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‌CHAPTER 4

4 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin mother with her exuberant child, says: Sometimes his energy is too much and I don’t know what to do with him.]

It’s perfectly good; this is the time he should have more energy. Don’t repress his energy. Each child brings great energy into the world but we repress it; that is a kind of crippling. Of course, it feels comfortable to the parents, because with less energy the child is more controllable, but he is less alive. So it is better to live in inconvenience than to destroy the child’s growing energy.

The world can be so full of joy if every child is allowed to have his way. Of course it will be a little difficult for the parents. Down the ages this has been the rule, that the child has to adjust to the parents. This should not be any more. The parents have to adjust to the child, because the child is the future. The future should not adjust to the past, because if we force the future to adjust to the past we are trying to repeat the past. That has always been done. That has caused misery in the world and created hell on earth instead of a paradise.

Respect his energy, even if it is inconvenient to you. I understand your problem, but that has to be your sacrifice. If you love the child that much sacrifice can be done. And if you really start sacrificing your convenience for him, he will become more understanding. Children are very perceptive: they can see how much inconvenience they are causing. And if you are not enforcing anything on them, they will learn the art of self-discipline.

He is a beautiful sannyasin! Help him to grow in his own way.

[Her son asks Osho: why don’t you have a mala? He wants to give Osho a mala.]

First become enlightened! (MUCH LAUGHTER) If you fulfil that condition then you can give a mala to me.

And one day you will be able to fulfil it. Just go on creating as many troubles as you can create for your mother!

Nirjano. It means solitude, but not solitariness. It means aloneness, but not loneliness. It means freedom from the other. In loneliness the other is absent but you are not free from the other; on the contrary you are desiring the other. And because you desire the other, loneliness hurts; you feel something is missing. You are not happy in loneliness because you are unoccupied. There is a kind of sadness in it. You cannot relate and you want to relate, because you know only one way of existing and that is relating. You can exist only in a kind of dependence on the other. When the other is not there you feel hungry, empty; and nobody wants to be hungry and empty. The hunger is far deeper than any physical hunger can ever be; it is spiritual hunger. When you miss the other, you start forgetting your face, because we know our face only in the mirror of relationship.

Aloneness is totally different. You are free from the other – there is no hungering, there is no desire, there is no longing. You are enjoying yourself, you are communing with your own self. You are learning how to be just yourself without being occupied, and it brings tremendous freedom. It opens the doors to self-realization.

You can see your face in the mirror of relationship but you can never see your self, because your self has no face, no form; no mirror can ever reflect it. To see your reality you have to be alone. Aloneness is silence, not sadness. Aloneness is a very very deep well-being. You start rising, soaring high, in your being, because there is no pressure from outside. Nobody is on top of you, nobody is there to pull you down or to pull you out; nobody is there to manipulate you. You are simply there as you are, you need not pretend; because whenever the other is there one tends to pretend. Whenever the other is there one tends to act. Whenever the other is there one wants to show one’s beautiful face.

When you are alone you are relaxed. Beautiful, ugly, good, bad, it doesn’t matter. When it doesn’t matter only then can you relax; you are no more in a kind of performance. Performance is tiring because it is an imposition from the outside. When you are not performing there is a tremendous serenity and a joy that you have never known before.

That is the difference between loneliness and aloneness. Nirjano means aloneness, solitude, but not solitariness. Solitariness is mundane, solitude is sacred. Solitariness simply is as if you are forced into it. A prisoner in his dark cell is solitary, but a meditator – and he may be in the same dark cell of the prison – is not solitary: he is in his solitude. He is utterly happy, he is settled in himself. No prison can make him a prisoner, no chains can chain him, because in his solitude he knows that he is a soul, not a body; that he is not a mind, that he is something which cannot be killed, cannot be imprisoned, cannot be destroyed. He is rejoicing in that eternal inner source of being, life, existence.

Sitaro means a star. Just as there are stars in the outer sky, there are stars in the inner firmament. These two worlds exist parallel – the outer and the inner – and whatsoever is in the outer is also in the inner; they are utterly balanced.

That is the meaning of the old mystic saying: As above so below. And again, in all the esoteric traditions of the world it is said that man is a miniature universe, a microcosm. Man contains all in seed form that is manifested in existence.

The centre of existence is light; so is the centre of the inner being, it is light. If you go deeper and deeper into yourself, one day you will find a star shining within your being. That is your self, and to find it is to find joy, to find it is to find real life, to find it is to find something that transcends death.

All meditations are a search for the inner star.

Nirjharo. It means the waterfall. Lao Tzu says that the best way to reach truth is to follow the watercourse way. The water has a great secret in it. First: it is liquid, and only liquid things can have a flow. Only they can move, only they can have a dynamism. Frozen things are dead; they are static, stagnant. One should be like water: liquid.

The second quality of water is non-resistance. It is ready to accept any mould. Pour it into a jug, it takes its form; pour it into another pot, it takes its form. It never resists. In that non-resistance is its power; nobody can defeat it. People are defeated by their own resistance. Resistance dissipates energy. Remember Jesus’ famous saying:‘Resist not evil.’ Not even evil has to be resisted. Then acceptance is total, and when acceptance is total, god is just in front of you.

The third thing about water is: it always moves downwards. It is non-ambitious. It does not want to be the first in the world, it wants to be the last; and that’s a great secret of the spiritual world.

Jesus says ‘Those who are first in this world will be the last in my kingdom of god. And blessed are those who are the last in this world, because they will be the first in my kingdom of god.’ He is talking like Lao Tzu, and Jesus has some quality of Lao Tzu.

Remember these three things. Be liquid, don’t be hard and holding, don’t control; remain in a state of uncontrol. And when one is liquid, in a state of uncontrol, the ego starts disappearing. The ego can exist only in a stagnant life; it is the centre of frozenness.

Second: don’t resist. Live the life of non-resistance, acceptance. Do not be in a constant conflict with existence. Relax and fall in tune with it. Seek and search harmony with life. Don’t stand aloof, don’t be a spectator. And drop that stupid idea of conquering life; that is the most stupid idea that has happened to the human mind. On the contrary, be conquered by life. Allow yourself to be defeated by life, because that is the sure way to be victorious.

And third: be non ambitious, be a nobody. And if all these three secrets can be fulfilled, nothing else is needed: one has arrived!

Prem means love, sato means being – love being. And they are aspects of the same energy, two sides of the same coin. If one is loving, one becomes truthful; it is impossible to be loving and not to be truthful. Truth is necessarily created by the energy called love, and vice versa: when one lives the truth, one becomes loving; it is impossible to be true and unloving. If you find somebody who is loving and untruthful then know well that his love is just a facade, a camouflage, it is phony; because the criterion is truth. And if somebody is truthful and unloving then know well that truthfulness is just an imposed character. It is not growing in his being, it is not his own flower. It is something borrowed, something synthetic, not natural.

Whenever love grows naturally it brings truth in its wake and vice versa. They are always together, they cannot be separated. There is no way to separate them, they are inseparable. In fact they are one, two faces of one reality.

The real seeker has to work from both sides, then growth is fast. Be truthful so that you can be more loving; be more loving so more truth happens to you. And there comes a moment when they are one. That is the moment of illumination – when truth is love and love is truth. That’s what Jesus means when he says ‘God is love.’ God is his word for truth.

Satyo means truth, satyo also means being. It means both, because if it only means truth there is a possibility that you may reduce it to a philosophical enquiry.’Truth’ gives the idea of being a concept, but in the East truth is not a concept; it is your innermost core. It is not something to be thought about, pondered over, philosophised; it is something to be investigated, enquired into, gone into. It is something that is already there and has only to be discovered. That’s the difference between the Eastern approach and the Western: in the West truth remained philosophical; in the East it became existential. So in the East truth means more being than truth.

A child is born as a being, then he learns doing; the doing is the second layer around his being. Then he learns having, that is the third layer; and people get stuck at the third. A few people get stuck at the second: a few people become too involved with doing, they are constant doers. Their whole life seems to be a constant occupation of doing this, of doing that. They cannot leave themselves in a state of undoing; they are afraid. They have to do something; they cannot rest, they are restless. They keep themselves occupied. Occupation is their obsession; it is pathological. A man who cannot remain restful, relaxed, who has become incapable of leaving himself in the state of non-doing, is mad!

There are doers: they cannot contact their being. And then there are people who are interested in having more and more, their whole life seems to be nothing but accumulation, greed: they are also incapable of knowing their being. The person who wants to know his own being has to be aware of these two threats: the trap of having and the trap of doing.

One needs a few things, but needs are very few; they can be easily fulfilled. But when needs become neurotic, then they cannot be fulfilled. One needs food, one needs clothes, one needs a shelter, but one need not have a bank account of millions of dollars. That is a neurotic need that cannot be fulfilled. You can have as many dollars as you imagine but again you will find that you are hankering for more. A neurotic need means a constant desire for more; whatsoever you have, you have to have more. But now this is impossible to fulfil, because whenever you have more, the desire will force you to have more again. Your whole life will be wasted!

Then there are people who are stuck with doing. Both these are the traps. One has to learn to be satisfied with natural needs and their fulfilment, and one has to learn that doing should not be spread all over one’s life. It has become so spread over people’s lives that even when people are in their beds they cannot stop their doing, so they dream. Dreaming is doing projected in sleep. There are people who cannot sleep at ease: they toss and they turn and they mumble. This is just doing continuously going on, an undercurrent of doing.

One has to be aware of these two traps, and if one can avoid these two traps, being explodes. This explosion brings so many flowers, so much light and so much celebration in life, that one cannot even imagine it! It is the greatest surprise in life. All that one has known, all that one has imagined and dreamt seems utterly foolish, futile, when the inner explosion happens. It is a benediction.

Learn these things. It is not difficult – a person just has to be a little more alert, aware, watchful.

Jayo means victory, but the victory that I talk about is not the ordinary victory. The victory that I talk about comes through surrender, not by fighting. It is not a question of conquering; on the contrary, it is a question of disappearing.

The conqueror is an egoist, and all the victories of the ego are just dreams. Sooner or later you will awake and will find your hands are empty. Even Alexander, when he dies, knows that his hands are empty, that all his victories have turned into dust.

There is only one true victory that comes by surrendering to existence, not by conquering but surrendering, not by imposing one’s power on existence, but by living utterly helpless, powerless. The search for power is political: the search for peace is religious, and only a person who has dropped his ego can be at peace. But blessed are those who are at peace because they are the victorious ones.

Jesus says ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.’ What earth is he talking about? – because this earth is not inherited by the meek and humble and nobodies. This earth is conquered by Adolf Hitlers, Mussolinis, Alexanders, Genghis Khans; these are not the meek people. Even Jesus could not conquer this earth. Crucifixion is not a victory.

He is talking of some other earth, something of the inner. He is talking of some other kingdom, the kingdom of the within; and that is the true kingdom because it lasts and lasts forever. But that is possible only to those who are ready to dissolve their egos.

Dissolve the ego and be victorious! It looks paradoxical because it is the ego that wants to be victorious. But the real victory happens only as a paradox. All that is real in life happens as a paradox. Disappear as you are and suddenly a new being arises in you. That new being is immortal. That new being knows no death. That new being is not temporal; it is beyond time and space. That new being is divine. That new being is god himself!

This is the victory I am talking about.

Pujari. It means a blissful worshipper. Worship can be done as a formality; then it is absolutely meaningless. Worship can be done as a duty; then it has no soul in it. When worship arises as bliss then it is alive, then it imparts grace to your being.

My whole effort here is to create a situation where you can drop formalities and can learn the passion of a worshipper, where duties are dropped and one lives through love, through intense passion. Then worship is a revolution. Then very small gestures of worship and prayer bring such benediction that one cannot imagine that it was ever possible. The impossible starts happening.

Learn to be blissful, then all else follows. Out of bliss, prayer becomes true. Worship is no more religious, it becomes spiritual, and then it knows no routine forms: one evolves one’s own style. Then you don’t do worship as a Christian or as a Hindu; you simply do worship as it happens to you. It may not have happened to anybody else before, it may not happen to anybody else again. It has the individual flavour, it has your signature on it; then it is authentic...

Let it become your experience too, and that experience will liberate, it is always liberating. Truth always liberates. Phoniness becomes a bondage.

[A sannyasin who had completed an Individual Primal Therapy and the therapist were at Darshan. The therapist said: He was reached on the second day – it was very beautiful. He threw all the games but then he continued playing them over and over, and he refused to participate... which was sad. The client agreed: she’s quite right.]

But it is difficult for you to drop the games? If you feel she is ‘quite right’, you could have dropped them. They don’t pay! Those games are the reasons that millions of lives are wasted. But if you want to play nobody can stop you, unless you understand and drop them. This is absolutely your freedom. A few people choose not to play games: they become Buddhas. The majority choose to play games: they remain mediocre. But nobody can be blamed; they themselves have chosen their life to be that way.

And remember, any moment you can cancel your whole programme, because the past has no power. This is one of the most beautiful things to be understood: a person may have played games for fifty years and one morning he decides not to play any more. Those fifty years are impotent against his decision; his decision is enough! Those fifty years are nothing compared to his decision. His decision is so potential that immediately all those fifty years can be cancelled.

So never think that you will drop them tomorrow, you will drop them slowly, you will drop them gradually; that is not the way to drop the games. The way to drop them is instantly, immediately; the moment you see the point, drop it! It is your life – why waste it in games? Why not live truly, because only through truth is bliss possible.

But if you understood that you were playing games, then you got it. Then it was not futile. Drop them! They will not help you to grow at all and they will not give you any joy; they will simply dissipate your energy. They are parasites: they will suck your blood, your soul; they will destroy you!

So meditate over it. Even if you can drop them now, then the process has been beautiful... maybe a little late.…

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