24 Saying small things with big words

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‌CHAPTER 24

Saying small things with big words

13 April 1988 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

Question 1 BELOVED OSHO,

HUANG PO, THE NINTH CENTURY ZEN MASTER SAID, “ORDINARY PEOPLE ALL INDULGE IN CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT BASED ON ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA; HENCE THEY FEEL DESIRE AND HATRED. TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA JUST PUT AN END TO YOUR CONCEPTUAL THINKING. WHEN THIS CEASES, ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA ARE VOID, AND WHEN THESE ARE VOID THOUGHT CEASES. BUT IF YOU TRY TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA, FIRST PUTTING A STOP TO CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT, YOU WILL NOT SUCCEED BUT MERELY INCREASE ITS POWER TO DISTURB YOU.”

BELOVED MASTER, WOULD YOU LIKE TO COMMENT ON THIS?

Anand Ritu, your question requires a little introduction. Huang Po is a mystic but he is also a philosopher. And that creates complications. He knows what is, but then he starts explaining it the way a philosopher will do, not a mystic.

It is unfortunate, because philosophy is a very much lower category in the world of existential experiences. I have been avoiding Huang Po. Many times it has come up that I should speak on Huang Po, and I looked into his book and each time I decided not, because mysticism needs no philosophical expression; it needs poetry, it needs music, it needs celebration. Dance can be allowed but not philosophy.

And the reason why philosophy cannot be allowed is that the whole world of mysticism is a struggle against philosophy. Now, to try to express mystical experiences in philosophical jargon is to destroy the beauty and the poetry and the music; then you start moving into a desert land where nothing grows.

And I know that Huang Po knows because what he says – although the way he says it is wrong, what he is trying to say is right. Sometimes, the reverse also happens: that the person knows nothing, but what he says is exactly the truth.

Life in this sense is a very complex phenomenon: there are knowers who don’t know and there are innocent people who know. There are very well-trained philosophers, but you cannot get a single drop of truth from their great philosophical treatises. And there are mystics who have simply danced or played on the flute or just sat in silence with their disciples and expressed the inexpressible.

The difficulty with people like Huang Po is that anybody who is interested in intellectual thinking will categorize them as great philosophers – and certainly, they are. But that is not their essence. That is not their very soul. Their very soul is not philosophical; it is not a desert land, it is a garden where roses grow. It is a night full of stars. It is a silence which is the authentic music without any words, without any instruments.

A single gesture of a mystic can say much more than the whole treatise of a great philosopher.

Huang Po has fallen into wrong company. I want to take him out of the wrong crowd he has fallen in. His authentic experience is that of a mystic, but unfortunately he speaks the language of a philosopher, and you will see it even in this small question.

ORDINARY PEOPLE ALL INDULGE IN CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT BASED ON ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA.

One thing you should always remember: that philosophy is a way of saying small things with big words. They don’t travel much, they go round and round. And they feel they are traveling, they are reaching towards some goal.

For example, in the eyes of a mystic nobody is ordinary. Nobody can be ordinary. It simply does not exist; that category is an invention of the egoists who want to prove themselves extraordinary.

To the mystic, the ordinary is beautiful. The ordinary is great. The ordinary is the extraordinary. The mystic cannot condemn, he can only provoke the subdued flame of your being, make you afire.

Huang Po is saying, ORDINARY PEOPLE... and I have never come across a single ordinary person. They don’t exist – everybody has his own uniqueness. They exist only for those who want some higher status for themselves. And he is saying about ordinary people that they ARE THOSE WHO INDULGE IN CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT – and that’s exactly what he is doing! – BASED ON ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA; HENCE THEY FEEL DESIRE AND HATRED. Sheer bullshit!

TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA, JUST PUT AN END TO YOUR CONCEPTUAL THINKING. WHEN THIS CEASES ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA ARE VOID.

This is how that which is within you is reached by the philosopher – by moving around the whole world. You are not a concept, you are not a thought. You are nothing but a pure awareness. So what is the point of all this nonsense?

It has a purpose: the purpose is to create “ordinary people.” And you all accept such people – who have been making you ordinary, sinners, mun-dane, mediocre – and you feel very happy and very receptive.

And when I say, “You are enlightened” you don’t believe it! It is very strange. Somebody says, “You are stupid” and you never doubt it. And I am saying you are a genius and you look all around – “My god, me, and a genius? I can be a genie but not a genius. Perhaps he is talking about somebody else.”

But this has happened because of continuous hammering on your mind for millennia that you are ordinary. And Huang Po accepts it and describes the “ordinary person”; that the ordinary person INDULGES IN CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT. The ordinary person has no time to indulge in conceptual thought! He does not know exactly what you mean by conceptual thought. He listens silently so that nobody starts thinking that he doesn’t understand. He sits silently and wisely. But do you understand “conceptual thought”? Have you seen any thought which is not conceptual? Concept and thought are two names of the same process of thinking, BASED ON ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA.

Now you say, “My god, this is real philosophy!” You could not have laughed before Huang Po; you would have been sad and serious and pretending that you are understanding what he is saying. And I want to tell you, even he does not understand what he is saying. But these big words have become the monopoly of the philosophers. If they don’t use big words, nobody is going to accept them as great philosophers.

It happened while Hegel, the great German philosopher, was alive. Nobody understood him or what he was talking about – and I am absolutely certain that he did not understand either. But he was very clever to use long words, one word almost filling the whole line – even to read it is difficult – one sentence filling the whole page. By the time you reach the end you have forgotten from where you had begun. And because nobody understood him, naturally, he must be great.

This is a simple logic that has prevailed in the world: if you want to be praised by people don’t be understood by them. Don’t speak in simple, direct, immediately-understood language; use such words that a person has to consult the dictionary ten times at least for every page. Finally he drops the idea of understanding; he knows you are great.

What is ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA?

This rain, these clouds, these winds – these are environmental phenomena. But if you say, “Rains, clouds, rivers, oceans...” you cannot become a great philosopher.

Philosophy has its own language. Only other philosophers understand it. In fact, nobody knows whether anybody understands it or not. Hegel remained for almost a hundred years the greatest philosopher in the world, just because he was not understood. Then researchers did great digging and found that there is nothing in it; the man was just hocus pocus. He was just clever in using big words where they were not needed.

In my village, there used to be a brahmin. He was a crackpot. Crackpots are very unique people. He had never been to the university but he could defeat any university professor with his language. All he had done was, he had learned by rote the whole Oxford Dictionary – without bothering about what the meaning of the word was – and his only job was writing ten-page, twenty-page letters to the prime minister, to the president. Of course, nobody answered because nobody could understand: “What is he...?” And he was very angry.

I said, “You do one thing: you write the whole letter and then a small summary of it, attached to it, so that the addressed person can understand the summary. And if he feels like going ahead, he can read the thirty pages.”

He said, “That is very difficult.” I said, “What is the difficulty?”

He said, “I myself don’t understand what I am writing! I am just like a parrot. Thinking that English is the international language, I have crammed the whole Oxford Dictionary. I don’t know what it means. I can manage to make sentences without knowing the meaning of them. But I use big words.”

He used to torture professors, principals, because his whole language was simply gibberish. He did not know what he was saying.

Huang Po certainly knows what he is saying but there was no need to say it in a philosophical way. “Environmental phenomena” simply means all that is around you. And because of these “environmental phenomena,” you will be at a loss: why do people feel desire and hatred? because first you have not understood the “environmental phenomena.”

The girlfriend is an environmental phenomenon. Because of these girls and these boys and this money and the power... then things would have been clear to you, why people desire and why people hate.

They desire – but desire never succeeds. One desire leads to another desire. It is an endless progression. And because they never succeed to fulfill all their desires, they start hating. Now it was a very simple thing to say that the world of things creates greed in you, lust, desire, and when you don’t succeed, a depression, a hate, a despair.

And when you succeed, then something even worse happens: the ego. A man who has failed may be awakened more easily than a man who is being victorious.

I had a friend – he was one of the richest men of this country – who wanted to become an M.L.A., a member of the assembly of his state. He asked me, “Give me your blessings.”

I said, “Just don’t ask that because I never give blessings for wrong things. I will destroy all possibility of your becoming a member of the assembly. You just go... there are many saints; I am not a saint. They are sitting there, just for somebody to come with a coconut and ask for blessings.” And nuts come, and they get blessed and one never bothers how many blessings succeed because the opponent also goes to the same saint and gets the blessing: “You will be victorious.”

Obviously both cannot be victorious. And in an election there may be ten candidates, all blessed by the same saint. He has gained ten coconuts – now what happens to all these ten nuts? Nobody bothers.

You will be surprised to know that the pope blessed Benito Mussolini – and that meant he was blessing Adolf Hitler because Italy and Germany and Japan, all were together in a fight against the whole world. The high priest in Germany blessed Adolf Hitler and the priest in Japan said to the king, “There is no question – you are the Sun God, you can never be defeated.”

And it is true: before the second world war, the emperor of Japan was never defeated. In fact, nobody bothered about it, it was so far away. When there were countries like India available, who goes to conquer Japan? When easy prey is available, you don’t go unnecessarily to the darkest jungles of Africa.

And in England, the high priest blessed England and in America, the same Catholic high priest is blessing America. All these blessings are going to one God, and all these people are in a fight! Nobody even bothers about the inconsistency and contradiction. Nobody has talked about it.

Once somebody becomes victorious – and somebody is bound to become – then it is very difficult to wake him up. He is too drunk with his victory.

The man who has failed, failed in every effort, is in such a despair that just a little push and he can be awakened.

Now Huang Po is saying, TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA... What is the need of eliminating the mountains and the clouds and the stars? They are all environmental phenomena. But there has been this trend of philosophy in every country that all these things, the mountains and the stars and the trees, are all illusory; they have to be eliminated. They don’t exist, they only appear. They are only appearances; they are maya, illusion. So if you wake up you will suddenly find there is no sun, no stars, no garden, no people... But this is not right.

Environmental phenomena will remain; only your greed for them will disappear. So I cannot agree with Huang Po. He says,

TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA...

In the first place, I don’t want to eliminate them. They are so beautiful. Why eliminate the roses? They are not bothering anybody. Why eliminate beautiful mountains? And how can you eliminate the immensity of the sky and the stars? What is the need? Neither can you do it nor is there any need.

What is needed is that you should not desire, that you should eliminate the desire for things. That does not mean that things don’t exist. Things exist – they will exist whether you desire or not. But if you desire, you will remain asleep. If you don’t desire, only one thing will disappear and that is sleep – not environmental phenomena.

... JUST PUT AN END TO YOUR CONCEPTUAL THINKING. WHEN THIS CEASES...

Huang Po seems to be very simplistic. Simplistic in the sense that he says, JUST PUT AN END TO YOUR CONCEPTUAL THINKING – as if it is so easy! He is saying, “Just don’t think, and everything is right.” It is easy to say – “Put an end to your conceptual thinking” – but he is not telling how. He is not telling you in what way you can get rid of conceptual thinking. And that is the only thinking.

WHEN THIS CEASES... He takes for granted what he has said to you: Put your bicycle outside – rented or not rented. When you have put your bicycle outside, then ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA ARE VOID, then everything disappears. They become void, they become empty. They only appear – as if in a film you are seeing a mountain, or in a dream you are seeing people. This whole world has been taken by a few philosophers to be made of the same stuff dreams are made of.

It is not true. Your dreams may disappear, your sleep may disappear – the world will remain. Certainly it will become more clear and clean, more colorful, because you will become more sensitive. As awareness grows in you, a great sensitivity comes to all your senses. You taste better.

Now, this I am saying against people like Mahavira, people like Gautam Buddha, people like Mahatma Gandhi. They think that for a religious man, taste or even smelling a roseflower is almost a sin. Mahavira, describing the five virtues... his first virtue is tastelessness. You should not taste.

The only way not to taste is to destroy the sensitivity of your tongue. For that, a small plastic surgery is needed; otherwise I can say without any doubt that even Mahavira must have tasted, because plastic surgery was not in existence. It is not a big operation because you don’t have much to be removed... just a small layer on your tongue at the back side. Your whole tongue does not taste, remember, just the back side of your tongue. And that too, is divided. The part that tastes the sweetness is not the part that tastes the bitterness. There are taste buds for sweetness, for bitterness, for all categories, and they are not much – the territory may be just one square inch – a small operation. Just by removing those taste buds you will not taste anything. Whether you are eating something rotten, cow-dung – it is a holy thing, don’t laugh! – or you are eating some really delicious sweet, it won’t make any difference.

In the second world war it happened that a man got shot by a bullet in his throat. The bullet was taken out, but the passage had to be closed, so he could not eat. Now it was a trouble: he was perfectly healthy, so some way had to be found so that he could eat, but from the mouth he could not eat. So they made a plastic tube joining to his stomach, which he used to hide under his clothes. And whenever he felt hungry, he would put anything that he wanted to eat in the tube. But it does not give any enjoyment – he wanted to eat some sweet, he is putting the sweet down in the tube, but no taste.

That is the only man in the whole world who has had no taste. If that is the criterion of being religious, then forget being religious! Only one man has been religious. But that man also revolted. He said, “I cannot... because whatever you put in my tube, I don’t taste. And without taste so much of my life is gone.”

You don’t consider it, that life consists of small things.

But the doctors said, “We cannot do anything. You cannot eat and we cannot manage”... because at that time, it was not possible; perhaps today it would have been possible to put some taste buds on his tube, so when he was eating rasogullas, he could enjoy it. But his whole life was meaningless.

Mahavira makes it a point that tastelessness is a fundamental quality of a religious man. Buddha does not give it so much importance, but makes it a point. Mahatma Gandhi insisted, following Mahavira, that those who live in his ashram remember never to taste.

It is so strange that people have to deceive. They all said, “We don’t taste.” To check them, he used to provide... he used to sit with the ashramites; he had not many, just twenty, and those were all just useless people. Somebody’s wife is dead, so he has no way to live in the world; most of them were women, widows. A strange and weird group had gathered. In fact, no sane person would have stayed there even for twenty-four hours.

Louis Fischer, one American journalist, was writing a biography of Mahatma Gandhi. So he had to stay there for three weeks to collect all kinds of information. The most difficult time was the mealtime, because Gandhi used to give everybody – and he was very particular about it – a chutney made of neem leaves, which are the bitterest in the world. They are very medicinal. They are good, they purify the blood. But one is not eating in order to purify the blood. And every day, purifying the blood – too much purified! You will become a Nordic Niskriya, “pure Aryan blood!”

And because Louis Fischer was his guest, Gandhi used to sit by his side when they were eating. Louis Fischer was not aware on the first day when he tasted the chutney. He said, “My god, who has spoiled the food?”

Gandhi said, “That is a very essential thing in ashram life. It makes a person tasteless, and taste is a great bondage in the world.” He had to stay and write this fellow’s biography, so he thought rather than destroying the whole plate of food – because chutney is used not in one gulp – he thought it is better to swallow it in one gulp and then, at ease, eat the other things. Rather than again and again... So as he ate the chutney in one gulp, Gandhi said to the cook, “Look! A man of great understanding. Bring another cup full of chutney.”

Poor American fellow... he had never conceived the idea that this would happen. He had to swallow another cup of neem chutney. Every meal, lunch and supper, that chutney was essential. In the ashram there was only one kind of tree grown all around, and that was the neem tree, because for twenty people every day... And I asked – Gandhi had died – when I visited his ashram; his son was in charge. I asked him, “Do you think... is it not pure hypocrisy? Because tastelessness does not mean that you have to make your food bitter – to experience bitterness is also taste, just as to experience sweet. It is such a simple thing, but you never objected to your father.”

He said, “Nobody ever thought about it... that bitterness is also a taste.”

I said, “It is so simple. Whatever you do, it will be hypocrisy. Taste will be there.”

The more you become aware, the more your sensitivity will become clean and clear. You will taste better than ever. Right now, you go on sleeping and eating. Most people don’t even have the awareness that they don’t smell things, that a great sense is non-functioning.

A man of awareness will also become aware of all his sensitivities. The world will have more taste, more love, more music, more fragrance. The world will not disappear, it will not become void. It will become more authentically true.

Right now, because of your desiring and dreaming, it is not exactly what you see it as. You see through the lenses of your glasses: if they are colored, the world looks colored. And everybody has colored eyes.

Awareness will take away your colored glasses. You will be able to see the real as it is.

When you don’t desire, when you don’t have any greed or any jealousy, then you simply see what is the case. And you rejoice: this world is full of joys.

And Huang Po goes on saying, AND WHEN THESE ARE VOID, THOUGHT CEASES.

Now this is what I call going in circles. First, he says, WHEN CONCEPTUAL THINKING CEASES, ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA ARE VOID. Now he is saying, WHEN THESE ARE VOID,

THOUGHT CEASES. Can you see? You cannot find a more clear example of circular thinking. First thought ceases; the world disappears. And when thought has ceased, the world has disappeared, then what is the point to say again, “Thought ceases”? Strange. Just absurd.

BUT IF YOU TRY TO ELIMINATE ENVIRONMENTAL PHENOMENA, FIRST PUTTING A STOP TO CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT, YOU WILL NOT SUCCEED BUT MERELY INCREASE ITS POWER TO DISTURB YOU.

Anand Ritu, avoid such fellows. They will make a mess of you. Now he is saying, “Putting a stop to conceptual thought you will not succeed.” First he is asking, “Put an end to conceptual thought; then everything – the illusory world – will disappear.” And now he has changed his point. “Putting a stop to conceptual thought, you will not succeed but merely increase its power to disturb you.”

In the first place I have never seen anybody disturbed by environmental phenomena. Have you met anybody suffering from environmental phenomena? “I am very much in trouble with environmental phenomena; what should I do?”

At least, I have never been asked. Perhaps people are hiding it, suffering and hiding, not exposing it. But I know so many people, and they have never even thought about this “environmental phenomena.” And who is worried about putting an end to conceptual thought?

This is how so-called philosophers go on not knowing exactly what they are doing. Here is a clear case of absurdity. First you ask and then you say, “You cannot succeed.” First you say, “Go to the Everest and then everything will be okay. But remember you cannot go to the Everest.”

So why have you bothered about it? And he has not said a single word which can take you out of your thinking process. He has not said a single word about meditation. And meditation does not destroy anything. It simply makes the green greener. It makes love deeper, it makes the dance really pleasant, blissful.

Meditation creates only one thing: a way of seeing the world in which everything looks ecstatic. The silence or the thundering of clouds... everything takes on a new dimension.

There are two persons like this... Huang Po is one and another is Hui Hai. You should avoid these two fellows. I know they can confuse you and then to sort it out will be an unnecessary effort. These two fellows Huang Po and Hui Hai should be sent to America. California is the right place. Confuse people there – there, they are so much willing to pay to be confused. Three hundred dollars! Huang Po has just to open a shop in America.

In the whole world, California is the most insane spot, so anybody who wants to earn money out of people’s insanity should simply move towards California. Don’t go astray, just direct your nose towards California. Many have already reached, many are on their way. When I was in America, I had made it clear to my people: “Avoid California! I am not going to California.” People are really sick, but they have money. And they are sick with stupid things. For example, somebody may be sick with Huang Po and he will ask, “What is conceptual thinking? And how to stop it?” And there are people who are ready – “You can stop it. We have the right method.”

And for three hundred dollars it is not bad – it is a good bargain, putting an end to conceptual thought. But remember: then the whole world will disappear. Then you will be sitting alone on this planet, thinking, what happened? Where is Huang Po? He is also gone because other than you, everything is “phenomena.” Now live in the void!

Very difficult – at least one needs a television. Without a television, is there any life? One needs cigarettes and this fellow has taken three hundred dollars and everything has become void. You open the packet of cigarettes and it is void. You go on looking at the television set and the screen remains empty.

This world has been tortured by many people who are not bad people, who are not knowingly doing any harm; on the contrary, they were trying to help you. But you don’t need any help. All that you need is to remember yourself, that you don’t need any help, that you are as perfect as you can be.

Just enjoy this perfection.

To me, there is no other religion than enjoying your perfection. And by perfection – don’t misunderstand me – I am not saying that you have to become perfect. I am saying you are perfect. Nobody has said that. You will find thousands of teachers around the world, telling you, “You are imperfect. Follow this discipline, this holy scripture and you will be perfect.” And you will never be perfect in thousands of lives according to their scriptures, because their scriptures demand absurd things.

I don’t demand anything from you. I don’t have any commandment.

When God created the world, he went around to the Babylonians and asked, “Would you like to have a commandment?”

They said, “What is a commandment?” He said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”

The Babylonians said, “What else should we do? We don’t want any commandment, just go on your way.”

He went around to the Egyptians, and here and there, everywhere, and finally he found the right man – Moses. Because Moses asked the right question. When God said, “Do you want a commandment?” Moses says, “How much?” – a real question! First one should know the price.

God said, “It is absolutely free.”

Naturally, Moses said, “Then I will have ten.” If it is free...

That’s why Jews are being tortured by ten commandments, and Christians have got those ten commandments as an inheritance.

But all the commandments of all the religions show one thing absolutely clearly: they are all bent upon destroying you, your naturalness, your at-easeness. They make people tense, guilty, afraid. They make people worried about the future.

I don’t have any commandment. I want you to know that as you are, you are perfectly acceptable. The only trouble is, you don’t accept yourself.

The other night, I went to my dentistry – it is just by the side of my library – and Shunyo was with me. New shelves are being created with mirrored glass, so she showed me and said, “Osho, it is not right that only women stand before mirrors for hours. I have been watching: everybody who passes here stands before the mirror, puts his collar right, smiles a little, looks all around whether anybody is watching or not.”

You are so afraid. Even to look in a mirror, you are worried somebody may be looking. Enjoy looking, there is no problem. If one side of your mustache is going this way and the other side is going the other way... put it right! There is nothing wrong in it, no sin.

But nobody is at ease, is always concerned what others are thinking about him; what will they say? At least you can be at ease with me.

Here, we are going to celebrate the moment. Your perfection in this moment, your arrival in this moment, your enlightenment in this moment. Just gather your energy into this moment.

... Before you do that I have to do some serious thinking.

Grandma Faginbaum calls her married daughter on the phone and asks her how she feels. “I feel terrible,” she groans, “I have a splitting headache, my back and legs are throbbing with pain; the house is a mess and the kids are driving me crazy.”

“Listen,” says Grandma, “don’t worry. You go and lie down. I will be right over and cook some lunch for you, clean the house and take the kids out while you fix a nice dinner for Sigmund.”

“Sigmund?” says the woman, “who is Sigmund?”

“You know Siggi,” replies Grandma, “your husband.” “My husband is not called Sigmund,” snaps the woman.

“Ah, my god,” cries grandma, “I must have called the wrong number.” “Ah, my god,” cries the woman, “does this mean you are not coming?”

Moishe Finkelstein’s wife Ruthie is always complaining about his bad performance in bed, so Moishe goes to visit his doctor. Doctor Bones prescribes some new miracle pills that are sure to do the trick.

A month later, Moishe returns to see Doctor Bones. “The pills are fantastic,” says Moishe, “I have been making love three times a night.”

“That’s great,” chuckles Bones. “And what does your wife say about your lovemaking now?” “Ah, I don’t know,” replies Moishe, “I have not been home yet.”

After making their fortune hunting Arabs, Paul and Herbie, the Jerusalem tailors, decide to go on a big game safari in Africa.

They set up camp one night and over dinner Paul boasts that he will be the first one to shoot a lion. Herbie disagrees. They argue for an hour and finally Paul bets Herbie one hundred dollars that he will be the first.

“I will do it right now,” says Paul.

He gets up from the campfire and stalks off into the jungle with his elephant gun. An hour later, Herbie is lying in his camp bed when a lion pokes its head inside the tent.

“Do you know a guy called Paul?” asks the lion.

“Yes,” gasps Herbie. “Well,” says the lion, “he owes you a hundred dollars.”

Gloria and Barbara go out for a night on the town. After a few drinks, they go to a disco. Sitting at a table, they are soon joined by a handsome-looking man. The man takes Gloria onto the dance floor and they are soon shaking and jiving.

“You are looking very pale,” shouts Gloria to the man as they sway together. “You look like you have been out of the sun.”

“That’s right,” screams the man over the loud music. “That is because I just got out of prison.” “Prison?” cries Gloria. “What were you there for?”

“Well,” yells the man, “I shot my wife, cut off her head and then threw her body in the river.”

As the disco lights flash off and on and the music booms out, Gloria leans backwards and looks over at her friend, sitting at the table. “Barbara,” she yells, “he’s single.”

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.

Be ready now. For two minutes no movement, absolute silence... Now let go...

... Now, come back.

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