18

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‌CHAPTER 18

18 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Antar is Sanskrit it means the inner, and Victoria is Latin; it means the victorious. The full name will mean: the inner victory, the victory over the inner. To win the other is not difficult it is not really a great challenge. The real challenge arises from the inner: how to win oneself, how to be a master of one’s own being.

It is easy to be a master of somebody else; that’s why people have decided to be the master of somebody else. Somebody is a husband and he thinks he is a master, somebody is a wife and she also thinks deep down that she is the master, the parents think they are the masters of their children, and so on and so forth. All are escaping from one real phenomenon, and that is victory over oneself. Unless one is a master of oneself, all relationship remains phony. Because you are not, how can your relationship be true, authentic, real? It can only be superficial. When you are not then you function only through the mask, the personality, which is a cultivated thing. Unless the real inner explodes, overflows, one remains phony.

One never knows who one is, one never knows what treasures one is carrying within oneself. One never knows that one is a bearer of Christ-consciousness, of Buddhahood that one has an inner kingdom. Compared to it all outer kingdoms are just stupid. Even to win a single inch of the inner territory is far more valuable than to become Alexander the Great, because all that is won on the outside will be taken by death – you will go empty-handed – but that which is won inside nobody can take, not even death.

Let this be the definition of real treasure: that which cannot be taken away by death is the real treasure, and the person is blessed who has it; he has something of eternity.

Prem means love, terry is Latin; it means soft, tender. Love can only be soft and tender; if it is not, then it is something else, not love. Many things pretend to be love, many things masquerade as

love. Love is such a valuable thing that it is natural that many pretenders will be born. The false coins come into existence only because the real coin exists; they are copies. Love is utterly soft, delicate, tender, as soft as the lotus flower, vulnerable; it can be destroyed very easily.

It is difficult to destroy a rock; it is not difficult to destroy a rose. The rock seems to be stronger, the rose seems to be very tender, but still the rose has something which the rock has not got: the rose is far more alive than the rock and the rose has something of the beyond in it; that’s its beauty. The rose has a poetry; that’s its being. But always remember: whenever there is a clash between the lower and the higher, it is always the higher that suffers, never the lower. If you clash a rose with a rock, the rock will not suffer, only the rose will suffer.

In the inner world of human consciousness there are all kinds of things: rocks and roses, all kinds of things. Hate is there, like rock, great longing to be powerful is there like rock, anger is there like rock. Love is there like a rose flower, not even fully grown up, just like a bud, just on the way. Anger can destroy it, hate can destroy it, jealousy can destroy it, possessiveness can destroy it – anything, and there are many things.

So only one who is really alert can be a lover – very alert to protect the tender, the soft, the delicate, the vulnerable.

It is not against others when you are full of hate; it is against you. It is not when you are boiling with anger that you are destructive to others – you may be, you may not be, but you are certainly destructive to yourself; it is not a question of perhaps.

One has to learn what is valuable in one’s being and what is worthless. And one has also to learn to sacrifice the worthless for the valuable. Only then, slowly slowly are energies transformed, the alchemy happens. Then it is very surprising: even anger can become love, hate can become love, jealousy can be transmuted into love. All that is needed is: don’t use these negative things for destruction. Even if they arise, watch, very silently, don’t be moved by them. Let them be there – just be a detached observer – and slowly slowly they will subside. And when they subside, not by repression but by awareness, the transformation happens.

Awareness is the vehicle of transforming all that is lower into higher. Rocks can bloom like roses; and this is what I am trying to do here: to help you transform rocks into roses. It is possible, it is within your reach.

Bliss is not a goal but a discipline. One just has to learn how to be blissful. We are born to be blissful, the quality is intrinsic in us; it is not something to be brought from the outside. It has to be drawn out; just as we draw water from a well, bliss has to be drawn out. That’s exactly the meaning of the word ‘education’: to draw out something that is already there. Bliss is an education.

Our so-called education is just doing the opposite. Rather than bringing out that which is intrinsic in the person, it goes on forcing something which is absolutely alien, something foreign, something that the whole being of the person resists, rejects, does not allow to be digested. That’s why ninety- nine percent of all that one is taught in the schools, colleges, and in the universities, is immediately forgotten once one has passed the examinations. It was of no use, and it was never something harmonious with your being.

My own experience is this: that whenever something is in harmony with you you cannot forget it, it is impossible. And when something is not in harmony with you you cannot remember it, howsoever hard you try; It the most, for the time being you can remember it. That’s why students only read the night before they are going to take an examination; and their examination is nothing but a kind of vomiting. They regurgitate whatsoever they have been somehow accumulating the whole night, managing, stuffing themselves with; their examination papers are nothing but vomit.

This is not education, education is a totally different phenomenon. It has to bring that which is hidden in you, it has to make it manifest, it has to help you to be yourself. Bliss is there, an inborn quality; it has to be helped.

Sannyas is an education, education in the true, literal sense of the word. And it can be learned. In fact it is difficult to learn the ways of misery because it goes so against your nature. k is very easy to learn the ways of being blissful.

Just a few small things to be remembered: one, emphasise the heart more than the head, and almost fifty percent of the work is done. Replace thinking by feeling. Think less, feel more, logic less, love more; and fifty percent of the work is done. And the second thing is: become more sensitive to life–its pains, pleasures, agonies, ecstasies. Don’t create an armour around yourself to protect, remain vulnerable; and twenty-five percent more is done. And the third: never cling to the known, because the known is dead, and if you cling to the dead, you will become dead. Always seek and search for the unknown, become an adventurer. Listen to the call of the unknown, risk everything for it, and you will never be a loser; and the remaining twenty-five percent is done.

If these three simple things can be managed, bliss starts showering. One is drowned in it, one is drunk with it.

Anand means bliss, hartmut is Teutonic; it means great courage. It is strange but this is how it is: to be blissful needs great courage. Misery can be afforded by any coward, it is cheap. It requires no sacrifice, it requires no learning; it requires nothing. It is just there, ready to be picked up. But bliss really needs great courage. And why is it so? It looks very illogical. It is so because misery has a few things in it which are very strengthening for the ego, nourishing for the ego.

The ego can exist only in the ocean of misery. Once misery disappears the ego dies; and who wants to die? We cling to our small egos, we cling hard. It is better to be miserable than not to be; that’s our choice. And the first condition, the first requirement to be blissful is to drop the ego, to be in a state of egolessness, in fact to be in a state of non-being; only then does bliss happen. It needs courage because it requires total sacrifice. You have to disappear, then bliss happens, you have to make a space for bliss to happen. You have to create the context for bliss to happen, and the only context that is needed is egolessness.

And because we are taught continuously from the very beginning to the end that we are egos – strengthen your ego, become strong in your ego, otherwise how are you going to survive? be ambitious, be rich, be famous, leave a name in the world – it becomes easier and easier for us to cling to misery and more and more difficult even to have a little glimpse of bliss. Yes, that’s why it needs great courage: it is going against all that has been taught to you. It is going against all the conditionings of the society. It is going against ambition, it is going against fame. It is disappearing

into a kind of nobodyness, into a no-man’s land. Only very few people have dared, but those who have dared were really born, they really lived, they really knew what life is all about. Their joy was infinite, their bliss was eternal, their benediction knew no bounds.

Samadhi is the ultimate state of consciousness. The mind disappears in it but awareness is total. Thoughts are absent but one is aware that there are no thoughts. It is as if the mirror is there reflecting nothing. Nora comes from Latin, it means honour; it comes from honoria. Your full name will mean: samadhi, the most honoured one. There is nothing else which is more valuable than samadhi. To know oneself as a pure consciousness is to know god.

These are the two possibilities of our being. If we are identified with the thoughts and the contents of the mind, we know the world but we become completely oblivious of god, we know the world but we don’t know who we are. The other possibility is if thoughts are dissolved we don’t know the world any more but we know ourselves, we know who we are; and in knowing it we know god himself because god is nothing but the pure consciousness of the whole universe. We are small drops of that pure consciousness. The difference between us and god is not of quality but only of quantity. To feel and to know oneself as part of god is to be honoured, is to feel worthy, is to feel immensely blessed.

All the meditations and all the groups that you will be going through here are ways and means of dropping the mind, of cleansing the slate of the mind, of making it a tabula rasa. Once that has happened you are standing on the door of the divine; the mind gone, god immediately enters.

Prem means love, reinhard is Teutonic; it means pure heart. The full name will mean: pure heart of love. Love is the fragrance of a pure heart. One cannot practise love; the practised love will be just a plastic flower, untrue, pseudo, and of no significance at all. The danger is not only that it will deceive others; slowly slowly it can deceive you too.

When you deceive people, in the beginning you know that you are deceiving them, but when they start being deceived it becomes a feedback: you start believing in your own untruth. Because so many people are believing there must be something in it, otherwise how can so many intelligent people believe it? You can deceive one, you cannot deceive all. So slowly slowly deceiving others rebounds, and one is deceived oneself.

That’s what is happening in the name of love: people are deceiving others and are being deceived by their own deceptions. People have completely forgotten that love is not something to be learned, not something to be cultivated, not something to be imposed on you; it is a natural consequence of a pure heart.

What do I mean by pure heart? I don’t mean what it ordinarily means: a pure heart means one who thinks only good thoughts – of god and paradise and virtues and prayers and churches. By pure heart I don’t mean that; all that is crap.

The pure heart is the heart of the innocent child who knows nothing of god, who knows nothing of the church, who knows nothing of prayer, but still who is innocent. Out of his innocence he is spontaneous. Because he has no ready-made answers he has to devise moment-to-moment; as the situation arises he has to respond. That’s my meaning of a pure heart: to become a child again,

so deeply a child that all knowledge is discarded and one moves in each moment responding to it, not from the past but from present awareness.

These are the two possibilities of encountering reality. One is reaction; reaction means from the past experience, knowledge and all that. Another is response; response means no past, no experience. Just this moment I am here, aware. The situation is there and I respond to the situation; out of my presentness, out of my presence, I respond.

The first act is of the cunning mind, the second act is of the pure heart; and out of this pure heart love simply arises like a fragrance.

[A sannyasin, who is leaving, says she does not like the way people at home react to her orange and mala. She doesn’t understand why she wants to be a sannyasin.]

My feeling is that you should leave sannyas; that will bring you to your senses. You leave it! And if you don’t like the mala...

If you like the mala then you will like the reaction also. Then who cares? If you love something, you are ready to suffer for it; the problem arises only if you don’t love. And if your past is more important then I am the last person to take your past from you– live in it!

[She then says she had met another group whom she trusted totally.]

So wherever your trust is be there. If your trust is not with me, then why waste my time and your time?

I want to weed out people. I am in a hurry, and I want only those who are really with me so I can work on them. I have something to communicate to people; once they are ready it can be communicated. People like you will not be ready, or it will take so long that by the time you are ready I will be gone.

So the best logical course is: you drop sannyas; and wherever your trust is, be totally there, maybe that’s where you are to grow. And if some day you can be here with total trust, the doors are open; the doors are not closed for you.

This may be the right way. A few people are like that: they cannot catch hold of the ear directly; they go round about. You may be one of them. So before you go, leave sannyas. And there is no problem in leaving it. Sannyas is given happily and taken back more happily, because my boat is already too full, and I would like a few people to disappear.

Those who are half-hearted, their being with me is just useless: it is useless for the work, it is useless for you, because you remain divided.

And whenever you leave sannyas I am not angry, I am not in any way disappointed in you. Leave sannyas with all my blessings. My love remains the same; your being a sannyasin or not being a sannyasin makes no difference. But leaving sannyas will be helpful at this stage; you will be clear and at least you will not be divided. And whenever you feel that you can be totally here, totally with me, you are welcome; you can come.

[A sannyasin says he always feels very nervous and he would like to transform his energy, because he has two children and he gets very irritable with them. Osho checks his energy.]

It is nothing to be worried about. From your very childhood you have been repressing it, and now it has to be thrown out of your system. So whenever you feel nervous, just go into the room, close the door, and start shaking all over the body; shake as much as you can.

It is in the body everywhere, it has become a part of your physiology. By shaking it the energy will be thrown out. It will take at least three to six months, and then you will be free of it. Next time you come here remind me again. Some body work will be helpful, or if you can do something there like Rolfing, Postural Integration, Rebirthing, these three things will be of great help.

[He says he has already done Rolfing and Rebirthing.]

Then start shaking; and really get into it, be possessed by it! Perspiration will come, allow it. It will be very relaxing, and it will clean your system of toxins. Good.

Prem means love, nagara means a citizen – a citizen of love. Love has its own universe, and unless you are initiated into it you never become part of it. Love is a great initiation because it is the greatest art to learn how to die and how to be reborn again. In all the mystery schools of the world the initiation into love was one of the most secret processes, because love is the energy we are made of and love is the energy that is our life. Not to know what love is, is to miss the whole point of being here in the world.

The world is only a challenge to know and learn love. But a calamity has happened in the world, and the calamity is this, that everybody thinks they already know what love is; so nobody tries, nobody explores, nobody enquires. We are capable of love but we don’t know yet what love is. We are born as potentialities but not as actualities.

My sannyas is simply nothing but an initiation into the world of love. In a way it is one of the most significant things; in another way it is the most simple too – simple because it is a natural growth of our being, difficult because the whole society is against it.

Our society is not based on love, it is based on competition, and competition is only a beautiful label for hate. Our society is rooted in ambition, and ambition is nothing but a cultured, cultivated kind of violent struggle.

To be a lover one will have to drop the ambitious mind, the competitive mind, the jealous mind, the possessive mind; in short, one will have to drop the mind itself in toto. Then another kind of life starts, the life of the heart, through the heart and for the heart.

That is the meaning of your name: become part of the universe of love, and by becoming part of the universe of love you become part of god, because god is love, because love is god.

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