25

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‌CHAPTER 25

25 June 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, hasid means a disciple a divine disciple, a disciple of god. Disciplehood is always of god; the master is only a link. One does not become a disciple of a master; one becomes a disciple through the master. The master is a door, a bridge, but the disciplehood is always of god. The master is only a representation, a visible symbol for the invisible, because the mind hankers for the visible. It is impossible for it to comprehend the invisible or to trust the invisible.

The master is a midway point – something of him is visible and something of him is invisible. Those who come to the master as students will know only his visible part. Those who come to a master as disciples will know his invisible part, because the invisible can be known only through love, intimacy, trust.

But disciplehood is basically of god. The deeper you go into the master, the less and less you will find him. The day you have penetrated his very being, he has disappeared: god is found. Hence in the East the master is thought to be god; the reason is... It is very difficult in the West to understand why a master should be conceived of as god. Certainly he has not created the world, so he is not the creator of the world; then why should he be called god? He is called god not because he creates the world but because he uncreates the disciple. He has uncreated himself, he is dissolved, and whosoever comes close to him is bound to dissolve.

God creates; the master uncreates. God is an evolution; the master is an involution. God is a movement without; the master is the movement within. He complements god, otherwise everything will go on and on and on, never to return, never to come back to the original rest.

So in a way, their functions are totally opposite to each other. God sends you into the world, and the master sends you back to the original source; god creates you, the master uncreates you. On the surface their work is antagonistic, it is diametrically opposite to each other, but deep down it is not;

it is complementary. The idea of the complementary is one of the greatest intuitions – that there are no opposites, only complementaries. God’s other side is the master.

Hassid is a Jewish word; Hassidism comes from this word. Hassidism means the art of disciplehood. The master is called zaddick and the disciple is called hassid. But to give prominence to the disciple – even more prominence than to the master – the whole philosophy is called Hassidism, the path of the disciple. Because the master is just an excuse. He exists for the disciple, his whole function is to help the disciple.

And what is the art of being a hassid? The most fundamental part of being a disciple is to rearrange your life around the master. Let him function as your centre – you dissolve functioning as a centre of your own. The master’s voice becomes your voice.

That is the basic art, the fundamental art, but the greatest too. It is an absolutely new arrangement. Mm, ordinarily everybody has his own centre; the moment you become a disciple you drop your centre, you renounce your centre. The master becomes your focus. Then you live through him, you live as him; you allow him to live through you, as you. And the paradox: when you drop your centre, you become for the first time centred. Because your centre is false – it is not a true centre; the ego is only a pseudo self, a pretender. When you drop your ego, your pseudo self, and you allow the master to function as your self, suddenly you find for the first time who you are.

So it is not really losing the centre; on the contrary, it is gaining. The disciple has nothing to lose – he has nothing. The moment it is understood that one has nothing to lose, all is dropped – in that very understanding.…

Prem means love and Bari is a name for god – it will mean god of love. And think of love as god. God is not available; love is available. Let it become your approach towards god. God is unknown but love is not so unknown. It is our potential – it can be stirred into being. It is asleep but it can be awakened. The flame is there... maybe very small, so small that you cannot even see it, but it can be provoked. Life can be breathed into it. It can become a great flame that consumes you: you disappear as you are and you appear as you should be.

Love is the only cross there is; hence it is painful. Don’t avoid it because of the pain, and anguish, the anxiety and the despair. Yes, all that is involved in it. It is a cross, it is a death, but the resurrection follows. And those who are afraid of love will never know what god is because they will never be reborn. They will live only in fear; they will never know what ecstasy is. They will be simply frightened – afraid to live, afraid to move, afraid to be. They will be a constant fear, trembling, and for no purpose; their whole life will be a wastage.

Life becomes a desert without love. With love it starts blooming. So think of love as god. And not only think – live love as god, worship love as god! Let your whole life become coloured with love. Whatsoever you do, small things or great things, let all of them arise out of love, and for no other motive. Let your whole energy be devoted to love and to no other god, because there is none. All other gods are man-created. Love is the only natural approach to god, and if one starts falling into love – falling and falling and falling – one day suddenly one finds that one has arrived. In that depth god is hidden.

So it is not accidental that whenever people think of god they think of the heart, because the heart is the centre of love. And whenever you think of yourself, you also think of the heart. When you want to point to yourself, you put your hand on your heart, not on your head – nowhere else. It is not accidental; it is very natural, because somewhere in the heart is hidden all: love, you, god, the whole secret of existence.…

So you have a beautiful name... unknowingly. It is a Sufi name for god. Will it be easy to pronounce? – Prem Bari. But drop one ‘r’ – just a single ‘r’ will do.

Prem means love. Bodh originally meant blooming of a flower, but slowly slowly it started meaning blooming of consciousness. They are similar. When you see a lotus opening up, it is just like seeing a consciousness opening up. Consciousness is your inner lotus. So the opening of a bud became the meaning of enlightenment. Hence Gautam Siddhartha was called Buddha – because of the word bodh, he bloomed. And unless a man blooms, he remains discontented. Unless one becomes full of light, one remains in misery.

The misery is that one has not yet even been able to be oneself. The misery is that one is carrying a potential but it is not becoming actualised... the misery of a seed who has not found its soil yet, the misery of a bud who is waiting for the morning and the sun to rise, the misery of a woman who longs for a lover. This misery continues if we don’t help our inner flowering. And the misery is very vague, because how can the seed know for what the hankering is? How can the bud know what it is going to be like when it blooms?

So it is an unconscious groping in the dark; much stumbling happens, naturally. People search in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of directions. They have to. But don’t miss this door! I am available here – you can bloom as a flower of love.

Anand means bliss, Hasib is a name of god – blissful god. Remember it! If god can be defined at all, he can be defined only by his blissfulness. God is not serious, as he has been depicted by the old religions. He is a dancing god, utterly joyous. If he was not, there would not have been such a beautiful existence.

The music shows something about the musician, the poetry something about the poet and the creation something about the creator. If the poet is sad, gloomy, serious, in despair, he cannot write love songs. We may never know the poet but the poetry is available; it carries all that is essential to the poet’s being. We may not be able to see god but his dance is available in the trees, in the rivers, in the stars.

We never come upon him directly – maybe there is no way to come directly upon him – but his signature is everywhere. And there are so many proofs that existence is a dancing existence, full of love and joy. It is a constant hallelujah, from beginningless time to endless time, from eternity to eternity. It is just a love call. That is enough to give you a glimpse of what god is.

Don’t listen to what the theologians say – they have not known – listen to the poets. They may not talk about god but they have known something about the true god. Listen to the musicians and the dancers. If you really want to ask, ask the children. Look into their innocent eyes and you will have some glimpse; some windows may open. Never go to the churches; they have been in the hands of wrong people, and not only Christian churches – all churches.

Somehow it always happens that whenever religion is born in the world – a Buddha moves, a Jesus comes, and a religion is born – it always falls into the hands of wrong people, because the right people are not interested in becoming powerful. Only the wrong people are interested in becoming powerful. And when a Jesus moves, power moves. The wrong people see the point, that sooner or later the name of Jesus can be exploited, and for thousands of years it is great business. They don’t miss the opportunity.

When the right people come to Jesus, they disappear in him; when the wrong person comes he becomes the priest. When the right person comes, he becomes a disciple; when the wrong person comes, he becomes a missionary. He exploits the name of Jesus or Buddha or Krishna – and churches are built by these wrong people. Never go to a church if you really want to find god. Ask the trees and the rivers, ask the moon, rocks. Even they are more capable of showing you the right path. But one thing is absolutely certain, that god, the true god – the god not of theologians and philosophers, but the god of Jesus and Buddha and Krishna – is a dancing god. He is nothing but joy, pure joy.

Once this is understood, your life starts taking a new turn. Then you don’t think of religion as something serious. Then prayer becomes play, and when prayer is play, it goes deepest; it goes to the very root of it all. When it is serious, it is superficial. It is of the head when it is serious. When it is playful it is of the heart, because the heart knows only one language, and that is the language of play.

Yes, religion is fun, should be fun; it should not be anything else. And by ‘fun’ I mean: prayer, meditation, love, bliss. They exist for their own sake – that is the meaning of fun. When something is done for its own sake it is fun; when you do it for something else, then it is a serious business. When it is a means to some end, you are serious. When it is an end unto itself, just running on the sea beach – for no reason at all, just the joy of running, the sheer joy of the sun and the sands and the ocean and the roaring waves and the salty, brisk air, just the sheer joy of it – I call that running religious. Just collecting seashells on the sea beach, coloured stones, for no reason at all... you will leave them then and there when you go home – or making sandcastles, for no reason at all, but just for the sheer joy of it; you will never think about them again.

Life has to be lived in this way – moment to moment, with no end in view. Then each act becomes an end unto itself. Each act has a completion, and when any act is complete, it has beauty, it has grace.

Deva means divine, rashma means a ray – a ray of the divine. God is like the sun and we are all his rays. We have all that he has, because a ray contains all that the sun contains in an atomic form. It is just as a drop of ocean water contains all that the whole ocean contains. If we can understand one drop of water, we will be able to understand all the oceans there are. And so is the case with human consciousness. It is a ray of god. If we understand what human consciousness is, we are on the right track: we will understand god too.

One need not go in any direct search for god; no direct search ever succeeds. One has to move indirectly. And this is the way one has to move: one has to understand first ‘Who am I?’ From there the journey begins. And the more you understand yourself, the less you are. The day you understand yourself perfectly, you have disappeared, evaporated – the ray has entered, returned

to the original source of light. Then you are god. That is the meaning of the famous Upanishadic saying ‘Tat twam asi’ – ‘that art thou.’ There is no difference between you and god. You have only to decode yourself, decipher yourself, and you will find god. And the first place one can find god is within – only then can one find him anywhere else – because that is the closest point to us. The name will constantly remind you that you have to work into this phenomenon of consciousness.

And consciousness heals. That is one of the greatest discoveries of psychoanalysis in this age, but this is an ancient discovery as far as religion is concerned. The psychoanalyst has come to know that if we can make a person aware of his problems, those problems start dissolving just by awareness. It is one of the greatest breakthrough discoveries, one of the most important of this century – that if we become aware of something, it dissolves; it cannot remain in that light of awareness.

So the more one becomes aware and conscious, the more one remembers oneself, the more one moves cautiously, alert, the more wounds start disappearing, the less anger arises, the less hatred, the less jealousy, the less possessiveness. One day one simply finds that they have become irrelevant, part of ancient history – no more in any way alive issues, just dead issues. The more one becomes aware, the more and more wounds are healed and more and more health and wholeness asserts itself.

This is the miracle of becoming aware: that all that is wrong starts disappearing and all that is right starts happening. And the ultimate that happens through awareness is god, because it is a ray of divine light. If you have one ray in your hand, you can go on, and just following the track of that ray you will reach to the source of all light and all life.

[A sannyasin who is going to the West says: I feel very worldly at the moment. I feel like I want to do things by myself and somehow I feel a little bit guilty and hectic about it.]

There is nothing to feel guilty about – it is perfectly good to be worldly. I am not against the world, not at all. One has to go beyond it, but not against it, through it. It is a passage to be used, it is a ladder; it is a path to god! So there is nothing wrong in this world.

And there is nothing beautiful in feeling spiritual. In fact a really spiritual person will first feel worldly and then other-worldliness will arise out of it; it will be a fragrance of the same world. If this world is the flower, then that world is the fragrance of the same flower. Of course the fragrance is invisible and the flower is visible – that’s the difference – but the fragrance arises out of the flower. It is not against it. How can it be? God is a perfect materialist, otherwise how would he create matter? Why?

So the first thing to be understood: never feel guilty about being worldly; it is perfectly right. That’s why we are in the world, to be worldly. Don’t get stuck there, that’s true – always remember that one has to go on, the journey is long. But the journey has to pass through all the things of this world, the whole marketplace of it. And guilt is not good at all. Drop that guilt.

If you are with me you cannot have any guilt, you should not have any guilt, because my whole message is that man has to be freed from guilt. Man has lived enough under the pressure of guilt, and that’s why he has become so paralysed, guilty about everything – guilty about his natural instincts, guilty about his body, guilty about food, guilty about love, guilty about beauty, guilty about everything. Then how can you live? And then naturally one becomes a hypocrite: one says one

thing and lives another. The old world concept, the old religious idea, is so life-negative, that it leaves only two alternatives for you: one is to live the life of a hypocrite the other is to go mad. So those who are simple and innocent go mad, because they try to live according to the prescriptions of the priests. And those prescriptions are impossible, so they go mad, they drive themselves crazy.

The cunning, the clever, become hypocrites: they show one thing on the surface and they go on living a totally different life from the backdoor. Both these alternatives are bad but the old religions leave no other possibility. So either a person has to become pseudo or a person has to become crazy. In both ways health is lost.

My whole work here is to create a new vision in which you need not be a hypocrite. If you feel guilt, you will become a hypocrite. If you feel guilt, you will become a hypocrite or you will become neurotic and I don’t want you to become neurotic or a hypocrite. Live whatsoever comes naturally and easily to you. Live spontaneously. If some desire is arising and you want to do it, do it! Don’t go on postponing it. Do it and be finished with it. All that I require of you is: go into it consciously. Don’t go like an unconscious robot. Go consciously – live the desire, but watchfully, so that you can understand what the point of it is, so that you never repeat it if it is worthless. If it is of any worth, then repeat it, and repeat it next time more whole-heartedly. But if it is worthless, then don’t repeat it. That is possible only if you go watchfully into it.

So I am not against the world I am all for watchfulness, but not against the world. Live in it, but live consciously. That consciousness will be your protection, your shelter, your refuge, and your liberation, your salvation.

So don’t feel guilty at all. Enjoy the things that you want to do, that are arising in you – whatsoever they are. That is the only way to go beyond them.

[A sannyasin says: I wrote you a letter about my mother. My grandfather is dying and my mother is very sick and your answer was go and serve them... I’m afraid about which situation I will find there.]

No, no, I will take care of you. You go, mm? just help them; they need you. Let this be your meditation for a few months, mm? While you are there just help them and help them absolutely. Let them know what love is.

Old people become helpless and nobody loves them, and in the West particularly they are really isolated. Nobody thinks of them, nobody is interested in them. This is a very ugly situation.

So just go and let them have a feeling that they are respected, loved, that their life has not been in vain, that when they are gone, somebody will remember them. That gives a great centering to dying people, to old people.

Just go and simply serve them, and with a smile and with a dance. Continue to meditate, and I will be with you.

[A sannyasin says she is thinking to be sterilized, but wonders first if she is going to ever have a baby. Osho gives her an ‘energy darshan’ and says:]

Go through it have the sterilisation. It will be good for you. It will help your growth. Having a child will be an unnecessary botheration for you. It can be easily avoided. It is not such a need in your being, not at all.

If there is a very great need and one will remain unfulfilled without a child, then only. But there is no need; you will be better without it. Just go through it!

[A couple who have participated in the Couple’s Group say they have relationship problems.]

He is in total confusion and you feel rejection, then separate. Why create misery for each other? You have done enough for each other; now separate and be free. It will be a little difficult – it is very difficult to separate from your misery. It is very easy to separate when you are feeling happy with each other, but when all is confusion and a mess, it becomes very difficult to separate, because then you will feel very very empty. All this is keeping you occupied. But it is time. I was waiting for this group, mm? to see how it would work. If rejection is still there, you are confused, say good-bye to each other.

It may bring you back together again but that will be a new beginning. End the old, and for a few days just remain separate. Start moving again, alive and feeling alone, searching. Who knows? – you may start feeling more love for each other when you are separate. Then it is good; that will be a new beginning. But this affair, this old affair has to be finished; let this chapter be closed. Mm? What do you say about it? Even if it is hard, do it.

You separate... and happily! With no complaint and no grudge. If you can separate as friends that will be far better than living like enemies continuously.

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