2

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 2

2 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, francesco means free, freedom. Your full name will mean a loving freedom. One can be free in anger, but then freedom loses something tremendously beautiful, then freedom is more a reaction against something; and when you are against something you are never really free of it. It will haunt you, it will follow you like a dark shadow. It will become your unconscious. It will pursue you and persecute you. It never brings real freedom.

The real freedom is not out of anger, reaction the real freedom is out of love. It is not against something on the contrary it is for something, and there is a tremendous difference between the two. Freedom against is political; freedom for is religious – freedom to create, freedom to pray, freedom to seek the truth. Then freedom is positive, and positive freedom frees; negative freedom becomes a new bondage.

Prem means love, marta is a form of martha. It has become a symbol of hospitality because Martha served Jesus, she was a hostess to Jesus. She became the patron saint of all hostesses.

Your full name will mean loving hospitality. Man has to become a host for god. God comes as a guest. He knocks on our doors many times, but the host is absent, asleep, not alert, engaged, occupied, somewhere else. The host has to become very very alert, only then can the knock of the guest be heard. The knock is not loud and it cannot be, because god is not, and never is, aggressive. He comes soundlessly, he comes as a whisper, he comes just like a small breeze. Unless one is very very alert, one goes on missing. A tremendous alertness and sensitivity is needed to hear the foot sounds of god reaching closer.

One has to become a host. By saying that I mean: one has to create inner space in the heart. Our hearts are too full of our own egos, hence we can’t be hosts to god. We have to empty ourselves of

ourselves. When there is utter emptiness inside the heart, there is no barrier god enters immediately, god is immediately found.

People ask ‘Where is god?’, they ask ‘Where is the guest?’; they should really ask ‘How should I become the host?’ Once the host is ready, the guest appears. It is inevitable, it is one of the fundamental laws of life. The ancient Egyptian teaching says: When the disciple is ready, the master appears.…

Anand means blissful, christel means a follower of Christ. Christ can be followed only by being blissful. Christians have missed Christ by becoming very serious, sad. The cross has come between Christ, existence, and the Christian mind; the cross has become a very very long shadow. The cross really contaminated the whole source of Christian religion. Because of the cross, the Christian became sad, naturally, because Jesus died on the cross; how can you rejoice? – how can you sing and dance?

Although his teaching was ‘Rejoice. rejoice...’, he says again and again to his disciples ‘Rejoice’, because of this accident of historyIt has nothing to do with Christ-consciousness, it was a mere

accident of history that he was crucified. There have been other Christs who have not been crucified.

For example, Krishna is a Christ; in fact the word ‘Christ’ comes from the word ‘Krishna’. But because he was not crucified, he is remembered as dancing, singing, playing on his flute. You can dance with Krishna. You can have a festive relationship with Krishna, but not with Christ, because the cross is too much. Between the Christian and Christ the cross is a barrier. Its shadow has turned temples into cemeteries.

So I would like you to be reminded: the only way to reach to Christ-consciousness is to be blissful. Dance your way to god, because that is the only way; there is no other. God knows only the language of dance and song and love and celebration. He does not know anything about theology, he does not know anything about philosophy; he cannot have any contact with your mind but he can have every possible bridge with your heart.

The Christian heart is crushed under the cross, hence I call Christianity, crossianity. It has forgotten Christ completely; it only remembers the cross. And why did the cross become so important? – because we are afraid of death.

We are obsessed with death. Death seems to be the most important thing in life, and because of death becoming the centre of the whole religion, thousands of monks and nuns became obsessed with only one thing – that is death. They lost contact with life. They started thinking only of what was going to happen in the after-life. This life became irrelevant; and this is the only life there is, there is no other life. This is the only existence there is, there is no other existence. We have always been here and we will always be here; we are eternal pilgrims.

And one thing more, remember: Christ has nothing to do with Jesus in particular. Jesus was only one of the Christs. Buddha is a Christ, Moses is a Christ, Abraham is a Christ, Zarathustra is a Christ – thousands of Christs have happened. And Christ has even said that.

Once somebody asked him: Why do you speak with such authority? From where is your authority? And he said: I am before Abraham was. A very strange statement, one of the strangest ever made,

because there is a gap of at least three thousand years between Abraham and Jesus; and he says: I am before Abraham ever was. For Abraham he uses the past tense; for himself he uses the present tense: I am. He is not talking about

Jesus at all he is talking about the eternal Christ-consciousness which is always in the present tense and which has always been before Abraham, after Abraham, in Abraham. Abrahams come and go, Jesuses come and go: Christ-consciousness remains.

Whenever one goes deeper into meditation, into prayer, one goes deeper into Christ-consciousness. It has nothing to do with Christianity, it has nothing to do with the bible; it has something to do with the inner journey from the body to the mind, from the mind to no-mind. The day you experience no-mind, you have experienced Christ.

Christ is only a symbol of that utter innocence, that silence, that happens when all thoughts, desires, dreams, have disappeared, when one simply is. That suchness is Christ, that isness is Christ.

[A sannyasin asks about an orange cap, hat, she found in her letterbox.] Keep it with you! It is beautiful.

And no need to analyse everything, no need to make everything a question. Learn from these small things that life is a mystery; and never try to demystify it. Demystify it: it becomes meaningless. The real artist is the person who goes on mystifying life. He creates great mystery around himself; he discovers the miraculous more and more. In each small incident he reads something of immense value. Naturally he lives in a richer world.

It all depends on you. If you analyse everything, if you want to find answers for everything, you will live in a very poor world. You will live in the world of knowledge, not of wonder and awe; and religion is nothing but the door into the wondering spirit, the spirit of awe. All is mysterious; nothing is answerable. All questions lead to more questions.

Let that become your fundamental approach. Forget about creating questions and slowly slowly you will be surprised: life becomes so colourful, so psychedelic, so immensely poetic. It is a splendour to be. Just to be is such a great benediction.

So good! Take it as a gift from god. because everything is a gift from god.

[A sannyasin, arriving, says he feels simultaneously very young and very old; and he feels to be alone.]

It is something to be understood. You have come across a very fundamental fact of life: the mind is old, always old, and the being is always new, fresh. You are wavering between the two, so simultaneously you will feel very old... the moment you become the mind or you lean towards the mind, you will feel very old.

The mind is very old. Your mind contains the whole past – not only yours: it contains the whole collective past, not only of human beings but of animals, birds and trees and rocks and everything

that has ever happened. Your mind contains it; your mind is the whole past of existence. It is really ancient, very stale, dead, a corpse. And the being, your consciousness, is moment to moment fresh: as fresh as dew-drops in the early morning sun, as fresh as the newly-opening rose flower.

This moment comes to meditators when they hover between the mind and the being; one moment when they are leaning towards the being they feel like small children.

Jesus says: Only those who are like small children will be able to enter into my kingdom of god. He is talking about being. Christians have completely missed the point. He is talking about the state of no-mind, he is talking about innocence. He is not really talking about small children, because small children are not innocent. Sometimes they can be very cunning, very clever, very diplomatic, political and everything, and very mean too. Small children are not small really because they have the ancient mind with them. They are not tabula rasa, they are not clean slates; much is already written, they are already old. ‘Small children’ is just a metaphor, a metaphor to show that you have both: you have inside you the oldest mind and the youngest being.

Slowly slowly you have to choose the fresh being against the stale, stagnant mind. Once you become settled in the fresh being this problem will disappear. Then the mind is there; you can use it. It is useful, because it carries all the information. It is a wonderful mechanism; no composer can compete with it yet.

But when you are not it, you are separate, and that separation is liberation. To know ‘I am not the mind’ is to know ‘I am god!’

[A sannyasin, leaving, says she loves Osho and even though she is speedy in the West she feels him with her.]

I am there with you. Love knows no distances. Love is not a phenomenon that happens in space or in time; it is beyond time and beyond space.

Wherever you are in love, I am there with you, I am there with you immediately. That is the miracle of love: it destroys all barriers of time and space.

Good! Just be here and enjoy.…

< Previous | Contents | Next >