8

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 8

8 February 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, the ultimate state of consciousness where no content exists, not even a ripple of experience. Where all experiences have been dissolved, where only the experiencer is without any experience, that state is of bliss. There is no happiness, no unhappiness, because they are all experiences, they come from the outside. They are all disturbances. If you like the disturbance you call it happiness; if you dislike the disturbance you call it unhappiness.

That’s why it is possible that happiness can become unhappiness any moment you start disliking it, and vice versa: unhappiness can become happiness the moment you start liking it. And likings change, so the same thing can give you great happiness and can drive you into deep despair. They are not different things; all that changes is your liking and disliking.

The state of bliss is not produced from the outside. The outside has completely disappeared; only you are, just pure consciousness, a mirror mirroring nothing. And that is the goal of all evolution.

Your name, bram, comes from Hebrew; it is the short form of Abraham. Abraham was chosen by god as the beginner of a new spiritual race. Abraham was a new beginning, a pioneer, a new breakthrough.

So is my idea of sannyas a new beginning, a break- through, a new step in human evolution. Something is desperately needed. The way man has existed up to now is no more meaningful. We are finished with it, we have outgrown it; hence there is so much feeling of meaninglessness around the world. Why should one live? For what? Life seems to have lost a]l flavour, and the reason is that we have outgrown all the meanings for which we had lived up to now. The time has come to create new meaning, new goals, new futures, new utopias. The time has come to dream new dreams and hope new hopes. If we cannot do that then we are finished, then we have come against a cul-de-sac.

Abraham also was a by-product of a crisis such as we are facing today. The old religions, the old creeds, concepts, dogmas, had become irrelevant, and he became a new beginning. He culminated in Christ. Jews may understand it, may not understand it, but what began in Abraham reached its climax in Christ-consciousness, Abraham was fulfilled in Christ. But the gap between the seed and the fruit is so much that you may not recognise the fruit as a continuum of the seed. And that’s what happened: the people who had loved Abraham could not recognise Jesus as the culmination, the crescendo, but he was the fulfilment. It was for people like Christ that Abraham was the beginning. It was for people like Christ that he opened the door.

There are very few pioneers in the world of spirituality, very few; they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even many great names are not pioneers. For example, Christ is not a pioneer but a culmination; the pioneer is Abraham. Buddha is a pioneer, a beginning. Mahavira is not a pioneer, he is just the ultimate flowering of a long long tradition of five thousand years; twenty-three masters preceded him.

Mohammed is also not a pioneer but, again, an off-shoot of Abraham; just a branch of Abraham bloomed, flowers came. Christianity and Islam are both by-products of Judaism. But it always happens: whenever a branch starts flowering, other branches start feeling jealous, angry. They cannot believe that they have not flowered and others have started flowering, that the spring has come to others before them. That creates anger, jealousy; that anger and jealousy murdered Jesus. If people had been a little more understanding, Jesus was not bringing anything new into the world; he was simply fulfilling all the old prophecies. He was a fulfilment of all the promises.

So I like the name Abraham.

Anand Willem. Anand means bliss. Willem is Teutonic; it means resolution – a blissful resolution. Man becomes a soul only by absolute resolution, decisiveness.

Ordinarily people live in a kind of vagueness. Their life is so-so, lukewarm, neither this nor that; they are somehow managing. They are not a togetherness, they are not one piece; they are a crowd. They don’t have a single mind, they are multi-psychic, they have many minds. There is no master inside. All the fragments are trying to possess the throne, but no fragment can become the master; at the most it can pretend for a moment to be the master, and the next moment it is thrown out. So one moment a person is one thing, another moment he is a totally different thing. Only on the surface do people maintain their identity, otherwise they have none.

If you look inside a person he is a flux, not an identity; a constantly changing scene with nothing as a centre, just a market-place, a multitude. That’s what a man ordinarily is, and the reason is: lack of resolution, lack of decisiveness. The moment you start deciding.It is hard, it is difficult to decide, it

needs guts. To decide means to take risks, to decide means to choose – and whenever you choose, something has to be left. That’s what choice is: if you choose to go to the left, then you have chosen to drop the direction that was going towards the right. That needs guts, because every resolution is a renunciation too.

For example, if you have chosen to become a sannyasin you have chosen to drop many things. If you have chosen to be a sannyasin you have chosen to be a universal man; now you will not be part of any ugly nationality. Formally you will be, but deep down you will know that you are simply a

man, you belong to the whole mankind. You are neither Indian nor Dutch nor German nor English, deep down you are neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan. You are dropping many things by becoming a sannyasin: all the concepts, belief systems, dogmas. You are dropping the very idea of living through imitation, of living by following the past.

To be a sannyasin means a resolution to live one’s own life according to one’s own light. It is a resolution to be a light unto yourself. It is risky to be free, because it is always safe to throw the responsibility on others – that they have told you to do this, that you are not responsible. To be a sannyasin means that from this moment you will be responsible, that whatsoever you do, you will be doing it – that if good happens, it is yours; if something goes wrong, that is yours; that you will be doing your own thing, whatsoever the consequence; that you are willing to accept all the consequences, but you are not willing to lose your freedom.

Sannyas is a declaration of freedom, of individuality; it needs great resolution. But through resolution the soul is born, one attains to a soul. Sometimes small resolutions bring great integrity; and this is a great resolution.

Move into this new vision with a very determined step, with great trust in yourself. That’s what I teach: trust yourself, trust your intelligence, trust your own heart; its feelings – and even if sometimes it looks crazy to follow those feelings, go with them. It is better to be crazy according to your own heart than to be sane according to others. That sanity is worthless. It will never bring you any joy, it will never bring you any benediction. All benedictions are for those who resolve to be themselves.

Anand means blissful. Annalisa is Hebrew, it is made of two words. The first is anna; it is part of hannah, which means grace. The other part is lisa; that is part of elisabeth. In Hebrew, el means god. Your full name, annalisa, means: god’s grace.

Life is god’s grace, ant so is death. Love is god’s grace, and so is all that ever happens, good and bad too.The whole duality of existence is god’s grace. One who understands this is not only grateful for all that is good but is also grateful for all that appears bad; that is real gratefulness. To be grateful only for the happy moments is nothing of gratefulness; that is simple greed, cunningness, but it has nothing to do with gratefulness.

Real gratefulness arises only when you are grateful even for unhappy moments, for all the pain and the suffering and the anguish that life brings. The moment one is capable of feeling grateful for both pain and pleasure, without any distinction, without any choice, simply feeling grateful for whatsoever is given.… Because if it is given by God, it must have a reason in it. We may like it, we may not like it, but it must be needed for our growth. And pain is needed as much as pleasure, darkness as much as light. Winter and summer are both needed for growth. Once this idea settles in the heart, then each moment of life is of gratitude.

Let this become your meditation and prayer: thank god every moment – for laughter, for tears, for everything. Then you will see a silence arising in your heart that you have not known before. That is bliss.

Anand means bliss, peter comes from the Greek, petros; it means rock. Your full name will mean: rock of bliss.

Everything else in life is in a constant change. Bliss is the rock of eternity: it is always the same, no change ever happens in it. It is the centre of the cyclone; all changes happen on the periphery.

The search for truth is the search for that rock which is timeless. One has to go within oneself until one finds that point, that unmoving point on which all movement depends. Life is like a moving wheel, but the wheel is moving around something unmoving. All movement needs a non-moving centre; the movement cannot exist without a non-moving centre.

Time exists as a wheel around the centre of eternity. Call it God, call it truth, call it bliss, the supreme self, or whatever you wish, but one thing about it is certain, that it has the quality of a rock-

-unchangingness, eternally unchanging. So it cannot be the body, because the body changes; and it cannot be the mind, because the mind changes; it cannot even be the heart, because the heart changes. We have to go deeper and deeper and deeper: we have to disidentify ourselves from the body, from the mind, from the heart. We have to go on disidentifying till we arrive at the point where only the witnessing self is left, where nothing more is there to deny, reject – just pure I-am-ness. Not ‘I am the body’, not ‘I am the mind’, but simply ‘I am’.

When that I-am-ness is left, one has arrived. One has found the rock – the rock of eternity, the rock of timelessness; the rock which is beyond all movement, all change, all death.

Prem means love, bonnie is Latin, it has three meanings: sweet, good, beautiful. And those are the three qualities of love. Love is sweet, love is beautiful, love is good – not just good but the ultimate good, the summum bonum. Love fulfilled, all is fulfilled. Love realised, god is realised. Love missed, and the whole of life is a sheer wastage. One can go on trying to be good without being loving, but one cannot succeed; in the very nature of things it is impossible. One cannot be virtuous without being loving; one can only pretend, one can only be a hypocrite. One can have masks which will look good and beautiful, but behind the mask just the opposite will be the reality.

Without love, no one is ever beautiful. One can have a certain form of beauty, one can have a proportionate body – but if the soul is not proportionate, just the proportion of the body cannot make one beautiful. The body plays a very minor role, a very secondary role, like the shadow. Just because the shadow is looking beautiful, you will not call the person beautiful. The person may be ugly. He may be standing in a certain way, at a certain angle to the sun-rays, so the shadow is looking beautiful, but the beauty of the shadow is not necessarily his beauty. So is the case with the body: the body of matter is only a shadow. It can be beautiful, but if you are carrying an ugly soul within that beauty, it is utterly meaningless, a deception, an hallucination.

Love makes the soul beautiful. It gives the soul proportion, it gives the soul melody, it gives the soul the quality of grace, aliveness. It brings a certain poetry out of the soul. And once the soul is beautiful, the body automatically follows. it. Even ugly bodies become beautiful with beautiful souls. Homely bodies become so luminous.

It is said about Jesus that he had a very ugly body. Christians don’t talk about it much, but all the old sources say that he had a very ugly body. He had such an ugly face that it is said that the people who spat on him and threw stones on him while he was carrying his cross were not necessarily against him. His face was so ugly that it provoked people to spit on him – even strangers. And he was a very very small man, only four feet six inches, and a hunchback! All other sources say that, except Christian sources. There is every possibility.…

Josephus’s ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ contains the following description of Jesus: ‘A man of dark skin, small stature, three cubits high (four feet six inches), hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose and meeting eyebrows, so that those who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair and with an undeveloped beard.’

Tertullian also spoke of the ‘ignominy of the face of Jesus’ and said, ‘No one would have mishandled, much less spat upon, Jesus, had not the face of the condemned provoked his tormentors to much brutality.’

But my feeling is that this ugly man became one of the most beautiful in the world. Those who came to see his love, those who came to feel his innermost core, they saw his real beauty. It was a miracle: two opposites meeting.

Buddha was a very beautiful man, so there was nothing of a miracle; his body was also beautiful. But Jesus is the meeting of the opposites: an ugly body with the most beautiful soul in the world. And because of the polarity, the tension between the two, he has a quality to his individuality which is lacking in Buddha. Buddha is just beautiful, simply beautiful. There is not the opposite in him; and without the opposite, the contrast is missing.

It is not accidental that Jesus has possessed many more people in the world than anybody else – because of the tension of the opposites. He has something very strange about him: the full range of beauty and ugliness. He is the whole rainbow, all the seven colours, from the lowest to the highest. He is a meeting point of the world and the divine, of matter and consciousness. In that way, Buddha is more like a solo fluteplayer, Christ is a great orchestra. His beauty comes not from the body but from the innermost core. It needs eyes to see it – and that’s why he says again and again, ‘Those who have eyes, see, and those who have ears, hear.’ It was difficult to look into his deeper being. People can only see on the surface, hence while alive he could not attract many people.

Buddha attracted many more people while alive. It is almost impossible to think that somebody could insult Buddha the way Jesus was insulted by people; it is impossible to think of it. His very presence would have prevented them. On the surface he was beautiful; he was beautiful in the being too. But people can only see the surface.

With Jesus they could not see; only very few people who had eyes could see. But once he was dead, once he was crucified, he started rising into people’s vision, he started haunting them. The cross became very significant. If he had not been crucified, people might have forgotten about that man, but the cross simply would not allow them to forget him.

Slowly slowly, the real body was forgotten and in the myth he became a beautiful man – tall, handsome, beautiful in every way. But in reality he was an ugly man, and yet one of the most beautiful: he was a paradox!

The beauty that happened to him happened through his love. He loved the world tremendously, he loved people tremendously. Nobody else has ever loved so deeply and so utterly and so unconditionally. Nobody has ever sacrificed himself so totally for his love.

You have a beautiful name. Remember those three qualities; they have to be grown. But they can grow only if you grow the central quality of love. Become more and more loving, become love, and you will find virtue arising, goodness happening, beauty following.

[The new sannyasin asks: How will I find it?]

There is no question of how – just start being more loving. Love is already there in everybody’s heart; it is not a question to be learned. Just as we breathe, we can love. It is natural, it is intrinsic. Just don’t hinder it, that’s all. All that has to be learned is how not to hinder it.…

It is difficult, otherwise the whole world would have been beautiful. It is difficult, otherwise everybody would have loved immensely. It is certainly difficult, but that is the challenge, and the challenge has to be taken. The more difficult a thing is, the more adventurous it is.

That’s what sannyas is all about: it will teach you slowly slowly how to remove the barriers and how to let the love energy flow. That’s my whole function here. I cannot teach you how to love – nobody can – but I can teach you how to remove all the barriers, how to remove all the obstacles. That’s all that is needed: remove the rocks and the spring starts flowing. It is already there, it is your very being; it does not have to be learned.

We just have to drop our attachments to the rocks. We have to see that they are rocks and our enemies, that we need not cling to them, that they are not protective, they are destructive. Once that is seen, those rocks can be thrown away. Those rocks are not clinging to us; we are clinging to those rocks. And there are all kinds of rocks, all kinds of stupid ideas, ideologies, which stop people from loving, which hinder people from growing into love – unnecessary fears, inhibitions, taboos. But this society has cultivated them because this society does not want people to be very loving; loving people are dangerous people. This society is not interested in real individuals; this society wants only slaves. And the best way to make a slave is to never allow his love to grow. He remains stunted, stifled, he remains an un-grown-up. And when you are an un-grown-up, you are bound to seek and search for somebody to cling to, to depend on, somebody who can order you. You will seek and search for your tyrants.

If you can love, you are free. Love brings freedom. This is going to happen. Wait!

Your old name I have to change. Wolfgang means the walk of a wolf. Of course even the walk of a wolf has a certain beauty and grace in it, but all the same, it is the walk of a wolf!

Prem means love. Joshua is Hebrew; it is the original name of Jesus. Joshua means: god is salvation, Jehovah is salvation. Salvation is in god and through god.

Man cannot become free through his own efforts. His own efforts will be very tiny, and the bondage is great. His own efforts will be very unconscious – from where will he bring consciousness to make conscious efforts? And whatsoever one goes on doing in unconsciousness brings more and more misery, brings more and more bondage, creates new prisons. Unconsciousness is darkness; if we go on groping in darkness we simply stumble here and there, we fall and we go astray.

The only possibility in this dark night of the soul is a ray of light from the beyond. And that’s what prayer is all about. Prayer means asking god for a ray of light, asking god to send some help, and if the help is asked for with one’s totality, it certainly arrives. Jesus says, ‘Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you, ask and it shall be given, seek and ye shall find.’

But what he means by seeking, asking, knocking, is not effort but prayer. Seek in prayer, ask in prayer, knock in prayer, and slowly slowly it gathers intensity, momentum, and a moment comes when your totality is prayerful. In that very instant, something from the beyond reaches you – a hand of help, some energy that is not yours, some light that you had never known before, some guidance. And to walk in that light is to get out of the prison, to get out of the dark night. That single ray is enough to take you to the source of light, to the very source.

Joshua is a tremendously significant word: god is salvation. And I am giving you this name because prayer will fit with your being very very deeply. More than meditation, prayer will fit you. Prayer will be your meditation; all meditations will simply help you to become more prayerful. So meditate, it will help; but finally the key will be prayer, so start praying too.

At night before you go to sleep, a fifteen-minute prayer, with tears in your eyes, with your hands raised toward the sky. If something comes to the heart you can say it, otherwise just silence will do. But go on remembering – and your name will remind you again and again – that god is salvation, so prayer is the door.

Anand means bliss, asho means hope. Life is not yet actual; it has to be actualised. It is only a hope, a potential, a possibility, but one can miss it. That is the danger, but that is the excitement also. With birth, only an opportunity is given – not real life, but only a possibility of attaining life. And because we have taken it for granted that we are alive, we go on missing it. Just by being born, one is not alive: another birth is needed, a deeper birth is needed. It has only given you the periphery; the centre is missing. It has only given you the body; the soul is missing.

That’s what Jesus means when he says, ‘Unless a man is born again, he will not enter into my kingdom of God.’ But the hope can become actual, the potential can be realised. Religion is nothing but the art of realising the potential, and the master is only a midwife.

So you have to remember: bliss has still to happen, life has still to happen, god has still to happen. As we are born, we are empty; and we have to be full – not only full but overflowing. Only then is there contentment, only then is there significance, and a great joy and a great gratitude arise.

People cannot be grateful to god. For what should they be grateful? – because they are still only promises, hopes, dreams. The real is missing, so they cannot be grateful. Once you start having a few glimpses of the real, gratefulness follows of its own accord.

Let sannyas become the journey from the potential to the actual, from the promise to the fulfilment.

Prem means love; trust is a by-product of love, the fragrance of love. If you love, you automatically trust. You cannot trust without love. You can believe without love, but you cannot trust. Hence belief is impotent, it is superficial; deep down you still doubt. Behind belief there is doubt; in fact the greater the doubt is, the bigger the belief needed to cover it. All believers are doubters, otherwise they would not be believers in the first place.

Belief is against doubt: trust is absence of doubt. It is not against doubt, it is simply absence of doubt.

That miracle happens only in love. when you love, you cannot find any doubt anywhere inside you: all is trust. and in that trust the miracle, the transcendence, the transformation.

To know what trust is is to know the door to the temple of God.

[A sannyasin has asked about her low energy. Osho checks her energy.]

Everything is absolutely good. You need not worry, just leave everything to me. sometimes low- energy moments come; that’s part of growth, they have their work to do. Sometimes depression is bound to happen. One has to learn to be a witness of it. The energy is moving perfectly well. But it is a rhythm; you cannot remain high all the time, otherwise you will become exhausted, spent, burned out. You can absorb only so much of the height, then you will have to come back to the valley to rest.

Always think of those moments when you are not feeling very ecstatic as moments of rest, and when you have gathered energy enough you will be flying again. But energy is moving in a perfect rhythm, so there is no problem at all.

< Previous | Contents | Next >