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‌CHAPTER 5

5 February 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Gurudas. Guru means the master, and das means the servant – the servant of the master. And it is very significant in the east. The very concept of guru is eastern; the word cannot even be rightly translated. When we translate it as ‘master’ much of its meaning is lost, because a master means a teacher – the guru is not a teacher. In the western consciousness nothing like the guru ever existed. That phenomenon is eastern... it is something basically eastern. It has to be understood.

We call ‘guru’ the person who can impart to you the truth. Not that he can teach – truth cannot be taught; it can be caught. The guru is a person whose presence can help you to catch it... a catalytic agent. He is not going to do anything in fact, he is not a doer. In fact a person becomes a guru when he completely loses his doer-hood – then he is no more a doer; when the doer is gone, the ego is gone, when he is absolutely passive, when not even a slight ripple of desire arises. When there is no desire there cannot be any doing, the doing needs desire and the doing needs a doer.

A master or guru is a person who is a nonentity, a nobody. But through his nobody-ness the infinite starts flowing. Through his emptiness the whole starts flooding. The guru is the person in whose presence truth can be caught.

It depends much on the disciple, because the guru is not a doer – he is simply there like a flame of light. If you open your eyes, your eyes become full of light. If you keep your eyes closed the flame is there, but it is not aggressive. It will not even knock on your eyelids – it will not say, ‘Open your eyes’; it will not say anything. It will be simply there... it will not interfere with you.

If you open the eyes, you become a receiver. If you don’t open the eyes, you miss.

There is a very strange story in the life of a Zen Master, Pai-Chang. He was passing through a forest and he came across a fox. The fox stopped him and said, ‘Master, wait a minute.’ Pai-Chang could not believe it, that the fox is speaking, but he waited and said, ‘What is the matter?’

And the fox said, ’I am in a trouble. For five hundred years I have remained a fox. Five hundred years ago I was a priest in a Zen temple. A young man came and asked a question I was just a priest – I was not a master. I had not experienced anything but I could recite the sutras, I was well-versed, learned; I was a great scholar. I knew all that can be known through the mind, but beyond that I had no access.

The young man asked: Is an enlightened person beyond the law of cause and effect? Not to show my Ignorance, I answered that he was beyond – and that became my karma, because I deceived the young seeker.

So I fell from being a man and for five hundred years I have remained a fox. Now only a master who is enlightened can relieve me of this burden. You are a master, have mercy on me; do something. It is too long, too much – just for one foolish thing that I did, that I answered without knowing. I suffered enough: five hundred years of foxhood!’

Pai-Chang said, ‘Then ask the same question again.’

So the fox asked, ‘Is a buddha, is an enlightened person, beyond the law of cause and effect7’

Pai-Chang said, ‘He does not obscure the law. He is neither beyond nor below. He does not come in... he is not. He is neither above nor below – he simply is not, so how can he be above and how can he be below? Whatsoever happens, happens. He does not come in His acceptance of reality is total. There is nobody to reject, to fight, to go beyond or do this or do that. He does not hinder, because he is not.’

And the story says that the fox understood. There was a satori in the innermost core of the being of the fox. The fox was released of the burden and became a man.Now, this story is beautiful.

Jesus on the cross wanted to interfere for a little while. He shouted loudly towards the sky, ‘Why have you forsaken me? Why?’ That complaint was there, so if you ask the eastern masters they will say up to that moment Jesus was not enlightened. Then he understood that this complaint, this saying, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ simply shows his ego, that he had his own will. He understood the point, he understood his mistake and he cried in deep prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.’ In that very moment he became enlightened.

To the eastern consciousness, Jesus became enlightened just before he died. For just a single moment he allowed god – ‘Thy will be done. My will is no more.’

Mm? that is the meaning of Pai-Chang when he says, ‘He does not come in – he allows. Whatsoever happens, he allows. He has no will of his own. He is absolutely will-less, egoless, a nonentity, a nothingness – at the most a window, a door that you can pass through.’

If you can be close to a master, to a guru, that being close to a master is known as ‘saiva’ – service. That too is very eastern. When Jaina followers go to their master, if you meet them on the way and you ask, ‘Where are you going?’ they will say, ‘We are going to serve the saint.’ They are not going to serve or do anything they will just go and touch his feet, sit silently and come back. If you follow them, you will say, ‘What type of service is this? What do you mean by service? You have not done anything!’

But this is the eastern way of serving a master – because you cannot do anything to a master. All that can be done is meaningless; what can you do? At the most if you allow him to do something to you, that’s enough for you to do.

So a disciple goes, sits by the side of the master, empties his whole mind, puts his thoughts aside, creates a little space so that the presence of the master can enter in him. This is called ‘saiva’, service.

And I give you the name ‘gurudas’. It means a servant of the masterAnd it has a deep message

for you – you have to decode it.

Being here, try to be more and more open, available. Ordinarily we resist; we create a thousand and one barriers. We are very much afraid. If you are afraid, there will be no contact with the master. Because of fear we distrust, because of fear we doubt, because of fear we protect, secure ourselves; because of fear we become closed. Hence love is needed, because only in love can you trust, only in love can you open and only in love can you allow the presence of the master to do something. The master himself cannot do anything – he is no more. He does not come in.he is not.

But if you allow, his very presence will become a luminous transformation in your being. By and by you will start feeling that something is showering inside you, touching your deepest core, entering all the layers of your being – conscious, subconscious, unconscious – touching the very substratum. And out of that touch, out of that contact with the presence of the Master, things change. A mutation happens – what greeks used to call ‘metanoia’; that is exactly the right word – a total change, a one- hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. That is the meaning of the christian word ‘conversion’ – a total turn about.

But you are not to do anything, because a disciple cannot do anything – he is ignorant. Whatsoever he does will be his own undoing. A disciple cannot do because he does not know, the master cannot do because he is not. When these two non-doings meet, there is a great revolution: ‘metanoia’. The disciple cannot do anything – he is ignorant – so to do anything will go wrong. The master cannot do because he is not. He is no more ignorant, so he is not, because one can exist only in ignorance. Both cannot do. The master is present; if the disciple can also be present, that is service.

Then why do we call it service? Why not just call it presence? Because in service the disciple is surrendered. Just in presence you may sit by the side of the master thinking yourself equal at least, but then the presence cannot pour in you. The presence follows a certain law – you have to be very very surrendered. Just like water flows downwards, the presence of the master flows downwards. So the humblest disciple will become the richest.

And Jesus says, ‘Those who are standing last in the queue will be the first in my kingdom of god.’ The humblest disciple will become the richest because he will be the lowest, the last – and of course, naturally, more presence will come to him. Those who are arrogant, egoistic, they will miss.

When it rains, it rains on the mountains also, but the water cannot be retained there. It goes on flowing downwards, reaches to the valleys, finds lakes; there it resides.

The master showers on both – the arrogant and the humble – but finally the humble contains it, the arrogant misses it.

That is the meaning of serving. So keep this meaning floating in your consciousness... Let it sink deep.

[The new sannyasin says he has a problem with loving. His partner of five years comments that he has been like a guru to her, and she feels love and caring.]

My feeling is that [your partner] may be right. You have some impossible idea of love in your mind and that is creating the trouble.

Whenever it happens that a person has an impossible idea about something, then nothing satisfies because everything falls short of the idea. So whatsoever you do, you feel it is not enough; more should be done. About love you have some very fantastic, fictitious, imaginative concept – you are not realistic about it. Then the very idea can become a very crippling influence on you.

Every ideology is poisonous. One should move with reality... one should not have ‘shoulds’. You have some idea of how love should be, how perfect love is, and it is not happening. In fact whatsoever is happening is all that can happen. You are not to change your love pattern – you have to drop your concept pattern. The comparison is creating trouble, and comparison is coming out of the idea. It has happened to many people – this is a misfortune.

All the philosophers and thinkers go on talking about love – and they don’t know anything. But they talk well, they speculate well. They have created such absurd notions in the mind of humanity that nobody can ever be satisfied.

Whatsoever you do, you will always feel that it is not yet the thing; you have to do more. Then one becomes miserable, desperate, and in that desperation and misery, even that which one has becomes poisoned.

So the one thing is that you drop the idea. Whatsoever is happening is the real thing – enjoy it. Don’t judge – flow with it... Let it take possession. Don’t stand aloof and go on criticising that it is still not the thing that you want. You are trying hard – maybe that’s why you are missing – so be a little more relaxed.

Love is nothing of the skies – it is very earthly, it is very animal. It is very chemical, it is hormonal. Nothing to be very worried about – just enjoy it. Whatsoever small quota you have got, enjoy it. The more you enjoy it, the more will be given to you; it comes out of enjoyment. But if you have some absurd ideas.…

For example, if a person thinks that he can run one mile in one minute or two miles in one minute or three miles in one minute.… There is a limit. Seconds may differ but there is a human limit. You cannot cross that limit. There are certain reasons why one cannot run faster: gravitation is there, the body weight is there, the lungs’ capacity is there. Everything is limited – you can go only so far.

In everything there is a limitation, and when one understands one’s limitations there is no problem. One follows the limitations – one does whatsoever one can do and one enjoys doing it. Otherwise you can be bogged down with your own concepts and become burdened.

My suggestion is that for one month you simply drop all concepts about love. Start from abc – as if you don’t know anything about love... and in fact you don’t know; in fact nobody knows. Love is not an object of knowledge, nobody can know it.

The people who really know it will always say that they don’t know and the people who don’t know will claim that they know, because the very experience of love is ineffable.

So for one month, start from ABC. From this very moment start from abc: enjoy small things and don’t hanker for the big. Life consists of small things.

[Osho said that now in the West, due to the reports of Masters and Johnson and Kinsey, people are becoming too overly-concerned about a need to experience a ‘total orgasm’. See the darshan diary “Blessed are the Ignorant” December 28th, where Osho talks about this in more detail.]

How can you achieve total orgasm? Total orgasm can happen only in death – otherwise it will not be total! Only death can be total, otherwise everything is going to be partial; only death is total.

Totality always brings death – only the partial can live. The total? There is no possibility to live beyond it... all growth stops.

Drop the idea, forget about love; forget the word ‘love’. Start from abc and enjoy small things – holding the hand, being together, loving each other, caring, and feel infinitely satisfied. That’s all there is to it. By and by you will see that such contentment arises, and out of that contentment, certainly your capacity to love grows. But it comes as a consequence: you cannot hanker for it, you cannot make a goal of it – that you have to achieve this. It is not a goal, it is just a by-product.

For one month resist the temptation to compare with any idea. Just enjoy the experience – don’t bring the idea in. And after one month, tell me again how you feel. You will never have this problem again. This is not a problem, it is a created problem.

And never try to be a perfectionist, otherwise you will become neurotic. Perfectionism is the seed of neurosis. A perfectionist can never be satisfied – because there is no way to satisfy a perfectionist. He will always find something or other – and that ‘something’ will create trouble. Be more realistic, down to earth, and enjoy imperfection too; that is part of life.

Sometimes you cannot love and sometimes you feel anger too and sometimes you hate the woman too, but they are all parts of life. Nothing to be worried about. You are not to cleanse your love completely of all anger, of all hatred, of all jealousy, of all possessiveness. You cannot do that – and there is no need – because then the love will be so purified that you will not be able to hold it; it will simply disappear like camphor. Such a perfect thing cannot live on the earth.

That’s the meaning of the eastern concept that whenever a man becomes perfect, he disappears – he never comes back... he is never born again.

Christians say that Jesus will be coming again.… Hindus will laugh at this and think it foolish. If he is perfect he cannot come, and if he is not perfect, what is the point of hankering for his coming?

A perfect man never comes back. By the very nature of things, perfection is beyond. Once a man is perfect he starts disappearing; this is his last life then.

So don’t be too much worried about perfection. Life is muddy – and it is beautiful; there is nothing wrong in it. So just enjoy the naturalness, the humanness of it, with all human flaws, with all human limitations.

For one month simply enjoy without the head, and after one month both tell me again how you are feeling, mm? It will change – nothing to be worried about.

Anand means bliss, the ultimate state of happiness, joy, and vidyarthi means a student, a seeker, an apprentice – an apprentiCe for bliss, one who is searching for the ultimate state of joy, delight.

Everybody is searching for that, but there are two types of seekers: one who seeks consciously, one who seeks unconsciously.

The one who seeks unconsciously never achieves it, because consciousness is a basic ingredient. If you really want to achieve it you have to go after it very consciously; you have to be very alert. So only those who are consciously seeking, attain.

The unconscious seekers go on and on, journeying from this life to another life, from this planet to another planet, from one species to another species. They go on changing and changing, round and round; they move in a rut but they never arrive. Because the arrival is possible only when you take hold of your being very very consciously.

So your name will mean that – to make your search conscious, become a conscious seeker. Jesus says, ‘Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Ask and it shall be given. Seek and you will find.’

But everybody is seeking and nobody is finding!

Then by ‘seeking’ Jesus means something else – seek consciously, knock consciously, ask consciously. Mm? that consciousness is missing in the sentence, so everybody goes on seeking and nobody seems to find anything – only frustration. Become a conscious seeker.

[A sannyasin asks: I was really wondering what the difference between releasing kundalini energy and... self-realisation and enlightenment and samadhi and nirvana.]

They are all the same, mm? just different words for the same experience. And different traditions need different words.

For example, Buddhists use ‘nirvana’, Hindus use ‘self-realisation’ – but for the same experience. Jainas use ‘enlightenment’, but for the same experience. The different words are different definitions of the same experience but by different experiencers. Sometimes the words may be just opposite to each other.

For example, nirvana means cessation of the self, disappearance of the self, and the hindu term is self-realisation, realisation of the self. So they look opposite – that creates confusion. But when

hindus say ‘realisation of the self’ they mean self with a capital ‘S’. The lower case self disappears – the ego disappears – and then whatsoever remains, that is what they call the self, with capital ‘S’.

But when buddhists talk about no-self, they say that when the self, when the ego disappears, there is no self left, so they call it cessation of self. But both are talking about the same experience. Of course they have chosen very contradictory terms, so those terms create confusion in many people.

Jainas use the word ‘enlightenment’ – it simply means that the darkness has disappeared. And the emphasis is that whatsoever is, is. There was no light, now there is light.

For example, you were sitting in the room but the room was dark. Now somebody brings a lamp. Nothing else has changed – you are still sitting in the room, everything is the same – only now there is no darkness. One thing has changed, the darkness has disappeared and light has come; otherwise everything is the same.

So when a person becomes enlightened nothing really changes – only one thing: he becomes conscious; he is no more unconscious. The dark night of the unconsciousness has disappeared. But otherwise he is the same as he was before. Nothing new has happened, but he has become aware of who he is. Before also he was the same but he was not aware.

These are all different expressions. Kundalini is another expression of the same. Mm ? the word ‘kundalini’ means coiled up energy. Sometimes you must have seen a serpent coiled up, all coiled and resting. So Hindus say – particularly the yoga schools – that the human energy is fast asleep, like a coiled-up snake, but if you wake the snake he will start arising; then he will uncoil.

Exactly in the same way, when one starts waking oneself up, the coiled energy uncoils. That means that kundalini is coiled-up energy and the rising of the kundalini is uncoiling of the energy. Now the energy starts rising higher and reaches to the highest peak in sahasrar. The lotus of consciousness opens, and they say that it is a one-thousand-petalled lotus – it is infinity.

But these are all ways of expressing the same thing, so you need not worry about words, mm? [The sannyasin then asked for an explanation of an experience of automatic writing.]

It is nothing – just your unconscious playing games with you. It is unconscious writing, automatic writing. But you have a vast unconscious – it can play all the roles. It can become Adolf Hitler and Alexander and Jesus and Buddha, and it can become anybody. Mm? just any fancy can catch hold of you. If you keep the pen in your hand and sit silently and wait, if your conscious mind allows, the unconscious takes possession and starts writing.

It is just the same thing that happens in dreams. When you are asleep your conscious mind goes to sleep and the unconscious has no trouble, nobody hindering its path, so it explodes into a thousand colours and creates beautiful dreams and scenarios and a beautiful world; a great movie goes on. And it gives its messages to you in many ways. That’s why dream analysis has become so important.

This too is a sort of technique to allow the un-conscious to express its hidden, repressed desires. For example, ‘relax’ came again and again. Mm? that was very significant. I am not saying that it

is not significant – it is very significant – but it is not coming from some master or from some holy spirit, or some adept; it is not coming from anybody.

It is just coming from your own deep unconscious – and that is a great thing! For millions of lives you have accumulated your unconscious – it is greatly experienced. Your conscious is very young – the unconscious is very ancient. It contains the whole unconscious experience of humanity; it is collective.

So when you allow – you sit silently and you start – the unconscious can give you messages. If you don’t start doing something consciously, the message will be very clear and pure. For example, this relaxation – that is a message from the unconscious to relax; if you relax, more will be coming. One can fall almost into a coma, writing; one can fall asleep and then the real thing will flow.

You can develop the art – it is beautiful. It is just like ‘i ching’. These are all unconscious ways to find one’s own deepmost feeling. But once somebody says that this is your unconscious, you don’t bother much, so these tricks have been invented – that masters are guiding, god is giving you messages. Then you become more interested, you are more alert, and you are more available, that’s all. So those words help, but the pure thing is that your own unconscious... But it can do great things.

You can continue to write. Make it a habit for at least fifteen minutes every day to do it. And more and more will be coming, and more and more you will become attuned, and you can find out more things about yourself. Then you can start asking questions about yourself. You can write a question and then ponder over it, and then start. Keep the pen in your hand, relax, and allow the answer. You will be surprised – such a wise answer comes that you cannot manage. It is not from you as far as you know yourself.

Try – it is good!

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