< Previous | Contents | Next >
CHAPTER 21
22 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Srajan means creativity. The highest value in existence is creativity, and it is creativity that brings you close to the creator, nothing else; there is no other bridge. Only a creative person comes to know something of god. And it is always only something, because god is infinite: the more we know the more there is to know.
Religion, to be real, should consist more and more of creative acts. In the past it has been just the opposite: religious people have remained very uncreative. That’s why they have remained dull, dead, and they have not contributed anything to existence. In fact they have been an unnecessary burden. Only once in a while a Buddha, a Krishna, a Lao Tzu, a Christ, has contributed something. Otherwise so many saints, the long chain of saints, have just been unfertile.
Art of any kind has to become prayer and creativity has to become worship. It is only in the moments of deep creativity that the ego disappears, time disappears, space disappears. And it is only in the moments of total absorption in a creative act that one merges into the whole. It is ecstatic to be creative.
What you create does not matter, the product is not important but the act of creation is. It is not a question of whether you become a Picasso or you remain an unknown painter. It does not matter whether you create great sculpture or you are just a poor potter; it doesn’t matter at all. The product is valuable in the market; but when I am saying to be creative my whole emphasis is on the very act of creativity, not on what it produces. Whatsoever is produced becomes a commodity, it can be sold in the marketplace. If people like it they will pay more, if they don’t like it they will not purchase it; that is a totally different phenomenon, a by-product. But the act, the very act of being in creativity, is prayer.
Almasta is a state of consciousness where no worry, no anxiety, exists and one is utterly drunk with the divine. These are two aspects: if worries, anxieties, anguish, disappear, then the intoxication
with god appears. If worries, anxieties, are there they go on dissipating our energy; and overflowing energy is needed to be drunk with god. Worries are leaks, holes, from where we go on dissipating.
Drop worrying. There is nothing to worry about; all is taken care of. Live with that trust. Existence loves you. No harm is going to happen, no harm can ever happen, because how can the whole do any harm to its own part? It is impossible. And if sometimes you feel that some harm is happening that must be some misinterpretation on your part; there must be some blessing in disguise.
Once this trust arises in a person he becomes religious. Then there is no need to worry, then there is no need to remain in a state of anxiety. Anxiety means ‘There is nobody to look after me. I have to carry the whole burden on my own shoulders. If I don’t carry it then I am finished, and the whole existence is inimical.’ That’s what creates anxiety: ‘Everybody is against me. Somehow, everybody is conspiring against me, everybody is at my throat. I have to protect myself. I have to be watchful, I have to plan, I have to move in such a way that I and not others prove the winner. Otherwise everybody is a competitor and they are bent upon defeating me.’
This attitude creates anxiety, and this attitude is the attitude of a non-religious person. When I say a non-religious person I don’t mean that he does not go to church, he does not read the Bible; that is not the point. He may read the Bible, he may go to church, but if he remains in anxiety he is not religious. And it is possible that he goes to the church only because of his anxiety, out of his anxiety; he prays to god out of anxiety, he reads the Bible as a protection, as a security. But if anxiety is there a person is not religious. He is pathological and his religion will be pathological.
The religious person knows nothing of anxiety; he changes the whole gestalt. He knows ‘I am part of this whole existence, and if trees are not worried and the birds are not going crazy and mad and the animals are utterly happy, why can’t I be? I belong to this existence, I am an essential part of it.’ This trust, this understanding, this faith, and anxieties simply disappear, they are not found any more; you have stopped creating them, you have stopped secreting them. Then so much energy is preserved that it starts overflowing in a kind of festivity; it becomes a dance. It is so abundant, it is so exuberant, that life becomes a festival. Then a person is religious, then one is drunk with the divine.
That is the meaning of almasta: drunk with the divine, utterly lost in the divine, feeling one with the divine, with no worry, not a worry in the world.
Ari means the enemy, hanto means the killer – one who has killed the enemy. The enemy is the ego, and unless the ego disappears life remains a hell. The ego creates darkness, the ego creates blindness. The ego becomes a rock and it does not allow your life to flow. The ego creates a separation from existence and the separation breeds all kinds of miseries. It is like uprooting a tree from the earth: the moment the tree is separate from the earth it starts dying. It feels thirsty, it feels hungry; the juices flow no more, the sap arises no more. Great sadness surrounds the tree. It is on its deathbed.
This is what happens with the ego: it separates you from your own nourishing sources, it separates you from the soil of god. It creates a thin layer, very thin and transparent, so unless one is very alert one will not be able to feel it. It is like a pure glass: you can see through it, it does not obstruct your vision in a sense, but if you want to get out then you will know that you are against a wall, a transparent wall. And we are moving with this glass-like shell continuously.
It does not allow you to love, because whenever you want to meet somebody it comes inbetween. It does not allow you to communicate, it does not allow you any possibility of relating; it obstructs. That’s why it is called the enemy. And one who is capable of dropping this enemy arrives at the doors of the friend. God is the friend: the ego is the enemy.
Arihanto has two aspects: one, killing the enemy, and the other, realising the friend. It is the highest state of consciousness. Just as the word ‘Christ’ is important in Christianity, arihant is important in Jainism; it is equivalent to Christ, to Christ-consciousness. Buddha is the Buddhist equivalent of arihant. Its meaning is of significance and has to be meditated upon. You will have to work it out it has to become your reality.
Sundaro means the beautiful. The East has praised three values very much: satyam, the truth; shivam, the good; and sundaram, the beautiful. But sundaram is the last and the highest, even higher than good, higher than truth. Beauty is the very essence of existence. The whole existence is its expression in manifold forms. Somewhere it is a green tree and somewhere it is a sunset, somewhere it is a human face, somewhere it is a tear and somewhere it is a smile, but the whole existence is an expression of beauty.
Religion should consist of aesthetics, the search for the beauty. Religion should be really the highest form of poetry. If it is not, then religion falls very low and becomes part of politics. The lowest is politics and the highest is poetry. Religion can either be politics or poetry. When there is a Jesus, it is poetry; the moment Jesus is gone and the popes arrive, it is politics.
These so-called religions have been fighting. They have been destroying each other in far crueller ways than animals can ever do. If man falls, he falls below beasts; if he rises, he rises above gods.
Religion in the highest form is creativity, poetry, aesthetics, a search for beauty, a rejoicing. At the lowest it is violence, power politics, an effort to dominate others, hypocrisy.
My sannyasins have to be very very alert that we are trying to create poetry, we are trying to create the beautiful. Religion should be at the highest peak; only then it brings deliverance, it becomes salvation.
Veet means beyond, laksho means goal. God is not a goal and can never be a goal: god is the source. God is not the effect but the cause. God is not there outside somewhere in the future waiting for you; he is inside you right this very moment. He is in the seeker. He is in the seeker, not in the sought. Your very existence, your consciousness, your life, is god. Because we have made a goal of god we go on missing him. We are searching for him where he is not; we can go on searching for him for millennia and we will not come across him.
It is as if you have your specs on and you are searching for them: through your specs searching for your specs. Now, there is no possibility of finding them unless somebody hits you hard on your head and makes you alert that the specs are there on your nose, you need not look for them.
People ask ‘Where is god? What is god?’ This is utter nonsense. You are him. He is hidden in the very questioner; in fact the question arises from himself. And if we go deep into our question we will find the answer hidden in our own being.
Mandir means a temple. The body is a temple. The world too is a temple, because god is residing in everything. Everything is a host and god is the guest; the body is the host and god is the guest.
They are not enemies as it has been told again and again down the centuries; they are friends. And the body has to be respected and loved. God has chosen it to be one of his temples, it is sacred. Not only is the soul sacred, the body is as sacred as the soul because this whole existence is permeated by god. Matter is also one expression of it, as the mind is, as the soul is. Matter is god visible; the soul is god invisible.
I teach respect, love, reverence, for the body, because it is only through going deeper into the body, into its sensitivities, that one becomes aware of who is residing within. Knowing your body in its totality is the introductory part of knowing your spirit. Remember it!
And drop all anti-body attitudes. Everybody is carrying them. The priests have poisoned humanity so much and for so long that we may not be aware sometimes, but it is there in the unconscious, an undercurrent, that we are all anti-body, anti-life, anti-world. It is because of these antagonisms that man is not becoming religious. A religious person is not anti anything. He is a yes to all and everything, and his yes is total.
Svargo means paradise. There is no paradise in the future. Paradise is a state of being aware now, here. Paradise is not something geographical: it is another name for being spiritually alert. Paradise is not after death; this very life is paradise! But people have reduced this life to hell; a life that could have been heaven has been reduced to hell.
We have not been responsible and we have not functioned as awareness. Man is functioning like a robot. He just goes on moving through empty, dead gestures, not really living, not intensely living, and always thinking of the future and the past. Between the future and the past the present is crushed, sandwiched, and the present is the only reality. The past is no more, the future, not yet: only the present is and always is.
To live in the present, to live in this is-ness, is to be in paradise. Paradise is neither in space nor in time. Time consists of past and future, so it cannot be in time. Present is not part of time at all; present transcends. time, it is non-temporal.
To be in the present is to go beyond time, and to go beyond time is to know what is. And that very knowing is a benediction. Then there is no death; if there is no time there cannot be any death. Then there is no ego; if there is no past, no future, there cannot be any ego.
The present knows no misery at all. You cannot be miserable in the present; you have to bring the past or the future in if you want to be miserable. Try it sometimes, to be miserable in the present, and you will be surprised: you cannot be. It is not possible in the very nature of things. Bring in the past – somebody insulted you yesterday – and then you can be miserable, or bring in the future.… Tomorrow you are going to have an examination so be miserable about it, about whether you are going to make it or not, whether you will succeed or not. But right this very moment you cannot be miserable. It simply is, and there is no misery in it. That state is paradise.
Meditation is a way to enter into paradise, because meditation is a way to go beyond the mind and beyond time. Meditation is a way to enter into the eternity through the present.
[A sannyasin asks: When people come here you give them a new name. Why have you not changed my name?]
The name is just a game... it is not a question of the new or the old; it doesn’t matter. You have to change, you have to become new.
And you don’t have any name; all names are just utilitarian. A child is born without a name. We give him a name because that is necessary, otherwise he will be in difficulty in life: how to call him, how to communicate with him? If he has no name he will find a thousand and one difficulties every day. If somebody asks ‘Who are you?’ he will be at a loss.
So we give a name. That is just a label, useful, but utterly arbitrary, of no existential value.
And this has to be remembered, that no name is yours, that you are a nameless reality, a formless existence: neither name nor form are yours. The form is of the body and the name is a social utility. Behind the name and the form is your being, utterly indefinable; no word can contain it.
Even to call it Rajendra, king of kings, is not adequate, because it is indefinable. No word can contain it, no word can describe it; it can only be experienced.
So whether I give a new name or whether I keep the old, it doesn’t matter.
[A sannyasin says: Lately I have been meditating with candlelight. After some time I suddenly felt that I didn’t know where my legs or my arms were. A great fear came and suddenly I felt a great agony. Osho gives him an ‘energy darshan’.]
Perfectly good! There is no need to worry about it. Just as your legs and hands are disappearing, your whole body will disappear – don’t be worried! It is perfectly good, continue; there is nothing to fear. It is a good symptom.
< Previous | Contents | Next >