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‌CHAPTER 20

20 November 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Madhu means sweet, mati means intelligence – sweet intelligence. There is a great difference between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is bitter, intellect is argumentative, intellect is sceptical. Intelligence is a totally different affair. It is basically love. It is not negative; it is yea-saying, it is affirmative, it is positive.

Intellect is negative; it is nay-saying. The fundamental structure of intellect is ‘no’. And parallel to it the fundamental structure of intelligence is ‘yes’. Intelligence is a sacred yes to existence, and to all that existence implies. It is essentially religious. It is intuitive, not logical, not argumentative. Intelligence is an insight. It is not a process. You cannot learn it, so no school, no college, no university, can give it to you. They can train your intellect and unfortunately they have succeeded in training everybody’s intellect in the world.

Intelligence can only be provoked, not taught. Intelligence arises out of silence, out of utter quiet; it arises out of your aloneness. It is not a question of information either. You are born with it. It has only to be called forth, discovered; it is there. Intellect is of the head; intelligence is of the heart. Intellect is male; intelligence is female, it is pure feminine energy. And all that is great happens through intelligence. Intelligence is the master, and once intelligence arises, intellect immediately becomes a slave. And then it is a beautiful slave. As a master it is very dangerous; as a slave it is perfect.

When your intellect starts serving your intuition then your life is no more a conflict. It becomes a harmony, and great sweetness spreads all over your existence.

Prem means love, and sheila means virtue. Love is the real virtue. Love is not one of the virtues; it is the virtue. All other virtues arise out of it – compassion, charity, character. All those virtues arise on their own accord if love is flowing in one’s being. And if love is not flowing then the so-called

vices arise. So love is the very decisive factor. If love is there all the virtues are bound to follow, and if love is not there, then all the vices – hate and anger and greed and possessiveness. They are all symbols of the absence of love.

So love is not one of the virtues – it is the virtue. And this is one of the greatest calamities of humanity, that we have praised all other virtues except love. In fact the society has been against it, has been very very alert about it, cautious about it. It has not allowed love to have its natural growth. Love is very stunted in every being because society knows love is a great energy, a great reservoir of energy. If you can possess a person’s loving energy, you possess the person. If his loving energy is given absolute freedom then the person cannot be possessed by the society, by the church, by the state. Nobody can possess him; then he becomes his own master.

Love brings freedom; freedom is another aspect of love. And the society exists on slavery, not on freedom, although much is talked about freedom. But the society’s structure is such that it exploits. It does not allow the individual to have his whole say, it does not allow the individual to be himself, or it allows only conditionally, only so far. And love knows no conditions, love knows no limitations. Hence down the ages all the societies of the world have been very cautious about love; it is dangerous ground. But now the time has come: man has become mature enough to move into the world of love.

And the earth can become a paradise if each individual is given total freedom about his or her love and no conditions are imposed on love. Love freed from all conditions is the ultimate in freedom and becomes the door into the divine.

Deva means divine, pyasi means thirst – thirsty for the divine. The thirst is in everyone; it is inborn, it is innate. We may know about it, we may not know about it, but there is not a single individual who has not got the thirst for god. If the thirst is unconscious then one goes on searching for god in wrong directions, because the search remains unconscious, foggy, confused, unclear. It remains a kind of groping.

In fact, whatsoever we desire is just a groping effort for god. People desire money. Thought about rightly, analysed rightly, it is a search for inner richness: that’s what god is all about. But not knowing what exactly they are longing for they start rushing after money, and money makes nobody rich. In fact the more money you have, the poorer you feel, because in contrast you can see your inner poverty more clearly. So the richest person is the poorest person in the world. The poor person is not so poor because he cannot feel his poverty yet; he has no contrast. He is simply poor, outside poor, inside poor; there is no way to feel the poverty. But when outside you become rich and inside you remain poor, the contrast is so great that even a blind person, even a stupid person, will be able to feel it.

Hence the moment a society becomes affluent, great search for meditation, for god, starts, because only then do people become aware of their inner emptiness. But the search for money is basically a search for richness. The desire is right but the direction is wrong. It has to turn inwards, because richness is an interior phenomenon.

And so is the search for power: whenever you are searching for power, you are searching for something that will help you to get rid of your inner inferiority complex. And everybody feels inferior,

because unless god is discovered everybody is inferior. It is not only a question of feeling, it is a truth, it is a fact, and it hurts! People start searching for power, but they move outside. They can become very powerful, they can become like a Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, and still deep down the same inferiority complex continues, in fact becomes more and more dear, hurts more and more, becomes a wound. The real search for power has to be a search for god, because only god is power; all else is an illusion of power.

And that’s how it is. We fall in love – the search is for thou, but that thou cannot be found anywhere else except in god. That’s why all lovers feel disillusioned sooner or later. A man falls in love with a woman or a woman falls in love with a man: the expectations are great. The woman thinks that she has found a god; unconsciously she has been groping for god. Now she hopes that this man is the one she has been searching for, that this man is her spiritual mate, that this man has been haunting her dreams, and she imagines and she hopesBut sooner or later the reality is there to shatter all

her illusions and dreams and all her fantasies, and she finds an ordinary man! There is frustration, great frustration. She feels as if she has been cheated; nobody has cheated her.

Every lover feels cheated, disappointed, disillusioned, but nobody is cheating anybody. We had hoped too far, we had longed too much; we had imposed too many ideas, too many dreams we had projected upon the person. The person was just there, a victim of our projections. Now how long can we carry those projections? They are against the reality and the man has to live his reality. He cannot go on pretending to be what you want him to be; he has to be himself. Sooner or later he has to assert himself, and the moment reality asserts itself the honeymoon is over.

But the real search is for god, the beloved! And unless we can find god, all that we go on searching for remains in vain, a futile effort. And if god is found then all is found. Then you can love people and you can love without any projection, so there is never any frustration and there is never any disillusionment. One never feels cheated because one has never projected anything. Then you live in reality, with reality, as it is, and then great love is possible. Then we can love people with all their limitations, with all their imperfections, and they are beautiful the way they are. In fact, my own observation is that the first love has to happen with god; only then are all other loves possible.…

Let it become a conscious search. That’s what sannyas is: searching for the truth of life and existence consciously.

Deva means god, divine, magno means absorbed in, drowned in, drunk with – drowned in god, absorbed in god, drunk with god. God is not a theory, it is an experience. God is not a person either. It is an experience of dissolving into reality. It is an experience of melting into the total like an ice-cube melting into water and becoming one with the river. That melting is the whole process of sannyas. Slowly slowly all that you have will start disappearing; your identity, your clear-cut definition will start disappearing. Only the ice-cube can have an identity. When we are frozen we can have identities, we can have egos. The ego is a frozen phenomenon. Hence the ego is always afraid of warmth, it is afraid of love. Anything that’s warm is a danger to the ego. It remains aloof, away from all warm experiences. The ego is very cold: it can exist only in coldness and it can exist only in darkness, because once it is in the light it starts melting. So the ego is part of darkness, part of a cold attitude towards life.

Hence my insistence on dancing, singing, loving, relating to people.… The warmer you become,

the better; the hotter you become, the better. Then the ego starts dissolving, and the ultimate experience of the dissolution of the ego is god.

Madhu means sweet, nado means music – sweet music, sweet sound. Existence is full of music; it is music everywhere, all over. The wind passing through the pines is music, the water descending from the mountains is music, the birds, the animals. The whole existence is a kind of great orchestra. It is a symphony.

Only man has fallen out of step, only man is no more musical. Man is noisy and he has created so much noise in himself that he cannot even hear the music that is all around. He is full of his own noise, his own chattering, his constant inner talk. Awake, asleep, the talk continues, the mind continues. The mind goes on spinning and weaving, spinning and weaving; it is almost neurotic. And because of this neurotic mind you cannot hear the immensely penetrating music of existence, of the cosmos.

To hear it is to be transformed. To hear it is to be reborn. Then life takes on a new dimension. Then life is no more ordinary; it becomes extraordinary, it becomes luminous. It throbs, it dances! It becomes a hymn to god, a prayer. Tremendous gratitude arises in one’s self once the cosmic music is heard. And that cosmic music is always there; it is just that we are not available.

Meditation helps you to become available. Meditation doesn’t produce anything, it simply removes obstacles so that you can hear that which is already happening. Meditation is a negative process: it simply removes rocks so that the flow of music can be heard, so that the music can reach you.

When you are quiet, silent, the still small voice is heard. That voice is divine. And it is absolutely miraculous, mysterious. Its splendour is immeasurable and it leaves nothing but a sweet taste in you – the taste of nectar!

[To a new sannyasin Osho says:]

And let this moment be an absolutely new beginning, as if you have closed the whole past, as if it no more belongs to you. It can be done!

And that is the whole art of sannyas: closing the chapters, dying to that which is no more so that life can become unburdened. The whole problem is that we are too burdened, and we are carrying unnecessary luggage. It is absolutely meaningless; that which is past is past.

Jesus is right when he says ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ One should be able to unburden oneself each moment so that the freshness remains, so that the mirrorlike quality continues to be there. That mirrorlike quality is real intelligence, and god is available only to intelligent people. By intelligent I don’t mean intellectual – I mean innocent.

Children are intelligent. They are not intellectuals but they are utterly intelligent. Their response is of intelligence. Their eyes are shining with intelligence, their whole being is full of vitality, freshness. They respond to reality with their totality. In their anger they are total, in their love they are total; they are always total, and that totality has beauty. And a sannyasin should be like a child, not childish but like a child. Childishness means immaturity. To be like a child means to be utterly innocent,

unburdened of the past, free of the past, not continuously bringing the past between you and your present.

That’s the only barrier that has to be removed. It can be removed in a single blow because it is only a question of you clinging to it; it is not clinging to you. The past is ready to go, to leave you; it has no interest in you. Just because you go on clinging to it and carrying it, it goes on growing every day and the burden becomes heavier and heavier and heavier. Then you cannot move; the burden is too much. It is a mountain on your chest. Life loses dynamism, life loses evolution and becomes boring, repetitive.

The whole significance of becoming a sannyasin is to learn the art of remaining a child. So from this moment be innocent, live moment to moment and live freshly. Bringing in the old gives you efficiency. If you live freshly you may not be so efficient, but efficiency is not a value in itself. You will be more responsive, and that is a real value; you will be more alive.

Functioning through the past you will commit less errors, that is true. That’s why people have chosen to function through the past. It is knowledge, it is skill; it is practised. You have done those things so many times, it is better to do them in the old way, less possibility of committing mistakes. Hence people are burdened by the past.

Don’t be afraid of committing mistakes. A real life moves through mistakes, grows through mistakes. Be always capable of committing mistakes, be always courageous. That is the only way to grow. Don’t commit the same mistake twice, because that will be old. Find out new things to do, new ways of being and seeing. And even if you are not very skilful and not very efficient, it doesn’t matter; you will be more alive, you will be full of juice.

And slowly slowly you will come to understand a totally different vision: that vision is sannyas! It has nothing really to do with religion, it has something do with the total quality of your life.

[A sannyasin, who is leaving, asks for a meditation to do while away. Osho asks which is his favourite meditation. He replies that he doesn’t have a favourite one; but sometimes he just sits quietly doing nothing: I felt that there’s nobody inside.]

Very good. That’s meditation! You can continue that sitting silently doing nothing for at least one hour every day. And one active one you choose – Dynamic will do; in the morning you do the Dynamic, in the evening you do the silent and that will be enough.

Both are needed to give you a balance, because man has two sides, active and passive. If one simply meditates actively then the passive side remains undernourished. And if one meditates only passively then the active side remains undernourished, and that creates a lopsidedness. Man has to become whole, and the wholeness is possible only through balancing. Your feminine, your masculine, your yin and your yang, should both be nourished. So one active meditation will do – Dynamic or Kundalini or dancing – anything, but one.

And then stick to it, don’t change it every day. At least for the time you will be away stick to it, because if you don’t stick to one method you will never go into depth. It is as if you want to dig a well but you dig here one day, another day somewhere else, the third day some other place. You

will destroy the whole land but there will never be any well. You have to stick to one spot and go on digging. Howsoever long it takes, one thing is certain, that one day or other you will come to the source of water. That is there.

Choose a single method, one for active and one for passive. Your passive method is perfectly good. That’s what real zazen is: just sitting, feeling you are nobody, a nothingness, a silence, an absence.

Relax into that absence. disappear into that completely not even leaving a trace behind. That is good for your feminine side. It will give you fifty percent of meditation; fifty percent more will be needed. That has to come out of Sufi dancing, Nataraj, Kundalini; or Dynamic, or anything done very actively.

Then one grows in a very balanced way. So you do this. [Prem punam – full moon of love.]

Love is the only phenomenon that can become perfect. Everything else has a limitation, but not love, because love is the very quality of god. Love is perfection itself. It can become a full moon.

Money you can have but you will never be satisfied; you will always feel that more is still possible. And because more is still possible you are still poor. You can have all the money in the world, still you will be poor because more is possible.

It is said of Alexander the Great that when he was coming to India an astrologer told him ‘Do you know that there is only one world, and if you conquer it, you will be in trouble?’

He said ‘What do you mean?’ The astrologer said ‘Think over it again: there is only one world. If you conquer it you will be in trouble!’

And it is said that Alexander closed his eyes and was very sad and he said ’Yes, I had not thought about it. If I have conquered the whole world, what shall I do? What more remains? And one thing is certain: I will not be satisfied by conquering the world.

Imagination can go on and on desiring more and more; there is no end to imagination. So money cannot take your poverty away and power cannot take your poverty away – only love! In the moment of love, one is suddenly perfect. That’s the beauty of the moment of love: out of nowhere arises the full moon.

Ordinarily we have only glimpses of it, but when you start meditating and you start becoming conscious about your love energy, it can become a constant phenomenon. For twenty-four hours the full moon is there and one is utterly fulfilled. That’s the meaning of your name: love is the only possible perfection in existence. Those who search for perfection in anything else are searching in vain. Only in love is one fulfilled, utterly fulfilled.

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