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‌CHAPTER 10

10 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, sandeh means doubt.

To go beyond doubt is the most fundamental step towards god. Doubt is a tremendously important method of enquiry into matter, but not into consciousness. It is utterly valid as far as matter is concerned, and utterly invalid as far as consciousness is concerned.

If you use trust in science, there will be no science at all. Doubt is a must; it is through doubt that science grows. Hence in the East, science could not grow – because of trust. But if you go on doubting and you forget how to trust, religion starts dying. That’s how, in the West, religion is dead: god is dead. Once trust disappears, then you cannot see god anywhere. Only the eyes of trust, of tremendous love, are capable of seeing god, the divine, in existence.

For the outer journey, doubt is the way; it is perfectly right. I am not against doubt, but it has its limitations, just as trust has its limitations. For the inner journey trust is perfectly right, but for the outer it is utterly useless. To be a total man, one needs to be capable of both.

These are two instruments to be used; one need not get identified with either. The modern mind is identified with doubt. That identification has to be dropped, because initiation into sannyas is initiation into trust. It is the beginning of an inner journey – esoteric, a flight of the alone to the alone. It is going into exploration within the very core of your being; it is trying to confront yourself. It is not an objective enquiry, it is going into pure subjectivity. Doubt will not be needed, doubt will be a hindrance. Only trust can become the boat to the unknown.

[The new sannyasin says she is not doing groups because she is expecting a baby in two months.]

Then you can take a few individual sessions after the camp – Shiatsu, Acupuncture – and book for one group, Zazen. If you enjoy it – because it is a very very silent meditation, one of the most

deep-going meditations; it is just meditation, but you have to sit for hours – if you enjoy it, then you can do one more group, some time later on: Vipassana. If you enjoy Zazen, then Vipassana is on the same track – still further going, deeper-going. But if you feel any discomfort, then drop out of the group; there is no need to complete it, and don’t do the others. Simply be here, enjoy singing, dancing, music.

Anand means bliss. Irene is Greek, it means peace. In Greek mythology, Irene is the goddess of peace. Your full name will mean: blissful peace.

Remember, just peace is not enough, because it can become sadness very easily. It has to be blissful. Peace has two possibilities. It can be negative; when it is negative it is a kind of sadness. Yes, one is peaceful but there is no cheerfulness. One is peaceful but kind of dull and dead, one is peaceful but not alive. The peace is not a singing and dancing one; the peace is simply absence of turmoil. It is an absence, not a presence.

That’s what has happened in the past to many religious people, they became involved too much in negative peace: avoid all situations of turmoil, activity, creativity, relationship; avoid the world, avoid people, avoid as much as you can so that you can be peaceful. Certainly they attained to a certain peace, but that peace was that of a cemetery, not of a garden where birds are singing and flowers are blooming and the winds are full of joy. There was no sunlight in that kind of peace. It was a dark night of the soul.

So I make it a point for every one of my sannyasins to always remember that one has not to fall into the trap of a negative kind of peace – which has its allurement. Peace, to be really true, has to be positive; not an absence but a presence, a well-being, a song ready to burst forth – alive, vibrating, pulsating. Then it has a totally different quality: it is life-affirmative, it is creative, it is active. It is not a kind of death; it is life abundant, it is ecstatic life.

And also remember that the negative kind of peace is easy to attain, because you have only to discard; you have only to negate, eliminate, you have only to escape. It does not need much intelligence to escape; any coward can do it. It needs only fear, that’s all; nothing else is needed.

Hence, in the past, cowards became great saints. They were not intelligent people, but simply afraid of life. And out of fear they escaped – to the deserts, to the mountains. Wherever they could find a way to escape, they escaped from life, and in their monasteries they started a kind of living death; they vegetated.

I am utterly against that kind of peace. Remember, peace has to be full of sunlight. Peace has to be in the world; peace has to be earthly, sensuous. Peace has not to be just an abstraction in the mind. It has to be full of love, fun of joy, full of hope. That is the meaning of your name.

[The new sannyasin will only be here for a few days, and will return in June.]

In June? Then I will give you groups–because by that time so much water will have flowed down the Ganges, you will not be the same person! So I cannot suggest right now, mm? The medicine can be prescribed only in June when you come back.

I will have to see the patient first!

Prem means love. Matthias is Hebrew, it means a gift of god – love, the gift of god. The greatest gift of god is love. It is a miracle that we are capable of love; and only those who go deep in love know what life is and know what god is. Love holds all the keys of all the secrets. But very few people go into love, although everybody thinks he is a lover. Everybody thinks that he loves, and loves too much. The father thinks he loves the children, the mother thinks she does; the husband thinks he loves the wife, the wife thinks she loves the husband, friends think they love each other. But look at the world: if so many people are so loving, the world will be a paradise – and it is not! It is the ugliest possible world that we have created. Love is utterly missing, love is not present anywhere. We only pretend to love, we don’t love. We do something else in the name of love.

The father may be dominating the children, he may be using the children as part of his ambition. The wife may be dominating her husband, possessing him; she may be jealous, she may be clinging to him, afraid – if he leaves, what will happen to her? And all this she calls love. The husband may be very very possessive of the woman and may call it love, but love is utterly absent. How can jealousy and love be together? How can possessiveness and love be together? If you love a person you cannot possess him or her, because to possess a person is to humiliate him, to possess a person is to reduce him to a thing, to a commodity. When you possess a woman she is no more a woman, she is just a wife; you have reduced her to a commodity. You are exploiting her; you are using her for sexual purposes, for other purposes, but you are not in love.

The first thing to understand is that we are not in love; whatsoever we have been calling love is not love. To know the false as false is the beginning. To know the true as true, first one has to understand what is false; then one starts seeking and searching for the true.

Love is the greatest gift of god. And very rarely, once in a while, a Jesus, a Buddha, a Krishna – yes, these few people have known what love is.

Matthias is also the name of a disciple of Jesus who was chosen in place of Judas Iscariot to make the apostles twelve again. He must have been a man of tremendous insight, of love, because love is the message of Jesus. And all the eleven apostles voted for him – he must have been a rare man.

Remember: become love, and you become an apostle of god. To be a lover is to be an apostle of god.

Shanti means peace, silence, stillness, serenity; and deva means love – god of peace, god of silence, god of stillness.

The mind is a constant turmoil, conflict, friction. It is a crowd, very noisy, of thoughts, desires, memories; one is utterly lost in the crowd. The noise is so much that one cannot hear one’s own voice, one’s own being. The still, small voice inside is suffocated because the mind shouts.

The mind has to be dropped slowly slowly, so that we can hear the still small voice within. That is god’s voice, and that’s from where we receive messages. It is from that source that the Vedas are born, the Koran and the Bible.

Each person is capable of giving birth to the Vedas, but the mind has to go; that price has to be paid, and it is worth paying. The mind has nothing of any significance; it brings only misery. Yes, it

gives you great hopes, but it never fulfils them. It keeps you always expectant: something is going to happen, going to happen, going... but it never happens. It is always arriving, but it never arrives, and the whole of life is lost.

The mind is really a perfect salesman. It goes on selling you things which are useless. You know that they are useless and many times you have decided ‘Enough is enough, now I am not going to be deceived’ – but again, when the opportunity arises, the mind deceives you. Many times you have decided not to be angry again, not to be greedy again, not to be this, not to be that – but when the opportunity arises, the mind again possesses you, drives you into the old rotten ways in which you have only suffered. But it is really clever at selling things. It says ‘This time it is totally different. This is not the same thing, and this time something is going to happen – don’t miss it.’ This has happened a thousand and one times.

The most strange thing about man is that he seems to be almost incapable of learning from experience. If one learns from experience, then one thing is bound to happen sooner or later – and it will be sooner if one learns – that one will start disidentifying oneself from the mind. One will not say ‘My mind is me.’ One will say ‘This is the mind – I am separate.’ One will create a distance between the noisy mind and oneself, one will use the mind but will not be used by the mind. Then one has come to the still small voice within, to the centre of the cyclone. To know it is to know all that is worth knowing. And that’s what sannyas is all about – helping you to drop the mind so that you can attain to your being.

Nirvan means enlightenment, the state of ultimate realisation, the experience of one’s innermost core, the actualisation of all the potential that one has carried all along, the seed turning into the flower. Hope is Anglo-Saxon; it has three meanings. One, the ordinary that is known – hope; the second, which is far more important – expectancy; and the third, which is even more important and which is not known, is cheerfulness.

Remember the third meaning: be cheerful because you are carrying the seed of ultimate flowering in you. Be cheerful because the kingdom of god is yours. Be cheerful because we are not accidental, because we are not meaningless, because we are the very crown of existence, we are the very salt of the earth.

Man is god’s hope. Fulfil it! It can be fulfilled, and it can be fulfilled very easily. It is not difficult to attain to your ultimate nature – how can it be difficult to attain to your nature? To attain to one’s nature must be a natural phenomenon. It must be just as fire is hot: no effort is made on the part of fire to remain hot, it is simply hot. Water goes downwards without any effort; it is its nature. Fire rises upwards without any effort.

So is the case with man: effort is not needed to become divine; we are already divine. All that is needed is to remove the hindrances, just the rocks that are blocking the path. My work here is nothing but removing the blocks so that you can be what you already are.

[The new sannyasin is assigned a residential group, and asks about caring for her five-year old son.]

Find somebody.… Five years old is old enough. Modern children of five years old are far more mature... than they used to be in the past. And he will enjoy the freedom also! Just let him be!

Anand means bliss. Susanne is Hebrew; it means a lily. Your full name will mean: a blissful lily, a blissful flower, a blissful flowering, a flower of bliss.

Man lives in misery. That is his own doing; he is not meant to be miserable, he has earned it himself. It is not god’s work, it is man’s own inventiveness. God has meant man to be blissful, just as trees are blissful and birds are blissful and stars are blissful; but man has lost the right track. Rather than being more and more natural, spontaneous, he has become more and more artificial, arbitrary. And the more arbitrary you are, the more miserable you will be.

The greatest arbitrariness is the invention of the ego; it is the greatest lie there is. We are not separate from existence, but we believe that we are separate, and in that very belief the doors of hell are opened. We enter into hell-fire the moment we think we are separate.

Only a single moment is needed to enter into heaven too – just the realisation that ‘I am not separate, I am not, I am one with existence’ and bliss starts showering and one starts blooming. Then life has a totally different flavour: it has the flavour of divineness. Then god is not to be searched for anywhere else; one knows it in one’s own heart – he is there! One feels him in one’s breath, in one’s heartbeat, in one’s pulsating blood.

Then god is, without any proof. To be blissful is enough proof, to be blissful is the only proof. Then who cares about proofs? – bliss is enough. Hence in the East we have called god ‘satchitanand’. Sat means truth, chit means consciousness, anand means bliss – three faces of god: one is truth, another is consciousness, and the third is bliss, the ultimate is the bliss.

So from this moment start dropping the patterns of misery, strategies of creating misery, techniques of creating misery – and the fundamental thing to drop is the ego.

Sannyas is a process of committing ego-suicide. And the day you succeed in killing your ego, you succeed in releasing your soul. You are liberated!

I will have to change your name – your old name is dangerous. Gunther is Teutonic; it means war. German and war – it will be too dangerous!

Anand means bliss, deva means god – god of bliss. That is our true nature, that is what we are to become. In the seed we already are that, hence the great Upanishadic saying ‘Tat-tvam-asi’: that art thou. In the seed you are already that, but only in the seed. The potential is there; it can be actualised, but it can be missed also. If you miss it you will have to come back again and again; if you miss it you cannot be allowed to leave this earth. This earth is really a school, a mystery school: people who don’t learn their lessons, people who don’t do their homework, are sent back again and again unless they learn. The moment they learn, they disappear from the earth-plane, they rise to a higher plane, to a different world, to a different dimension.

Man is a student. It is good to learn all that life makes available, but one has to remember that sooner or later one has to go beyond it; and one has to prepare for that going. One has to remember continuously ‘Whatsoever I am is not my total self; it is only a part of me. I have to seek and search for my total being.’ Because only in knowing the total is freedom possible. Only in knowing oneself in utter nudity is one liberated.

To know oneself in totality is to be blissful. Not to know one’s self, to remain ignorant of oneself, is to be in misery, is to be in darkness. Knowing and bliss are two aspects of the same coin, just as ignorance and suffering are two aspects of the same coin.

[A new sannyasin says: I am doing Nadabrahma.]

Do you feel good? Then continue Nadabrahma and do it regularly. Even if you have to give up a meal, do it... but do not give up meditation. The more regular you are, the greater depth you will attain. And meditation is such a delicate thing that it takes months to grow but just a day or two to wither away. A delicate thing needs much regularity, continuity. Meditation is the highest; everything else is secondary. You will not miss much by missing a day’s sleep. One can do without sleeping for five to seven days. It is okay if you miss a meal; man can survive without food for three months. You can go without drinking water for a day; you will not die.

But usually, people give much more importance to such petty things and think that for a day or two they can do without the things that are really significant. But let it be remembered that nothing will go wrong if you do not fulfil the petty things of your routine. You will not gain anything by doing them, neither will you be a loser by not doing them. But meditation is of the highest, and through it god is attained. If you do not meditate, you will not know what you were to gain and what you have missed; you will really not know what you have lost.

The greatest misfortune that can befall people is that they never come to know what they have missed. Apart from missing, people never come to know what they were to gain, they never become aware of it.

So always devote energy to meditation. I lay down no other conditions for my sannyasin; only meditation is enough. If meditation is attained everything is attained.

[A sannyasin, leaving, says that before coming here she felt suicidal because she closed off from people. Now she feels good but is afraid of returning home to her two children and husband.]

Because the idea of suicide comes only if love is missing, otherwise it never comes. If love is there, then the idea simply never arises in one’s mind. It is the absence of love that gives you the idea ’Why go on living? For what? – because without love, life has no meaning, no significance. It is a drag, so why drag on? It is love that gives a dance to yom feet and a song to your heart.

So suicide is never the problem in itself; it is a symptom. The problem is love. But it almost always happens that we become too absorbed in, obsessed with, the symptom. Don’t be bothered about suicide; it is simply indicative that you are not loving as much as you should. And unless you love, you will not receive love. It is only by giving love that we get; there is no other way – the more we give, the more we get.

So pour your love into your husband, into your children, into friends; pour your love into trees, animals, birds, stones. Wherever you are, pour your love! Hug the tree; close your eyes and feel your love for the tree. Lie down on the rock; close your eyes and feel your love for the rock, shower the rock with your love.

Within two to three months you will be surprised that the whole idea of suicide has simply evaporated. It can be simply dropped, mm? But you are not to pay much attention to it directly; simply start moving into the direction of love, and it wi]l disappear.

It is like darkness: if you fight with darkness you cannot destroy it. But just bring in a small candle, light the candle, and there is no darkness. Love functions like light; and if love is there, there is no death. What to say about suicide? – not even death exists for the lover. Love knows no death. Love is the only eternal element in existence. Everything else comes and goes: love remains. And for a woman it is more so; the woman lives on love, it is her nourishment.

I can feel, I can see, what is missing. Just go back and pour your love, even into strangers. Don’t be too concerned towards whom you are being loving; just be loving, that is the point. Within two, three months, your whole energy will be transformed. I will see: it will be transformed.

Keep it (a box) with you... and whenever you need me and the idea of suicide comes, put it on your heart: it will immediately disappear!

[A sannyasin, who has been travelling to and fro between here and the West, is concerned about not being total enough. Osho checks his energy.]

I have just one thing to say to you. It is time to learn one thing: drop the idea of being perfect. That is the sole cause of your misery. Nobody can be perfect, because the moment you are perfect you cannot be here. Perfection cannot exist on earth; on earth only imperfection can exist. Once the idea of being perfect settles in their hearts, it drives people crazy. They start asking for the impossible in everything, and because it cannot happen they are miserable. Their expectations are very high and they cannot be fulfilled; and when they are not fulfilled they think that life is slipping by, through their fingers. They become depressed; each day more depression will be coming, because each day more life will be disappearing.

To be a perfectionist is to be on the verge of neurosis. All perfectionists are neurotic, more or less; the difference is only of degrees.

That’s what you have been trying: in everything you have to be perfect, you have to be total. You cannot allow any errors, you cannot allow any mistakes; and because you cannot allow mistakes and errors in yourself, you cannot allow them in others. And that becomes a barrier in love. You cannot love a person because your expectations are so much that nobody can fulfil them.

And forty years is time that you have wasted.

Now learn one thing: take life easily. Take it easy, with an its limitations, with an its imperfections. Enjoy it, and then the paradox happens: when one starts enjoying life with all its imperfections, it is almost perfect, but I say almost! It is ninety-nine point nine percent perfect. That point one percent remains imperfect – that’s the only way to exist here. But it happens only when you allow life as it is and you don’t demand too much. There is simply no need to demand: you accept whatsoever happens.

If you look for a perfect woman you will never find one. If you look for a perfect religion you will never find it. If you look for anything perfect you will be simply miserable, that’s all; you will find misery, more and more misery.

In the East in the old days there was a superstition that kings would not make their palaces perfect. They would keep one part of the palace imperfect to deceive god, mm ? Because the palace was not yet perfect: So let it be, it can be allowed to exist. Mm? it is still in the process of being made. Once the palace was perfect it could collapse – that was the superstition, but it has a grain of truth in it: once anything is perfect, it collapses.

That’s why Buddhas disappear from the world. Once a person becomes a Buddha, then this is the last time he is here; he will not be here again. This body just has to fulfil its momentum.

Relax, take things easily. God is not so hard. He is not such a hard taskmaster as you think. God is really compassion, love; existence is very compassionate.

That’s why it allows all kinds of limitations, imperfections, and still it goes on showering all kinds of gifts.

Start enjoying. You have been trying to improve upon yourself too much. You have done forty-eight groups! That must be the record.

Now it is enough! Yes, a few – fifteen, eighteen – is enough. Forty-eight is too much! Now forget all about groups and forget all about growth and growing – start living and enjoying.

That’s what I wanted to say to you!

[The sannyasin says he has not done forty-eight groups – only thirteen.] You have done forty-eight–you can’t count tonight! I keep records!

You count again! Maybe I am counting all the groups of all your lives!

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