when people are afraid they are ready to become slaves. When people are afraid they are ready to follow politicians."
Although he was an insane person, once in a while he made statements which are very significant. He has said, "The greatest leaders of humanity are born in times of war." So unless there is a great war, you cannot be a great leader; just to fulfill the desire of being a great leader, you have to kill millions of people.
And he is right: in days of peace, people don't need to follow; people don't make the leader almost a god, so that his word becomes the law.
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Politicians try in every way to keep countries afraid. China is gathering nuclear weapons on its boundary with India; Pakistan is gathering armies on its boundary with India -- the Indian politicians go on insisting this is so. In Pakistan, they go on insisting that India is gathering armies on its boundary; in China, they go on insisting that India is preparing nuclear weapons. In the parliaments, they go on saying, "We are not creating anything" -- but that is an absolute lie.
The Chinese leader has to keep the people of China afraid. The Indian leader has to keep the Indian people afraid. The Pakistani leaders have to keep the Pakistani people afraid.
In your fear is their power.
The more they make you afraid, the more powerful they are. Outside the country they go on creating fictions, and inside the country they also continue: Hindu and Mohammedan riots, riots between Hindi-speaking and non-Hindi-speaking people. They want you to continue fighting for anything -- any trivial thing. If you are engaged in fighting, they are in power. If you stop fighting, their power disappears. This is an ugly game.
It is one of the duties of religious people to keep themselves above politics and lead the people towards creative values, towards more humanity. In fact, if religions understand one thing -- that the whole of humanity is one, and there is no need for any nations -- all these pygmy politicians will disappear.
But the strangest thing is that politicians go on saying that religion and politics should be separate. Why? Why should truth be separate from politics? And why should love be separate from politics? Why should meditative consciousness be separate from politics? Why should a prayerful heart be separate from politics?
Yes, I understand that it should be separate in the sense that it is higher. And the politician is in need of psychological treatment and spiritual treatment, and he should go to the religious people for advice. That was the situation in ancient India. We have seen those days; those golden days are still alive in memory. There was a time when kings would go to the forest to pay their respects -- to beggars, who had nothing -- and to ask for advice.
Kings used to touch the feet of those who had realized themselves, because even their blessing can transform you. Politics is functional; it is utilitarian. But it has no way of transforming man into higher consciousness. And, particularly in reference to India, it has been such an ugly situation. It hurts.
Mahatma Gandhi used to say, before freedom, that the first president of India would be a woman -- and not only a woman, but she would be a sudra, from the lowest untouchables.
But as freedom came, he forgot all the promises that he had been talking about
and the power game started again in the old style. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a brahmin; he was not a woman and he was not a sudra. Again, the brahmin becomes the power, and for forty years, one family of brahmins have been dominating India. They have made it almost their personal dynasty. It is no longer a democracy.
Just look at the facts: What was the hold of Mahatma Gandhi over the Indian people? He was pretending to be religious -- he was not a religious man -- pretending to be a Hindu saint, because Hindus were in the majority and they were going to rule the country. That's why he was insistent that India should remain undivided, because in an undivided India, Hindus will be in power; nobody can take the power from the hands of the Hindus because everybody else is in a minority. Nobody looks at gandhi's politics: he was using even religion for ugly ends.
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Doctor Ambedkar wanted a separate vote for the untouchables, and I am in absolute agreement with him for the simple reason that for five thousand years these people have been oppressed, exploited; their whole dignity as human beings had been destroyed -- and they are one-fourth of the Hindu population. And they do the ugliest jobs; they should be respected, they should be honored for that. But on the contrary, even their shadow is untouchable. If the shadow of an untouchable falls on you, you have to take a bath immediately to purify yourself.
Ambedkar was absolutely right to ask for a separate vote for the untouchables so that they could be certain of having one-fourth of the members in parliament. Otherwise, they will never be able to be in the parliament; they will never be able to change the five-thousand-year-old, ugly laws created by Manu.
There are great criminals, but Manu seems to top them all. Adolf Hitler was very respectful of Manu; Friedrich Nietzsche was very respectful of Manu -- not of Gautam Buddha -- and Manu has been a curse to this country. He has taken all humanity from millions of people; they are living like animals.
Ambedkar was absolutely logical and right in saying that they should be given a separate vote, but Gandhi started a fast unto death for Ambedkar to take back his movement; otherwise, Gandhi will not eat until he dies. Now this is absolutely illogical. Because you convince people by fasting, it does not mean that you are right. It is blackmail, it is threatening: "I will commit suicide if you don't agree with me."
Naturally, the whole country was pressurizing Ambedkar: "Take back your movement; otherwise Gandhi's death will prove very dangerous to you and to the untouchables. They will be burned alive. Their villages will be burned; the Hindus will take revenge because the untouchables have killed Gandhi." Ambedkar tried as long as possible, and finally gave up, seeing that perhaps if Gandhi does die... Although this is no argument.
If I was in Ambedkar's place, I would have told Gandhi, "You can die because your death is not an argument. It is as stupid a story as I have heard."
A very ugly man wanted to marry a beautiful girl -- and he was the age of the girl's father.
And he tried the Gandhian methodology: he took his mattress, lay down in front of the house of the girl and declared a fast unto death unless her father agreed to give his daughter in marriage to him. Now everybody was in sympathy with the poor man: "He is dying... what a great lover! We have only heard about these lovers in stories, and he's actually a Majnu, a Farhad, a Mahival."
The father was in great distress; the girl was in great fear. The whole day, the house was crowded and they were shouting: "His death will be dangerous for you. The man is not being violent: he is being nonviolent, a religious man, fasting."
Somebody suggested to the father of the girl, "You go to some old Gandhian to find out what to do."
The Gandhian said, "There is no problem. There is one ugly prostitute, very old... You just give her a hundred rupees and she also takes her mattress and lies down by the side of the man, saying, 'I will fast unto death unless you marry me.'" In the night, the man rolled up his mattress and escaped! These are not arguments...
But Ambedkar was forced to take back his movement, and went to Gandhi with a glass of orange juice to break his fast. This is using religion in the service of politics. No religious man can do that.
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The idea of India remaining whole and one was also nothing but politics being used in the service of Hindus, so that Mohammedans or Christians or Jainas or Sikhs will never be able to be in power. Hindus will remain in power -- they are in the majority.
Jinnah, the man who created Pakistan, was not a religious man at all; but he also used religion. He created the movement for Mohammedans to have a separate country; otherwise they could not be in power, ever. Suddenly he became a great Mohammedan, a great religious man. And in the name of religion, it was all politics: neither Mahatma Gandhi was religious nor Muhammadali Jinnah was religious. But both wanted power.
Since then, forty years have passed -- what have the politicians done to this country? When it became independent, the population was only four hundred million. They have not even been able to prevent the population explosion -- which is going to kill the country without any nuclear weapons. Now the population is more than double: nine hundred million people! And by the end of this century, India will have the greatest population in the world. Up to now, it has been China, but China is behaving more scientifically and trying to reduce its population.
By the end of this century, one in every four men will be Indian.
And what are the politicians doing? They are afraid to say anything to the people in favor of birth control, in favor of abortion, because their whole interest is not whether this country survives or dies; their interest is that they don't want anybody to be hurt. People have their prejudices, the politicians don't want to touch their prejudices because they need their votes. If they hurt their prejudices, these people are not going to give them their votes.
Only a religious man with a clarity of vision, who does not need the votes of the people, can say the truth. Politicians can only say beautiful lies, consoling lies, just to get your votes.
The religious man has nothing to get from you; on the contrary, speaking the truth can be dangerous to his life -- it has always been so. Whenever truth is spoken, the man who has spoken it has been crucified. Politicians need power, not crucifixion. The world needs more religious people who are ready to say the truth even if it means crucifixion. The religious man is not afraid of being crucified, for the simple reason that he knows there is no death. At the most they can destroy his body -- but his consciousness, his soul, his god within, will go on living.
Religion should have a higher status, and religious people should be listened to.
Parliament should continually invite religious people to give them some ideas on how to solve the problems of the country, because they themselves seem to be absolutely impotent in solving anything. Problems go on growing. But the ego of the politician wants nobody to be higher than him. But whether you want it or not, the religious person is higher than you. You cannot bring transformation into people's consciousness -- he can.
Certainly, religion should not step down from its sacredness into the trivial matters of politics. So I agree with this point: religion and politics should remain separate. The distance is big. Religion is a star in the sky and the politicians are creatures crawling on the earth. They are separate; there is no question but that they should be separate. But politicians should remember that they are functioning in mundane matters. And that is not the true goal of humanity.
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-- this is simply protecting the people from the exploitation of politicians. The separation is already there. Who has given Rajiv Gandhi the idea that religion
and politics are not separate?
Politics is something that belongs to the gutters. Religion belongs to the open, clean sky --
just like a bird on the wing, flying across the sun to reach to the very center of existence.
Certainly religious people cannot be participants in politics; but politicians should learn to be humble -- their power should not make them blind. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; and all politicians are corrupted by their power. And what power do they have? They can kill you -- their power is the power of a butcher; nothing glorious, respectable.
The religious man has a totally different quality of power. It is in his presence; it is in his great love and reverence for life; it is in his gratitude to existence.
We should not forget that the lower should remain within its own limits. And the wise people of the country should be asked to address the parliament as often as possible on problems which politicians cannot solve -- don't have even the brains to solve.
But Rajiv Gandhi's intentions are totally different. He wants politics to be the only power dominating everybody, religion included, and that religion follow the dictates of the politicians.
I absolutely condemn the idea. Religion cannot follow the dictates of the politicians.
Politicians should learn, should listen to the advice of the religious people. The problems are so small that any man of intelligence and good will can easily solve them. But the politician does not want to solve them; he only talks about solving them because his power is dependent on how many problems you have. The more problems you have, the more miserable you are, the more powerful he is.
To the religious consciousness, the more joyful you are, the more loving, the more rejoicing... He wants your life to be songs and to be a dance. Because that is the only way we should worship the source of life -- with our joy, with our songs and with our dances.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
BEFORE I CAME TO POONA THIS TIME, I WAS JUST A NOBODY. BUT SITTING
IN FRONT OF YOU EVERY DAY, READING PEOPLE'S QUESTIONS, A FEELING
AROSE OF BEING SOMEBODY, AND THAT THERE WAS NO NEED FOR ME TO
ASK ANY QUESTIONS. BUT THE OTHER NIGHT IN DARSHAN, WHEN YOU
RAISED YOUR ARMS AND STOPPED THE MUSIC IN FRONT OF ME, YOU CAUGHT
THIS SOMEBODY IN HIS MIND. NOW, INSTEAD OF FEELING FINE ABOUT BEING
A NOBODY, I FEEL LIKE A VERY STUPID SOMEBODY. PLEASE WILL YOU
EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?
Vimal, that is the difference between the politician and the religious man. The politician feels he is somebody, and the religious man feels that he is nobody.
But to be a nobody is to be divine, because you have dropped your ego and you have allowed God to enter in you. When you are somebody, you are just an ugly ego, and you have Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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closed the doors for God to enter within you -- because God and your ego cannot exist together. They are just like darkness and light: you cannot have them both.
Either you have light... then there is no darkness, and that is the state of a nobody. He is spacious, without any tensions, without any anxiety, without any anguish; just a tremendous silence prevails over his heart. There is a song without sounds in his being; there is a poetry without any words. Nothing moves, and still everything is dancing.
It is good that you have experienced both: now it is up to you to choose. Only fools choose to be somebody -- that means you are limiting yourself, encased, imprisoned. Being a nobody means you are as vast as the sky; perhaps even the sky is not the limit.
So it has been a good experience for you, and I will keep an eye on you so that you don't become somebody. I am not very reliable -- I can even hit you on your head. Just as I stop the music, if I see somebody is arising in you, I will stop it too. Just a good hit on your head...
So be careful: remain a nobody. It is so beautiful to be nobody, anonymous, just like a newborn child with no name, no fame, but tremendous innocence, great joy, eyes full of wonder and freshness. To be nobody is an absolute necessity on the path. The moment you become somebody, you become frozen. As you allow yourself to be nobody, the ice starts melting and the river starts flowing -- flowing towards the ocean. That is the goal of us all.
Just a joke for you, Vimal, because when you laugh totally -- in those moments you cannot be somebody. The people who are somebody are very serious; they never laugh, they don't even smile. Only people who are nobody can enjoy the great blessing of laughter. And I have been watching: when you laugh totally, you are no longer there -- only laughter. Every cell of your body has become just a dance.
So don't hold yourself back, because this is not a serious place. It is for the gamblers, for the drunkards, for all kinds of good people who can relax and who can laugh and who can dance, and who don't care what the world thinks about them. At the most they will think you are mad -- so what? Madness is better than politics. You are not going to harm anybody. And mad people are always joyous, not worrying about anything in the world.
A man with a poodle goes into a bar. After ordering a drink, he tells the bartender that he would like to buy some cigarettes. But the bartender replies
that they have run out.
So the man says, "That's alright, I will just send my dog across the street to get some." He reaches into his pockets for the money, and discovers that the smallest bill he has is a twenty.
He puts it in the dog's mouth and tells the dog, "Boy, run across the street and get me some cigarettes. And don't forget to bring the change." Immediately the poodle runs out the front door.
A man sitting at the bar says to the dog's owner, "Say, that dog is really something!"
"Sure," says the man, "he can do all sorts of stuff. He is an amazing dog."
Just then they hear the loud sound of tires screeching. The man runs out into the street, and sees a car stopped right in front of his dog, who is making love to another poodle, right in the middle of the road.
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"Hey," says the man to his dog, "what is going on? You never did anything like this before."
The dog looks up at him and says, "I never had twenty dollars before." Okay, Vimal?
Yes, Osho.
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Chapter 7 - Preparing for the last world war 7
Preparing for the last world war
15 March 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
SINCE PEACE WAS OFFICIALLY RESTORED TO THE WORLD AT THE END OF
WORLD WAR TWO, WHAT HAVE THE POLITICIANS BEEN DOING?
Anand Maitreya, there has never been any peace. There have been only two periods in history: the period we know as war, and the period we call peace, which is a cover up -- in reality it should be called preparation for another war. The whole history consists only of two things: war and preparation for war. And you are asking me, "Since peace was officially restored to the world at the end of World War Two, what have the politicians been doing?"
The politicians have been doing exactly what they have always been doing: creating more conflict, more unrest, more discrimination, more destructive weapons -- and preparing for the third world war.
Once, Albert Einstein was asked: "You, being the scientist who discovered atomic energy, must be able to inform us what is going to happen in the third world war."
Einstein had tears in his eyes and he said, "Don't ask me about the third world war -- I do not know anything about it. But if you want to know about the fourth world war, I can say something."
The journalist who was asking the question was immensely surprised and amazed: The man is not saying anything about the third world war, says he knows nothing about it, but he is ready to say something about the fourth world war? He asked excitedly, "Then please tell me about the fourth world war."
Einstein said, "Only one thing can be said about it -- that it is never going to happen."
The third world war will be the last world war. For this last world war, politicians have been preparing since peace was officially restored after the second world war.
The politician and his game are the ugliest things you can conceive of. We are facing a dark night, and I am reminded of the old saying that "When the night is darkest, the dawn is very close by." But I hesitate to say that this dark night that is surrounding us will have any dawn to it.
I will just tell you exactly what has been happening since 1945 -- and people are kept in absolute ignorance; they are not aware that they are sitting on a volcano which can erupt any moment. They are kept engaged in trivia, and the real problems are kept hidden as if they don't exist.
Since 1945 there have been one hundred and five wars fought in sixty-six countries -- all of them in the Third World. One is necessarily tempted to ask, "Why in the Third World?"
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America and the Soviet Union both have gone so far ahead in developing destructive weapons, that the weapons used in the second world war are out of date. For them, they are of no use. They have to be sold somewhere; some market is needed, and the market is possible only if there is war.
America goes on giving weapons to Pakistan. Then, naturally, India goes on taking weapons from the Soviet Union. And this has been happening in the Third World: one country purchases out-of-date material from the Soviet Union; then its enemy purchases from America. This is good business.
And they don't want these people to stop wars, because otherwise, where are they going to sell these weapons on which they have spent billions of dollars? And these poor countries and their politicians are ready to purchase them, although their people are dying of hunger --
seventy-five percent of their budget goes towards war.
On the average, each war has lasted three and a half years. So who says peace has been restored? One hundred and five wars in sixty-six countries, each war lasting at least three and a half years -- and you call it peace?
These wars caused sixteen million deaths. In the second world war, there were also millions of deaths. Since the second world war, which is the time of peace, sixteen million people have been killed in wars -- and still you go on calling it peace?
But the politicians are so cunning, and people are so blind that they will not look around at what is happening. They will go on fighting about small things: which district should remain in which state? Belgaum is a district here; should it remain in Maharashtra? -- because it is a boundary district between the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra.
There are people belonging to both languages, and they have been killing each other continually for three decades -- and just a small thing cannot be decided.
In fact, nobody wants to decide it. Otherwise, what is the problem? Just a small plebiscite, a vote under neutral observation, and people can decide where they want to be. There is no need for killing each other. But it seems politicians are deeply interested in trouble continuing somewhere or other, so that they are needed.
Sixteen million people have been killed, and yet in every school and every college and in every university, they go on repeating, "We are living in a period of peace." In fact, the world war was almost more peaceful!
The majority of the wars have been in Asia. It is one of the strategies of the powerful nations and their politicians that they should fight always in some other country; the Soviet Union and America should fight in Afghanistan. So the people of Afghanistan are killed; Afghanistan becomes a graveyard, and America and the Soviet Union are both profited by selling weapons. They are sending their experts, their weapons; they are training the Afghanis, and Afghanis are killing other Afghanis. One side has weapons from America, the other side has weapons from the Soviet Union.
Nine million civilians have been killed in conventional wars since Hiroshima. In ancient times, civilians were never killed. It is absolutely absurd: if your armies are fighting, the people who are fighting in armies may be killed, but now there
seems to be no sensibility, no reasonability -- nine million people who are civilians are killed. There may be small children, women, old people -- who have nothing to do with the war, who may be reading in their schools, who may be working in their factories, or who may be cooking in their kitchens.
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Just a few days ago Ronald Reagan, for no reason at all, attacked Libya -- he bombed the civilian parts of Libya. His target was Kaddafi, and because Kaddafi has three houses inside the city, all his three houses had to be bombed. And in bombing his houses, other houses were burned and bombed. And just now, investigators have come to know that while the bombing was going on, professional killers were searching inside Libya for Kaddafi because it was possible he might not be killed by the bombs, he might not be in his own house.
So they were bombing the civilians, and professional killers were searching inside Libya to find Kaddafi. They could only kill Kaddafi's daughter. And neither Kaddafi nor the Libyans have done anything wrong against them.
And it is a coincidence that the day England allowed Ronald Reagan to use England as a base for bombing Libya, the parliament of England did not allow me to stay at the airport, in the lounge, for six hours -- because I am a dangerous man! And Ronald Reagan is allowed to use England to bomb an innocent country which has done no harm to him.
This is as dark a night as humanity has ever faced.
The current war budget is around seven hundred billion dollars per year. Every year, fifteen million people die from malnutrition and disease, and every year seven hundred billion dollars are spent on warfare.
Every minute, thirty children die for want of food and inexpensive vaccines and every minute one point three million dollars of public funds are spent on the world's military budget.
It seems we are not interested in life anymore; we have decided to commit
suicide. Man has never been in such a suicidal mood -- ever, in the whole of history.
Two hundred and fifty million children have not received even a basic education. A single nuclear submarine equals the annual education budget for one hundred and sixty million school-age children in twenty-three developing countries. Just one submarine! And there are thousands of submarines moving around the ocean all over the world -- American and Russian both -- and each submarine has nuclear weapons six times more powerful than all the weapons that were used in the second world war. And they are so costly that we could have provided our children with education and food, nutrition. But our interests are not there.
These are the politicians who don't want to be interfered with, who want absolute control of humanity -- nobody above them.
The world's forests are disappearing at the rate of eighteen to twenty million hectares a year -- an area half the size of California, and California is one of the biggest states in America. Within the next twenty to thirty years, all the tropical forests will be gone; and the implications are tremendous because these forests are supplying you with oxygen and life. If these forests disappear at the rate they are disappearing, mankind will be at a loss to find enough oxygen -- from where?
And on the other hand, whatever carbon dioxide you exhale, these forests inhale. If these forests were not there... already there is a very thick layer of carbon dioxide continuously accumulating in the sky, just on the twenty-mile boundary where the atmosphere ends. And because of that carbon dioxide, the temperature of the atmosphere is rising. It is already four degrees higher than it has ever been.
If all the forests disappear, the temperature will become so high that it will do two things: firstly, it will become impossible for life to survive; secondly, all the ice at the north and the Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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south poles, on the Himalayas and the Alps and other mountains, will start melting because of the heat. And this will raise all the oceans by forty feet. It
will flood all our cities, all our countries; it will drown almost the whole earth -- and this is not a flood that is going to recede.
But these politicians go on doing it. Just a few months ago I was in Nepal. Nepal is the poorest country in the world, but rather than dropping its arrangements for war, it has sold its forests -- eternal forests of the Himalayas -- to the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union has cut whole mountainsides and left them dry. And for what? To create more newspapers.
What is the need of so many newspapers? It is almost the same news every day, and now that we have got far better media systems, the newspaper is out of date
-- there is radio, there is television. Why do you go on clinging to newspapers and destroying all the forests? Just because all the politicians, presidents and prime ministers need their pictures on the front page; their speeches, which are simply bullshit, to be published -- without any consideration of what harm they are doing.
During the same period, the world population is expected to increase thirty to forty percent, from five billion to seven billion. This population growth alone will cause requirements for water to double in nearly half the world. Food is another thing... even water will become difficult, because the requirement will be double and we don't have that much water for drinking.
In addition, the United Nations reports say that globally, twenty million hectares a year of farm and grazing land are being reduced to zero productivity. More than one thousand plant and animal species become extinct each year -- a rate that is expected to increase. One and a half to two million people in developing countries suffer acute pesticide poisoning annually, and pesticide-related deaths are estimated at ten thousand per year.
Officers of India's planning commission reported recently: "We in India are on the verge of an enormous ecological disaster, with our water reserves drying up. What is happening in Africa is going to happen in India within a few decades."
Your population goes on growing, your land goes on becoming more barren, your water supply is becoming less and less, and because forests have been cut, the rivers that go through Nepal to Bangladesh are creating, every year, such floods as have never been seen before.
Thousands of people are dying, thousands of villages simply disappear --
because those thick trees were making the rivers flow slowly. Now that there are no trees, the rivers come with such force that the ocean is not ready to absorb that much water so quickly. The water starts returning and that returning water creates the floods that happen in Bangladesh.
Neither Indian politicians nor Nepalese politicians are ready to stop cutting the trees.
Nobody is interested in human life. Nobody is interested in finding out what our priority should be.
A poor country like India has so many newspapers, so many magazines, which are absolutely unnecessary. And that newsprint paper does not grow in the fields, does not fall from the sky; you have to cut trees. Trees that have taken one hundred fifty years, two hundred years to grow, disappear. And what do you gain from your newspapers?
Politicians are the real criminals -- not the criminals who are in your jails. It would be a far better world if there was an exchange: all the politicians in the jails, and all the criminals in the politician's positions -- they would prove more human.
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The politicians go on hiding facts as long as possible, as if by hiding facts you can change anything.
Now many countries are not declaring how many homosexuals they have. Families are not declaring that the person who has died, has died from AIDS. They are bribing doctors to get certificates that he has died of a heart attack, or of cancer -- because the family is more worried about its respectability, about what people will think: "Somebody has died of AIDS in your family?"
But hiding the fact means... that man had a wife; he may have transferred the disease to the wife and if there are children, they may be born with the disease -- and nobody will know it and they will go on spreading it all around.
The disease is not an ordinary sexual disease -- anything that comes out of your body, even your tears, carries the virus. If a child is crying, and just out of kindness and compassion you wipe the tears of the child, there is a danger you may be getting AIDS. Saliva carries the virus, and the whole of humanity is being kept in darkness: kissing should be stopped now --
completely!
There is only one small part of humanity -- the people who live in Siberia, the Eskimos --
they are the only people in the whole of history who have never kissed. And when for the first time they saw Christian missionaries kissing, they could not believe it: "How dirty these people are, mixing saliva with each other! Are they human beings or some kind of monsters?"
Their way is far more scientific and far more hygienic. They don't kiss just to show love --
because it can be not love, but death -- they rub noses with each other; that looks very clean, unless you have a cold.
The other day it was accepted that ten million people are suffering from AIDS right now; and this is not a definitive report because countries like India have no way of knowing -- nor the means to know. Only very developed countries have come to know that ten million people are suffering... Perhaps at least one hundred million people are suffering in all these backward countries.
For example, in Africa, AIDS is more prevalent than anywhere else. And it was never made known that Africans are not homosexuals, but they have a strange perversion: they make love to women, but not from the front.
There are people around the world, in small villages, who even make love to animals --
and they have given AIDS to animals! And now animals are spreading that AIDS through their milk, through their meat. Things have gone beyond human control.
No doctor wants... even if he comes to know that his patient has AIDS, he does
not want to tell the patient because then the patient will insist, "Treat me!" There is no treatment. So the doctor tries, "You have some other disease," and sends him to some other expert because being in contact with the AIDS patient the doctor is in danger, the nurses are in danger. The whole staff is in danger.
In one of the reports I saw about jails... thirty percent of the people in jails are homosexuals. And that does not seem to be an accurate report. It must be the minimum that jail authorities have accepted -- because people who are living in jails for twenty years, thirty years, and cannot come in contact with women, are bound to force homosexuality on each other.
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The simplest thing would be... There are separate jails for women -- why should they be separate? The prisoners should live in a mixed way, with women and men together, and then AIDS and homosexuality can be avoided. But politicians will not say anything about it, simply because of fear. Their whole object is to say only things which people like, only things which don't go against people's prejudices, their traditional mind -- because they depend on people's votes.
That's why I said that religious people should always be consulted by the politicians; their advice should be given every possible attention. But Rajiv Gandhi says that politicians should not be interfered with by religious people. Religious people can be interfered with by politicians -- about that, there is no question. This is an unfortunate thing, but it goes on and on, and time is very short.
I used to be very hopeful. Still, I go on hoping against hope that perhaps, in a very dangerous situation, man may awaken. But there seems to be a sadness in my heart because I can see that if nothing is done, then this century is going to be our end.
And not only our end, but the end of the whole of existence's dream of creating consciousness. It has been successful only on this planet. There are millions of stars and each star has dozens of planets; only on this small planet has the miracle happened that not only life exists -- consciousness exists; not only
consciousness exists, but there are people who have reached to the ultimate peak of consciousness: a Gautam Buddha, a Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Chuang Tzu.
Life disappearing from this small planet will make the whole universe so poor that it will take millions of years to come again to this state where consciousness can become enlightened.
My sadness is not about myself. I am absolutely contented. Death cannot take anything from me. My sadness is concerned with the whole of humanity, because their death will take away any opportunity of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming blissful, of their knowing meaning and significance. They have lived in darkness. Are they going to die in darkness too?
I would like my people, at least, not to waste time in postponing their own growth, because politicians are absolutely prepared to destroy each other -- to destroy all and everything. Their lust for power has come to the climax. Before they succeed in committing a global suicide, at least you should have known the god that exists within you.
You should spread your joy and your silence and your laughter to anybody you come in contact with. You cannot give a better gift to your friends, to your acquaintances, to your lovers, to your children.
The time is very short and the work is tremendous, but if you have courage, the challenge can be accepted. Don't depend on politicians; they cannot do anything; they are not even aware of where they have been leading humanity -- into what darkness.
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Chapter 7 - Preparing for the last world war Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
I AM NOW GONE -- GOOD FOR NOTHING; SORRY TO SAY, DON'T EXPECT
ANYTHING FROM ME. KOTI KOTI PRANAM.
Gyan Asanga, I will tell you a small, beautiful story. Just before Ninakawa passed away --
he was a great master -- the Zen master Ikkyu visited him. "Shall I lead you on?" Ikkyu asked.
Ninakawa was dying and Ikkyu said, "Shall I lead you on?"
Ninakawa replied, "I came here alone and I go alone. What help could you be to me?"
Ikkyu answered, "If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and going."
With his words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.
Gyan Asanga, where are you going? You say, "I am gone -- good for nothing." That is true.
You have proved definitively that you are good for nothing. Nothing is wrong in it... but where are you going? because there is nowhere to go!
We are always here and always now. Neither we go nor we come. All going and all coming is only dreaming, so just wash your face with cold water and wake up! You have not gone anywhere, you are just sleeping in your bed.
And you are saying, "Sorry to say, don't expect anything from me."
You amaze me! Who has ever expected anything from you, good for nothing? So don't be worried about it. Just remember one thing that Ikkyu said to Ninakawa: "If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going" -- just awakening.
A young nun said to her mother superior, "I was out walking in the garden last night and the gardener took me, threw me to the ground, and well, you know... Can you give me penance?"
"Go and eat ten lemons," said the mother superior. "But that won't cleanse my sins away."
"I know, but it will wipe that contented grin off your face!"
So Gyan Asanga, first get up, wash your face and eat ten lemons! I think that is not too much to ask. You can do that and if you cannot, there are many people here who will force you to do it -- till your grin is gone!
And to whom are you saying this koti koti pranam? Koti koti pranam means millions and millions of goodbyes. You are not going anywhere. I am not going anywhere. Stop talking in your dream! Koti koti pranam!
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Chapter 7 - Preparing for the last world war Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
CAN YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS BEAUTIFUL POEM BY RUMI WHICH I LOVE SO MUCH: "OUTSIDE, THE FREEZING DESERT NIGHT. THIS OTHER NIGHT
INSIDE GROWS WARM, KINDLING. LET THE LANDSCAPE BE COVERED WITH
THORNY CRUST. WE HAVE A SOFT GARDEN IN HERE. THE CONTINENTS
BLASTED, CITIES AND LITTLE TOWNS, EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCORCHED
BLACKENED BALL. THE NEWS WE HEAR IS FULL OF GRIEF FOR THAT FUTURE.
BUT THE REAL NEWS INSIDE HERE IS THERE'S NO NEWS AT ALL."
Devaprem, the poem by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi is beautiful, as always. He has spoken only beautiful words.
He is one of the most significant poets who are also mystics. That is a rare combination; there are millions of poets in the world and there are a few mystics in the world, but a man who is both is very rare to find.
Rumi is a very rare flower. He is as great a poet as he is a mystic. Hence, his poetry is not just poetry, not just a beautiful arrangement of words. It contains immense meaning and points towards the ultimate truth.
It is not entertainment, it is enlightenment.
He is saying, OUTSIDE, THE FREEZING DESERT NIGHT. THIS OTHER NIGHT
INSIDE GROWS WARM, KINDLING. The outside is not the real space for you to be.
Outside, you are a foreigner: inside, you are at home. Outside, it is a freezing desert night.
Inside, it is warm, kindling, cozy.
But very few are fortunate enough to move from the outside to the inside. They have completely forgotten that they have a home within themselves; they are searching for it but they are searching in the wrong place. They search for their whole lives but always outside; they never stop for a moment and look inwards.
LET THE LANDSCAPE BE COVERED WITH THORNY CRUST. WE HAVE A SOFT
GARDEN IN HERE. Don't be worried about what happens on the outside. Inside, there is always a garden ready to welcome you.
THE CONTINENTS BLASTED, CITIES AND LITTLE TOWNS, EVERYTHING
BECOMES A SCORCHED, BLACKENED BALL. THE NEWS WE HEAR IS FULL OF
GRIEF FOR THAT FUTURE.
These words of Rumi are more significant, meaningful, today, than they were when he wrote them. He wrote them seven hundred years ago, but today it is not only a symbolic thing, it is going to become the reality: THE CONTINENTS BLASTED, CITIES AND LITTLE
TOWNS, EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCORCHED BLACKENED BALL. THE NEWS
WE HEAR IS FULL OF GRIEF FOR THAT FUTURE. BUT THE REAL NEWS INSIDE
HERE IS THERE'S NO NEWS AT ALL.
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This last sentence depends on an ancient saying which says: No news is good news. I was born in a very small village where the postman used to come only once a week. And people were afraid that he may be bringing a letter for them; they were happy when they found that there was no letter. Once in a while, there was a telegram for someone. Just the rumor that somebody had received a telegram was such a shock in the whole village that everybody would gather there -- and only one man was educated enough to read. Everybody was afraid: A telegram? That means some bad news. Otherwise, why should you waste money on a telegram?
I learned from my very childhood that no news is good news. People were happy when they received no news from their relatives, from their friends or from anybody. That meant everything was going well.
Rumi is saying: THE NEWS WE HEAR IS FULL OF GRIEF FOR THE FUTURE. BUT
THE REAL NEWS INSIDE, IS THERE'S NO NEWS AT ALL. Everything is
silent and everything is as beautiful, peaceful, blissful as it has always been.
There is no change at all; hence, there is no news. Inside it is an eternal ecstasy, forever and forever.
I will repeat again that these lines may become true in your lifetime. Before that happens, you must reach within yourself where no news has ever happened, where everything is eternally the same, where the spring never comes and goes but always remains; where flowers have been from the very beginning -- if there was any beginning -- and are going to remain to the very end, if there is going to be any end. In fact, there is no beginning and no end, and the garden is lush, green, and full of flowers.
Before the outside world is destroyed by your politicians, enter into your inner world.
That's the only safety left, the only shelter against nuclear weapons, against global suicide, against all these idiots who have so much power to destroy.
You can at least save yourself.
I was hopeful, but as the days have passed and I have become more and more acquainted with the stupidity of man... I still hope but just out of old habit; really my heart has accepted the fact that only a few people can be saved. The whole of humanity is determined to destroy itself. And these are the people... if you tell them how they can be saved, they will crucify you.
They will stone you to death. Going around the world, I still laugh, but there is a subtle sadness in it. I still dance with you but it is no longer with the same enthusiasm as it was ten years ago.
It seems that the higher powers of consciousness are helpless against the lower and ugly powers of politicians. The higher is always fragile, like a roseflower; you can destroy it with a stone. That does not mean that the stone becomes higher than the roseflower; it simply means the stone is unconscious of what it is doing.
The crowds are unconscious of what they are doing, and the politicians belong to the crowd. They are their representatives. And when blind people are leading other blind people, it is almost impossible to wake them up; because the question is not only that they are asleep
-- they are blind too.
There is not time enough to cure their eyes. There is time enough to wake them but not enough time to cure their eyes. So now I have confined myself completely to my own people.
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That is my world, because I know those who are with me may be asleep, but they are not blind. They can be awakened.
Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 79
Chapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 8 - The taste of your beingChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 10 - Enlightenment is not an experienceChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 11 - A noah's ark of consciousnessChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 12 - Life itself is a miracleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 13 - Truth is not divisibleChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 15 - This is the last danceChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 16 - Love is always an emperorChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 18 - Inside you god is hiddenChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 19 - At the maximum you disappearChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 20 - Your longing is the seedChapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 22 - What more do you want?Chapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 24 - All our doings are disturbancesChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 26 - Life's aim is life itselfChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your realityChapter 27 - Harmony is your reality