8

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‌CHAPTER 8

8 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, sambhavo means potential. Love is not an actuality, it is only a seed, and the seed can die without ever becoming the actual. That’s the risk of life: every man is born with a possibility but it is only a possibility – it may be actualised, it may be missed. If it is missed then life remains futile, meaningless, a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise signifying nothing – because love is the significance, love is the meaning. If love is missed, all is missed; and without love there is no god, without love there is much logic but no poetry.

Logic cannot impart meaning to life. It is impotent..lt is barren, it is a desert. It is dry, not even an oasis exists in the world of logic. If man does not actually become a lover then he lives on the surface. He never knows what the depths are and what the heights are. He lives horizontally; he knows nothing of the vertical dimension. Logic is horizontal: love is vertical.

I am not against logic, but logic in itself is meaningless. Love without logic is mad: logic without love is dead. The true balance arises when a person is intelligent and loving, when intelligence and love meet and become one, when they are no more separate in your being, when a kind of loving intelligence has arisen in you. Buddha has called it pragyan; we call it intuition, wisdom. Logic is given by the society, by the schools, colleges, universities, but there are no more any institutions which can impart love.

My function here is to impart the quality of love. Sannyas is initiation into love.

Bodhi means awareness, taru means tree the tree of awareness. Remember the biblical parable of the tree of knowledge. The parable is very significant, very fundamentaL. It says that man fell from heaven because he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Knowledge means information, knowledge means something borrowed, knowledge means that which enters from without into you.

Knowledge is a burden. It is ego-gratifying, hence the fall. It creates the ego. The knowledgeable man becomes very egoistic. Subtle is his ego, very hidden, not on the surface. Maybe on the surface he is very humble, but even in his humbleness one can see ego being expressed. That too is a gesture of the ego. The really humble person is neither egoistic nor humble. How can he be humble if there is no ego? It is impossible to be humble without an ego; humbleness is a gesture of ego.

Man fell from paradise because he became knowledgeable. Man can come back into paradise if he eats from the tree of awareness. Awareness is something that happens within you; it does not come from the outside. It is your own potential that blooms. It is not information: it is awakening.

Man has fallen asleep in his knowledge; he can be awakened. The moment he is awake he is back in paradise. All the religions of the world can be reduced to a single principle: the principle of awareness.

Bodhitaru also means the tree under which Buddha became enlightened. The English word ‘tree’ comes from the Sanskrit root ‘taru’.

Become more and more alert, more and more aware, less and less knowledgeable and more and more intelligent. And remember the distinction between intellectuality and intelligence: intellectuality is the cause of fall; intelligence will be the cause of rising back to the real, original status. Awareness brings intelligence: knowledge brings intellectuality. And to live intelligently is to live religiously. One need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; all that is needed is intelligence. Not to live superstitiously is to be religious, not to live through beliefs, to live out of one’s own understanding is to be religious.

It needs guts, it is the very spirit of rebellion, but only those who are rebels know the real taste of life and love and light, and only the rebellious people dare to enter into god.

Shraddhes. It means god of trust. Remember, trust is not belief. Belief is out of fear: trust is out of understanding. Belief is imposed by others. It is political; it is a way to dominate people. It is a way to reduce persons to things. It is a subtle strategy, utterly political. It has nothing to do with religion at all.

Trust is not belief. Nobody can impose it upon you. Only you can help it to grow in your being. It is a growth. It is not like a plastic flower that you can purchase from the marketplace. It is a real rose; it grows in your soil, in your psyche. It comes out of you, it is your flower.

The man of trust does not believe in any dogma: he believes only in what he knows. His respect for truth is immense. The believer has no respect for truth. He is a pretender, he is a hypocrite. He says god is, without knowing. He says things which he has heard, and he is ready to fight for them, to kill and to be killed; he is stupid! The man of trust goes only as far as is allowed by his own understanding, not even an inch more. He is authentic. He is not a doubter either.

This is something to be understood: all believers are doubters. They have repressed their doubts, that’s all. They have imposed the belief on top of their doubts but the doubt is there boiling within. And all doubters are believers: their belief is negative, that’s all. Somebody believes in god’s existence, somebody believes in god’s non-existence.

For example, a Catholic is a positive believer and a Communist is a negative believer, but both are believers; and there is not a difference of an iota, they are the same type of people. One believes in the Bible, another believes in ‘Das Kapital’. One believes in Moses, another believes in Marx. It doesn’t matter in what you believe, the content of belief is not important; the very phenomenon of belief is ugly.

The man of trust neither believes nor doubts. He begins with an agnostic spirit; open, vulnerable, ready to go into any adventure, ready to try and experiment, ready to explore, but without any prejudice. To begin with he has no prejudice this way or that; he moves with a clean intelligence. This is respect for truth; and the world is missing, very much missing, these people, the people who respect truth and who are ready to drop all securities, safeties, comforts, for truth.

To be a Christian is comfortable, to be a Hindu is safe: you belong to a crowd. The very feeling that you belong gives you a kind of security. The church protects you; the organised religion creates a comfortable, warm milieu for you. The moment you start searching for truth you are alone.

Plotinus is right when he says ‘The search for truth is a flight of the alone to the alone.’ Yes, it is to go alone. You will not be able to be a part of a crowd, you will have to move alone, because you will have to move withinwards and there nobody can accompany you. Buddhas can point the way but they cannot accompany you. Even the master cannot go with you. He can give you a few indications, a few hints about how to search. He will not give you a belief, he will not give you a dogma: he will simply give you an insight. He will open his insight to you, you can partake of something of it; but even that has to be done by your own understanding.

Then slowly slowly trust grows: the more you become aware of the beauties of existence, of the truth of existence, the more trust starts happening, and when trust starts happening, one becomes integrated. Truth gives you more trust; more trust makes you available to higher truths. They help each other: they are two wings of the bird.

Veet means beyond, amo means darkness. Life is dark, life is darkness. But there is a way to go beyond it, there is a possibility to have a breakthrough. Darkness is not all: there is light too: But there is a gap between our being and the phenomenon of light; in that gap darkness surrounds us.

Meditation is nothing but a bridge between you and light. Then darkness is just a river, it goes flowing underneath the bridge; you can move to the world of light. And the essential core of meditation is very simple: it is to be a witness of your mind process, not to be identified with the mind processes – thoughts, desires, imaginations, projections, dreams, memories and so on and so forth – not to be identified with anything that passes in the mind but to remain aloof, watching, seeing it, knowing, tacitly knowing ‘I am separate, I am not it. I am just a mirror reflecting it all but I don’t become the reflection. The thought of anger passes in the mind but I don’t become anger; I simply reflect it, I simply take note of it, that it is there. I may act accordingly, I may not act – that decision is mine – but I am not obliged to act. There is no compulsion. I am separate. The mind is giving a certain clue but I am the watcher.’

And the more you become a watcher, the more and more the mind simply disappears. At the peaks of watchfulness the mind becomes empty, and that emptiness is the bridge, the bridge that takes you beyond all darkness, beyond all death.

Prem means love, amir means rich. Love is the real richness, the only wealth. Everything else that people think is wealth is more illth than wealth. Only the man who has discovered the dynamism of love in his being is rich. Jesus calls it ‘the kingdom of god.’ Jesus also says ‘God is love.’

And it is there, it is a given reality, but is lying there undiscovered. And we are rushing all over the world, searching, seeking something that will make us rich: power, money, prestige. Nothing will ever make you rich, neither power nor money nor prestige. Only one thing can make you rich, and that is the hidden sources of love within your being. If they are tapped, if the energy called love starts flowing in you, you will be rich. Even in poverty you will be rich. Even if you are a beggar you will be an emperor; and vice versa: you can be an emperor, you can be Alexander the Great, and still you will remain a beggar, a poor man.

Once this is understood a great turning point happens in life. Sannyas is that turning point. This is conversion; this is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. One simply turns towards oneself; for the first time one starts encountering oneself, and from that very moment great riches start happening.

Deva means divine, satyam means truth – divine truth. Truth cannot be manufactured by man: truth is. It has not to be invented, it has to be discovered or rather, rediscovered... because each child is aware of it in his innocence, but cannot be aware of his awareness. That is the only difference between a sage and a child: the child is aware of the truth but is not aware of his awareness; the sage is aware of the truth and is aware of his awareness. Hence Jesus says: Those who are like small children, only they will be able to enter into my kingdom of god.

Truth is already here: we have just to open our eyes. Truth is not a conclusion arrived at by any logical process. Truth is not a hypothesis, because a hypothesis remains tentative, and any conclusion arrived at by logic can never be absolute; it is always relative. That’s why science goes on changing its theories every day. It has to: they are all man-made. A few more facts are discovered, then one has to change the theory to adjust to those facts.

But there is a truth: that truth is god, the ultimate, the absolute. It has to be discovered only once and then there is no change, there is no possibility of change. Then one can abide in it. Then it is yours forever and forever.

Thinking is a way of inventing truth: meditation is a way of discovering truth. Thinking is human: meditation is divine.

Sugito means a great song. Life can be a song or it can be just a long long process of misery. It can be heaven or it can be hell; it all depends on you. And small things make the whole difference.

For example, a person who is too interested in the outside world will not be able to sing the song that is hidden in his heart. One needs to turn towards oneself. A person who is ambitious will never be able to know who he is; and only by knowing oneself can the song burst forth. Without knowing oneself life can never become a celebration. It remains dull, drab, a dragging affair. It remains a boredom.

My sannyasins have to learn how to laugh, how to love, how to sing, how to dance. I don’t teach a serious religion – sincere, of course, but not serious. Seriousness is a kind of disease, a psychological cancer.

Life should be playful, because god is playful, and we come closest to him when we are playful.

Deva means divine, bandhu means brother. The whole existence is nothing but a great brotherhood. We are all interdependent. Nobody is independent, nobody is dependent; it is an organic unity. Even if a pebble is missing in the world, the world will not be the same. There is no hierarchy, it is not that something is higher and something is lower; there is immense equality. In fact existence is very communistic: it exists in equality, it exists in brotherhood. And man has destroyed that harmony; he has destroyed the whole ecosystem of existence. Man has poisoned ecology because of a mad desire to be at the top, the stupid longing to conquer nature. It has been the greatest calamity. We are now on the verge of committing a universal suicide.

To me, to be religious means to fall in harmony with all that is. You are neither lower nor higher. Trees are brothers, rocks are brothers, birds and animals are brothers. I love Saint Francis because he used to call his donkey ‘brother’. He would always address the donkey as ‘brother’ and trees were ‘sisters’.

That should be the approach of a religious person. Start feeling a kind of brotherhood towards all that is; let that be your meditation and your prayer.

It means absolute contentment, unconditional contentment; and that is the door to the divine. Having no complaint in the heart is prayer. Having utter contentment and gratitude in the heart is enough; no other prayer is needed. That is a silent prayer, and only a silent prayer can be there for twenty- four hours. You need not say it: your very life shows it. You need not go to any temple or church: wherever you are, you are surrounded by your own contentment, and that is the temple.

The word ‘temple’ comes from a root ‘tem’; ‘tem’ means to cut off. The temple is the place that cuts you off from the world. Now the outer temple cannot do that. It is part of the world; how can it cut you off from the world? It is part of the establishment, it is part of the status quo; how can it cut you off from the world?

Something totally different is needed. One needs to create a temple around oneself. It is made of contentment, that is the stuff that the real temple is made of; and when you are surrounded by a vibe, an aura, of contentment, you are cut off from the world, you are no more part of it. You are here and yet not here: you walk on earth but your feet no more touch the earth. That is really to be in a temple. One becomes a temple oneself. Contentment is a miracle, it is a magic key.

Be contented with whatsoever life has given to you, feel utterly grateful. Even sometimes when you think that something is wrong, know perfectly well that the whole knows better than you. Don’t disturb your contentment for small things, because nothing is more valuable than contentment. Once it is crystallised in you, you have arrived; you have arrived home! You have penetrated the source of your being.

It means courage; and courage is the most essential quality for the religious. Cowards cannot be religious, although you will find cowards in churches and temples and mosques every day, worshipping, praying, going through all kinds of empty gestures, fulfilling all kinds of so-called religious formalities. But they are not religious and they cannot be religious. Their god is nothing but their fear projected.

One can come to god never through fear but only through love. But love needs courage: it is risky. And to fall in love with the unknown is certainly very risky. It is falling in love with something invisible. It may be, it may not be. Unless one is a gambler one cannot be a religious person, because unless one is able to gamble, one cannot adventure, and god is the greatest adventure there is.

[A sannyasin says: Osho, my mind’s put up so much resistance to you since I’ve been in Poona.]

It happens, but it is natural. The mind is afraid to die, and if you come close to me, the mind has to die, hence the resistance. But now nothing can help it. It can resist and delay the process a little more, that’s all; but your heart wants to come close, so the mind cannot obstruct it for long. When the heart wants to come close, the mind can at the most create a few resistances, but they are not to be worried about. The mind has no power before the heart.

The mind is powerful if the heart remains asleep. If the heart has not become full of love then the mind is very powerful; then the servant is the master because the master is fast asleep. Once the heart has started becoming alert, has started becoming loving – a longing has arisen in the heart – then the mind can create resistances but those are all futile. They will all disappear. But it is a natural process: the mind has remained so long in power; who wants to be dethroned?

It is going to happen; don’t be worried! My eye is on your heart. Don’t be worried! Your mind can make a little fuss – that’s nothing!

Anand means bliss, neerava means silence. Bliss is a state of absolute silence, tranquillity. Bliss is not a state of excitement. Pleasure is a state of excitement, happiness too. But bliss is utter serenity: no waves arising in your being, not even a ripple. When you are as if you are not, when your presence has almost become an absence, then there is bliss.

So become more and more silent. You create silence and then bliss descends in you like a gift from god.

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