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‌CHAPTER 2

2 August 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives someone sannyas.]

Just drop the control over the body, and if the body starts leaning backwards, forwards, or sideways, allow it. If it falls, allow it to fall like a lump. Just relax into death... because death is exactly like meditation.

[The new sannyasin closes his eyes and then opens them.]

Why did you open your eyes? Dead people don’t open their eyes! Try again. It will be very good to contact death right now, then sannyas will have a right beginning, because unless you die you cannot become a sannyasin. Just relax and don’t be worried. If the body falls, nothing to be worried about: allow it to fall.

Good! Come back.You are very afraid of death, the fear of death is very deep in you, and that

is one of the barriers to entering into life. One who is afraid of death . remains afraid of life too, because they are both together. Death is not against life, it is the very culmination of it, it is the ultimate orgasm of life. The sexual orgasm is nothing compared to it; the sexual orgasm is very small, tiny. The orgasm that comes through death is cosmic. In sexual orgasm for a single moment you forget your body, you forget your mind. For a single moment time disappears and you become part of eternity, but it is a very very fleeting moment. The moment you are aware, it is already gone. The peak comes fast and you cannot stay at the peak. Before the peak there is tension it is coming, it is coming, and one gets tense. When it has come there is not even a second moment to chew it, to cherish it, to celebrate it. It remains for a single moment, and by the time you are aware it is no more. You are receding, you arc coming back to the world, into the body, into the mind, into time. But that is one of the most beautiful things in human life that nature has given as a gift. It is a glimpse of god.

That’s why I am not against sexual orgasm, because that is the only natural possibility to have a contact with the divine... the biological approach to god, the biological bridge. But it is nothing to be compared with death, because in death the body is completely lost, and with the body, the mind, because the mind and body are together. In fact they are not two, they are one – two functions of one phenomenon. On one side it functions as body, on another side it functions as mind; it is a psychosomatic unity.

But if you are afraid of death you will miss it. And if you are afraid of death you will miss sexual orgasm too; you will not allow it to take possession of you. And if you are afraid of sexual orgasm.… Millions of people are afraid. They hanker and yet they are afraid, because they are afraid of death and this is a tiny death, a small death.

A man who is afraid of death will be afraid of sex too; and a man who is afraid of sex will be afraid of sleep too; this is a logical sequence. Because sleep is also a tiny death: there are moments in sleep when dream stops and you are again in eternity. You are no more here; you disappear into the unknown, into the abysmal.

If you are afraid of sleep and you are afraid of love and you are afraid of death, how can you enjoy life ? All these things are involved in life! So people have become so afraid of death that they have become naturally afraid of life too. And they think that they are afraid of death because they love life; that is simply stupid. If you love life you will love death too because it comes as a culmination, as the ultimate growth of life. Life brings it, it is the final flowering. But you have a deep fear.

You may not be alert about it, you may not have encountered it, but it is there... and I wanted to see because with that many things can be known. You have to drop a few fears – and they are all basically based in the fear of death. Life is to enjoy, to enjoy intensely, totally. When a man enjoys life totally he is in god.

And each sense can become a door. If you enjoy beauty then your eyes become doors to god; if you enjoy . sound, music, then your ears become your doors to god. Every sense can become a door and all five senses are doors to god.

So you drop your fear. First try to understand that it is there; then I will give you a few groups in which the fear can be brought out and slowly dropped, mm ? But be alert – that is your basic problem.

Anand means bliss and munindra means the silent one. Muni means silent. It comes from a root ‘mouna’; mouna means silence. And when you are silent there is bliss, when the mind is utterly silent there is immense bliss. All misery is because the mind goes on being noisy – chattering, chattering. It never allows anything to grow, to flower, to bloom. The song is through silence, the song is soundless.

So become more and more silent; that is my message to you. Talk less. Unless it is absolutely necessary, don’t talk, and say only a few words. In the time you are here you will start having a few glimpses of silence. Go to the riverside or sit alone with the trees, with the birds, with the river, and just watch and just be silent.

[Osho says that groups will be helpful and suggests he begin with primal therapy]

If we really want to drop the fear of death we will have to go back to the birth. That’s how things are connected; if the birth problem is solved, the death problem is solved. The fear of death starts exactly the moment the child is passing through the birth canal, coming out of the womb; there is the beginning of the fear of death. Because the child has lived for nine months in a beautiful world, in a paradise – no anxiety, no responsibility, nothing to do, just enjoying, just being – and then suddenly one day he is being thrown out of his home. The home has been so beautiful: never again will he find any home so beautiful, so comfortable, so warm; never again will he be so carefree. Unless he attains enlightenment he is not going to be so carefree again. Never again will his mind be at rest, never again will joy be so pure. So naturally the child starts becoming very afraid – and that fear is the beginning of the fear of death.

The child feels as if he is going to die. I am not saying that he actually thinks in these words, he cannot, but when you uproot a tree, the tree also starts trembling: death!

He doesn’t actually say the word ‘death’, but he feels it in the guts; it is a gut feeling. The child cannot think of death, that’s obvious, but the child can feel that he is being uprooted. It is not a thought, it is a feeling that he is being thrown out, expelled.

In fact, the christian parable that adam was expelled from heaven has its roots in birth. That is the paradise from where every adam has been expelled. So that story, the expulsion of adam, has tremendous significance. This birth canal is a very very small passage and the child feels suffocated. He is being thrown into a dark tunnel, and a thousand and one fears enter into his being, unknown fears. He cannot even label them; he has never known them before. Then suddenly he is thrown out of the womb into a very strange world.

When man walked on the moon he was not walking in such a strange world because after all the moon is just like the earth; it is not very different. Maybe trees are not there, maybe lakes are not there; it is a desert. You will find many places on the earth exactly like the moon; it is nothing new, it is not strange.

But when a child comes out of the womb, when he opens his eyes for the first time and sees the light, the colours, hears the sounds... and his senses are so sensitive, so alive that everything seems to be mad! This is ‘the beginning of the world’, what the zen people call ‘the beginning of a thousand and one things’. The child cannot figure out what it is! He cannot even breathe because for nine months he was not breathing himself; he was breathing through the mother. Now he has to breathe on his own – the beginning of the anxiety of whether he is going to arrive or not.

[For a few moments he’s between death and life, Osho says. That pause is the first experience of death, and from there the fear enters the nervous system and then it goes on accumulating.

Osho reiterates that primal will be particularly helpful and that he should follow it up with bioenergetics and then encounter later on.]

Anand means bliss, vimoksha means the ultimate state of freedom – bliss, freedom. But vimoksha does not mean any other kind of freedom – neither political, nor economical, nor even psychological. It means freedom from the self. It does not even mean freedom of the self; it means freedom from the self. That is something of tremendous value of which to be aware.

In the West all the religions and all the mystics never go beyond the freedom of the self; the self remains. The self becomes free, it is no more in bondage. The body disappears, the mind disappears, all kinds of bondages disappear. Freedom comes, but the self remains.

In the east we have taken the ultimate jump – from the self to no-self. Buddha has said that if the self remains then you are still in bondage because the self is the very root of bondage. To be is to be in bondage. Being is bondage so being cannot be free; that is a contradiction.

It is not the house, not the family, not the wife, not the children, not your job that is making you a slave. It is just the idea that you are that creates the slavery. When the ‘I’ disappears, then there is utter freedom – so much so that there is only freedom and nobody who is free. The agent himself has disappeared. It is utter void, emptiness. That is the meaning of ‘vimoksha’ – when not only the prison disappears but the prisoner too.

[The new sannyasin says: I’m a teacher and a therapist.]

Mm mm, both ? That’s very good, both are lovely things. And I am going to make you a great therapist! Much is going to happen; your energy is so ready. You need just a little push and you will be gone forever!

That can happen right now but I will not do it right now – you have to do many more things before it... but it can happen! Very few people are so ready. You must have worked in your past lives very much. You are near about ninety-nine degrees; just one degree more and one is gone, evaporates.

... Do a few groups here; you will find a totally new quality in these groups. In the west where you are doing groups, the whole milieu is different. Here it is totally different.

[Osho says that in the West one may only go so far in therapy; the therapist takes you only to your maximum limit and not beyond the boundary from where you might not come back. At least that’s something because people usually live at the minimum, but here people can cross even that boundary in the knowledge that Osho is with them. Through trust you can go deeper, and the fear of going deeper, the fear of madness, disappears. Osho suggests some groups for him, concluding, you have come home... just be happy!]

[A sannyasin, who is leaving, says he will return, but he was upset while he was here because he did not find other sannyasins as loving as his friends in France.]

There are a few things to be understood.The people who are here can give you love, but if you

ask they will not give, because my whole approach is that when somebody begs for love it is going to be a pathological love. Love should be a sharing between two independent people. It should not be a need it should be a celebration; that’s my whole teaching. And you have great desire, that’s why you missed; otherwise you cannot find more loving people anywhere. In France you will find the love that you are seeking but that love is not going to help.

You have been in France; it has not helped. Back there again you will be in the same rut. This kind of love is like being an alcoholic: it helps you to forget your misery – it is an intoxicant. But then it creates a dependence. You need the alcohol and you will need it more and more, in more doses, in

bigger doses, and it will go on destroying you. Here, love is available, but only for those who are not in need. So first I prepare people to drop their need. Then love has a totally different quality to it; then you share as a fun and you never become dependent.

The whole world is suffering because of this dependence on love. If you are in need and somebody loves you, you will start clinging because he is like food to you: if he goes away you will be starved. You will not allow that person to love anybody else because that is uneconomical: you will not be having as much love as you could have had; he will be sharing it. So you will cling. You will create all kinds of situations in which you make the other feel guilty if he shares his love or her love. And in this situation only somebody is going to fall in love with you who is also a clinger, otherwise not.

And I teach people to be non-clingers. Love as much as you want but never cling. And never allow anybody else to cling to you, because clingers function like leeches. They are dangerous people, they exploit.

So I know why it has not happened – because of your desire; the very desire has been the hindrance. In France you will find that love because the whole country is ill. You can find it in India too. Just go outside these orange people: you will find many, many people who are ready to love, but once you are in love you are caught and trapped.

Then you start suffering: why did you get into it in the first place? Then that sweetness of the beginning is no more there. Every day it becomes more and more bitter because every day both try to dominate each other. All loves are beautiful in the beginning but the honeymoon is only one week, two weeks, three weeks, and by the time you settle, by the time you come to know the other person, you see that you are both beggars. Neither she has anything to give nor do you. She wants from you, you want from her – and both are beggars!

You want love and the other person also wants love. How can you give when you want and how can the other person give when he or she wants? You can only pretend to give. Your basic need is to get – to give is just a bargain – and you will always be alert that you should give less and get more. Naturally it is a business, it is a bargain. That’s the conflict between lovers.

Here people are very very free. That’s my whole effort – to create a totally new community, an alternative world... small, but some day it can spread. It can become a great fire, it can burn the whole earth!

But my approach is to first be a master – not to beg. Give. It comes back a thousandfold but don’t ask for it. Not that it doesn’t come, it comes more than you could have ever asked, but you simply give... you enjoy giving. When you enjoy giving you will find somebody of the same quality because the same attracts the same: you will find somebody who also enjoys giving. And then you can both give to each other and still there will be no clinging. When you are interested in getting then there is clinging. There is possessiveness, jealousy, and all kinds of uglinesses enter from the background.

Go... and this time you will be able to see that that love is not going to satisfy you. I will haunt you! That love is not going to satisfy you.

... That is not only your problem. It is the problem of the whole humanity because we have been brought up in wrong ways, we have been conditioned in wrong ways; from the very beginning we have been poisoned.

[Because parents demand love from the child, the child feels that love is a duty and that unless you demand love, you don’t get it, Osho continues. He learns to be diplomatic, learns that if you don’t feel love you can pretend to and that is accepted; hence he is taught to be hypocritical and inauthentic. So everyone is demanding love and no one has any to give... but we pretend in order to get. A great unlearning has to happen, says Osho – of all one’s parental teachings; hence Buddha’s insistence that you kill your parents and Jesus’ that you ‘hate’ your mother and father.

First you need to love yourself, to learn happiness, then you attract people and love]

The english word ‘magnetism’ comes from a root which is very meaningful; it comes from ‘magi’. It comes from the same root from where ‘magic’ comes and ‘magistrate’ and ‘meister’; it comes from ‘magi’.

Magi means one who has attained to himself. It actually means an enlightened person, hence the word ‘magic’. When somebody becomes a magi, he has a magic around himself, hence the word ‘magnetism’. He becomes a magnet: people start being pulled.not that he tries to pull them.

So first you have to fall in love with yourself, first you have to become a happy person, and that is very simple. For a few months forget about love. If you really want to attain to love, forget about it. You are in too much of a hurry. Next time you come, just be here and enjoy yourself and see how many people fall in love with you!

All are lovers here but with a different quality, with a distinction. They will not fall in love with a man who is in need, that is true. They will be afraid of such a man because that man is a trap: Avoid him! Whenever they see that you are happy many people will start flowing towards you, they will share their energy, and that’s exactly what you need.

So when will it be possible to come back ?

[Osho explains the meaning of deva pashyo: divine vision.]

You are divine vision. It is the capacity to see into things so deeply that matter disappears, that only god remains, to see so deeply that the solid disappears; only the subtle remains, the gross disappears. the visible is no more seen but the invisible is seen. And to see the visible is not to see much; to see only the visible is to be blind. To see the invisible is to have eyes. That’s what it means: divine vision.

[A visitor says he is a therapist in bio-energetics. Osho says that bio-energetics has a great future and can be further evolved for it is just in the beginning stages right now]

It is just the beginning of a science; much can be done. And it is good to be associated with something that is in the beginning: then it is a challenge and one can help people to explore, one can explore.

All these small beginnings that are going on around the world are going to contribute tremendously. Within fifty years, for the first time psychology will be really born.

Freudian psychology is very primitive; it is like an aboriginal religion compared to Buddha. After a hundred years it will look simply silly. And all these people who are working – in encounter, psychodrama, bioenergetics, gestalt and others – they are all going to contribute. All these groups will disappear, they are not going to stay for long. Their work is to contribute, to pool all that is possible from every direction, and once the real psychology starts taking shape they will disappear. They are tributaries: once the river is there, they will not be there.

And it is always good to be into something that is growing; then you can grow with it. When something is complete it is very unfortunate to be related to it; then it makes you dull, stale. But remember this point – that these are just fragmentary things. There is a fallacy that comes to everybody – that this is the whole, that this is complete.

That’s what is happening to Janov: he thinks the primal therapy is the last word, that he has arrived. There is something in primal therapy that is beautiful – but it is just a departure, not an arrival! But this is how the human ego goes on functioning: you get a small fragment and you start thinking that this is the whole, that you have stumbled upon the master key that is going to open all the doors.

This has happened down the ages to so many people, yet it goes on happening. Every time something is found, people think, ‘This is the panacea. Now there will be no problems in the world; now everything will be solved through it.’ This has failed a thousand times but the human fallacy persists.

Good that you have come.

[A sannyasin wrote to Osho saying she was feeling a lot of resistance coming up. Tonight she says it’s still there and she keeps fighting with it.]

I was expecting that it would come up some day or other. It needed only for your body to become a little weak and now that has happened, so it has come. What happens is that when your body is very strong you can go on repressing something. That’s why many religions have prescribed fasting; it is a great trick! If you fast, sooner or later the body becomes weak and the energy that was repressing something is no more there: the repressed explodes. So because of your illness your body has become a little weak. The resistance has always been there but now you are not capable of forcing it back into the unconscious. You are weaker than the resistance, that’s what is creating the trouble.

But this is a good situation in fact, because that resistance has to be faced; repression is not going to help. So don’t fight with it – rather express it, but express it in vacuum Don’t throw it on people because that creates new chains.

[Osho tells her to cathart on a pillow every night for an hour]

This is basically your problem so you have to tackle it alone. Otherwise one thing leads to another, and when you are throwing things at people when they are not responsible at all, you feel guilty and you cannot throw totally. And when you cannot throw totally something goes on lingering, so it is better to be throwing in a vacuum.

So from today, every night give one hour to it. This has to be encountered, faced, accepted, released. Once this is released you will feel very very unburdened.

It has been there but I was waiting for some day when you were a little weak and it came up. You have great strength to repress things. You are very much the type that can will things: you can manage, you can force, you can sit upon things for years; you have that energy. Right now it is missing, so this is a good opportunity. By chance you are weak and things are coming up. Don’t repress them now. Soon you will be again strong enough to!

Sometimes illness can be of great therapeutic help and illness should be used as a therapy. It can bring many things which are not ordinarily available, to the surface, and the curse can become a blessing... so don’t be worried.

Everything is perfectly good. Within a week it will be gone... but do it fast because soon you will become strong and then it will be difficult. Use this opportunity!

[A sannyasin, who has just completed the tantra group, said she did not have sexual feelings but her body felt the need to be touched.]

Mm mm, it is not only the body – your sound has no sex in it! It is asexual! Can you sing a song?... Just close your eyes and sing a small song. I would like to hear you sing!...

And bring as much sexuality into it as possible. Just close your eyes! [She sings a few lines of a song.]

Good... mm mm, very good! Something needs to be done with your throat centre; your sexuality is repressed there.

People think that sex is concerned with the genitals, it is not: it is controlled by the head. These three centres control... and this is the lowest of the higher centre – the throat. The second is the third eye centre. The throat is controlling your sexuality. So start singing, start dancing in the music group and sometimes just sitting, hum, but bring the quality of sexuality into the sound... and you will be surprised.…

That’s why music affects sexuality so much. A certain kind of music can give you almost orgasmic joy; a certain kind of music can bring you to orgasm. So enjoy all kinds of music and avoid the eastern music for a few days. It is all non-sexual, it was created to repress sex. Anything western will be okay – nothing eastern, right now at least. Later on when your throat centre has relaxed you will be simply full of sex energy. It is blocking it.

So sing, hum, dance and hold people, touch people. If you want to be touched, touch, but when you touch bring great sensitivity: when you touch somebody, touch with great reverence, love. And it doesn’t matter whether you are touching a man or a woman or a tree or a rock; it doesn’t matter. Anything that you touch, touch with great sensuality.

Tenderness is good, but tenderness can be of two kinds, two dimensional. One is tenderness that comes when your sex is fulfilled: there is sensuality without sexuality. You have gone beyond that, and the same energy has turned into a higher energy; then there is tenderness.

But there is another kind of tenderness; you can repress sexuality, then you feel tender because you don’t allow more than that. You only allow tenderness, only a small energy leaks through the tenderness. You don’t want to go into sex full-fledged; you are afraid of it.

So your tenderness is of repression. It is not a value; it is a disvalue. I would like you to become tender in the second sense but that comes only when one has lived life totally without fear.

You are carrying great sexuality in you, repressed, and the repression is through the throat.

Good! Mm mm. The whole problem is there, mm? It is simple: you hum, sing, sway, join the music group and dance in the sufi dancing. Just help your sound to become more sensuous, more sexual, more alive. And the day it is alive you will suddenly see that the sex energy is released. It will change.

[Another tantra group participant says: I didn’t have sex very freely. Every time I am with a woman I feel very tired and want to sleep.… The second thing is... I don’t know if I am really a sannyasin, because it is very easy for me to change clothes and names; I have always done this.]

[Osho says that the day one takes sannyas one may not actually become a sannyasin; it can happen days or weeks, months or years afterwards. The taking of sannyas is just a gesture of willingness for the inner sannyas to happen.]

And the second thing – that’s my feeling also: you are afraid of women, you want to avoid them. That’s why I told you to go into the tantra group – to become alert about it. I was not thinking that this tantra group is going to give you great experiences of sexual ecstasy, no. I was just thinking that it would give you the experience, the awareness, that you avoid women, that you don’t really want to go into any relationship, that deep down you are against woman and you are against your body too.

Sleep is one of the ways to escape, but that is a very childish way; that too also shows something. Children do that: when they want to escape from something they fall asleep. But this is very indicative that from your very childhood you have become afraid of sex; people have made you afraid. Maybe it was your mother who has made you very much afraid of it knowingly, unknowingly... hence the fear of women that they are going to castrate you.

Man has always remained afraid of women for many reasons. One is the mother, because every man has been brought up by a woman. The mother was powerful, so powerful that every child knows that the father was nothing. So the fear – that if you are in the grip of a woman you know that you will become hen-pecked. How to avoid her ? You must have avoided your mother by falling asleep.

[The sannyasin says: She committed suicide.]

That may also be a reason to be afraid of women. I’m not saying what actually happened, but that may also be one of the reasons why you are afraid. That may be one of the reasons: the mother committed suicide and the child was left alone. You cannot trust women: they can betray, they can leave you alone so why go into any relationship? Avoid!

But this was the point, and it happened: I wanted you to become alert about where your sexuality is, where your hang-ups are.

[Osho suggests that primal will be helpful... ]

These things are going to change. You are in a far better space as far as I can see, mm ? A great understanding has arisen about your sexuality, and that is one of the basics.

I will send you into tantra again after a few other groups and then things will happen. But this has been good – nothing to be worried about, mm?

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