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‌CHAPTER 12

12 May 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love and gatya means a river-like, dynamic quality.…

The english word ‘go’ comes from the same root ‘gatya’, ‘gathya’ – the quality that continuously moves.

Love is a moving energy. The moment you make it stop somewhere, it dies – then it becomes stagnant, it stinks. While love is moving it has tremendous beauty. Whenever it stops, wherever it stops, it turns into poison. When love disappears, something else starts playing the game – politics, domination, possessiveness. And when love stops, everything stops, then nothing flows. And existence is a flowing phenomenon.

Nothing is; everything is just becoming. When you say ‘the tree is’, it is not right. It is gramatically right, but existentially not right – because the tree is growing, it never ‘is’. It is never, in any moment, static; there is no stasis – it is a dynamism. When we say ‘a man is’, it is wrong – the man is becoming. Everything is a verb, nothing is a noun.’

That is the meaning of ‘gatya’: everything is going and going and there is nowhere to reach. This going is what god is, this on-going energy is god. God is not a goal. If god is a goal then existence is dead. If god is a goal then it is not worthwhile achieving, because once achieved then what will you do? Your love will stop there, your flow will stop there; you will simply become frozen and die!

Nothing is and everything is becoming. One never arrives and one is always arriving. There is no goal – this is pure journey... a pilgrimage from nowhere to nowhere. And all that is beautiful arises out of this pilgrimage between nowhere and nowhere; all that is ugly is energy stuck somewhere.

When your love gets stuck, you start dying – then you are no more growing. Growth is a function of love. If a man can go on loving he goes on growing... even in the moment of death he is growing. If

he can love death too then there is growth. If he becomes afraid and fear arises and love stops then growth stops. A real man never dies and an unreal man never lives. The unreal man only pretends to live and the real man only pretends to die, because reality never dies and unreality cannot live.

Unreality is that which we think of as unmoving, and reality is that which is dynamic, is a process. And the closest we come to god is through love. But it should go on and on. It should remain pure, and by pure I mean: it should not be obstructed by any object.

One should be in love with love itself; then it becomes prayer.

Love for love is love for god. To never betray love is to never betray god – once you betray love, you betray god.

[A sannyasin musician, who plays with a small band in the West, asks Osho for a name.Osho gives the group the name ‘nada’.]

It means the universal sound, uncreated sound, out of which everything is born.what christianity

calls ‘the word’. ‘In the beginning was the word’ – that word is ‘nada’. It is what Zen people call ‘the sound of one hand clapping.’

A created sound needs two things to clap together. to clash; a created sound comes out of conflict. But there is an uncreated sound out of which the whole existence arises. When you move deeply into your inner silence you hear that. For it there is no cause; it is uncaused, so it is eternal.

Whenever a thing has a cause it cannot be eternal – then it goes only so far. When the energy is finished, it drops. Only something which has no cause can go on perpetually, eternally. And it is not out of conflict, it is out of the harmony of existence – what the pythagorean’s in the west have called ‘the harmony of the universe’, ‘the celestial music’.

It has been heard down the ages by all sorts of people – poets, mystics, musicians, dancers. Whenever somebody reaches to a level of silence when thinking stops, it is always there. It is there in you right now but it is very still, very silent. Because of your mental noise, you cannot hear it.

And in fact whenever in music you feel that something is tremendously present, it is nothing but a reflection of ‘nada’. When people listening to music feel lost, absorbed, they have heard something through the music – a reflection, as if one has seen the moon in the lake. It is not true, but still it is a reflection of the true. In China they say ‘When a musician becomes perfect he throws his instruments, because then he starts looking for the real music, not the reflected one.’ The instrument is a way to reflect the real music: it creates a mirror. That is the meaning of nada.…

[A sannyasin came to darshan some weeks ago (see ‘For Madmen Only,’ April 17th) with her baby that had been born with a spinal defect. She said she felt the child hadn’t decided whether she wanted to live yet or not. Osho said to just let things take their course and whatever happened, the situation could be used for growth. Tonight she returns alone. The child has died. She says she feels a sense of emptiness in her stomach. Osho says that she should be happy that the child has been freed from the body. Both of them would have suffered, and when you love somebody you

should think about them more than yourself. He said to fill the emptiness with meditation, with god...

]

Children won’t help. So many people have so many children – do you think they have been able to fill their empty space? That is just a deception. Yes, you will become occupied, that’s all. But to be occupied is just a distraction; it does not fulfil you. And because you become occupied, you forget that you are empty, but that is simply avoiding it. It is there – it is better to see it. And rather than avoiding it, enter into it.

Do one small exercise from tonight, mm? Sit – the way you are sitting is okay (she is sitting with her legs folded under her). Just sit this way and first start feeling that emptiness in the stomach, mm?

Then start feeling that it is coming up; that emptiness like a vacuum is coming up, a bubble of vacuum is coming up. Slowly, slowly, feel it and bring it up, and let it come to the crown of the head. Then suddenly feel that when it comes to the crown of the head, the crown opens and there is a hole. From that hole feel that the emptiness is going out.

And when you feel this hole has come into your imagination, exhale deeply, and with the exhalation feel that you are exhaling from the hole also – not only from the nose and the mouth, but from the hole also. And with that air and exhalation feel that the emptiness is being-taken out, thrown out.

When you inhale, feel that a great light is entering from the hole and you are inhaling light, streams of light... just like foam, light is going into you. When you exhale, feel emptiness going out; when you inhale, feel light coming in. Do this for at least ten to fifteen minutes and then go to sleep. Do it for one month and then you tell me how you are feeling.

That emptiness will disappear and instead of emptiness you will start feeling full of light. You will start feeling that not only is the light inside, but that it surrounds your body. And that light will change many things. It will bring a radiance, a joy, a quality of dance around you. So start from tonight, mm

? Nothing to be worried about. Good!

[A sannyasin asks: I’m a runner and when I run each day I get a feeling very much like when I’m doing dynamic meditation... Can I use it as a meditation?]

Yes, use it as much as you can. If you can run then there is no need for any other meditation – it is enough!

... Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation, and running is so beautiful that you can be totally lost in it. And you are in contact with all the elements – the sun, the air, the earth, the sky; you are in contact with existence. When you are running your breathing naturally goes very deep and it starts massaging the hara centre... which is in fact the centre from where meditative energy is released. It is just below the navel, two inches below the navel. When breathing goes deep it massages that centre, makes it alive. And when you are running, you are throwing all carbon dioxide out of your lungs. Carbon dioxide makes people dull, dead, frozen, blocked. Carbon dioxide is good for trees and very bad for man. We are in mutual agreement with the trees: they inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen; we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That’s why as there are becoming less and less trees on the earth, man is becoming less and less alive, because the partner is dying.

That’s the whole meaning of ecology: we are together! You breathe out, the tree breathes in; the tree breathes out, you breathe in. The tree purifies you through oxygen, you nourish the tree through carbon dioxide.

When you are running, the whole carbon dioxide is thrown out and your lungs are full of oxygen. When they are full of oxygen they purify the blood, they purify the whole system. That’s what purity is; it has nothing to do with morality. Purity has something to do with biology, it is a biological concept. When your blood is pure and is not hampered by poisons and used garbage – it is red and alive, full of joy and each drop of blood is dancing in you – you are in the right mood to catch meditation. Then there is no need to do it – it happens!

Running against the wind is a perfect situation. It is a dance of the elements. And while running you cannot think: if you are thinking, then you are not running rightly. When you are running totally, thinking stops. You become too earth-bound, the head no more functions. The body is in such an activity that there is no energy left for the head to go on and on; the thinking stops.

And in those moments of non-thinking, your existence is pure, you simply are, you don’t know who. You don’t know if you are Indian, German, English, Christian, Mohammedan – you don’t know who you are. All is forgotten, you are unburdened of the head... you are again an animal! In that moment – when you are again an animal – there is a possibility to contact god.

This is my message – that before a man can contact god he will have to become an animal, never before it... because man is a false entity, not authentic at all. Before we can rise high and reach the ultimate we will have to become authentic, as authentic as animals. Through running that authenticity happens.…

It is perfectly good, and now it will be coming more and more because now you know what meditation is. And both these things will help each other: in meditation you will again and again come to those moments which come in running, and in running you will come again and again to those moments which come in meditation. By and by both methods will become one. Then there will be no need to do them separately: you can run and meditate, you can meditate and run.

Sometimes try one technique.… Just lying down on the bed, imagine that you are running. Just imagine the whole scene: the trees and the wind and the sun and the whole beach and the salty air. Imagine everything, visualise it, make it as colourful as possible.

Remember any morning that you liked the most – when you were running on some beach or in some forest. Let it fill you completely... even the smell of the trees, the pine trees, or the smell of the beach. Anything that you have liked very much, let it be there as if it is almost real; then start running in imagination – you will find that your breathing is changing. Go on running... and you can do this for miles. There is no end to it, you can do it for hours.

And you will be surprised that even doing this on the bed, you will attain to those moments again when suddenly the meditation is there.

So if some day you cannot run for some reason – you are ill, or the situation does not allow, or the city is not worth running in, you cannot run – you can do this and you will attain to the same moments.

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