9

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‌CHAPTER 9

9 May 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin asks about his brother, a former drug-taker and now a religious fanatic, who spends the day lying on his bed.]

I understand the type. The only way to bring him out is not to argue with him – the first thing... not to give him any indication that you want to bring him out of his state, otherwise he will defend himself. Even if he suspects, that’s enough, and he will undo all your efforts.

So the first thing: don’t give him any suspicion, any idea, that you want to bring him out. Rather, when you go, feel very happy – at least pretend to be very happy – and you tell him that he is in a great spiritual state; that will be the right beginning for him. Sympathise with him. Not only that – respect him; that’s what he needs. Then you can become close to him, he will take you into his confidence, otherwise not.

This type of person is very defensive. So when you go, just tell him that he is in a perfect state, this is the right state to be in. Ask him to teach you also how to be in it. Be a disciple rather than a teacher; then you can pull him out. He needs to be pulled out. Deep down he will like to be pulled out, but his ego will create difficulty.

So give him the feeling that the parents are wrong, that everybody is wrong – he is right. Once he takes you into his confidence then things will become very easy. By and by you can motivate him to come back to life. For example, how to motivate him? There is no hurry: for one week simply wait, just go and sit by his side, be meditative. Let him feel that you are learning something from him, that he is in some higher state, mm? Pretend it as much as you can – it will be just acting but it will help him to come out.

Then once he starts being close to you and takes you into his confidence, tell him that he has such a great experience – now it is to be shared with people. This is his duty, so he should come out of his lethargy, should share it with people... at least share it with you.

Make him talk to you; don’t try to talk to him. Talking to him will be talking to a madman, a deaf man – it will not be of any use. And talking to him you will feel tired, exhausted. When you are talking to a wall, you feel tired. When there is some response, you feel happy – then your effort is bringing some fruit. When you are talking to a wall how long can you talk? You can go on dissipating your energy and you feel exploited, sucked out.

These people who fall into such a neurotic lethargy become suckers unknowingly. They become like a low place, so whenever you are close by, your energy starts flowing towards them – not that they do it knowingly; it happens naturally. They are like a hole.

So let him talk to you, provoke him to talk. Just give provocation, just small starts – that is the whole art of bringing him out. Tell him, ‘You have got so much and the world needs it, people are in tremendous need. So come out of it – start at least telling me what you have experienced and where you are going.’ Once he starts talking, things will become very easy. If he can be persuaded to talk, he can be persuaded to do anything. Then by and by tell him to come out, to talk to the family, and tell your parents also that this is the way to bring him out: listen to him.

Mad people enjoy it tremendously if somebody listens to them. If a madman can find a person who listens sympathetically, the madness will disappear. That’s all that psychoanalysis is about. You pay the psychoanalyst to listen to you sympathetically, so that he is at least in sympathy. And just through talking to a psychoanalyst, day by day, you start coming out go through a unwinding process. That boy needs unwinding and you can help.

Once he starts talking with you then sometimes sitting by his side, start meditating. Tell him just by the way, what you have been doing in india... tell him that he is far higher than you. Once that is settled – that he is higher than you – then there is no fear from your side. Then he will not be defensive: he will ask about meditations and what you are doing; he will start doing them! But the first basic point is that he becomes perfectly confident that you are not the enemy but a follower.

Go and try. And this will be very good for you too – if you can bring him out... and you can! One just has to be very very artful. The greatest art needed in life is to bring a madman to sanity. You will be helped tremendously if you can pull him out. It will help you to understand your own mind, because in fact it is everybody’s mind.

People move from one extreme to another: first he was thinking that lsd is divine; now he thinks it is devilish. These people are extremists – again one day he can start thinking that it is divine. In fact these people have split personalities, they are two persons: the person who was taking LSD was a totally different personality, this is another personality. These people have a spare personality. When one gets tired they start using the other and the other is just the opposite. Go – it will happen! When will you be coming back?

[A sannyasin says he is not sure whether to continue with his master’s degree in sociology when he returns. He has four more years to complete. He enjoys university life but wonders if he could do more.

Osho checks his energy]

My feeling is that you should complete it; and it can be used in many ways.…

Sociology can become of great importance if you know how to use it creatively. It will give you a background to understand man, to understand the human mind, to understand how the human mind has been functioning in the past. It is your past, it is man’s biography, and if one does not want to repeat the past again, one has to understand it, otherwise one goes on repeating. It can be of great significance if you study it with the right perspective.

Don’t be bothered about it only as a subject and don’t be too much concerned about the degree – that is secondary. The primary thing should be an effort to understand man... and in understanding man everything comes in. Man is his science, man is his religion, man is his art – man is all! We live in a human world! Without the human mind you will not be in the same reality. Humanity has created a special world of its own... and we live in it. It is like an ocean and we are like the fish in it. To understand that ocean is very very helpful in understanding yourself.

And if you want to be free of this society, then to understand sociology is very very important. If you want to get out of the prison, you will have to understand the prison, its laws, the gaolers, the guards, how it functions and who manages it, how it is ruled, and what the loopholes are... from where you can escape, which the weakest links are in it.

No, I would like you to finish it. Don’t be negative about it. And side by side be creative, meditate, but finish it. It will give you a good foundation to start with and much can be done, so don’t think in those terms. And always remember that even if something looks futile it can be used. The question is not whether something is useless or not – the question is whether you are capable of using it or not. You may have one of the most precious things and you may not be able to use it. For example, you can have the best brush and the best colours and the best canvas and your painting may be just third rate, while a great painter may not have the best brush in the world, may not have the best canvas, may not have the best colours, but still creates a great painting. It does not depend much on the materials you use; it depends more on you and how you use them.

We produce better paint now – better brushes, better canvases and everything – but still, a michelangelo is a michelangelo; we cannot produce a Michelangelo. He has done something with colour – those colours were not as good as our colours are, but he has created poetry out of those ordinary colours.

Our greatest painters – Picasso and Salvador Dali and others – are just childish before him. Howsoever skilful they are – our modern painters – they just look like school children. Michelangelo remains the master. He does something to the colour which is not in the colour; that’s the whole art. He brings into the colour some new quality which is not a chemical component. It was not there; it is he who brings it.

So always remember: it is finally you who will do whatsoever you are going to do, and all that you learn will be used if you move in the right direction, with the right perspective, with the right understanding. Then everything that you have lived, known, experienced – good and bad – all can be used. And my feeling is that nothing is useless in that way.

So continue, mm? but continue with this idea: you are not only studying sociology, you are studying your own past. You are studying the past of man and how to get rid of it, how to get out of it, how to get out of sociology and become an individual, how to go beyond sociology, how to really create a psychology. People have sociologies – they don’t have psychologies.

Gurdjieff used to say that psychology does not exist yet because man does not exist yet – only society exists. So at the most, in the name of psychology, we try to understand the science of behaviour, not the science of the mind. Because the mind is not there, so how can you study that which is not there? You can study Gurdjieff and then there will be psychology. You study Richard Nixon – it will be just sociology, it cannot be psychology... or Jimmy Carter – it will be sociology, it cannot be psychology.

Only by looking into a buddha can you see what psychology is. So study it with the view that you have to go beyond it, and all this knowledge will be helpful.

[The sannyasin then asks about a experience he has when about to sleep of an energy rush through his body and he feels like he is dying.]

Don’t be afraid, mm? don’t be afraid. You will come closer to life through that. Any energy experience is going to be a life experience; energy is life, energy is never death. You can die without energy but you cannot die with energy – it has never been heard of.

Mm? – energy is life! When you are feeling so full of energy that you feel like exploding, it is not the fear of death that comes. The fear is that life is going to be too much and you will not be in control. That in the fear – that it is going beyond your control: if something happens now, you will not be the master.

The fear comes from the unknown possibility. It is not of death at all, because death comes only when energy starts disappearing. You start feeling that you are falling and falling and energy is no more there. Death is a zero energy phenomenon. This is absolutely against death. You should enjoy it, you should dance with it and allow it. It is your life, it is your life trying to contact you. It is beautiful, mm?

So next time it happens, enjoy it. Give one hour to it; dance, sing, and go into it. Go really mad – I will take care!

[A sannyasin said that when she was ill recently, she pushed her body to carry on. She feels she doesn’t know the limitations of her body, when she is doing too much.]

This happens sometimes to some people. So do one thing: when you are feeling very very bubbling with energy, try to hold it inside rather than dissipating it. It is not repression – it is simply holding it just as a mother holds the child in the womb. Not that you are against it: you love it so much that you hold it in, you don’t want to give it and throw it away. Not that you are a miser, not that you are hoarding – but you love it so much that you would like to have it inside you a little more. Whenever you feel very very joyful and full of energy, make those moments of silence, of sitting. Be happy but don’t throw it, don’t just start jumping. This morning I was talking about that in the last sutra, mm? – that is helpful for you. Just hold it in, let it become a reservoir, and that will give you great silence, great joy, and it will make you more and more strong.

Once you have started having this energy there, just still, unswerving, once you have started knowing the beauty of it – that just to have energy is so beautiful, that nothing can be so beautiful, just to feel in that moment so powerful, as if you are at the top of the whole world – that will make you alert about your body needs and that will lessen your problems.

Otherwise sometimes you can go on throwing your energy and you will not know it. You can throw so much that you will fall ill, and then too you will not be able to understand that you are dissipating too much energy; you don’t have a sense of your energy.

So while you are there, do this: whenever you are feeling very happy, just sit silently with closed eyes and hold it there. Rejoice in it, sway with it, but don’t throw it. Become very passive. When the energy goes on increasing more and more and you start feeling that it is rising... The level is rising higher and higher and higher and as it rises higher, the higher chakras start functioning.

Otherwise, what will you do? Whenever energy is there you will lose it from the first chakra and it will never rise to the second. Hold it, let it rise.

And remember the difference: I am not saying to repress it, I am not saying don’t be joyful. I’m saying be joyful passively. You can sing a song but very passively. You can even dance, but very gracefully, very alert about the precious energy so that it is not wasted. And then it will enter more deeply into your chakras.

There are only two chakras from where it goes out: either the first or the last – because energy can leak out only from the ends, not from the middle. So if when the first chakra’s energy is there too much, you jump and talk and go and do this and that and become hectic and restless, it will be released by the sex centre. And then sooner or later you will feel very lost, weak. If it is gathered there, then there is no way from the middle.

One day it opens from the last centre, the highest, and then it is not a wastage – it is fragrance. Then you can share as much as you want and it is never exhausted. So just do this while you are there and continue your meditations.

[A sannyasin has finished everything in the West, and come to live in the community today. She says: I have very little to offer because I’m very closed. I have a lot of pain inside and a lot of fear.]

Mm mm! You offer your pain, you offer your fear.

... nothing to be worried about. That is not your problem – that is my problem. I have entered in you already. If I can find a way inside you, then there is no problem!

[A sannyasin said that when she hears music she feels ecstatic and has pains in her body at the same time:... it’s so beautiful. I don’t know what to do with it!... ]

When it gets too much just touch people and your touch will make them ecstatic. Go round running and touch a few people and enjoy that and you will see that they start getting into it!

[I’d like to express it creatively – I wonder if I should dance?]

Dance – dance, sing, mm? – whatsoever you feel like... but it is perfectly good. And I understand: when energy comes that much the problem arises of what to do with it, because we have been conditioned to be doers. We have never been told just to be and enjoy it. So when the energy is there the problem arises of what to do with it? If we don’t do anything it becomes too much and we cannot cope with it.

By and by you will learn to cope with it. There is no need really to do anything, but in the beginning it is good – dance, sing, hold people, hug people, just transfer your energy. I can see that you can become a good transmitter.

You can try it on a few innocent people and see what happens, mm? But really holding them, go mad. Let them be also shaken, mm? And dance... it is very good!

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