14

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‌CHAPTER 14

14 August 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss and sujan means awareness. This has to be remembered – that awareness is good only when it is suffused with blissfulness. If it is dry it will enhance the ego; if it is dry, with no joy in it, it will not lead you towards the divine; it will make you more and more self-centred.

So awareness has two possibilities. One is: it can make you a very very crystallised egoist or it can lead you to a point where ego completely disappears. That’s why you will find jaina monks and other kinds of monks who have been practising awareness but without bliss, very egoistic; their ego is just on the tip of their nose. In India we have many stories about great saints getting so disturbed by small things that they could curse them for their whole life or even for future lives. And they were people who were practising awareness – but the practice was devoid of joy. It was done like a serious thing; it was not done playfully.

If one becomes aware and is not playful about, it, one is serious, one is getting into another trap and has been befooled by the ego. First the ego was there because one was unconscious; now the ego is there because one has become very self-conscious. The self disappears only when bliss arises. Only bliss is unselfconscious: it is conscious but there is no self in it. In the moment of joy you disappear – there is only joy. There is only a climate of joy with no centre to hold it.

... Become aware but constantly remember that each step in awareness has to be a step into cheerfulness too. If they are both growing together you are on the right track. If one is lagging behind, wait for it to come, grow, but always keep both together; they are like two legs or two wings.

[The new sannyasin says: I had tried vipassana.]

Right now it won’t work. It is what I have been telling you: it is awareness without bliss. First do something else. Vipassana is good – in the right context, with the right ingredients it is tremendously

beautiful. Alone by itself it can become dangerous. It is repressive – alone – but if you do things like encounter, gestalt, bioenergetics, psychodrama, something cathartic first so the fever is thrown out, so anger is no more there lurking inside you, so repressed emotions are not poisoning your system any moreWhen the system is purified of emotions, repressed emotions, and they are many, then

vipassana is just the right thing to do. One has to first prepare for the right moment to enter into vipassana.

I never give vipassana to people in the beginning – first I give them catharsis; they should pass through a few cathartic groups. When they start feeling that now nothing is coming up, now even if somebody is shouting and they don’t feel anger arising, then is the moment to go into vipassana. Now the body is ready to receive it. It is a great gift; first one has to be ready to receive it.

If you have been holding poison in a pot it is first necessary to clean it completely. Only then put something else in it, otherwise whatsoever you put into it is going to be poisoned. The poison has to be completely thrown out – not only that, the pot must have soaked the poison: the pot has to be thrown into fire again.

These groups are fire groups: it is throwing you back into the oven so that all that is non-essential and does not belong to you and should not belong to you, is burned. Then you attain a pure passivity. In that pure passivity, vipassana is the right guest – but first you have to become the host.

So next time when you come, do a few other groups and in the end, do vipassana here. Good! [Deva Mahabha – the divine path of love]

And become more and more alert about it. Don’t miss a single opportunity where you can be loving. If you start looking for opportunities for being loving, you will be surprised: they come in thousands. Because you have not been looking for them you have not noticed them, otherwise they come each moment.

You are passing by the road and a child smiles. Now there is a possibility, a great opportunity. God has smiled at you – you have to respond! You are sitting and a stranger is sitting by your side and is crying, and the tears are coming; now you have an opportunity to respond. Or you see a rose flower just opening; it is an opportunity to be loving. You can dance around the rosebush; you can at least say hello to the rose. You can have a little chit-chat.you can be a little mad!

The whole universe goes on giving millions of opportunities but because we are hard and we don’t look for them, even if they come on our way uninvited, we bypass them.

By and by our eyes become completely incapable of seeing the opportunity for love, otherwise each moment god approaches you.

His hand is always very close to taking our hand but we don’t move: we function like rocks.

The society has trained us to be more and more rocky, because in being a rock one feels more secure, less vulnerable. But there is no security – death is coming, and before death comes, let love come. Then death never comes: through love one becomes immortal.

There are three important things in life: birth, love, and death. Two are beyond human control: you cannot do anything about your birth – it has already happened; now you cannot do anything. You cannot do anything about death because it is unpredictable: when it comes, it comes; nobody knows when it will come. It can come this moment or it may not come for fifty years or one hundred years. And it comes so suddenly that it never gives a single moment’s time for you to prepare even. Suddenly it is there and one is gone; it does not come gradually so nothing can be done about death either. And these are the only three important things. Something can only be done about love; love is man’s freedom. Birth and death are destinies; love is man’s freedom.

By being loving a man grows, by being loving a man becomes spiritual... by being loving one attains being-hood. And the miracle is that if you start being loving, if between birth and death your whole life becomes a bridge of love, you have changed both in an indirect way: you have changed the birth and. you have changed death also. You have changed death because the man who knows what love is knows there cannot be any death. In that very moment of experience one knows eternity; time disappears. One knows the body will die and the mind will die but there is something beyond both – within – which is not going to die.

That certainty is such a certainty, such absolute certainty. It is not based on any argument; it is based on experience. It is as if you have tasted something and you know it is sweet or it is bitter; you need not have any argument. Even if somebody proves that it is bitter, you will laugh at the whole thing. You will say, ‘It doesn’t matter what you prove, what arguments you bring – I have tasted it myself. Now it is absolutely certain that it is sweet. I know the taste.’

Once one has known love, death becomes just an impossibility: one never dies. And if one never dies, how can one be born? So there has been no birth and no death. The birth was just the beginning of the body and the death will be just the body falling back into dust, but you continue. You were before birth and you will be beyond death.

So by knowing love, one comes to change death, birth, both. Love is the only transforming door in life.

Deva means divine, nisarga means nature – divine nature. And all that one has to do is to allow divine nature to function through oneself; nothing else is needed. We go wrong because we go against nature; we go wrong because we start trying to improve upon nature.We go wrong the moment we start thinking that we are higher than nature. Relax and become part of nature.

[A sannyasin says he feels a generosity inside that he can’t express, that doesn’t get through. Osho checks his energy.]

Good... very good. It is happening!

And it will come: it will become a flower soon. It is coming up, and it is coming with such energy that soon it will flower. Be happy, rejoice!

And it happens that when it comes for the first time one feels suffocated. One knows it is there just ready to burst and it is not bursting. It is very urgent it feels and still something is blocking – but nothing is blocking. It happens when the energy for the first time comes to a point from where it takes a turn.

It is like you throw a ball up: it starts going away from your hand; then a moment comes when it stops. It is neither going away nor coming close; for a single moment it stops and then it starts coming back. This is the moment: the energy has up to now been going away, away, away. Now it has stopped going away – it is no more going away from god. It is a very very pregnant moment; it will start turning back home. Once it starts turning back home, joy will grow, ecstasy will grow. You are going to disappear; there is going to be only ecstasy.

So don’t be afraid, because when one starts disappearing one becomes very frightened. I am with you, so when you start feeling that you are disappearing, relax and surrender, accept and welcome, because that is a blessing. That’s what sufis call ‘bourka’ – that’s a gift from god. And it is going to happen.…

[A sannyasin says she has to return to her work as a lawyer to earn the money to return to the ashram, but she does not enjoy the work.]

Manage, mm? because you will not be able to remain in your profession long. That profession is one of the most ugly; even to be a thief is far better! And it is difficult – it will become every day more and more difficult, and I don’t think that it is for you.

Even if you try to remain unaffected by it it will be destructive to your soul. It is a wrong kind of profession, and when you are in a certain profession more and more time has to be devoted to it, you have to think about it more and more. And if you are not in a fighting mood it will be difficult to be a lawyer because the whole thing depends on fight. Even when there is nothing to fight, one has to fight; the whole profession depends on that. One has to find ways and means to fight and to continue fighting. The longer the fight goes the better... and finding how to make it more complicated is the whole game.

So if you are not m the fighting mood, and you cannot be any more, it will be really hard and destructive. So my suggestion is – you are finished with it – that you go and arrange somehow and just come back.

[In reply to Osho’s invitation to take sannyas, a visitor says: I am so afraid of death!]

Nothing, mm? – everybody is afraid of death... and that’s why everybody goes on missing life. If you are afraid of death you will be afraid of life too because death is involved in life. If you are afraid of death you will escape from life because everywhere, wherever life is, death is. So if you really want to live life don’t be afraid of death: start living death too!

Both can be lived together because both are together: each moment of life is a moment of death. It is so together – it is like breathing: when you breathe in it is life, when you breathe out it is death. When a child is born he will breathe in; that is the beginning of life. When a old man dies he will breathe out and will never breathe in; that is death. Inhalation is life, exhalation is death; it is so close. And the same inhalation becomes exhalation; it is the same breath just turning its direction.

[The visitor says: I want to be a child. I feel I am dying as a child too soon.] Every child will become old, every child is on the way to becoming old.

Do you want to become a plastic child?... Then you will never grow. You will be a child but you will be a toy! An alive child is already on the way to death, is already dying. The day the child is born he has started dying. Now every moment is of death. You can avoid death only by becoming plastic, false, artificial.

The real rose is gone by the evening; you can keep the plastic flower forever. Every day you can wash it with soap and it will be very fresh and very young – but whom are you befooling? No bee will come to it for honey, no butterfly will come to it. Whom are you deceiving ? You can deceive human beings because they are also plastic. And there will be no fragrance in the flowerIt is already

dead; that’s why it cannot die!

If you are alive then death is going to come – and death is beautiful! I will teach you how to die.… Have you heard a joke ?

An Indian who used to live in Germany, died and reached hell. The devil said, ‘You can choose which hell you would prefer – the German or the Indian.’

The Indian was puzzled and asked, ‘What is the difference between the two?’

The devil laughed and said, ‘The punishments are the same, the torturers are the same, but of course in a german hell things are done with german accuracy, precision and perfection – in short, in a german way!’

[A sannyasin says: I was reading some Laing and some other things and I’ve just been having the feeling that my whole make-up is just a kind of fantasy.]

Mm mm... don’t read much; this is not the right time to read. Reading will not help you right now. It will give you many more troubles, and those ideas will start moving in your mind. And particularly not Laing.no! When you want to go crazy then you can read laing. He is just crazy – a good man

but crazy! It is not good; you will not be able to absorb him. It will create a kind of sickness in you. Meditate more, be more, dance more, sing more.

Reading is good when you are not affected by it at all. Then it is perfectly beautiful; you can enjoy it. But then there is nothing serious. You can read the bhagavad gita or the bible or the koran just as if you are reading a detective novel; there is no problem. And they are all detective novels of ancient days written in a different pattern. But right now you can get very serious about things .…

Just relax. Reading is not good right now.…

Enjoy things: doing is good rather than thinking. Go for a long walk, start running, swimming, dancing, jogging. Do things; these are all relaxing. Whenever your mind is not getting tense, you are relaxed.

Do something with the body – be in the body more than in the mind. Shift your energy towards the body and you will start becoming integrated.

By relaxing I don’t mean just go and relax on your bed, no; that won’t help. You will think. What will you do on your bed? Run, walk, swim. Do something so the whole energy moves into the body and the head does not get any. And enjoy these things because these are the real things in life. Reading is almost living life second-hand.

For example, you are reading poetry. The poet may have lived the experience – he may have looked at the moon, he may have listened to the birds, and a song arose in him and he sang. Now you are reading his song; it is second-hand! Why not go to the bird? Why not go to the rose? Why not go to the moon... directly? Why bring in this poet as a mediator? Why look through his eyes?

You have eyes and the moon is available and the rose is available, and the bird is singing for you too! Live life directly. That’s what I mean when I say ‘relax’. Relaxation is not being lazy. Relaxation means being utterly joyful in the body.

When you have run for miles and enjoyed the wind and the sun and the sand and then you come and you lie down on your bed, there is relaxation. Then you can fall into a very very quiet and silent sleep. Or even if you remain alert, thinking does not happen; there is a kind of silence.

Try this!

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