15

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‌CHAPTER 15

15 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, nijo means individuality. Individuality is your essential core. Individuality is not your personality. Personality is given to you by the family, the society, culture; individuality is that which you bring into the world – that is your original face. The individuality gets lost in many layers of personality, and a man has many personalities. You have one personality with your father, another with your mother, another still with your wife, another with your child, another with your servant, still another with your boss. You have many personalities, you have many faces, because you need different faces with different people in different situations.

So personality is just a changing flux around you. It is like the surface of a lake, continuously wavering, waving, rippling. It is not its depth. It is constantly at the mercy of the winds. The personality lives through the stimulus it gets from the outside; it is a stimulus-response. And people have completely forgotten about their individuality.

The whole work of meditation is to help you to recover it, to reclaim it – your original face, your originality, your nature, your essential nature. And that is what god is. God is everyone’s essential core. The personality is Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Communist, Fascist, Socialist; the personality is white, black, Chinese, Indian, German. It has so many colours, it comes in all shapes and all sizes.

But the individual core is nothing but god... the taste of totality. And it is always there. However many layers there are, they don’t destroy it. Millions of layers can be there but the treasure remains intact. Whenever you start penetrating your layers, whenever you start peeling your onion, one day suddenly you find the essential core. That is freedom, that is bliss, and that is the only way to be really alive, ecstatically alive.

Sannyas is a search into the individual, beyond the personal. The individual is universal.

Anand means bliss, atita means of the beyond – bliss of the beyond, transcendental bliss. Happiness is of the earth. It is earthly, hence it is momentary. And in the wake of it there is always unhappiness, because the earth exists in a kind of duality. Everything is a dichotomy: light and darkness, happiness-unhappiness, pleasure-pain, life-death.On the visible plane everything is dual, polar,

diametrically opposed to something; this is the dialectics of existence. But beyond the duality there is also something transcendental which is one, undivided. That is bliss. It has no opposite to it.

It happens only when one has gone beyond happiness and beyond unhappiness. How to go beyond happiness and beyond unhappiness? Everybody wants to go beyond unhappiness but nobody wants to go beyond happiness, and that is the whole crux of the matter. If you don’t want to go beyond happiness you will never be able to go beyond unhappiness; they come together. People want happiness, and just hidden behind it comes unhappiness. And they are always in the same proportion: the more happiness you have, the more unhappiness you will have. They always balance each other. The more you laugh, the more you will have to cry; the more you love, the more you will have to hate. They always balance.

So one who really wants to go beyond this continuous conflict of the dual has to see the pint that if you cling to one pole, the other pole is bound to remain there. So don’t cling to either – just become a witness. When happiness comes, witness it. Just be a watcher, unentangled, untouched by it. It is there; take note of it. Say to yourself, ‘Happiness is there but I am not it. I am just the watcher, the mirror that reflects it.’ Don’t get identified with it and that is the secret key.

So when unhappiness comes, you use the same key again. Unhappiness is there, take note of it: ‘I am just a mirror reflecting it. I am not it. I cannot be it.’

When one has become a witness to happiness and unhappiness, that witnessing leads to the transcendental. Then one goes beyond the two and becomes one. And that oneness is bliss. And that is the goal of all life: how to go beyond the two, how to go beyond the conflict, how to go beyond this constant division in one’s being. To attain to one is to attain to god. That one is called god, another name for that one.

Deva means divine, magan means utterly absorbed, intoxicated, drunk – drunk with the divine, intoxicated with the divine, lost in the divine.

Man can exist in two ways. One is the way of the ego: separate from the whole, defending his own territory constantly, defining himself in separation like an island. But that is the way of misery, the way of anxiety and anguish, because it is absolutely unnatural. Man is not an island; nobody is, nothing is. We are all joined together: it is one universe. That is exactly the meaning of the word ‘universe’; uni means one. It is not a multiverse; it is a universe. We are all one, howsoever separate we appear; that is only an appearance. One should not be deceived by the appearances. We look separate but we are not separate. We cannot be separate; separation is impossible.

One tree looks separate from the other tree but they are joined in the same earth, they are joined with the same sun, they are joined with the same air. How can they be separate? They only appear to be, otherwise they exist in the same ocean of life. The ocean may not be so visible, but it is there. If the sun simply disappears tomorrow morning, forgets to rise or changes its route, all life on the earth will immediately cease, immediately. We will not even have time to discuss it. We will not even

have time to be aware of what has happened. And it will not only be man who will disappear – the birds, the animals, the insects, the trees, all life will disappear. Life exists as one vibe.

To see it and to start living it is sannyas. To start feeling it is sannyas, and that is another way of life, a totally different kind of style. It is not of the ego, it is of unity with the whole. Sannyas is a step beyond the ego into the whole. It is to be drowned into the whole, absorbed, and immediately a great blessing arises. All anxiety disappears. Anxiety is possible only if you are separate. If you are not separate, how can anxiety be there? – there is nobody to be anxious about. And then there is no fear, because you are not there to die.

If you are one with the whole then there is no death; the whole never dies. It is only the parts who come and go, it is only the waves who come and go. The ocean remains, abides; it is eternal. And when you are one with the eternal, where is the fear? Where is anxiety? Where is anguish? When you are not separate you don’t have a private goal, hence there is no anxiety of whether you will make it or not. There is nothing to make, nowhere to go. Then one is utterly herenow.

To be with the whole is to be herenow. If you are separate you cannot be herenow; you will have to think of tomorrow. You will have to manage, you will have to plan, you will have to project, and, certainly, when you project fear is always lurking. You may be able to manage it; you may not be able to manage it. You are so tiny and the universe is so big; the fight is doomed to fail. You cannot fight with the whole. It is trying to go upstream and wasting your energy.

Those who know, if you ask them, if you ask the awakened, they will say ‘Drop all fight and go with the wind like a dry leaf, with no private goal of your own. Let the whole decide the goal and wherever it is going it is good.’

This relaxation is sannyas... this let-go is sannyas.…

Deva means divine, sanjayo means victory, but with a special flavour to it – not an ordinary victory. In English there is no equivalent word for it. It can be translated as ‘right victory’.

The ordinary victory is always wrong victory, wrong, because it is not really happening; you are only imposing it on the other. It is a coercion, it is violence. The other is silent but will wait for its time. The other is silenced but not won over. The other is not yet a friend... and this is no way to make friends; this is the way to make enemies. Then what is right victory?

Right victory is totally different. It is out of love, it is through love; it is not coercion on the other. It is not in any way a rape on the other’s being; on the contrary it is a surrender. When a lover surrenders to his beloved or a disciple surrenders to a master or a devotee surrenders to god or a poet surrenders to the beauty of the world, whenever there is that surrender, it is right victory.

So right victory is a paradoxical phenomenon. It does not come by becoming victorious; it comes by surrender. To be defeated in love is to be victorious.

Deva means divine, abhar means gratitude. And gratitude is real prayer. To be grateful is to be prayerful. Prayer is not a demand, it is not a complaint, it is not asking for something, it is not a desire; if it is, it is not prayer. It is just a thankfulness for all that the existence has done, for all that has been given to us.

Each moment is so precious that it is really impossible to understand how people can remain ungrateful to existence. Each breath is a miracle, and miracles abound. Wherever you look and whatsoever you see is a miracle. The seed becoming a sprout is a miracle. The sun rising in the morning is a miracle. The night full of stars is a miracle. To look into the eyes of another human being is a miracle and there are depths upon depths and you can never come to an end. If you look into the eyes of another human Being you enter into an infinity. Each flower is a miracle and each stone, yet man is insensitive.

That insensitivity is what I call irreligiousness. I don’t call the person irreligious who does not go to the church or to the temple. The irreligious person is one who has lost sensitivity, who is no more receptive to the glories of life, who is no more available to the splendours.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said as his last words, that the greatest and most profound thing in existence is the feeling of wonder and awe. That’s what the real religious attitude is: the feeling of wonder and awe. And when you feel the wonder of all that is and you are full of awe. prayer arises as a fragrance. with no effort. It arises as gratitude, and in that gratitude god is found.

Gratitude is the beginning of god: you start with gratitude; one day you end in god. Gratitude is the direction of god. One need not believe in god. one can do without believing in god, but one should be sensitive to nature, to all kinds of experiences. One should be like a child – full of wonder and awe. And one should remain alive to this childlike quality so that each moment in life is a surprise. One should never allow oneself to become knowledgeable, because the knowledgeable person loses awe, loses the quality of wonder, becomes insensitive and then is no more grateful.

And the wonder goes on and on, and the splendour goes on and on but there are blind people, millions of them. They have never bowed down to the earth, they have never hugged the earth, they have never kissed the earth, they have never looked at a tree. They have no time. Because of this, humanity has become more and more irreligious. Temples are millions, churches are millions, but it is very rare to find a religious person.

My effort here is not to create a temple, not to create a church, not to create a ritual but to create wondering, that great quality of awe, of love, of beauty, and it all leads to gratitude.

[A sannyasin says: I want to return now to my studio and start painting before my teaching duties take up again.… I have lots of material to work from...

You will be able to do it! This is going to be the greatest thing that you have ever done... because I will be in it, part of it!

And you are growing. Growth does not need much work. All that it needs is a kind of let-go, and that is happening. It is let-go that brings grace, it is not human effort. With human effort we can do only mundane things. That which is great always happens; it is never done. It comes, descends; it is not manufactured.

Growth is a natural phenomenon... just as trees go on growing. All that is needed is that.Man is

no more as natural as trees. So many hindrances have been created by the society, so many rocks; the roots cannot move, and many roots have been cut. So all that is needed is to become aware

of the rocks and just becoming aware of them is enough. They are removed by becoming aware of them, because they are rocks of unawareness. They are not material things, so it is not a question of becoming aware and then removing them. Just in the very act of becoming aware they are removed. They consist of unawareness, so when you become aware they cannot exist; they disappear. And then life becomes a growth. And when life starts growing on its own, there is tremendous joy. And then each moment is unpredictable because you cannot see what is going to happen next moment.

Even while painting you cannot know what is going to happen next moment.

You will be able to know only when it has happened. And then it is not only a surprise to others, it is a surprise to the painter himself, to the poet himself. If the poet is not surprised by his poetry it is ordinary poetry. He has managed it; it has not come from the beyond. If the painter is not ecstatic, surprised, taken aback by his own painting, then it is an ordinary painting; it is not a masterpiece. But when something great happens the painter is as much surprised as anybody else, in fact, more so, because he has been involved in it, it has come through him, and yet it is not his. A hand from the beyond has reached. He was simply available, he was instrumental, a medium.

And whenever art has that quality, of descending ; from the beyond, it is religion, it is mysticism. It is the way that great things have happened in the past, it is how they have always happened. It is not by manipulation. It is by becoming available to god, just becoming available and saying ‘Whatsoever you would like, do with me. I am at your disposal.’

That’s what Jesus said at the last moment ‘Let thy kingdom come. Let thy will be done.’ That should be the motto of all painters, all poets, all musicians:

‘Let thy kingdom come. Let thy will be done. Let me be removed completely. Don’t allow me to stand in your way. Let me be just a passage, empty, a hollow bamboo’ and then the hollow bamboo immediately becomes a flute on his lips!

Much is going to happen, and you have come at the right moment. It is always a question of the right moment. Sometimes people come to me when the moment is not right, they are not in the mood to receive me; they will come and they will go. And even if I want to give to them, it is impossible, they will not take it. But you came at the right moment – you have prepared for it your whole life. Now miracles will start happening. And your painting is going to become your meditation. You are going to grow through it, and as you grow, your paintings will grow. And as paintings grow deeper and more profound, you will become deeper and more profound. You are on the right track – just go on moving.

It is said that once a man came across Socrates and he asked Socrates ‘I am a stranger in these parts. I want to go to the temple of Delphi. How should I proceed?’ He was not aware that he was talking to Socrates.

Socrates says ‘Just go on moving exactly in the direction of your nose and you will reach.’ And that’s what I say to you: Just go on moving in the direction of your nose. Your nose is pointing to the right direction, just go on moving and you will reach the temple. The temple is not far away.…

[A sannyasin man asks about his passivity: Sometimes I feel like it is a very strong female part in me – just wanting to be passive, receptive and not active. But sometimes I just think I’m lazy.…

Osho checks his energy.]

Good... perfectly good. It is absolutely right to be feminine. You should feel fortunate, because this is the quality that one needs in the search for god. One can move towards god only in utter passivity. One cannot be aggressive towards god. In the East we have a saying: ‘God is the only male and everybody else is female.’ It is in deep feminine receptivity that god penetrates. So this is the quality of a disciple, of a devotee.

The problem is arising because of your Western conditioning. In the West the male ego is praised. To be active is thought to be very valuable. In the East we have learned something more profound. To know the art of inaction is the greatest thing in the East – we call it tao, wu-wei. And this inaction is not lethargy. Much action happens through it, but you are not the doer. The doer is god, you are just a vehicle. So it is not lethargy. Action will be there but it will come through inaction. And you are ready for that jump.

Rather than feeling it as a problem and making it a curse, accept it with joy and gratitude. this is the quality in the East people try to years to attain, and when they attain it they have already arrived; almost half the journey is over. Then the remaining half is to be done by god, not by you. You have taken your step and you are already there where god can immediately penetrate you. All that you need is to drop this male chauvinistic mind and this attitude that one has to be strong.

There is a strength in being delicate too, a totally different kind of strength. There is a strength that only a woman can have and no man can ever have; that is the strength of love, softness. Man is like a rock and the woman is like water; hence the beauty of the woman and the roundness and the softness and the vulnerability. It is not an accident that the woman has been chosen by nature to be the mother, because only she is capable of being pregnant, because she is receptive!

So don’t be worried about it – it is not a problem at all. It is a blessing and we will use it. And this is the place where it can be used perfectlyBut drop this idea – there is no problem at all. This is the

way you should be. The way you are is the way you should be.

Trying to become active and trying to become stronger will be like putting legs on a snake. It is unnecessary, and not only unnecessary, it will hinder the snake moving. The snake is perfectly able to move without legs; legs are not a necessity. You don’t need to be more active. You can simply move as feminine energy. it is beautiful.

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