15

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‌CHAPTER 15

15 January 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, guha means secret – the secret bliss. Happiness can be shared, it is always in sharing; bliss cannot be shared, it is utterly private. Happiness happens in a relationship, in love. When you are feeling in tune with somebody there is happiness. When you feel in tune with yourself there is bliss; it happens in utter aloneness. It is not part of a relationship. It is meditation, when only you are there – not even the concept of god, because that will also be a disturbance. When there is nobody else, you are utterly empty of everything else – the whole world, the ten thousand things – then bliss arises in your being.

Your being is bliss but those ten thousand things are hindering it; they are there too much, occupying too much space and bliss cannot flow. When those ten thousand things have been thrown out, when you are clean and clear and empty, bliss arises. It is a secret phenomenon, it is not public.

You can come across a buddha but you cannot see his bliss. You can hear a few echoes. The way he lives will be peaceful, the way he walks will be graceful. The way he relates with people will be compassionate, the way he looks at people will be of immense love. But still, these are only echoes. Something which you cannot see has happened at the innermost core of his being. You can feel a few hints here and there, vague; you can suspect, you can assume, you can infer. But you cannot see what actually has happened inside him; there is no way to his innermost core.

Bliss remains secret and even if a buddha wants to share it, he cannot; it is untransferable. He can show you the way he achieved it but he cannot show you what it is. He cannot exhibit what he has achieved. He can show you the way and the method. He can lead you to your own innermost core and then you will know. But before you have reached to your own core there is no way of knowing about it; it is so secret. The secrecy is absolute.

That’s why down the ages there has always existed by the side of the established religion, a secret religion, the occult. It is occult not because those people want to keep it secret; it is occult because

it is secret and there is no way to make it public. The established church is a public thing; it is part of the marketplace. Side by side, parallel to it there always runs a secret church. Only a few belong to it because only a few can rise to those heights. Only a few belong to it because only a few can risk that much.

By becoming a sannyasin you are becoming part of an occult atmosphere. That’s why I have called it the buddhafield.

I cannot give you what I have come to know, to feel, to be, but I can show you the way. And you will understand me when you have understood yourself. Keep that always in your consciousness, that there is a joy which is not of relationship, there is a joy which nobody can give you, there is a joy which cannot come from the outside. That is exactly what is meant by having a soul: having something so secret that you cannot share it even with your beloved. If you don’t have anything so secret, all you have is public. You are not! Then where are you? You are just a collection of public things. Where is your soul?

The soul starts arising only when the secret bliss has started happening. [To a sannyasin leaving for the West:]

Travel and spread my word!

Every sannyasin has to do it now. Let it be your joy to share me with people. You have something immensely valuable to share, you are fortunate; don’t be a miser and don’t hold it. And it is needed immensely; people are in a desperate search for something, and because they are in a desperate search they become victims. There are many people around who are exploiting the spiritual urge of people.

The urge is so new: for many centuries there has not been such an upheaval in human consciousness. This upheaval comes only after twenty-five centuries; it is a cycle. The highest peak of that cycle was when buddha was alive. In India was Gautam Buddha, Mahavira and many other great teachers. In China was Lao Tzu, Lieh Tzu and Chuang Tzu and many other great teachers. In Iran was Zarathustra and in Greece was Socrates and Heraclitus, Pythagoras and many other great teachers. The world has never known a moment like that. It was a great upsurge of human consciousness. That moment is again coming close by; twenty-five centuries are complete.

This age is going to touch its climax, hence so much search, particularly in the young people because they are the first to herald a new age. They are always the first to understand and to receive the new. The churches are dead and the people who go to the churches are dead. They don’t belong to the future and the future does not belong to them. They cannot understand what is happening. They go on reading their Bible or their Gita and they don’t understand that god is penetrating the world again, that a great climax is coming. And after that, humanity will enter a totally new kind of space, a new age.

It entered a new age after Buddha. Religion was completely transformed: a new quality was brought to it, the quality of love. Before Buddha, religion was very cruel; that’s why prophets who preceded Buddha look a little primitive. Their god was very vengeful, jealous, envious, angry, unforgiving. After

Buddha, religion became soft and feminine; it became more aesthetic. It was no more masculine, aggressive, primitive, barbarian. God was no more an angry god; god was love. That’s what Buddha and Christ brought to the world.

Now again, a new step has to be taken and humanity will have to prepare before it can take the jump. This time it is going to be celebration that will enter into religion. Love is good but unless it is a dancing love and a celebrating love, it is mild, it has no passion in it. Now religion has to become celebration: celebration of life, reverence for life.

First god was masculine, then god became feminine. Now god will no more be separate; god will not be a creator as opposed to creation. The next step in human evolution is that god will be creativity, not separate, not a person at all, neither male nor female. God will be simply godliness – no more god... a fragrance, not something concrete, very elusive and mysterious.

Celebration is going to be the virtue. The non-celebrating person will be the sinner. So help people to become more celebrating. That is the message of sannyas – spread it!

[A visitor talks at length about his childhood problems, his pain, his catharting, his need for love. Osho gives him an ‘energy darshan’]

It is not much of a problem. You have been enjoying it, it has become your ego trip.

You want it to be there. You love it, you are fascinated by it; through it you feel special. You are creating it: it is not there in your inner core at all, it just on the periphery. You are managing it and maintaining it, and of course it is hard work so you are tired. It is ugly work, destructive, suicidal, but you have invested in it too much. You can drop it immediately if you want.

That’s why those therapies have not been of much help. If it were a real problem those therapies would have been of help. Therapy can help only real problems.

When there is an unreal problem nothing can be done.

When you go to the doctor, if you have a real physical problem they can help. But if there is no problem and you are a hypochondriac they cannot do anything; they are simply at a loss.

You are enjoying it. You are enjoying the very idea that you have gone through all the therapies and you have failed all of them.

You are beyond their reach: your problem is so deep that nobody can touch it and nobody can change it. It is not a problem at all. Just an insight is needed, a simple insight and you can drop it right now. Not even a single moment’s delay is needed. Because as I see your energy, it is not heavy, nor is there any pain in your heart.

Your body is certainly in a gesture of pain. That is a practised gesture; you have cultivated it. It happens to a few people; it is an accident in childhood. This is the way the child learns how to attract attention. Whenever the child is unhappy, the mother comes running arid holds him; the father looks after him. When the child is ill, the neighbours and the relatives come and sit by the

side of the bed. The child feels like a king: everybody is concerned about him. He is important, he is significant. Without him the world would not be running; he is the centre of all.

Once the child has learned that trick, and sometimes it happens, then it is very difficult – to drop it means to drop your joy.

When misery becomes your joy naturally it is very difficult to drop it... because it is a double-bind. On one hand it is a misery, so you want to drop it; on another hand you have a subtle joy in it so you don’t want to drop it. So, to be or not to be; that remains a constant wavering of the mind.

If you want to drop it, try my suggestion. Simply drop it. And when I say ‘simply’, I mean simply... no ‘how’ to it. There are so many people here, so many women here; make friends, start moving. Just get out of it; and it will be easier here than anywhere else because nobody will help you in this, nobody will pay any attention to you. My people only pay attention to those who are happy; a miserable person is left aside, left by the road. I don’t teach them to be sympathetic to miserable people, because to be sympathetic to a miserable person is to increase his misery. Help him, but don’t be sympathetic and don’t pay any attention. Here we pay attention only to those who are happy. And if you have decided to be mad, then why not be happily mad? Why this misery?

I will suggest a few groups which you have not done – something like Tantra – in which you can move and in which your sexual energy can reach to a new experience. Do a few like this and see what happens, mm?

The first group you go through is individual primal. Two women take that group and they will be taking you as an individual, not as a member of a group. So they will work hard; and the feminine energy is all that you need. The second you do is healing and the third is tantra. Then I will think about something else.

Start mixing with people. They don’t know about your past. They don’t know anything about your past and they don’t expect you to be that way. Just start living something new from tomorrow morning. Laugh a little more, dance a little more. Talk to people, hold hands, hug people, fall in love. Be a little foolish! You look too serious and too wise, and the world belongs to the fools. Blessed are the fools, for theirs is the kingdom of god! (laughter)

Just drop this; it is meaningless. Why waste your energies and your life? And because this crust of misery is there you cannot enjoy love, because to enjoy love you will have to be foolish...

A wise man cannot enjoy love. He feels frustrated. He thinks of a thousand other things and later on he thinks, ‘How much energy I have wasted.’ He feels it was not good, it was a sin, and this and that.

When you have invested too much in being miserable, you will shrink away from all the things that can give joy; you will avoid them. And love is one of the ways to attain to natural ecstasy.

But it will happen. I don’t see the problem. Really, I am not giving you these groups for your problem; you don’t have any problem. I am giving you these groups just to enjoy; and they will help you to come out of it.

Decide this moment to be out of it and see how the decision starts changing you; it simply changes the whole vision. In fact, that’s what you need: just a decision, a commitment to be joyous. And I see that it will be possible.…

You have lived a certain kind of language in the past and you know only that language. But my people will force you out of it; they will drag you out!

[Another sannyasin says: it’s as if I’m resigned. It’s not quite acceptance, it’s more resignation.]

Mm mm. Resignation is not a very good thing, it is not very okay. Acceptance is beautiful; resignation is defeat, acceptance is victory. There is a great difference between the two. Existentially they don’t mean the same. One becomes resigned when one feels all is hopeless, nothing is possible. Not that the desire has dropped; the desire is there. You want to go, you want to become, you want to be this and that, but seeing that great mountains are on the way, you feel it is not possible. So you console yourself. You say, ‘It’s okay; there is no need to go, there is nowhere to go.’ But you know that the need is there and there is somewhere to go, and the desire is there, lurking behind. No defeat can ever destroy desire. It will wait for the right season, and whenever you are feeling more energy again, are more positive, more dreamy, the desire will come back and the resignation will be gone.

Acceptance is a totally different thing. Acceptance does not mean that you have accepted defeat. It simply means that there is no defeat and no victory. The whole idea is stupid! Against whom are you going to be victorious? It is your world: you are part of it and the world is part of you. There is nobody as an enemy against whom you have to fight. You are fighting with your own shadow.

Seeing this – that there is no enmity in existence. that existence is not alien to you, not opposed to you, that it is your home and that you are not an outsider, that you can be perfectly at ease with it, that its victory is your victory and there is no other victory – there is relaxation and then there is acceptance. With that acceptance, things start changing. With that acceptance transformation sets in. Nobody can change themselves. but if one can accept, change happens. It is not through you, not by you. When you are not, it happens.

That is one of the secrets of life: fight and you will be defeated; surrender and all victory is yours. So I will not say that this is a good state, to resign. It is better to fight because one day through fight you may come to the understanding that you are fighting with yourself – the left hand fighting with the right hand and both hands are yours. Victory is not possible, neither is defeat. It’s up to you: you can make the right victorious, you can make the left victorious. The whole of existence is one, we are part of one energy.

If you go on fighting, one day or other the light will come to your mind; your consciousness will be full of that understanding and you will relax. With resignation that J will never come; resignation is repression. So if you have to choose, choose between fighting and acceptance. Resignation is worse than fight because underground a fight continues. It simply becomes unconscious, subterranean.

It is better to fight consciously so that one day, if acceptance comes – and it will come if one fights...

You have to fight! It will depend on how intensely you fight. Put all that you have into the fight, risk all and soon it will be coming. There is never any radical change from the middle; the radical change happens only from the extreme. Resignation will keep you in the middle; it will keep you bourgeois.…

It is not painful but it will never allow you any bliss either. It is not painful, that’s true; that’s why many people accept it. It is not painful, it is very convenient; that I know. But convenience is not life; convenience is a name for death. It is comfortable, it is cozy because it has no adventure, no struggle, no journey – but no growth and no joy either. Pain makes pleasure possible too. They both come together and they both go together.

This is a kind of suicidal attitude. I cannot bless resignation; my whole effort is against it. A resigned person is a very sour person, bitter, angry... angry against the whole. Out of pride he has resigned, but he keeps his pride. He says, ‘I am okay.’ He does not want to say to people ‘I am not okay’, because that will be humiliating.

Look into it again. Resignation won’t help; either acceptance or fight – those are the only two ways. And fight, naturally and inevitably, brings you to acceptance. That’s why I would like you to choose that. Resignation is only delaying. it is postponing. It is saying, ‘We will see tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Why be in a hurry? Everything is comfortable right now; why bother. why bring any discomfort?’

Think it over again.

[The sannyasin answers: It’s temporary.]

It is temporary, so it is better to drop it soon because that time is wasted; that time can be put into fight! (laughter) Be a warrior and only then will you understand what acceptance is. It is only after you have given a good fight to existence that you come to your senses – otherwise not.

[A sannyasin group-member of the Enlightenment Intensive says: I have difficulties to live playfully and I have a tendency to indulge in negativity and self-destruction.

In primal therapy I had the experience of being aborted by my parents... I’d just like to know if this is all bullshit or what.

Osho checks his energy.]

It is bullshit! (laughter) No need to get into things like that. Your problem has nothing to do with your birth trauma, no. But about this you have always to be aware, that if you go to a naturopath, he will find some disease that he can treat; if you go to the allopath, he will find some disease that he can treat... naturally, because to find a disease which he cannot treat will create problems. So if you go to a primal therapist he will find a problem about which he is supposed to be the expert.

Experts sometimes can be very dangerous because they have a very very narrow vision. They reduce everything to their expertise. They have only one small vision of life; that if there is a problem there is a birth trauma, problems cannot exist without the birth trauma. And problems don’t know anything about primal therapy! They come in all sorts of ways, from all dimensions. Experts are

good and helpful because they know something about a certain aspect of human life. But in the same package they are dangerous too because they only know about this small aspect. The expert is defined as one who knows more and more about less and less. If you want to know more you will have to know about less and less, otherwise there are limitations.

You cannot know more about more and more. You have to define, confine; you have to make your vision very very concentrated, then only do you know more. So by and by a point comes when the vision of the expert becomes so narrow that he becomes almost unaware of the totality of life. Experts are almost always becoming blind. Listen to them but don’t believe in them too much.

Your problem has nothing to do with your birth trauma; you need not solve it there. You can solve it now; there is no need to go backwards. Your problem is that you have become very skillful in creating the negative. And of course when you become too skillful in creating the negative you go on finding it. We go on finding that in which we become skillful. We only find that for which we look. The world is vast, it contains all, infinite alternatives are there and the reality is an open reality; but we choose.

You have become an expert because it gives great food to the ego. The positive is a death to the ego; the negative is nourishment. The egoist will always be critical, always criticising. He cannot say yes, it is very hard for him to say yes; he will rather die than say yes.

If you bring him to the rosebush he will start counting the thorns. He will not see the rose. And even if you show him, he will say, ‘So what?’ The real reality for him is the thorns, and naturally when you count thorns you may be hurt by them; then you become more negative. Blood may come to your hands; then you become even more negative. Thorns start looking so big, out of all proportion to the real, because your anger and your blood, everything, gets involved in them. When your blood has come, you are hurt and wounded, then it is impossible to see the rose. You become oblivious to it; it no more exists.

We are taught to be egoists. The family, the society the school, the university, all teach us to be egoists and the basic need in being an egoist is to be negative. Here, we are trying just the opposite. Here I am teaching you to say yes to life, to love, to people. Yes, there are thorns, but there is no need to count them; ignore them. Meditate on the rose. And if your meditation goes deeper into the rose and the rose goes deeper into you, thorns will start becoming smaller than they are. A moment comes when the rose has possessed you totally; there are no more any thorns in the world.

So it is not a question of your birth. It is not a question of heredity, past life; it is simply a question created by the culture, the society. And because it is created by the society, it can be very easily dropped. You are simply a victim of it. Your only responsibility is this, that you go on accepting it and cooperating with it. You are not responsible for it; your only responsibility is this much, that you cooperate with it. Don’t cooperate and it will die on its own.

Start putting your energy into yes; make a mantra of yes. Every night before you go to sleep, repeat, ‘Yes, yes...’ and get in tune with it. Sway with it, let it come over all of your being from the toe to the head. Let it penetrate; repeat ‘Yes, yes, yes,...’ Let that be your prayer for ten minutes in the night and then go to sleep and early in the morning again, at least for three minutes, sit in your bed and do it. The first thing to do is to repeat yes, and get into the feel of it. In the day whenever you start

feeling negative, just stop on the road, anywhere. If you can say loudly ‘Yes, yes...’ good; otherwise at least you can say silently ‘Yes, yes...’ For three weeks practise yes.

[A sannyasin couple ask for a name for their school of ‘psychic opening’ in America]

This will be the name: madhu. Madhu has many meanings. One meaning is wine... but not wine of this earth, divine wine. The second meaning is honey, which is symbolic of love, sweetness – which is symbolic of the feminine. And only the feminine energy can open, the opening is feminine. The feminine is the womb. When the psychic energy opens, it becomes feminine; when the psychic energy is closed, it becomes masculine.

People are so tense and closed because the masculine pattern has been imposed upon them too much. Each man and each woman should be capable of being both. No man should only be capable of being a man; he should be capable of being a woman too. And vice versa: no woman should be only able to be a woman; she should be able to be a man too. Then only is a being a human being – when the polarities are both there, available, and there is freedom. Because there are moments when one needs to be a woman; love needs, meditation needs, prayer needs. And there are moments when one needs to be masculine; otherwise life loses zest, becomes placid. Life loses rebellion, because the feminine cannot be rebellious, it can be religious but not rebellious.

That’s why in India there has not been any rebellion. The religious consciousness became feminine. In that way Christ is far more balanced than Buddha. Buddha is utterly feminine, has lost track of his masculinity. Jesus is still capable of becoming masculine if it is needed. He can drive the money-changers from the temple, he can shout, he can fight; and he is very soft, he can relax. He can talk about love, and he can say to people ‘I have come to destroy, I am fire. If you come close to me, beware!’ He is a lotus flower too. When a man is capable of becoming a lotus flower and fire, can swing from one to the other, this is freedom; there is no other freedom. This freedom has to be brought to each person.

Madhu means wine. One can be intoxicated with god. So in the ancient days, in india particularly, spiritual science was called ‘madhu vidya’ – the science of getting intoxicated. It means love too, or sweetness. And when you really open to the world, to existence, you actually taste sweetness. Something sweet starts flowing in your being. No other word than sweet can express it. Even sweet is a very far-off echo, a distant echo. So call it this small name, madhu...

And you will be with me there and I will be with you. Much has to be done. Now it is not only your work. Many many more people will be coming to you, so help people; let that be your prayer.

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