6

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 6

6 August 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives someone sannyas.]

Raise your hands and close your eyes, and just feel as if you are being born from the mother’s womb, right now this moment, and whatsoever body posture comes, allow it. If you start crying, weeping, it’s okay. Just think of birth. If your body falls and starts rolling or anything, just allow it. I would like to contact you there. Just think, visualise, that you are coming out of the womb. Let it be a primal moment... and if you feel that the body starts taking a certain posture, allow it.

Anand means bliss and haritama means greenery – blissful greenery. And many things have to be understood about the colour green; it will be helpful for you. Get more in tune with green, look more at the green trees and feel in tune with the green trees. By that falling in tune with the greenery, you will fall in tune with your own self.

Watching anything growing, fresh, young, is of tremendous value. We grow through watching growth, and we become green through watching the tress. Green is the colour of freshness, of aliveness, of vitality, of nature. And whenever man is natural he is blissful; whenever we ar unnatural, we become miserable. Misery is an unnatural phenomenon, it is an accident, and the accidental has become our whole life. By and by we have lost contact with the natural.

It is not only that we have destroyed nature on the outside; even before that we have destroyed nature inside. The outer ecology has been disturbed just within a hundred years, but the inner ecology has been disturbed for at least five thousand years. Man has completely lost contact with his own source.

Now there is only one way to again contact that source, and that is to be in tune with anything that is alive. It is better to be in tune with animals than with human beings. Human beings are more plastic

and artificial, pseudo. When you touch a human face; you touch the mast. And you don’t touch the face, you don’t touch with your hand; there is a glove, so the glove touches the mask. You remain hidden and the person remains hidden and real people never come in contact with each other.

It is not accidental that in the west people are becoming more and more interested in animals; it is not just accidental. A great urge is there to see the real face – at least of your dog or your cat, because the wife is never real and the husband is never real. Even small children start learning diplomacy and the moment the child starts speaking, he becomes false. So feel in tune with animals, they are yet uncorrupted. Feel in tune with trees, in tune with rivers, oceans, clouds, and that is the way you will fall in tune with yourself. Whenever you are sitting silently, just visualise the colour green: close your eyes and see the green spreading all over. Sufis have done great meditations on green, and I am giving you that particular meditation because my feeling is that you have been in contact with some sufis in your past lives – not in this life. Once you start meditating on green, all that which you have done in your past lives will be revived.

Much has to be done and much is going to flower in you. You can wait for it with all hope. It is almost certain to happen; there is no problem... Good!

Deva means divine, vinya means discipline. There is a discipline that we can force upon ourselves, but that is repression. We can give it a good name but basically it remains repression, and all repression leads into pathology, into some kind of neurosis, hence is dangerous.

There is another kind of discipline that flowers. We don’t enforce it: we just look into things as they are and allow that understanding to become a discipline.

For example you look into anger: one time, ten times, a hundred times you look into it. Now, the ordinary decision is to decide that because anger brings misery to you and to others, it is horrible, nightmarish, creates anguish, guilt, disturbs you, is of no use, you will force yourself not to be angry. Next time it comes. you will force it into the stomach, repress it. You will breathe in a shallow way and control yourself... will contract yourself so that you can control yourself. This is the ordinary way of disciplining oneself – whether it concerns anger or greed or whatsoever. This is a dangerous thing to do. This is how the whole humanity has become a madhouse.

The second kind, the real kind of discipline, is to look into anger, to look into all that it brings – the misery, the anguish, the anxiety, the frustration, the guilt. Just go on looking into anger, at what it brings. That very look, again and again and again, culminates in an understanding. You start seeing the futility of it.

In that very seeing it disappears. Not that you control it: you simply wait, watch and wait. One day suddenly, it flowers. It can’t be otherwise, it has to be so, because if you see again and again that this is a wall and again and again you are hit and your head hurts, how long can you go on persisting

? How long can you be stupid ?

I have not come across a single human being who can be that stupid! Stupidity also has limits. One hundred times, one thousand times, ten thousand times, it happens, but one day or other this understanding, that this is a wall, is bound to dawn on you. In that very seeing that this is a wall and nobody can pass through it, there is a sudden change, a satori; an insight has opened. Now there will be no more anger. And it is not that you repress it, not that you control it.

Control is an ugly word, because control needs contraction and a contracted being is an ill being. One needs to be flowing, not contracted. One needs to be expanding: only through expansion does one come close to god.

The sanskrit term for god is ‘brahma’. It means the one who remains extended, always and always. It means extension, infinite extension... one who goes on extending.

It is just within fifty years that western physics has come to the idea that the universe expands and goes on expanding: continuously, every moment, it is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. But in the East, the word for god is ‘expansion’.

And whenever you are in that mood of expansion you are close to god, you fall in tune with god. When you shrink, then you fall apart. You are no more in tune with this expanding universe, you have become a private thing; a small, tiny, mediocre, human being. Then the part starts thinking it is the whole. The part has to disappear, and that disappearance comes only through understanding, never through control.

That’s what I mean by deva vinya – divine discipline. It is not discipline at all because you are not doing anything. Or you can call it discipline using the exact meaning of the word. The word comes from the same root as ‘disciple’. The original root means ‘the capacity to learn’. A disciple is one who is capable of learning, and a man of discipline is one who is capable of learning from his life, that’s all – not that he forces any pattern or creates a character around himself.

All characters are bondages and all characters are armours, defences. All characters create walls around you and naturally, when there are so many walls around you, you start living alone because there are no longer any bridges with people. We create walls, that’s why we are alone. Rather than creating bridges we create walls, hence everybody is suffering in loneliness. Even when people are together, they are together but they are alone because those walls are there. They are very subtle walls, not very visible, very invisible, but everybody is carrying his own imprisonment around himself. Wherever you go, you carry your prison around you; it is an invisible thing. That’s what people have been taught as discipline: behave yourself... shoulds and should nots.

The word ‘vinya’ does not mean shoulds and should nots. It simply means a deep understanding about things, and then whatsoever that understanding brings, one trusts and one goes with it.

[Osho gives someone sannyas.]

Raise your hands and close your eyes, and be a tree. Forget that you have a human body; become the body of a tree. It is raining and the tree is really celebrating. These hands are no more hands: these are your branches in the sky. It is windy and the tree starts swaying and dancing. Feel like the tree and be the tree.

This will be your new name... Forget the old one and drop the idea of your past. Sometimes it is of tremendous help to drop the past and not to choose anything from it. There have been good things, there have been bad things, and one wants to choose: one would like to have the good things and drop the bad things. That’s what we go on doing: we always go on choosing the beautiful, the pleasant, and we always go on dropping the painful, the miserable. But they are together. We cannot drop the miserable if we choose the pleasurable; they are two aspects of the same coin.

So at the most what we can do is to go on putting the painful into the unconscious, into the basement. We go on carrying the beautiful in the conscious and go on throwing the ugly into the unconscious. That’s why the unconscious becomes almost like a junkyard... and that is the place from where we live! The conscious is impotent. We live from the unconscious, our real life arises from the unconscious. But because we go on throwing things into the unconscious it becomes cluttered and our whole life becomes ugly.

The conscious has no power really, it is a very tiny part. It can pretend to be powerful but whenever a real crisis arises it proves of no help and then immediately the unconscious has to rush to help. It is good when there is no problem, the conscious, good when there is no challenge. You can lie down on a chair and you can think beautiful thoughts. It is good as far as speculation is concerned but as far as existence is concerned it is impotent.

So we have to live from our innermost core but that innermost core becomes very much cluttered with the ugly, and because of those ugly things in the basement the unconscious starts becoming distorted. That is the unconscious that freud talks about – the distorted unconscious; it is not the true unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is only a parody.

Buddha also talks about the unconscious, but that unconscious is god. Then it is not really unconscious: it is only not self-conscious, that’s all. It is unselfconscious; that will be the right term for it.

So sometimes it is of tremendous value to drop the whole past – good and bad both... so the conscious becomes free and the unconscious becomes uncluttered; that is the significance of changing the name in sannyas.

Sadhananda means always blissful. Sadha means always, and anand means blissful... and let that seed sink deep into your being. Bliss should be taken as natural. We have become accustomed to take misery as natural. Whenever people are miserable they think it is how things should be. Whenever they are happy they feel a little guilty: they feel as if they are cheating somebody or they are doing something which should not be done.

This has happened because of conditioning in one’s childhood, Osho explains. Parents don’t like children being happy because then they become mischievous and unruly. We learn the trick of looking miserable. Sannyas is about reclaiming your childhood, free of all conditioning, so that you start doing things you like and dropping things you don’t like]

Once this has happened, life takes on a totally different colour; it becomes a song. Never do a thing that you don’t enjoy – whatsoever it is. Even if the whole world says it is very very useful, don’t do it. because that is going to kill you and destroy you. And do only that which you enjoy. Maybe it is not going to pay, maybe nobody will respect you for it, maybe nobody will ever thank you for it, but that is not the point. If you enjoy it, that is enough of a criterion that this is the thing to do. The day a man starts enjoying things and doing things that he enjoys, to me that day is the day he has become mature. And it is very difficult to find mature people. They are all grown-up children, still being dominated by the parents who may be no more, who may not be visibly dominating at all.…. Sannyas means a freedom – freedom from the parental hold, freedom from the society, freedom from the politician, freedom from all egoistic ideals that have been put into our being, freedom to

enjoy, freedom to be one’s self. Sannyas is the greatest rebellion in the world, and it is not political rebellion: it is an individual rebellion. It is not revolution.…

.… Sometimes it happens that a person comes but it is not the right moment. Sometimes a person comes when the right moment has gone. But sometimes it happens that people come in exactly the right moment. You are in the right moment, so much is going to happen! Don’t be afraid, because when it really starts happening great fear arises.

Although we have been desiring it, when it starts happening fear arises because it is a kind of dissolution: one dissolves into something unknown, one melts into something absolutely unknown. And in that moment great trust is needed, faith is needed; that’s why sannyas... It helps only in that moment when trust is needed, when you cannot see ahead.

You cannot see because you are not going to be. You cannot see because you are melting, you are dissolving. All that you can do is cling to the past because that is all there is. In that moment if you start clinging to the past you miss the opportunity.

In the eastern scriptures faith is described as a bird which sings, which starts singing while it is still dark, when the sun has not risen. Other birds will sing when the sun has risen but faith is the bird which starts singing while it is still dark. It starts welcoming the sun which has not yet arisen.

So just fall more and more in love with me and with the people here... and much is going to happen here!

[A sannyasin newly returned, says It’s been a difficult year since I took sannyas. I feel split – between good and bad. That’s because you don’t accept the bad, Osho replies. You don’t allow the higher synthesis to arise where the saint and the sinner meet, where the transcendence happens.

Only in the transcendence is there unity; then there is no possibility of a split.

The sannyasin then says he once had a teacher who was a kind of a magician, a black magician, and he feels he still has a power over him.

No, nobody is controlling anybody, murmurs Osho, He must have made a great impact on you... but you need not be worried: now you are under a white magician!]

< Previous | Contents | Next >