15

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‌CHAPTER 15

17 December 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, dhamma means religion. I teach a religion which is beyond religions. I teach a religion which is religionless, because religions – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism – have not helped. They have, on the contrary, been very great disasters to humanity. Now something is urgently needed which will not have any adjective to it, just pure religion. A kind of religiousness I teach. Prayer I teach, meditation I teach, love I teach; but no theology, no dogmas, no doctrine, no scripture.

These three r’s have utterly failed: religion, reason and revolution. Religion has failed because it believes in belief, and belief is blind. It cannot lead humanity to sunlit states of consciousness. In fact it helps humanity to remain blind; it depends on blindness. Belief is not the way to truth; belief is the beginning of a lie. You don’t know and you believe – you have become a victim of a lie. Now, you will become more and more rooted in it. The more you practise your belief, the farther away you will be from truth. The belief leads just to the opposite of truth; the belief cannot take you to God. It can take you to the devil maybe, but not to God.

And belief is just a repression, because you cannot destroy your doubt through it, you can only repress. You know that you don’t know, how can you forget it? You can believe that God is but deep down you know that you don’t know... maybe, maybe not. You can go on repressing the doubts deeper and deeper, but the deeper the doubt goes, the more significant it becomes in your life because it starts pulling your strings from the back door, from behind, and you become completely unconscious of it.

Religion has failed because it didn’t help humanity to become more aware; it helped humanity to become more blind, to become more unconscious. And the reason?it depended on belief, not on knowing, not on clarity, not on meditation.

And similarly reason has failed. Reason means the opposite to religion; it depends on doubt, it believes in disbelief. It has also failed because just reason alone is not reasonable; life is more than reason, much more than reason. Reason is not all; it is a very small part – significant, useful, but it cannot become synonymous with the whole of life. Your hand is significant, very useful without the hand you will be crippled – but you are not the hand. Your eyes are significant – without your eyes you will see nowhere – but still your eyes are not you. Reason is very very significant, but reason is not all, it is just a part; there is much more to life than reason. Reason is also significant.

Reason depends on doubt and whenever you depend on doubt, joy disappears because joy happens only when you can say yes; doubt teaches you to say no, only no. Doubt is a way of no, of saying no. So you can go on saying no, but by and by you are surrounded by your own nos. And they destroy you, they suffocate you. One cannot dance with nos, one cannot sing with nos... For the dance and for the song and for love, one needs yes. And reason denies it.

And secondly, this doubt also depends on a kind of belief – very paradoxical. There is a belief in doubt itself; there is a belief in reason which is unfounded. Nobody knows whether doubt is the right method to truth; there is a subtle, tacit belief that doubt is going to take you to truth, that doubt is the way. That belief is as religious as any belief, so you cannot find much difference between a theist and an atheist. The theist believes in God and the atheist believes in the non- existence of God, but both are very very stubborn about their belief; nobody is open. And the third ‘r’, revolution, has also failed because revolution was either dependent on religion – the Christian revolution, the Buddhist revolution, the Hindu revolution or revolution was dependent on reason: the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution. Revolution was either of faith or of doubt, and because faith has failed, doubt has failed, all revolutions have failed. Now a totally different kind of religiousness needs to be released in the world which will not be confined by doubt, which will not be confined by belief – which will be able to absorb both – which will be courageous enough to be contradictory. And that I call the greatest courage of the religious man. He’s so vast he can have both the contradictions – he can have reason, he can have irreason; he can have faith, he can have doubt. He dares to be paradoxical! And only that paradox can succeed.…

Deva means divine, neerava means silence, stillness – divine silence. And let silence become your meditation.

Whenever you have time, just collapse into silence, and that’s exactly what I mean – collapse, as if you are a small child in your mother’s womb. Sit this way and then by and by you will start feeling that you want to put your head on the floor; then put the head on the floor. Take the womb posture, as the child remains curled up in the mother’s womb. And immediately you will feel that the silence is coming, the same silence that was there in the mother’s womb. Sitting in your bed, go under a blanket and curl up. And remain there... utterly still, doing nothing.

A few thoughts sometimes will come – let them pass, be indifferent, not concerned at all. If they come, good, if they don’t come, good. Don’t fight, don’t push them away. If you fight you will become disturbed. If you push them away they will become persistent; if you don’t want them, they will be very stubborn about going. Simply remain unconcerned; let them be there on the periphery, as if the traffic noise is there. And it is really a traffic noise – the brain traffic of millions of cells communicating with each other and energy moving and electricity jumping from one cell to another cell. It is just the humming of a great machine, so let it be there.

Become completely indifferent to it; it does not concern you, it is not your problem – somebody else’s problem maybe, but not yours. What have you to do with it? And you will be surprised: moments will come when the noise will disappear, completely disappear, and you will be left all alone. In that all-aloneness you will find the meaning of... Neerava. That silence is called neerava. And it is possible for you, that’s why I am giving you the name. Do the meditations here, do the groups here, but whenever you are alone, just curl up, go into a womb posture. You follow? A womb posture – just as if you are in a mother’s womb and there is not much space so you curl up, and it is cold, so cover yourself with a blanket. It will become a perfect womb, warm and dark, and you feel yourself very very small. It will give you a great insight into your being.

Deva means divine, and parartha means unselfishness – divine unselfishness. And to be not-self is the source of unselfishness. To be a nobody is the art of unselfishness. Out of your nothingness that fragrance arises. The more a person is, the more he stinks. The less a person is, the more fragrant he becomes. And when a person has completely disappeared there is that fragrance called Christ, Buddha. That is the meaning of your name: start disappearing, start dying unto the self. As the self, die! – then the no-self arises. It is already there, just too much hidden in the self. The self is very noisy and the no-self is silent, so when the noise is there you cannot hear the silence. Once the knowledge, this noise, is gone, that silence possesses you. And that silence cleanses, purifies. A man cannot do that cleansing on his own.

And a man cannot become really religious, because whatsoever you become, you will remain in it. It will not be new; it will be a continuity with the past, and that continuity has to be broken. All these methods of meditation are nothing but hammering at that continuity. In the beginning it happens only for rare moments but once you have tasted a single moment, then there is no problem. Then you know it is, then you can trust. A great confidence arises.

[At darshan earlier this month (December 6) a sannyasin had told Osho he’d felt like strangling one of the girls in the group he’s just completed. Osho advised him to get a doll and for seven days pretend it was his mother, talk and act towards it as he had towards his mother, and at the end of that time to strangle it – kill the mother image in his unconscious. Tonight, he says he was unable to ‘kill’ the doll, but during the night he woke up and felt like making love in a violent way towards the doll, and after that he felt very guilty and took the doll out and threw it in the river.]

Mm mm, that that happened is good too. There is no need to feel guilty. Every child desires to make love to the mother; that’s very natural. Your Christianity disturbed you! (chuckling) Otherwise it was perfectly good, it was as good as strangling the mother. And they may both be related: you wanted to make love to the mother and because you could not, it was not possible, that’s why the idea to strangle the mother.

... It has been really good; something happened. There was no need-to throw it, but it is okay – whatsoever happens, happens. Next time start the whole process again as I have told you. Continue at least for three weeks, and if sometimes love-making happens, that’s perfectly good; go wildly in it! And every possibility is that if you don’t become guilty then immediately after love-making you may like to strangle. In fact you became afraid – the idea was coming, and before the idea could have taken possession of you, you threw the doll. You rationalised that you were feeling guilty, because if love-making creates so much guilt, how much guilt will come when you murder your mother? So you got frightened.

But if you can do both things you will be free from your mother, and that will be of great help, mm? – you will feel for the first time adult, mature. But it worked! Just a few more days were needed it seems, that’s all.

[He says he’s afraid this violence will show towards his girlfriend.]

No, if you can do it with the doll it will not spill onto anybody; if you don’t do it, it can. So the doll is a must, you have to murder the doll! And whatsoever you want to do with the doll, do it. Don’t feel guilty, otherwise sometime you may do it with a woman. Just to protect women I am giving you this method! (chuckling) You are dangerous!

... Yes, it can spill; if you don’t do it, it can spill. It is there. So for three weeks, four weeks do it again, mm? and you will be finished.

[A visitor says: I feel conflict because I’m thinking about you and I don’t trust you and I want to trust you.]

There is no need to want to trust, and you cannot create trust. Whatsoever you create will be false, artificial. So don’t want to trust; that is meaningless, that is not going to help.

If the distrust is there, it is there; just watch it. Don’t force trust on top of it, otherwise you can hide it but sooner or later it will come again.

So just watch it; it is there. Meditate, dance, sing, do a few groups, and it will go. When it goes on its own then trust will arise, and that will not be something brought by you. Something brought by you will not be of much value; it will not have any significance, it will be pseudo. I can understand; and this is not only with you, this is with everybody: how can you trust me, mm? – there is no reason to trust me.

[She replies: But I need to trust myself.]

That need is there in you! That need is there, that’s why you want to trust, but how can you trust me? That creates the conflict. I am so different and I don’t fulfill anybody’s expectations. If I feel that somebody’s expectation is fulfilled accidentally, I immediately destroy it, because your expectation fulfilled, you will think you trust me, and that will be false again.

For example, you want to see something in me, and if you see it in me, you trust. But that is not trusting me, that is trusting again your own mind. So if I feel that there is something that I am fulfilling accidentally, I deliberately destroy it. I will not fulfill anybody’s expectation about me. Only then, one day when your mind is completely shattered, a trust arises, not because of any expectation, not because your idea is fulfilled in me... but simply because you have fallen in love.

Trust should be a fragrance of love; it should not be based on any other motive. It has to be simply pure love. Then you are ready to go with me into the unknown, into the darkness. That will happen... if you wait a little, it will happen. And don’t be in a hurry, otherwise you can create something false.

And there is a great desire, that I can see, so things are going to happen; if you can just wait a little, the fruit will ripen on its own. My suggestion is that you start meditating and do one or two groups. Have you done any groups before?

Deva means divine, renu means dust – divine dust. That’s what we all are made of. It is dust but it is divine too. Each particle of dust is a particle of God. And one should respect one’s body, one’s being. It is the shrine of God. To feel reverence for oneself is the beginning of a great journey. And unless you feel reverence for yourself you will not feel reverence for anybody – it has to begin at home.

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