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‌CHAPTER 14

14 June 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin says: I haven’t really got any problems or anything but I feel that I’d like some advice.]

There is no need. It is good to be without any problem. And if one can live without any problem, one knows how to live. All problems are unnecessary. We create them because we cannot live without problems, because we cannot allow ourselves to be without problems – we cannot allow that much freedom and that much joy. It is not that problems are there and that’s why we have to solve them. No. If there are no problems we will create them, because it is very very difficult to live without problems. Our whole way of life is neurotic. And this is my definition of a neurotic person: the person who cannot live without problems is neurotic. The healthy person is one who can live without problems.

Once you understand it – that it is up to you to create or not create – the gestalt changes. Then life has such a new flavour to it, and it is so beautiful that even to live for a single moment is enough to be grateful for the whole eternity.

Keep this state of no problems. Not that problems don’t arise in life – they do, but we need not cling to them, we need not give them too much importance. One has to continuously surpass them, transcend them. And the way to transcend them is to remain unaffected by them. One takes them for granted. One is not in any way disturbed or distracted by them; one keeps one’s cool. Problems come and go and slowly slowly one understands that whether there are problems or there are no problems, one is separate from them... and that’s a great realisation.

So if you want any advice, this is my advice: remember that the innermost core is always beyond all problems, all anxieties. Just that remembrance – that one is above, beyond, transcendental – is enough.

Prem means love, vibhuti means power... but a special kind of power – pure power, not power over others, but inner power. The political power is power over others. It is dependent on them; they can take it away. Howsoever powerful a politician is, he is dependent, he is a slave. In all his glory he is impotent deep down. He is afraid – it can be taken away. It has been given by the public, by the people – it can be snatched away any moment. So he constantly clings to it.

Real power is intrinsic power. It doesn’t come from the outside: it wells up within. It is just your spring, your source. Nobody can take it away; there is no way to destroy it.

Pontius Pilate has one kind of power; Jesus has another kind of power. Jesus can be killed, murdered, butchered, but his power cannot be taken away from him. And Pontius has power, but his power is just from the outside; it is not his own. In fact, he didn’t want to crucify Jesus but he was afraid: he might lose his post. The Jews were angry; they were against Jesus. They wanted him to be crucified, and Pontius Pilate was not ready in any way to offend them. He never wanted to crucify Jesus. He had seen the beauty of the man. He had talked to the man, he had looked into his eyes, he had felt his grace and silence. And he was continuously wondering ‘Why should he be crucified? He has not committed any offence, he has not done any wrong to anybody. And whatsoever he has been doing is beneficial.’ He was not a Jew, so he was not offended by the assertions of Jesus; he was an outsider. He was powerful, he was governor-general. All power was his but it was impotent: he could not save this man.

And Jesus is absolutely powerless from the outside. Never was there such a powerless man from the outside. He had to carry his own cross, humiliated, insulted, crucified... but a great power was there. He could say to god ‘Forgive these people because they do not know what they are doing.’ This is power, this is called ‘vibhuti’.

So it is a special kind of power – nothing to do with the ordinary power. It has nothing to do with the power to kill, the power to dominate. It is power to resurrect, power to create, power to love.

Prem means love, darsho means vision – love’s vision. There are a few things which only love can see, and only love. They are not available to any other kind of vision. God is not available to the intellect, to logic. Hence people who think about him are bound to decide that he doesn’t exist – that is an inner necessity of their logic. They have chosen logic and logic has no approach, no way towards god.

It is as if somebody is trying to see through the ears. He cannot see, so he says that there is no colour, there is no light – because he is making all the efforts he can and still he cannot see. But he is trying to see through the ears. Ears have a specific vision: they cannot see, they can hear. The eyes can see but the eyes cannot hear. You may have the most capable eyes, the most perfect eyes, but still you cannot hear music from them. Each faculty has its own limitation. There are things which are available to logic; there are things which are only available to love... and vice versa.

You cannot create a science out of the vision of love – that is not possible, that is not love’s work. That’s why in the East science could not develop. It developed in the West out of the logical choice. The East has chosen love through which to see reality. It sees many things – it sees god – but it cannot find atomic energy; they are different visions.

Science is utilitarian – good as far as it goes but not far enough. A man’s heart remains empty with it. Even the greatest scientist remains utterly empty and feels meaningless. Only love brings meaning.

[Prem Champak – a flower of love.]

There are methods in which love is not implied at all – they won’t work for you; you will become more and more dry and desertlike. They work for a few people. No method is for all. You will need some methods in which love is a necessary ingredient; only then can you bloom and become more green, more alive.

Life in itself is worship if one knows how to love. Life without love is only another name for death. Avoid all the methods in which love is not asked for. They can create great will in you but that will be nothing but an extension of the ego. They will lead you to friction, fight, conflict – a kind of civil war – and that will be destructive.

Love is a flow, not a fight. And when god is available through love it is just absurd to try something else. If love is impossible in a heart, then only should other methods be given or should be chosen.

My feeling about you is that you have lived a very very proselike life without any poetry in it. The poetry has to be introduced. You have lived life very logically, rationally, but to live life rationally is not a real way of living life. Logic is destructive to all living things. Reason kills, reason understands only by killing. It dissects, it analyses. So only death comes in the end – life disappears. Delicate, tender love is needed, caring is needed, to feel the phenomenon of life. And life is an active verb – it is not a thing, it is a process, a living verb. If you also become flowing, then only can you feel the flow of the universe, the flow of the cosmos. And god is not somewhere there, static; he is in the very flow. He is the flow.

So my message is: bloom more and more in love. Allow a little more poetry in life. Allow a little more madness. Become a drunkard – drunk with the juices of existence. And there is so much to be drunk with – one just has to look around! Just looking at a tree one can be drunk. Just seeing the stars one can be drunk. Just Lying down on the earth as if you are on your mother’s breast, you can be drunk. Be drunk with existence and you will flower into one of the most fragrant flowers possible.

And if you can find a champak somewhere, meditate over it. Its perfume is such that a single flower is enough to fill the whole home.

Ananda means bliss, varda means blessing – blessed by bliss; that will be the full meaning. And it is very close – just a little groping on your part and you will be fulfilled. It has always been close, and you have felt it also, that it is very close. But now the moment has come. Each experience waits for its right moment. When the moment is not ripe, one can go on trying and one will not succeed. When the moment is ripe, just a little effort or even sometimes no effort and it happens.

My feeling about you is that it is very close by; just a little stretch of the hand, a very little effort on your part, and all will become possible. So don’t be frightened, because when one opens to the all it is very frightening. One commits suicide, one disappears forever, never to come back. It is a point of no return, so naturally the mind hesitates; it thinks a thousand and one thoughts. It tries to postpone it. It says ’Tomorrow. What is the hurry? Let us enjoy this life, this way, this pattern a little

more.’ One can go on postponing indefinitely; that’s how we have lived for so many many lives. Our whole past is nothing but a history of postponement. Now, don’t postpone it.

Let your sannyas be the jump into the unknown. Risk all. In fact, there is nothing that we are risking because we have nothing except a bundle of miseries, a few chains, a few prison cells – dark and dismal – a few nightmares; that’s all we have. A few wounds, diseases; that’s all we have. But we think about it as if it is a treasure, we pretend it is a treasure. One has to pretend, otherwise life will become impossible. If one continuously sees only wounds, miseries, hopelessness and hopelessness, how can one live? One will simply fall flat, will not even be able to gather enough courage to breathe again. For what? So we pretend that there is a great treasure, that our life is precious, and we have much to lose, so we have to think about it. In fact there is nothing to lose and all to gain.

The energy-field that I am creating here is just a device to help you. Alone, it may be very difficult for you to take the risk. With so many people risking, and joyously risking, and even after risking, celebrating, one becomes more confident. A certainty arises, a trust, that if others can do it, one can also do it.

Real meditation needs a field of meditators, hence sannyas, so you don’t feel alone. There are so many people moving in the same direction. A few are ahead, a few are at the back – you are part of a great chain and the chain is slowly moving. There is all joy. As far as you can see ahead there are dancers and singers. You forget that you are risking in fact, you want to risk.

The blessing can be yours any moment – it is just waiting for you.

Deva means divine, aranya means wildness divine wildness. And that has to be the key for you. All kinds of civilisation, all culture, create falsity. It makes people unreal, it creates masks, and god can only be found when your being is utterly naked. Only in the purity of a naked being does god become available. God is still wild and there is no way to civilise him. It is good that we cannot catch hold of him.

I am not saying to become anti-culture; I am saying: remember that culture is false. So even when you have to live with people, live deliberately knowing that this is all acting. I am not saying to become wild in the marketplace; there is no need. Remain wild within, and always remember that you are not identified with the conditioning that has been given by the society and the culture, that it is a role, an act – maybe a necessary act because we live with people and they have decided to live in a certain way. But if you remember that you are not identified with it – that you are not a Christian, not a Hindu, nor a Mohammedan, neither American nor Indian nor Chinese; that you are not the language that you speak, that you are the wild silence, that you are not the nation to which you formally belong; that you belong to the universe as such, that you are universal, that the colour of your skin does not decide your being, that your being remains colourless; whether one is black or white, one is neither black nor white. One is simply one – that one is god!

This has to be your key: slowly slowly you have to create a distance between you and your personality. The personality is there – it’s okay. It is just like in a drama when you are playing a role but you know that you are not it, so whatsoever is happening in the role has no effect on you. Whether you are a beggar or you are an emperor doesn’t matter When the curtain falls and you go home, you will be yourself – neither emperor nor beggar.

So this life is a great drama, and when the curtain falls and death comes we go home and we are neither black nor white, nor Hindu nor Christian. And that person is blessed who can know it while alive. Then he dies a totally different kind of death. He dies and yet he does not die, because he has known the immortal in him. The Indian has to die, the Christian has to die, but not you. Only cultural conditionings die, but not you!

This is sannyas: to become disidentified with all that one has become identified with and just to remain resting in the witnessing soul.

[Prem Vanyo] Primal love – that will be the full meaning. Not the love that has become prevalent in the world – that is very lukewarm; it does not satisfy anybody. Rather than satisfying, rather than quenching the thirst, it provokes it. It makes people miserable: it gives them hopes and it never fulfills them; it is a pretender. It promises much but the goods are never delivered.

But there is another kind of love – more primitive, more primal, more primordial – that has nothing to do with the surface of the mind. It has something to do with your innermost core which is still in the forest, which has never left it, which is still wild. All civilisation is just around you, not in you. The poison is only on the surface; at the deepest core the stream is still pure, unpolluted.

And that is the whole process of meditation: slowly slowly moving from the surface to the centre, moving into the depth of one’s own being.

Down the centuries, meditators have left the society and gone to the forest. That was just symbolic – symbolic of going to the inner forest, to the inner jungle. And when you go to a jungle where man has not yet reached with all his devastations, suddenly a silence grips you, an innocence, a purity. It is a different air, a different milieu. Suddenly you are no more in the twentieth century, you are no more a modern man. And you start feeling an affinity with the animals and the birds and the trees. Suddenly you know that you understand them and they understand you and a great bridge immediately happens between nature and you. That’s why people feel so beautiful and so nourished by going to the mountains or to the ocean or to the jungle. People come back as if rejuvenated, with new life – a fresh lease of life. But the outside is not that important.

There is an inner jungle, the inner wilderness. If you can contact that, then you can remain there forever. You can be in the marketplace and yet not of it. And I would like you to penetrate there. I am here to help you towards that... and it is possible.

[To a sannyasin who is leaving, Osho says:]

Whenever you feel that you would like to be close to me, just sit silently in the room, naked, raise your hands and start communing with me with your energy. Soon you will know the language. It is in-built. It is like swimming: nobody really learns swimming yet everybody knows it. One just has to recover something forgotten. Swimming is not learning but a remembrance. You will be surprised to know that even six-months-old children can swim. And they learn it more easily than grown-ups because they have not yet forgotten it. The body is naturally capable of remaining floating on the water; a natural bio-energy is there.

So is the case with energy. It is naturally there and it is an unlearned language – one just has to recover it. Use it and you will recover it. So just raise your hands and let energy say something.

Don’t interfere and don’t try to even understand what you are saying. Let the energy have its own say, and soon you will see that you have poured your heart out; soon you will understand what you have said. And in the third step you will know that the answer has been received also.

This is the real way to commune with a master.

[A sannyasins says: I’ve been feeling a tight feeling around my heart all the time I’ve been here... And one time... I was just sitting there relaxed, and I felt something like a very hard egg pushing up.]

The heart is trying to function again, and you have kept it paralysed for so long.

And after such a long paralysis, energy has to work hard, push hard; energy has to melt the armour around the heart. The tightness is there – the energy is trying to melt that tightness; work is going on there. Help it! And you will be a totally new person once this hardness around the heart disappears; you will start functioning as the heart. Up to now you have functioned as the head – as everybody is doing – and the head is just the porch of your house.

It is just like a man who lives in the porch and has forgotten the whole house and is unnecessarily miserable. It is just the entrance into your being, but your being is hidden in the heart – because treasures cannot be put in the porches; they have to be in the innermost core of your being where they will be safe.

So to really live is to live from the heart. But this whole society is against the heart, against love, against feelings, so naturally every child represses the heart, slowly slowly, by-passes the heart, because whenever he goes through the heart he finds himself in trouble. He sees a hungry man on the road and he gives him his food. He comes back home and he is in trouble.

So he starts by-passing the heart; he does not listen to the heart because it is a source of trouble.

But then the whole life becomes just calculation, and calculation cannot give joy. It can make you rich – it knows all the economics there are – but it does not know anything higher than economics. The heart knows something which is not economical but spiritual, non-mathematical but poetic, and not confined to this life – its compass is infinite.

So something beautiful is happening, but it is just as if your hand had a fracture and it has been in the cast for six weeks, and then you have to massage it and it takes time to be revived and brought back to normal functioning.

So after so many years and in fact after so many lives, a little bit of trouble will be there, but that trouble has to be welcomed.

Sudhir means wisdom, insight, meditativeness. And if you can just sit here, just be with me, things start happening, the insight starts opening. All that it needs is just a trusting, waiting, loving atmosphere around you. The seed is there. It needs soil, a little water, a little warmth from the sun, and miracles start happening.

[Osho asks a sannyasin to raise her hands above her head, to keep them clasped together and go with the energy.]

The energy is going well. Relax more and more into it. But make it a point every night to sit in the same way and raise your hands. At least for five to ten minutes let the energy shake you. Soon you will start feeling like a flame of fire... and that purifies. It brings alchemical changes in the body. The flame is there but needs more energy to be poured into it.

This posture has to be remembered. Don’t let your hands part; they have to be together. The joining of the two hands is not just the joining of two hands; inside it joins the two hemispheres of your mind. So you need not take them away. Whatsoever happens – the body shakes and trembles – the hands have to remain joined, and soon you will find energy passing through one hand to another. Soon you will become aware that sometimes it passes from the left to the right and sometimes from the right to the left... as if something warm is pouring from one hand into the other. And each time your experience will be different. So just watch.

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