Chapter title: None

‌Chapter title: None‌

14 June 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8006145 ShortTitle: IMPRIS14 Audio:

No Video:

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

The coward can not cross the boundaries of misery, it is impossible. Although he wants to, he has no courage to drop the known. Misery is all that he knows. He clings to it, he clings to his wounds, to his hurts.

He lives in a contradiction. The contradiction is that he does not want to be miserable... But it is not only a question of not wanting, it is a question of taking the courageous step of going beyond the boundaries of the known. That courage is missing; hence he goes on hoping that something, some miracle will happen. But no miracle ever happens in the life of a coward. It cannot happen, he prevents its happening.

Miracles abound when you have courage. They happen each moment, because each moment the courageous man goes on dropping the known. That's what real courage is. Whatsoever is known has to be dropped. You have lived it, you have experienced it; there is no need to cling to it. Clinging to it will prevent the new from happening. The new needs space; if the old is occupying the space, then where can it happen? The courageous man goes on dropping the past, the old, the known, and is always ready to go into the unknown. It needs guts, because one never knows what is going to happen in the next moment. It is unpredictable. The familiar is predictable. Even if it is miserable you are familiar

with it and you have become accustomed to it.

Bliss is only for the courageous. Bliss is really the constant dropping of the past. Bliss is dying to the past, being born anew each moment. That's what bliss is.

Except for meditation there is no deliverance. Nobody else can deliver you from your misery, from your 1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

ignorance, from your bondage, it is only you who can save yourself. But people always want somebody else to do the work for them, hence they go on waiting for the messiah to come. That is impossible.

Christians think that Jesus delivered them, Jesus only delivers himself and he helped those who were ready to go into deep meditation with him. He has not delivered humanity from its pain, limitations, misery.

And those fools are again waiting for another coming of Christ, Jews have been waiting for three thousand years. And the same is the case with the Hindus: they are waiting for god's incarnation again. They can't learn a simple lesson, that the past incarnations have been of no use.

Buddha is the only person in the whole history of humanity who told the truth exactly as it is, He said, Be a light unto yourself; nobody else can do it for you.

Of course, Buddhas can point the way, but everything else you have to do. It is totally up to you to be miserable or to be blissful, to live in ignorance or to be full of light. And there is no other way to become full of light than meditation.

Pour your whole energy into meditation.

Bliss is the ultimate truth, hence only those who know how to be blissful can know the truth. The miserable and the sad and the serious cannot find it. The first step towards truth is cheerfulness, a deep inner dance.

One has to drop all that prevents that dance, one has to drop all that prevents one's life becoming a celebration. And we are all carrying many conditionings which are against blissfulness. In fact, religion has become almost synonymous with seriousness. Religious people look so dad, as if it is a sin to laugh. They cannot sing, they cannot dance, they cannot enjoy anything. They are against life. That is not the way to find the truth.

Love life, love the small things of life, the very small things. Eating, walking, sleeping -- just the ordinary activities of life have to be transformed into delight. They have to be done with such joy that they all become a dance. Then truth is not far away, then each moment it becomes closer and closer. In the very moment your bliss is total, truth descends in you -- and truth liberates.

Meditation has to be a joyous activity, it has to be a song. One has not to do it as a duty, one has to enjoy it as fun, as play. If you do meditation as a duty you will miss the whole point. Then it cannot happen to you. It can happen only in a very light mood, in a very non-serious mood. Seriousness is heavy, and anything heavy drags you downwards. You have to be as light as a small child playing on the beach, collecting seashells, colored stones, running here and there, almost part of the wind and the sea and the sand and the sun. When that lightness is there you have wings, you can fly upwards. And meditation means an upward movement of your energies.

Science has discovered gravitation - that is the downwards movement of things. Long before the discovery of gravitation religion discovered a totally different law; I call it the law of grace. To make it appear more scientific you can call it the law of levitation. It uplifts you, it takes you upwards. But for that you have to lose weight, and the serious mind cannot lose weight. That's why I don't think your so-called saints have ever tasted what meditation is; they are only pretending. Out of a hundred so-called saints, ninety-nine are pretenders.

And remember the exception only proves the rule. That one may be pretending seriousness, that's all; deep down he must be laughing and enjoying. He may be just pretending seriousness - sometimes that has to be done.

The great German mystic, Meister Eckhart, had to do it because of the stupid Christian priesthood and the pope and the church. They were so foolish a people... in fact only foolish people become priests and popes. Now they cannot find anybody else - they have found a Polack to become a pope. This is a great

discovery!

Meister Eckhart was a man of great joy, but he pretended on the outside that he was just an ordinary conventional saint. Only when he died were his writings discovered. His writings are tremendously beautiful. If they had been known before he died he would have been killed like Jesus, crucified by the Christians. The same is true about Saint Francis: he was a very light-hearted man. Just think, he used to talk to the trees and to the fish and even to his donkey; he would say to him "Brother Donkey, how are you?"

When he died he thanked his disciples; he also thanked his donkey, and he said to him, "You have served me with such love that I am immensely thankful to you." Now, such a man cannot be serious, but he had to pretend seriousness, otherwise those fools would simply kill him - and that would not help anybody.

1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Real saints have always been men of love and laughter. Jesus says again and again to his disciples,

"Rejoice, rejoice. I say again and again, rejoice!" That's my whole message. And it is only in rejoicing that you will come to know what meditation is, because when you are really rejoicing, mind disappears, and the disappearance of mind is meditation. You suddenly fall into a state of no-mind.

There is nothing more meditative than celebration. And the whole art of religion is how to transform your life into a constant celebration, into an unending celebration. Celebrate everything, then meditation comes of its own accord, it follows you like a shadow.

Love is a purifying process; it purifies you so totally that after the purification you are no more the same person. But because of that many people avoid love. They don't want to change so radically, they want to remain as they are. They want love also but they want love as they are; they don't want to go through a

radical change. But that is impossible.

Love is an alchemical revolution; hence very few people gather courage to go into love. The first problem arises with the ego because that is the most ugly thing. Love demands that you surrender it. That is the beginning of the purification, that is entering into fire. And if you can drop the ego then naturally you will be able to drop many more things. That becomes a test. Then you will be able to drop possessiveness, you will be able to drop jealousies, you will be able to drop all efforts, gross and subtle, of dominating. You will be able to drop all politics... because people go on playing all kinds of politics in their relationships.

What they call love is only one per cent love and ninety-nine per cent politics. Unless one is ready to drop all that politics, love cannot happen. To allow love one has to be able to pass through the fire of love.

But it is not harmful, Yes, in the beginning it is painful, because many things that we have lived with for so long start being burned by the fire. But finally it is realised that those were the things which were the cause of all our misery -- now there is no more misery.

Once ego, possessiveness, jealousies, dominating games are gone, nobody can make you miserable.

Even ii the whole world wants you to become miserable it is impossible, you cannot be made miserable: bliss is yours. It is indestructable.

Love brings you to something eternal. Call it god, call it truth, call it freedom, call it your real self --

whatsoever name one chooses, one can choose -- but one has to be ready to pass through the fire.

That's why I have chosen the colour of fire for my sannyasins. It is symbolic that you are entering into fire, which in the beginning will be painful but in the end is going to give you the greatest ecstasy possible.

It will give you the greatest dance. It will explode into thousands of songs in your heart. It will open up something in you which Buddha calls the inner lotus. It will release your fragrance, and that very release fulfils, one feels one has

come home.

Meditation is a very strange phenomenons on the one hand it makes you more and more aware; on the other hand, simultaneously, it makes you more and more drunk. Hence it is incomprehensible to the mind, because mind can think only in logical ways, and meditation is a paradox, it is a mystery. Not only is it a mystery, it is the door to all other mysteries too. It is the very key that opens the doors of a thousand and one mysteries in your life.

The paradoxical thing is that you are aware, more aware than ever, and yet more drunk than ever too --

drunk in the sense that your life becomes ecstatic, aware in the sense that you are not unconscious, you are fully aware of your ecstasy. You are witnessing it, you know it is there. You have not fallen asleep.

It is because of this phenomenon that many people, even very intelligent people like Aldous Huxley, became deceived by drugs, because drugs can give half of it. They can give you the ecstatic feeling, the euphoria, but they don't make you aware. They make you very joyous, but there is no witness to the joy.

And when the witness does come, the joy is only a memory. You can only remember how joyous it was later on, but not at the moment when it was happening.

Huxley thought that LSD does the same as meditation. He was a sincere man, but because of his sincerity, authenticity, he created a misguidance for thousands of young people. The whole drug scene was created because of his impact. When such a prominent intellectual of the age is supporting drugs, then there must be something in it, then others followed. And of course, it gives you half of it, and the half can create the deception. And it is not new: the East has known it for centuries.

In the East the pseudo mystics have always taken drugs, it is a five-thousand- year-old story at least.

They were all deceived by the fact that they went into the same ecstasy as the meditator. From the outside they look almost the same, they both look stoned, they both look somewhere far away, into the beyond, they 1/08/07

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

both look as if they have entered into some other space, into some other dimension. Their joy seems to be unbounded. There is a difference, but that difference is inner. That can be known only from the insides nobody can observe it from the outside.

The real meditator is ecstatic, but deep down there is a flame of awareness, and the person who is under the impact of drugs has no awareness at all. Because of this similarity all great religions have been against using drugs: it can create a deception in peoples' mind; it can give them a cheap kind of mysticism.

Remember that the first thing is meditation, dhyan; and the second thing is drunkenness. It should come out of meditation, not out of any chemical, It should come out of watching, witnessing your own mind processes. Then it becomes something which is not a momentary phenomenon because it is not dependent on anything outside. You can carry it with you everywhere, in every situation; even in death you can carry it. Even dying the mystic remains alert, aware, totally aware. He can see death happening. And because he can see death happening he knows 'I am not dying, because I am the seer, I am the witness, I am the knower.

Death is happening in the body -- I am totally aloof, untouched.'

To know this is to know the most fundamental truth of life -- that we are not the body nor the mind but pure awareness.

The real virtue arises out of meditation, the pseudo virtue is cultivated. The pseudo virtue is part of character, the real virtue is part of consciousness. All societies live on pseudo virtue because it is easier to impose on children; it is difficult to make them meditators. That's what people have thought up to now. It is not true: children can be taught to be meditative, and more easily than older people.

But for centuries the idea has persisted that they are children -- how can they meditate? Of course they cannot sit still like an old man, but there is no need to

sit like an old man. Meditations can be devised especially for them: they can dance and jump and jog and run, and yet meditation can happen. Their meditation has to be very active, it cannot be inactive.

If children are introduced to meditation from the very beginning they will have a totally different kind of virtue. Then you need not tell them what is right and what is wrong; they will know it on their own.

And that's my effort here: to help you to know on your own what is right and what is wrong, I never say what is right and what is wrong, I have no commandments, no shoulds, no should-nots. I simply want you to be able to see, to be clear like a mirror so that you can reflect reality.

Any action out of that clarity is virtuous.

The Imprisoned Splendor

Chapter #15

< Previous | Contents | Next >