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CHAPTER 13
2 September 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
[A visitor says: I’ve come here hoping with my heart to be captured by something and I’m still waiting.
I have this idea that I won’t be able to have the drive to follow a path until my heart is captured, so I’m just waiting.]
Mm, I understand. You don’t know your own strength – nobody knows, hence the problem. You don’t know what you can do and what you can be. And I can understand. It is difficult to know unless you have done it. By doing it you come to know what you can do. The potentiality in itself cannot be known unless it becomes actual.
Everybody is so infinitely potential, but if you are simply waiting for somebody to do it for you, it will never happen, because there are things which cannot be done for you by anybody else. If you want to move in love, nobody can do it for you. You will have to fall in love. If you want to grow, nobody can grow for you. You will have to grow. Yes, others can help, they can show the path, but you cannot be dragged. That’s what you are waiting for.
You are waiting for some father figure who comes and takes hold of you, and even against you, takes you. Nobody is going to come. You are waiting for Godot. That waiting can be eternal, and it will be a sheer wastage. You have to catch hold of your own potentiality, and you will have to start working on it.
Jesus has a beautiful saying, precisely for you: Those who have, more will be given to them. Those who don’t have, even that will be taken away from them. So if you really want to be caught by some force bigger than you, you will have to earn it. It cannot just happen as you are. At least you have to throw the net into the river. If you simply sit on the bank, nothing is going to happen. The river abounds in fish, but you have to throw your net. Then waiting will be meaningful.
Yes, after throwing the net one has to wait, but then waiting is meaningful because one has done something for it; one has earned it. But if you simply sit on the bank, asleep, then your waiting is pointless. Take a jump into sannyas and wait. Start doing meditations, do a few groups here... and have a little courage. Because if you have, I can give you more. If you don’t have, nothing is possible.
The maxim looks a little absurd and anti-communistic, because ordinarily we think that those who don’t have, they should be given more; the poor should be given more. And the saying says, ‘Those who are rich, they shall get more. Those who are poor will lose even that which they have.’ But it is really of a very fundamental nature. It is so.
If you start singing, more and more songs will be coming to you. If you start dancing, your body will start melting into dance and your body will start growing wings. Your body will become more fluid and you will be thrilled with new dreams and new dances. You will become a receptor for more. If you paint, more paintings will start floating in your mind. Your dreams will become more colourful, more psychedelic. Visions will start following you like shadows – but the basic step has to be taken by you.
They have a saying in Egypt that if you walk one step towards God, He walks a thousand and one steps towards you – but only when you walk one step. If you don’t walk one step, nothing happens. So waiting is not bad, but you have not chosen a right time for it. Waiting is beautiful, but take the first step. That first step simply shows, ‘I am available.’ The first step simply indicates, ‘If something is given to me, I will appreciate it. If something is transferred to me, I will welcome it. I am ready. I will drink and absorb it. I will keep it in my heart as a treasure.’ Your first step is a gesture.
So if you are really in search, become a sannyasin, because then you will need a life of commitment, involvement. Just standing by the side of the road, just being a spectator, is not going to help. You will have to move into the very centre where the action is. So don’t be a spectator – that is something that is happening to the western mind. It is almost like a disease spreading. [See Above All, Don’t Wobble, Tuesday jan. 27th 1976 where Osho talks further on this . ]
To know dancing, you will have to become a dancer, because the knowing happens only from withinward. When you participate, then you know.
So that is happening in the spiritual world also. People come from the West. They go from this ashram to that ashram, and they watch what is happening. They have forgotten how to participate. Hence my insistence for sannyas. It simply means don’t be a spectator. Commit yourself. Go into it. Know it by participation – and there is no other way to know it.
So would you like to become a sannyasin or will you think about it?
[The visitor adds: One last thing to clarify. I felt that to become a sannyasin I should already know that this is it, that I should feel some calling, feel something in my guts before I become a sannyasin. The way you talk it’s more like becoming a sannyasin is the beginning of finding out.]
It is the beginning... it is the beginning. Only then can you find. If you are waiting to find first, it will never happen.
This will be your new name: Swami Anand Nigama.
Anand means bliss and nigama means scripture – scripture of bliss, a bible of bliss. That has something to do with your future. You have to make it a point of continuous remembrance to be blissful. Don’t ask for any reasons to be blissful... just for no reason at all. Make it your very style of life.
[Osho said that ordinarily we think that only if certain conditions are fulfilled can we be happy, but bliss, happiness, actually has nothing to do with anything outside one.]
Misery is a way of life. Bliss is a way of life. To be miserable, one has to practise it. And that’s why people are miserable – because they have practised it. And there are others who are miserable.…
A child is born. He starts imitating and practising misery. Through imitation he learns. You don’t have many blissful people around you so it is very difficult to see. All these miserable people have one logic – that something is miserable, and that’s why they are miserable. They will become happy one day – if not in this life then another, in some paradise far away.
These are the majority, the mass. They are very weighty. They function like a gravitation on every soul. By becoming a sannyasin you change your pattern of life from misery to bliss. That is the real conversion.
My insistence is that it is just your attitude that makes you miserable or happy. You can see the same thing with miserable eyes and it will give you misery. You can see the same thing with blissful eyes; then it gives you bliss. The thing remains the same. The life is almost the same. A Buddha passes in the same life, a Jesus passes in the same life, but they have some other attitude, so their.every movement becomes a dance, a pulsation, a throbbing of life.
So this is the meaning of your name – Anand Nigama. It means that now you have become a blissful scripture. Everyone is – you just have to learn the new language so that you can open your inner book and can read it. It contains tremendous insights, it contains great poetry, but one has to learn the language.
The first thing to remember is that whatsoever you are doing, bring the quality of blissfulness to it; whatsoever – small things. You are polishing your shoes or washing your clothes. Why waste time? You will have to use the same time in washing them anyway. You can do it in a miserable way – why not do it in a blissful way? Why not feel happy? Why not do it in a prayerful way? Why not enjoy it?
[The new sannyasin said he had done Primal therapy and Encounter groups:I felt good. It seemed that they opened me up to a lot of misery and made me pretty uptight for a while.]
They can open you, but go on remembering to be blissful and then the same opening will open you towards more bliss. They simply open – these groups open you – but if your style of life is not blissful, they will open you towards hell. They are simply an opening. What you do with that opening will come from your whole pattern of living.
I can give you some plain paper but what you write on it will belong to your mind. You can write beautiful poetry or you can write rubbish. That plain paper is simply plain paper; it contains nothing.
So the same group can open a person towards very very happy experiences, and the same group can open one to very unhappy experiences. It depends. The same happens with drugs too.
There are people who feel that the drug opens a paradise, and there are people who the drug leads into a nightmare, into hell.
The drug simply opens you chemically. What you put in that opening comes from you. It has nothing to do with the drug.
And the same is done by groups – of course in a more human way. The drug is doing something by changing your chemistry. That can be dangerous because you are not changing, only your chemistry is being played with. The groups – Encounter, Primal, Gestalt – function on a better human level. They don’t touch your chemistry. They try to change your mind.
Meditation works on an even higher level. It doesn’t even touch your mind. It tries to transform your heart.
But the openings can be used in a very beneficial way. Do a few groups here. Change to orange and the journey starts!
[A sannyasin said he is repeating the same ‘bullshit’ habits every day, like smoking, and then adds: You say to me to stop all meditations but I come here and do the Kundalini because I love the music, and when I listen to the music I cry]
That’s very good. Do one thing.…
Habits like smoking cannot be dropped in this way – the way you are trying. They become even stronger. The more you fight, the more energy you give to them, because by your very fight you recognize that they’ are powerful. Again and again you are defeated, so again and again you become less and less confident. You know beforehand that you will be defeated. You are in a self-defeating game.
... Forget about it. When you feel like smoking, smoke. When you don’t feel like smoking, don’t. But don’t make it a point that you will smoke or will not. Don’t make so much fuss about it. You are simply doing a stupid thing, not a sin. Taking smoke in and throwing it out is just stupid, nothing else. So don’t make it so important. Don’t be obsessed by it. There are greater things in life to think about, to meditate upon.
There are millions of people who don’t smoke – so what? They have not reached heaven or anything, they have not attained to nirvana. Nirvana is not so cheap. By dropping beedies you cannot reach nirvana. You are making a mountain out of a molehill. Don’t call it bullshit, because that word is very loaded with emotion. You are angry so you will be defeated. You are already afraid – that’s why you call it bullshit. You are fighting it, continuously condemning it, but the whole condemnation will come upon yourself. Next day when you smoke you will become bullshit, because now you are doing something which you condemn, so now you condemn yourself. You feel like an ugly thing. If self-condemnation enters you, it is very difficult to achieve higher peaks of being, because you are so condemnatory that you cannot even believe that anything higher can happen to you.
It has nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with any spirituality. When you don’t feel like it, good. Don’t think then that you are doing something great, obliging the whole world or something, or obliging God – ‘Look, I’m not smoking.’ Both ways it is irrelevant. That’s what I mean when I say forget it.
One day suddenly you will see that it is gone, because once importance is then out of it, it starts dying. You are giving it too much importance; you go on feeding it. It is not the bidi that is clinging to you. It is you who is clinging to the bidi. So just relax.
And music is good. Enjoy it. Move with the music and allow the vibration of it. Don’t hold in any way. Let your whole being vibrate. In fact the whole existence consists of nothing but vibrations – millions of forms, but all the forms consist of different types of vibrations. Even physicists say that the deeper you go into the atom, the more you find that nothing is left but only a pulsating energy, vibrations.
We are made of vibrations, so the more you vibrate, the more alive you are. Hence music is tremendously meaningful, because it can vibrate you. It can bring pulsation to many layers of your being which have become stale, stagnant. It can create ripples in your innermost core. If you allow and you are not afraid, those ripples will go on deeper and deeper and deeper. They will touch your very core, your very centre.
So allow music to enter you. Just become a receptivity, an openness. Go all the way and don’t hold, because holding will create trouble; your energy starts being divided. When music influences you, when you are under its impact, then completely forget yourself. Be oblivious of yourself. Just become part of it, and then you are nothing but a vibration. Then the music will start playing upon you and you will be just like an instrument.
It is going to give you the greatest meditation that is possible. No other meditation is needed.
[A sannyasin says: I’ve never really dared to let myself be as happy as I know I can be, because it hasn’t been allowed me somehow. The idea of actually staying here is too wonderful to believe. I’m not deserving of it.]
You deserve it!
People have very strange ideas. These ideas have been put into everybody’s heads. Somehow one starts feeling guilty if one feels happy – as if happiness is something one should not enjoy. The whole world is so miserable that being happy feels almost as if it is against the world. People are living in such misery that the very idea that you can be happy looks almost inhuman. And we have been trained not to be happy. Happiness has always been postponed for somewhere else in the future, in another world, in heaven – not here. Here is misery. Heaven is somewhere else. And we have been taught that everybody has to earn happiness. That is one of the most foolish notions that can happen – and it has happened.
There is a reason why it has happened. Children are naturally happy and parents cannot allow it – their natural happiness – because they have only one way to teach them, and that is by reward and punishment. If they are already happy, you cannot reward them. If they are already happy, the whole system of reward collapses. So you have to make them unhappy and you have to force them to earn
their happiness. If they behave, if they are good, then you can allow them to be happy. If they don’t behave well, if they don’t follow you, you force them to be unhappy. You punish them. That is the only trick that humanity has come to know, to condition.
So from the very first day to the very last, we go on being rewarded and punished by parents, by society, by the state, by this and that, but everywhere we are being pulled and pushed between reward and punishment. Then naturally the idea arises that one has to earn happiness. Unearned happiness creates guilt – and my whole approach is that happiness cannot be earned. You can be just happy or not – it is your choice, take it or not – but there is no question of earning it.
Happiness is natural. It has nothing to do with what you do, but the parents cannot allow it. The priests cannot allow it because the whole kingdom of the priests exists on this – that if you are good and moral and righteous, you will be happy in heaven, otherwise you will be thrown into hell.
I am saying that there exists no hell – only heaven exists. And wherever you are, you can be in heaven, because being is heavenly. Just to be is to be happy. These are synonymous. As we need not earn our breathing, as we have not earned our being, we need not earn our happiness. Once this false notion of earned drops, you will feel such joy arising in you.
Of course in the beginning you will feel very guilty because what are you doing? – You have not earned it. You are not worthy of it. Your parents will go on saying inside, deep in your mind, ‘Have you earned it or not? Are you worthy of it or not?’ I am saying that everybody – just by being here – is worthy.
I give you happiness not as an award. I simply make you alert that you are happy. All the time while you were thinking that you were not happy, you have been happy. It was just a nightmare of being miserable. Deep down the current has always remained happy.
So I can understand your constant search for being worthy. One.then feels ‘Okay, I have earned it. So it belongs to me.’ But happiness is you.
[She answers: I supposed it always seemed as if there were a quantity of happiness in life – that there was a limited amount, and if I had more]
That too is there. But it is just like air. There is a certain amount of air. You breathe in but you cannot keep it in; you have to breathe it out. The same breath that was your breath a moment before is my breath now. Happiness is certainly like an atmosphere. You breathe in and you breathe out. You cannot keep it in; nobody can keep happiness in.
So nobody is taking it away from anybody else, because it is continuously moving. Nobody can be miserly about happiness. That is something to be understood. You can be miserly about misery, but you cannot be miserly about happiness. Happiness tends to express itself. It goes on exhaling. It goes on merging with the atmosphere again and again. So nobody possesses it really. It is Like breathing. But that too has been put in the mind – that there is a certain amount of happiness in the world so you can only take this much. If you take more of it, others will suffer. This is foolish, but the idea has grown so deep that even parallel ideas exist.
Gurdjieff used to say that knowledge exists only in a certain amount. He was joking, but there are foolish people who believed that too, because they have always believed that happiness exists in a certain amount. Now to think that knowledge exists in a certain amount is parallel logic. Gurdjieff used also to say that only a certain amount of people can become wise in a certain time. All people cannot become wise because only a certain amount of wisdom exists.
When a Buddha is there, many people cannot become Buddhas, because he holds all the amount, so you can only have a certain amount. People thought that Gurdjieff was talking sense. He was simply joking, he was playing tricks; he was deceiving. He was just looking at their absurd minds – that they can believe in this also! There are now Gurdjieff followers who go on propounding the theory that knowledge exists in a certain amount so only a chosen few can have it. Only people who work hard and earn it, who become worthy, can have it. This is not so.
Neither knowledge nor happiness exists in any amount. This whole existence consists of intelligence, consists of happiness. We only have to know how to vibrate with this whole existence. If we can dance with this whole existence, then suddenly all that is there becomes available to us. It is only a question of right tuning. In tune, you are an emperor. Out of tune, you are a beggar. It is not a question of amount, not of quantity, not even of worthiness. It is just a question of getting in tune... Learning how to fall into accord, how to be in harmony.
The day is dancing with the night. There is an accord. They are polar opposites but they balance. Life is dancing with death. There is an accord. And if you can also start feeling a balance between the opposites, the positive and the negative, summer and winter, good and bad, then you are falling in tune. Then in a deeper way within you life dances with death, Eros with Thanatos. And when Eros dances with Thanatos, you become a cosmos. A subtle order arises in you. Then there is no conflict within you. That state of no conflict is happiness.
And one thing more. By being happy, you increase the amount of happiness in the world, because when one person falls in tune, he creates subtle vibrations around him, and whomsoever comes in contact with those vibrations also starts falling in tune They are infectious. So if you are really happy, it is just the opposite to feeling guilty. In fact you have become a great servant to humanity, to life at large. Just by becoming happy, a person becomes helpful, tremendously helpful, beneficial, because whomsoever will come under his influence, in his territory, will be affected.
That’s what I am doing here. My whole effort is to help you throb with me, to be in a subtle love with me so you can become flooded. Once it happens in you, you have a vision of your own. Then you can go on your own. You know how to fall in line with existence.
That’s what Buddha called this morning’s sutra – one who is in accord is great. But to be in accord is happiness.
[Osho said that with money and political power, the more you have, the less is available for others, but that this is not so with happiness.]
That is the difference between worldly riches and other-worldly riches. In the worldly riches you have to grab and rob others. You have to exploit others. In other-worldly riches, by becoming rich, you make everybody rich. The whole economics is totally different. By becoming beautiful, you make
everybody beautiful. By becoming wise, you make everybody wise. When one person becomes happy, the whole world is benefited, the whole world is blessed.
[A sannyasin who is leaving says: I had so much happiness here, but I also know that I have a lot of blackness in me. I’m very frightened that I won’t... that I will lose you.]
No, no, you cannot lose me. There is no way. If you have me, you have me forever! If you don’t have me, that’s another thing.
You are not going to lose me. The contact has happened. It will be growing more and more.
... When you start feeling too starved of me and too much appetite arises, come back!
[A participant of the Enlightenment group said: I kept struggling with the fact that I’m too hard on myself. I’m not happy most of the time. I put myself down.]
Nothing to be worried about. Why be afraid? If you can be happy today, you can be happy tomorrow. You can be more happy tomorrow because tomorrow will be coming out of today. It will be growing out of this moment.
Never be afraid of the future, because the future is not coming out of the blue. It is growing right now. It is growing in the womb of the present. If you are happy, tomorrow is going to be more happy. One can be absolutely certain about that.
Just be happy today, and I will take care of your tomorrow.
[Another group member said: I feel energized by the group. I also feel a little bit afraid of all the energy.
When I was in the group, before it ended I was thinking, ‘I must be careful not to dissipate the energy.’
When I came out of the group I was so frightened by the energy that I dissipated it as fast as I could, because I couldn’t hold onto it.]
Yes, it is still there. There is nothing to be worried about. The thing to do is, if you feel too worried that it should be dissipated, you will throw it through the very worry. When you feel too much energy, deliberately throw it. Let it become a dance. Go on throwing it, go on giving it to people. Shake hands and give it to them. Hold them and give it to them. Just make it a gift and you will feel very centred and settled. This is how it will work for you. If you try to hold it, you will lose it. In the very fear of losing it, you will lose it.
[Osho said that this was the law of reverse effect – that whatsoever you want to do, the opposite happens, and that energy is like a well from which you need to continuously draw if the well is to function. (See Hammer On The Rock, Jan. 3, 1976, where Osho talks at length about this.)]
Sing and dance and celebrate. Go and give to people. Let them also have a little experience of what energy is, and you will never be at a loss.
Give, and more will be given to you.
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