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‌CHAPTER 15

16 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Darpano means the mirror. The moment one starts functioning as a pure mirror, god is revealed immediately. God is already here: we are just not a mirror to him. One need not search for god, because he is not far away: he is very close, he is closer to you than you are to yourself. All that is needed is to become a pure receptivity, with no interference. That is the beauty of the mirror: it doesn’t interfere, it simply reflects that which is. It does not project, it does not impose anything. It is simply there, with no idea of good, bad; with no judgement. A beautiful woman comes before it, it reflects; an ugly woman comes before it, it reflects. It has no likes, no dislikes, no prejudices at all: it is simply empty.

This is what meditation creates in you: meditation creates a mirror of consciousness.

The ordinary mind is full of thoughts, desires, ambitions, prejudices, beliefs, superstitions, ideologies. They are all there clamouring, creating great noise. They are like dust on the mirror, and the dust is so much that the mirror has completely disappeared; you cannot look into it.

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.

Deva means god, shahid means beloved. God is the only beloved. We have been seeking the beloved in different ways, in different lives, but we have not yet arrived because we have not been seeking god consciously; the search has been an unconscious search. It has been more like a groping, less like a search. Search means intensity, awareness, watchfulness.

There is an unconscious longing in every being to know the truth, to be the truth; but it is an unconscious longing. The first step towards truth is to make it conscious. That’s what sannyas

is. The first thing that I have to help you to do is to make the search conscious. It should not be a groping, it should not be deep in the darkness of your being; it should come to the lighted part of your being. If it remains unconscious we go on moving into wrong directions.

People search for money. In fact they want to be rich, and one can be rich only when one has achieved to god, never before. But the unconscious search for inner richness becomes distorted and we start searching for money.

People search for power but the real power is with god. Without god we have no power. But if the search is unconscious then one becomes a politician, one wants to become a prime minister of a country or a president. Ultimately one will find tremendous frustration because that was not the real search. Something got distorted; the unconscious was not interpreted rightly.

Just as you need a psychoanalyst to interpret your dreams to yourself – they are your dreams, but you cannot interpret them because a certain skill and understanding is needed to interpret them, and they are very metaphoric, they are not literal, because the unconscious speaks in metaphors – in the same way a master is needed to transform your unconscious desire for god into a conscious flame. And once it has happened, life takes on such a quality of which you had not even dreamt before. When one’s whole life becomes just a rush towards god – just as a river is rushing towards the ocean – then life is so rich, so beautiful, has such grandeur, is a splendour.

That is the meaning of your name. From this moment think of god as the beloved. Whomsoever you love, search for god in him, in her – in your children, in your wife, in your friends, in your parents; whomsoever you love, search for god in them! Let each lover be now the beloved, and you will see a great change happening of its own accord.

Bodhi means awareness, sagar means ocean – an ocean of awareness. The mind is tiny, narrow, very small, petty: consciousness is oceanic. Hence we all feel suffocated in the mind. We are vast, huge, immense, and the mind is so small; it is a prison cell. There is no way to grow in it, and it becomes smaller and smaller every day. The child has a bigger mind than the young man. The young man still has a little more space than the old man, because as one experiences more and more things, all those experiences go on accumulating in the mind. More and more space is occupied by unnecessary furniture – by memories, the past, experiences, knowledge. Slowly slowly a moment comes when you don’t have any space to live in, no possibility of any movement. You are simply stuck, drowned in your own mind.

That’s why in children you see a certain intelligence. It is very rare to find that intelligence in old people, and whenever you can find that intelligence in an old person, that shows he has lived well. That shows he has not been accumulating baggage, unnecessary luggage. That shows he has been able to die moment to moment to the past. He has kept his space intact. He has remained uncorrupted by experiences, uncontaminated by experiences, unpolluted by experiences. He is still a child: open, vulnerable, full of wonder and awe. He has not de-mystified experience, existence, life; the mystery is still there.

But even then, the mind of a child is small – spacious, more spacious than the old man, but still small.

Consciousness needs the whole sky. It is an ocean. In some moments you slip out of the mind and you experience the ocean too. Watching the night full of stars you slip out of the mind. You forget all about your mind – your worries, your name, your address, your thoughts. For a moment you are transported. You are no more part of your so-called identity; you lose your identity. For a moment the whole sky is yours, for a moment all those stars are moving within you; hence the liberating experiences of nature, of beauty, of love, of music.

Any experience that liberates you on the mind becomes an experience of god; but those are rare moments, and you don’t know how they happen. They happen almost of their own accord: suddenly one day things fit. You slept well, the night was undisturbed, there was not a single nightmare: your mind is clean and fresh, you are feeling very vital, rested, relaxed. You see the sunrise and the birds singing... and it happens! But you are not able to create the space yourself, it was just coincidental, hence it cannot last long; it comes and it goes.

Sannyas means becoming capable of creating that space of your own accord. That is the whole art of meditation, of yoga, of tantra, of tao. The whole art is simple: how to create a space where the beyond can penetrate you. That space can be created, and because that space can be created religion has relevance; otherwise there would be no relevance, no relevance of religion. Then there would be science, which knows nothing of the beyond, and there will be poetry, which knows only coincidental moments of the beyond.

Religion is a conscious effort to create that space, to give the invitation to god, to provoke god, to open oneself in such a way that god has to come.

Prem means love, arifo means wise – wisdom through love. Knowledge needs no love: wisdom is based in love, and that is the beauty of wisdom. Knowledge is dry: it only collects dead facts about life. It cannot come in contact with real life, because real life is love.

The scientist is trained to remain aloof, dispassionate, not to get involved; he has to be there just like a computer. That is not the way to know life. That’s why science goes on knowing only something that is dead. It knows about matter; it misses all that is alive. It has no vision for life, no opening for it.

The poet also knows, but in a different way; he knows very lovingly. His knowledge is not dispassionate, he is involved in it. He participates in what he knows, but his participation is not total, it is momentary: sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t happen. He is not a master of his own life, so one day he feels great poetry arising in him and the next day all has disappeared; he is just a dry wasteland, a desert. One day a flower blooms and then for months there is no flowering.

The mystic knows life in the same way as the poet, with one difference: he remains totally in contact with life. Each moment he goes on renewing his contact. He is a master: he is not just accidentally in participation with existence, he has created the space to be in that participation. He knows how to create it and he goes on creating that space and he goes on and on participating; even when he is asleep, he is a participant. And then great mysteries are revealed to him.

That is the meaning of arifo: a mystic, a wise man, a saint, who has come through love, whose knowing is another name for loving, whose knowing is rooted in loving, whose knowing is part of his prayer.

The scientist is the most gross: the mystic, the most subtle. The scientist moves into the visible: the mystic, into the invisible; and the poet is just a mid-way house between the scientist and the mystic. Ordinarily he remains part of the world of the scientist, but there are extraordinary moments when he soars high and touches the world of the mystic. But very rarely, once in a while, it happens only sometimes. The mystic abides there. That is the meaning of arifo.

[A sannyasin says: I feel like this time I’ve come to commit myself either way and I get really scared of committing myselfAll the time I’ve been here I just think ‘I’ve got to decide.’]

Decide not to decide; be finished!

Commitment will come on its own. It will not be your decision; don’t be worried about it. Commitment will happen; it will not be your decision. Suddenly you will see it has happened, so no need to worry about it.

One day I am going to do it – you just wait! (LAUGHTER) You need not make any efforts this way or that, for or against. Don’t unnecessarily waste your time; do something else. That is my work, that I will do!

[A sannyasin says: I find I lose touch a lot – with you, with god, with myself, with the world, with other people.]

I understand. Simply accept: when you are in touch, accept that; when you are not in touch, accept that. Only through acceptance can worrying be stopped; and worrying is the factor that comes between you and me, between you and you, between you and the world: it is worrying, the wall of worrying. So we have to cut the roots of worrying, and the best way is to accept whatsoever happens in that moment; that is the reality.

And don’t think about whether you are really in touch or not really in touch. Whatsoever it is, it has to be accepted; real and unreal does not matter. Acceptance is a sword: it cuts all worrying in a single blow.

[A sannyasin says: For the past months my blood pressure has been mostly going too high. I’ve been to the doctor but he couldn’t find anything physical, so I don’t know what to do about it. Osho studies her energy.]

It is not physical – the doctors are right – and it is not psychological either: it has something to do with your astral body. But it is nothing bad at all, in fact it is a good indication. So whenever it happens, start enjoying it. Rather than thinking of it as a disease, think of it as a blessing. Some work has started happening inside you and that work is of immense benefit to you, so you have to help it rather than hinder it. And once you have started enjoying it, it will disappear: the restlessness will disappear – the work will continue.

The restlessness is not caused by the work; the restlessness is caused by your interpretation that something is wrong. That very idea of the blood pressure going high makes you restless. Drop the interpretation, and the restlessness will disappear and soon you will find that the blood pressure will also disappear. But even if it remains for a few days there is no need to be worried. Soon you will see what is happening; when it has happened only then will you be able to recognise it.

Great energy wants to be released. Mm? it is like a bird who wants to get out of the prison and becomes restless. It starts flying in the cage, gets stuck, tries to fight.That’s what is happening;

but it is a good indication: something wants to flower.

Anand means bliss, raje means secret – the secret of bliss. It is a secret in one sense: that people are unaware of it. Otherwise it is not a secret at all. It is an open secret. Somewhere deep down everybody knows it and yet goes on denying it because misery seems to be more paying in the world, misery seems to be more profitable.

A blissful person is a very rebellious person, he is pure rebellion. A blissful person is so independent that he needs nobody, that he can be alone, that he does not depend on anybody; and that seems to be arrogance to the society. The society does not like blissful people, it likes miserable people. The society patronises misery in every way, and if one wants to be patronised by the society, one has to remain miserable; that is the pay-off of misery. Otherwise it is a simple phenomenon to be blissful, very simple.

Just don’t impose any ideals on yourself, no ideals; don’t try to pretend that which you are not. Then bliss starts showering. Just as it is showering on the trees and on the mountains, it starts showering on you; because trees have no ideals, no pretensions, no hypocrisy. And when you don’t have any ideals, when you don’t want to be anybody else other than who you are, how can you be miserable? You are never frustrated because you never expected anything in the first place. You never feel inferior because you have never wanted to be superior. You never feel defeated because from the very beginning there was no desire to succeed, no desire to be victorious. In such a space, bliss happens naturally; it wells up in you. To be relaxed, to be natural, to be spontaneous, is the secret of bliss.

And Anand Raje can have another meaning too.… Anand means bliss, raje can mean queen. But those who know the secret become kings and queens of bliss, so that is an extension of the first meaning. Once the secret is practised one becomes a king or a queen. We are beggars because we have chosen to be beggars; otherwise we are born as kings and queens. Everybody is born that way.

So become natural and you will see bliss arising. It arises with such tremendous energy, it becomes uncontainable. When it arises in you it is not only that it gives you bliss, it starts overflowing, it starts reaching other people. The blissful person creates a held, an energy-field around himself, and whosoever enters into that energy-field is immensely benefited by the grace.

Deva means divine, sarvo means total, whole. Man is totally divine. There is nothing in man which has to be discarded, there is nothing that has to be denied: man is divine.

All the so-called religions go on telling man ‘Discard this, deny that...’ They teach you to choose something but they don’t help you to accept the wholeness of your being. And because of the teachings of choice they have crippled every man, every woman. The denied parts go on hanging like dead-weights; and the denied parts will take revenge some day or other, because nothing can be cut. You are an organic unity, everything is absolutely necessary: whatsoever has been given is absolutely necessary, needed.

So rather than cutting anything from your life, you have to use all that is given in such a way that your life becomes an orchestra. If your life is noisy and miserable, that simply shows you have not been able to create an orchestra, that’s all. So one instrument is doing something, another instrument is doing something opposite, and then it is creating a madness. But both instruments are needed: one just has to learn the art of creating a synthesis.

Anger is needed as much as love; greed is needed as much as compassion. All is needed; you just have to create a synthesis. Black is needed as much as white; in fact without black, white will lose all meaning, it will not have contrast. Use the black as a background, then paint with white and the white will come out loud, clear. Use anger as the background and then paint it with compassion and then compassion will come very loud, very clear, crystal clear.

Life is not a question of denying, destroying, choosing. Life is a great art, it is an alchemy, so that you can put all the ingredients in such a way that the baser metal becomes more.

You have a beautiful name!

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