12

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‌CHAPTER 12

14 December 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love and samadhan is the state where all questions and problems disappear. It is the state of mind where no question arises, a non-questioning state. It comes through love. It is only love that we never question, it is beyond question. We never ask, ‘Why am I in love? What is the purpose of love? What is the meaning of love?’ And if somebody asks that it simply shows that he has not known love, that he is not in love. A man who is in love trusts it. There is no questioning about it, the trust is absolute. And love exists in its own right, for no other reason. There is no why to it; that’s why there is no how to it either.

There is no cause to it, it is not an effect of something: it is neither an effect nor a cause. It is utterly there. It is a mystery, it happens for no reason. And whenever one is in love all questions start disappearing... not only about love but about other things too, because if at the deepest core you can accept one thing without questioning, that is the beginning of faith. If one thing can be accepted without questioning then why not all? Then there is no problem.

The real atheist is one who has never been able to love. That’s why he asks, ‘Where is God? Give me proof of God!’ If he had loved he would have known that love is God and there are no proofs for it. That’s the state of samadhan. All questions have disappeared, all doubts have disappeared. Not that you have got all the answers, no. Not that now you know all the answers, no, not at all – you know nothing. It is not a state of knowing, it is a state of innocence... so innocent that the questions don’t arise, and because questions don’t arise there is no need for any answers. One is free of questions and answers. One is simply free of the mind, one is liberated from the mind. The mind is the prison and love is the door to go out of it.

[To a sannyasin newly returned from the West Osho says:]

So the first thing that will help you tremendously is be a chaos while you are here. And remember

that chaos does not make you incapable of order, no. Chaos simply makes you available to a different dimension, but whenever order is needed you can immediately move into order.

If you have to relate to people in the world you need some kind of discipline. Chaos simply gives you a feel of another kind of reality. You can slip in and out of it easily. It is difficult to slip out of order; it is not difficult to slip out of chaos because chaos is so chaotic that it can contain order too, but order cannot contain chaos. You follow me? Order is small, chaos is vast, huge. If in a small corner there is order, chaos is not worried about it, it can accept that too. it is real chaos, it accepts that too. That’s the first thing.

And the second thing is that man finds himself only in communication; communication is a mirror. When you commune with people, you are reflected through them, they are mirrors. But down the ages people have been thinking that you can only know yourself when you are alone. You know yourself more when you are not alone. It is good sometimes to enjoy aloneness – it is a kind of holiday, it is good to rest into yourself. But never become addicted to it, otherwise it kills. That’s how monks were born: they killed all communication, they killed all love. They stopped relating with people, they became morbid, they became self-obsessed.

So one who wants to go deep into meditation should be alert from the very beginning that meditation should not become anti-love. It tends to become, that’s why I want you to be alert about it. It tends to become, because meditation gives you so much joy when you are alone that you start feeling ‘If so much joy is possible in being alone then why not be alone forever? Why not cut all bridges?’ – because people bring problems, and when you relate, naturally there is misery and anguish and anxiety and a thousand and one things start happening. But those things happen not because people are there; those things happen because you have them! Those other people simply provoke; their presence is just an excuse. If you escape into your loneliness those things will remain there and you will never be aware of them, but you will never get rid of them either.

So it is good to be fluid; sometimes be alone and enjoy your aloneness, but the real test is in relationship. The real test of whether you have become silent, whether you have become happy, blissful, is when you relate – there is the criterion. If now you can remain the same in relationship as you are alone, if no change happens in your inner quality, in your inner being – no disturbance, no distraction, no wavering comes – if you can easily be related and easily be unrelated, you don’t have any fear of relationship, when love and meditation are balanced, then the highest richness happens in life.

Love gives much but it is only fifty percent; meditation can give much but that too is only fifty percent. And when one can have one hundred percent, why choose fifty percent? Yes, I say to you: you can have the cake and eat it too.

Deva means God, preetam means beloved – God’s beloved.

And everybody is God’s beloved; that’s why we are. God has chosen us to be, and one only chooses out of love.

The creation is out of love. You desire a child out of loye. And God loved the world so much that he created the trees and the rivers and the mountains and man and woman. So everyone, not only

man but birds and animals and trees and rocks are all God’s beloveds. The love is continuously showering but it is so close and so obvious, that’s why we go on missing it. We are born in it, we live in it and we die in it, like a fish in the ocean. Sometimes the fish may be wondering, ‘Where is this ocean? Where should I go to find the ocean? Does the ocean really exist or is it just a myth?’

Exactly like that is God and his love: you are surrounded by it, you are breathing it in, breathing it out. It is nothing but his love. Existence loves you, that’s why you exist; existence desires you, that’s why you are alive. The moment you recognise this fact great gratitude arises and that gratitude is what constitutes the basic religious consciousness.

[A new sannyasin asks: What keeps me coming back, what keeps me returning? What in my being keeps me returning to this life?]

There are not different things – it is the same for all: it is desire. Buddha has called it ‘tanha’; it is the root cause... because we desire, because we are not contented as we are. When you desire, you create future; the future means another life. When you stop desiring, the future is dropped; when the future is dropped there is no other life possible.

Buddha has talked about four noble truths. The first he calls ‘dukkha’, suffering. All is suffering, everybody is in anguish, in misery. The second he calls ‘samudaya’. The cause of suffering is desire: people are suffering because they desire. When you desire, there are two possibilities: either the desire will be fulfilled or not fulfilled. If the desire is not fulfilled you will be frustrated and you will suffer. If the desire is fulfilled, then too you will suffer, because the desire will be fulfilled but you will still remain unfulfilled. You don’t have one million dollars; one day you can have it but the day you achieve one million dollars you suddenly see that that is not going to help. The mind says,‘Have two million dollars.’

So whether you succeed or fail in desire, you fail all the same. And when one desire fails it leaves many desires in its wake. One desire dies; it leaves many children around. Out of one desire a thousand desires arise, and so on and so forth it goes. The whole of your life you will be desiring and desiring and never feeling fulfilled. Fulfillment never comes through desire; fulfillment is the fragrance of a non-desiring mind.

When you feel fulfilled there will be no birth again because there will be no need: you don’t have any hankering. hen you feel fulfilled you are finished. Then your training on this planet is complete, then your training in this body is complete; you need not have another body.

It is just like you have passed the examination in the university, the final examination. You go home; you don’t come again and again, but if you go on failing you have to return. Failing means something has remained incomplete and you have come to complete it. Nobody is allowed out of life unless he has completed the whole work; unless you have finished your homework you are not allowed to get out. That’s the whole purpose of life.

So Buddha calls the first noble truth, ‘dukkha’, suffering, the second noble truth, ‘samudaya’, the cause of suffering, and third he calls ‘nirodha’. There is a possibility to destroy the very cause; nirodha means destroying the cause. If the cause is destroyed, suffering will disappear. If desire is destroyed... and how to destroy desire? One has to see the futility of it; there is no other way to

destroy it. One has to see the utter futility of it, the ultimate futility of it. No desire can be fulfilled; that is not its nature to be fulfilled, unfulfillment is intrinsic to desire. Seeing this, desire ceases. The fourth noble truth Buddha calls ‘megha’: how to see, how to see desire.

So he has devised an eight-fold path to see desire, from eight different vantage points, so that you see its totality. When you have seen it from every corner and you have understood that desire is unfulfilled and will remain unfulfilled, there is no way to get any fulfillment through it when you have seen it totally, when this understanding has sunk deep into your heart, desire disappears.

And then comes the state of non-desiring. In that non-desiring there is no return. You become ‘anagamin’, a non-returner. But the basic point to understand is: you cannot desire the state of no-desire, remember otherwise you are again back in the trap. So one should not ask, ‘Then how not to desire, how to achieve this state of non-desiring?’

You have not to achieve the state of non-desiring. It is not a result, it is not a goal. You have simply to see desire, understand it, observe it, analyse it, become aware of it. The more you know about desire and the more you see deep into it, the more penetrating you become, the more desire becomes transparent to you – less and less will you desire. One day when you have seen the whole game of desire, suddenly it evaporates. When it evaporates there is that state called non-desire.

It is not a goal. It is not against desire; it is absence of desire, not against desire. And that’s where many people go wrong: millions of people all around the world, down the ages, have gone wrong on this point. They also feel that desire brings suffering. They also see that a man like Buddha has no suffering, is just bliss, so a great desire arises in their mind to attain this state of Buddhahood, this state of nondesiring. And there they go wrong; again they move into the world and they go on returning.

This is the subtlest point to be understood: desire cannot be dropped by desiring. It is absurd to try because you are again nourishing another desire. So this desire may be dropped, another desire arises in you. And it is not a question of this or that desire. Non-desiring is not against desire, it is absence of desire. And how does the absence come? Absence comes by seeing it.

You see that this is a wall, and to try to pass through the wall hurts, that’s all. So you don’t pass through the wall, you search for the door. You don’t ask how not to pass through the wall because it hurts. Desire is a wall: nobody has been able to pass through it. It creates suffering; that keeps bringing you back again and again and again. So once desire is seen in its nakedness, coming back to life disappears, and when coming back to life disappears, then you are life itself... unconfined, unbounded, infinite.

[A seeker says he is unsure about taking sannyas because, although he has been enjoying the meditations: I don’t want to be a member of a church. When I came here it seems to me that it is nearly established.]

I can understand your trouble, because you cannot yet see deeply. You’re only looking at the outside of things here. You’re only seeing the walls, you are not seeing the inner emptiness. It can look like a church, but the Christ is also there! And when the Christ is there, to be in a church is worthwhile. When Christ is gone then to be in a church is futile, dangerous, harmful, poisonous. Then you cling to a dead body. But when the Christ is there it is beautiful to be part of it.

From the outside both will look the same. A man alive and a man dead may look the same from the outside, both may be sitting in a Yoga posture. But the dead man is dead and the alive man is alive. When Christ was there the church was alive. Those first disciples, those apostles, those who followed him, they lived in a tremendously beautiful space. Once Christ is gone, of course there will be only a church.

So start looking a little deeper: on the outside the church has to exist, on the outside it is a must. Just as the body is needed for a soul to be here, so the outside formality has to exist, otherwise it becomes difficult. I can talk to you so intimately because of these people, this church.

Otherwise I was surrounded by thousands of people for twenty-four hours each day. There was no possibility of any intimacy, mm? – I might be talking to you and somebody would come and jump on my feet, and hold me and I would have to stop talking to you. Now Shiva is needed to prevent him; now he is the church. And you may be prevented because of Shiva. You will think about whether to take sannyas or not because there exists an established church.

It was impossible even for me to sleep... because people were there. It was impossible for me even to eat – people were there – and they were taking prasad from my food.… It was impossible to eat! (laughter) They would have killed me! They almost killed me; they destroyed my health utterly. Think about it. The church is only on the outside. Just don’t be misguided by it, otherwise you will be missing an opportunity. And I can see, your heart is ready, so just for small and non-essential things don’t be debarred. An intelligent person is one who goes on looking for the essential. Sometimes he has to agree for the non-essential because he knows the essential is there, it is worthwhile. But think; when it comes, it comes. Good!

[A seeker asks Osho whether to take sannyas.]

Good. Come here, come close. Just look at meYes, it is difficult to know what sannyas is without

going into it. There are a few things you know only when you are in them. You cannot explain what love is to a person who has never loved. You can try but no meaning will be conveyed by you. He may start collecting a few words about love, a few concepts and theories about love, but to know about love is not to know love. ‘About’ is not the real thing; you go round and round. A blind man can know about light but cannot know light, and the real thing is to know light.

Sannyas is a kind of love... a love with the unknown, a discipleship for the unknown. You ate becoming an apprentice in the search for the unknown. And only by searching, by and by will the feel of what it is arise in you. And even when you have known what it is you will not be able to convey to others. You would like to convey something, you would like to share the joy that has happened to you but you will be utterly inadequate. At the most you will try to persuade the other also to become a sannyasin; that’s what other sannyasins are trying to do with you. Sometimes it seems like nagging, sometimes one will feel a little embarrassed – ‘What to say to these people?’ They go on saying, ‘When are you going to take sannyas?’ and you don’t know even what it is. They don’t help you in any way to know what it is. It seems as if they are going to convert you or they are after you. They are simply after you because something has happened to them and they would like it to happen to you too. They are dumb because the thing that has happened is inexpressible.

And that has been the case always. How to say what happens when you are with a Christ? And nobody will believe it. People will think you are mad, you are hypnotized or something.

So I understand your problem, I understand my sannyasins’ problem too. They are too enthusiastic, naturally; they would like everybody to share this joy, this celebration. But new people come and they start feeling a little difficulty.

But the only way to know is to beNow you will know, mm? Help others to become sannyasins!

Prem means love, sadhana means search – search for love. That is search for God and that is search for truth; that is the whole search. That’s what we have been doing for many livesand it

has not happened yet because one can go on searching in wrong ways, one can go on searching where it doesn’t exist. But the search basically is right, the direction may be wrong. Now sannyas will help to bring you to the right direction.

Prem means love, lola means moved by, swayed by, flooded with – moved by love, possessed by love.

And don’t be afraid of loveDon’t be afraid of love, because love is the only life. All that happens,

happens through love. A person afraid of love remains closed to all that is significant and becomes obsessed with the mundane.

If you don’t love, if you are not available to love you will have to do something or other, you will have to keep yourself occupied with trivia, petty things money, clothes, a house, this and that; one remains engaged there. That’s what is meant by the worldly man – one who is engaged, occupied, with the insignificant, non-essential. I call that man religious who is capable of loving and capable of being loved. He goes into the exploration of love. In the territory of love one finds God sooner or later – God exists there. You will not find God in money and you will not find God in gadgets, you will not find God in fame, in prestige, in power; you will find God only in love.

Fear exists in everybody, so don’t be much worried about it. Everybody is afraid of love. People talk about it, and their talk is also a trick: by talking they start believing that they love, because they talk so much about it. People sing songs of love, create poetry about love and paintings about love but they don’t love; these are just substitutes, tricks of the mind to deceive themselves. And fear is natural, because in love you start melting and disappearing. So fear is natural but in spite of the fear one has to go into it.

The courageous man is not one who has no fear, the courageous man has as much fear as the coward. The difference is not of fear; the difference is that the coward trusts the fear and escapes, and the courageous person keeps the fear inside, puts it aside and in spite of it goes into it. That is the only difference between the coward and the courageous man. Not that the coward has fear and the courageous has no fear. They both have fear, fear is human. Only the idiot has no fear, because he has no...

[She answers: But I’m not sure if I’m able to love or be loved. I’m not sure if I can go deep because my mind.]

Don’t be worried – I will destroy the mind! I have started working on you. That is my work; leave it to me. Mm? that is my skill; don’t be worried.

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