24

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 24

24 June 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, Hamido is a name of god, so it will mean god of love.

Only love gives the quality of being divine. All else is mundane, all else is just trivial. Only love is something of the beyond, non-material. In the world, except for love, there is no proof for god. So the man who does not know what love is will be incapable of knowing god – not only incapable of knowing but incapable of trusting, not only incapable of trusting but even incapable of comprehending the fact of god.

Love is the only proof, and through love you start feeling more and more of god around you. Then trees are no more just trees and mountains are no more just mountains but forms of god... and so are people and so are you! Then the whole starts pulsating in one rhythm. But the beginning is always love... and the end too!

The beginning has to be the end, and the first step is always the last step too, because life moves in a circle, and unless the circle comes back to the original point, it is not complete. The source and the goal are always the same; the means and the end are always the same. Love is the means and love is the end.

[A sannyasin says: I didn’t want to go and I got sick, and then I thought ‘Well, if you want me to go, then I’ll go.’]

As if you listen to me! (Osho chuckles)

If you had been listening to me there would be no need to go. But you don’t listen at all.

It is not that I want you to go – I would like you to be here – but rather than being a help in the commune, you are a continuous nuisance. If you try to change yourself you can remain. But then

you have to change a few things. You have to be more particular about work; don’t try to be tricky, don’t try to avoid work. Because something great is going to happen, and it has to be prepared for. People who are avoiding work are avoiding me. That is the only way you show your love towards me. If you start escaping from work and you start finding excuses – you can find millions... but then how is the thing for which I am continuously working going to happen? All the sannyasins have to contribute to create the field; only then can something great descend into it.

So if you don’t want to go, then change; it is your choice. Either change yourself and don’t create any more problems for the commune – just become non-problematic – or if it is too difficult to change, you can go! (a chuckle) So it is up to you now. What would you like to do?

[She answers: I’ve got myself into trouble for so long that there are times when nothing really problematic is going on but... you know... people will get suspicious because I’ve been like that for so long.]

No, no, that is again trying to remain the same. You have been creating problems. Even if you have gone to stay outside, you came to [your boyfriend] and you started fighting in the middle of the night. This is not people’s suspicions – these are simple facts! (chuckling) Nobody is suspecting you, but you have been doing these things.

You have not thought at all about the commune yet; you only think about yourself and your small things and problems and love affairs. You don’t think of me, you don’t think of the place where you are, what you are expected to do. You don’t think at all. You just go round about in your own world. That world has to be dropped!

Here, I am the primary thing for you to think about and everything else is secondary. But your problems are primary and I am secondary. I am meaningful only when you have some problem, then you come; otherwise everything is okay.

You can change. I don’t want you to go. This is just an opportunity for you to choose: either you change or you go. But this way I won’t allow you to remain here. Because you have remained the same way long enough and you don’t change. So think over it...

And these things won’t help – that others are suspicious and somebody is creating.Nobody is

creating any suspicion about you. But change, so that even if they are suspicious – they have been experiencing you in the past, so for a few days they may remain suspicious, but if you change they will drop their suspicions.

[Osho gives a name for a meditation centre in the West.]

Samapatt. It means the real wealth. The unreal wealth is outside; the real wealth is inside. It is subjective, it is your interiority. One can be outwardly rich and inwardly poor, and that is the greatest failure in life, because with the same amount of energy and time one could have become inwardly rich. And the outward wealth is not going to stay with you. Sooner or later you will be gone and whatsoever you accumulated will be taken away from you. Death robs one of all outer wealth. That’s why those who have only outer wealth are very much afraid of death. The man of inward wealth is not afraid of death, because death cannot take anything away from him; why should he be afraid?

He will be as rich in death as he was in life. No difference at all is going to happen to him, hence, he remains tranquil and cool and blissful even when he encounters death.

And to remain blissful and cool when you are encountering death is the greatest thing in life the difference that makes the difference. Then one is never born again; there is no need. One has passed all the examinations of life, the school is finished; one goes back home. That is what Buddha calls ‘nirvana’ – going back home; the school is finished, the training is over.

But if we go on accumulating the outer, the training is never over, because the training is over only when we have known the inner. We will be born again and again into misery, into form, into body, and we will move through the same wheel. It is torturous, it is horrible. We cannot see its horribleness because we don’t remember our past lives.

It is a great blessing from nature that man is not allowed to remember his past, his past lives. Otherwise it would have been impossible to bear the burden, because you would see that what you are doing, you have done millions of times. The sheer repetitiveness of it will be enough for one to commit suicide. But suicide never ends anything; you are thrown back again. Only one thing ends this vicious circle and that is to become inwardly rich.

Samapatt means one who is inwardly rich, one who has found the treasure. This richness is of consciousness and of love and of light. So a single inwardly rich person makes the whole world rich... just by his presence.

Anand means bliss, rupen means form, but a very liquid form, because bliss is a liquid state. It has no rigid form; it is like a cloud – always changing, with new forms arising. It is a flux.

Bliss is not an entity but an energy field. It is not a thing but an experience. You cannot hold it in your hand; you cannot show it to anybody else. It is not objective. It is so inward that you cannot show it even to your beloved. But the form can be felt. The dance can be felt, the song can reach – those are forms of bliss. Suddenly a song bursts forth.You are not doing it; it takes possession. You are

overwhelmed by it; suddenly it is there. It will be heard by others. In that moment bliss has taken the form of a song; sometimes it will be a dance and sometimes it will be silence and sometimes something else.

So never think of bliss in any rigidity. It is dynamic, it is movement, it is liquid, vaporous; it is like a cloud. And one has to become like a cloud to attain to it. One has to lose rigidity, armour, defence. One has to drop pseudo faces, definitions, identities. In short, one has to drop the personality because the personality is your form and it is a rigid form. Bliss cannot exist with it. Bliss can exist only in a kind of presence but not in a person.

If you say ‘I am a Hindu’ or ‘I am a Christian’, bliss cannot exist in you. You have defined your form, you are clinging to a certain identity. If you say ‘I am an Indian’ or ‘a Chinese’, bliss is not possible. Bliss happens only to those who are simply open and vulnerablewithout any identity.

The whole work of religious growth consists of this – dropping all identities. Naturally, when you start dropping your identities great fear arises, because those were the things that were giving you a certain idea of who you are. They were false, but still the mind says ’Something is better than

nothing, even if it is false. At least you can say that you are this; you can label yourself.’ And people think labelling is knowing.

Labelling is not knowing, and behind our labels is only our ignorance and nothing else. But a person thinks ‘I am a doctor. I am an engineer. I am this, I am that, I am a husband, a father, a son, a wife...’ and feels good: one has some identity, one is not just nobody. One feels safe in the boundaries, otherwise the vastness of existence frightens one; to think of the infinite scares one. And everybody is infinite.

So before a person really becomes blissful he has to pass through a certain identity crisis. He has to lose all that he has been thinking he has. He has to drop all that he has been; he has to forget all about the past, he has to become discontinuous. That is the risk... that’s what sannyas is all about. But once you have taken the risk, the whole sky is yours, and then you will never want to be narrowed down to a certain label. Even if sometimes it is needed, it will be only utilitarian.

Of course, when you function as a doctor, you are a doctor, but that is just a function; it is not your identity. Of course when you live in Australia, you are an Australian, but that is just an arrangement. You have to have a passport, so you have to belong to some country. The world is still not mature enough to accept people who don’t belong to any country, who are just citizens of the world. Because of that, you have to, but those are just utilitarian things – you are no more attached, you have no obsession any more; you remain free. You remain indefinable even if there are definitions to be used. In this indefinability bliss descends.

That is the form of bliss: to become indefinable, to become vague, to allow the chaos of existence to take possession of you.

[A sannyasin says she is always attracted to people who are the opposite of her, for example with her boyfriend with whom she has been fighting.]

First: everybody is attracted to the opposite – that is one of the basic dilemmas every human being has to face. One is attracted to the opposite because the opposite is strange, mysterious, unknown. You cannot be attracted to exactly the same type of person you are because you already know what it is. It will be almost like falling in love with a twin.

So you cannot fall in love with somebody who is like you, because you know yourself already, so what is the point of love? Love is an exploration, it is an adventure, so the more opposite the person is, the more intriguing, the more interesting the journey. Mm, everything is unknown, so you have to explore unknown territory.

It is just as people were interested in going to the moon or to Everest or are interested in going to the depths of the Pacific: it is just the unknown which has not been known yet that attracts. But the problem is that the opposite is your opposite, so when you meet there is going to be conflict...

The more opposite he is, the more conflict will be there, because you are such polar opposites that you will clash. But love is a kind of war. Who has told you that love can be without war? It cannot be! (chuckling) But it is worth enjoying – it is a challenge! So fight is bound to be amongst lovers.

And fight is not anything that destroys love, no. It enhances it, it brings spice to it. So sometimes you fight and you separate and again you come together; this is how it goes! It is nothing special that is happening to you: it happens to all lovers.

If you want to avoid it you will have to avoid love, and that will be miserable. This is far better, this war, than the misery of loneliness... unless you become capable of being alone. I am working hard towards that – sooner or later you will become able to be alone, but meanwhile...

It is not yet possible, so you have to go through this. And it is perfectly good – enjoy it and accept it! When you are fighting, then really fight, mm? (laughter)

[The sannyasin answers: But after I always eat and then I feel bad.]

My feeling is that you are afraid of love because love brings conflict. And people who are afraid of love always start eating too much; that is their substitute.. Food is a substitute for love. So if you really love, the food problem will disappear.

It happens only because you are afraid of love. You go only so far, you don’t go totally because you are afraid of the mess that it creates. It does create a mess. It is a messy thing, just bloody... but one has to go into it! It is just like a childbirth – it is messy, bloody, but the child comes out of it. The birth has to be like that. Love is also a process of birth: one becomes mature. And at the peak of that maturity, one becomes capable of being alone.

You cannot avoid this mess, so don’t call it a mess, you can’t avoid it. It has to be accepted joyously – it is a beautiful game. Play it intensely! This food problem will disappear automatically. There is no other way. You can go on dieting and this and that but you will again fall into it, because whenever you feel that love is missing, how to fill the emptiness? You stuff yourself with food!

< Previous | Contents | Next >