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CHAPTER 6
6 March 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Rick Atmo. Rick means a powerful ruler, atmo means your own self. One can rule others or one can rule oneself. To rule others is a poor substitute, because the real ruler is one who rules himself. Because it is arduous to rule oneself, people have chosen the cheaper thing; the cheaper thing is to rule others. The lowest thing in the world is power politics; and by power politics I mean every effort in which you are trying to possess, to dominate, to rule, the other. The highest thing in the world is religion; and by religion I mean the effort to rule oneself, to become a master of oneself.
If you rule others you remain a slave. Your being a ruler is only a facade; deep down you are a slave, maybe a slave of your own slaves. Ruling others does not bring freedom. But when one is able to rule oneself, when one is centred, rooted in one’s own being – when one is not dominated by desires, dreams, thoughts, when one is not just a crowd of many, many minds inside but has become a master who can direct his body, mind, soul, into a particular rhythm, in a particular harmony, who can start moving as a togetherness, not like a multiplicity, not like a crowd, but like a unity, who has created inside a cosmos instead of a chaos – then one has become a real king. And that’s what sannyas is all about.
The kingdom is within and the king is asleep: the king has to be awakened!
Prem means love, ken means beautiful. Love is beautiful, and not only that, love beautifies too. Without love beauty is artificial, formal; with love it becomes substantial, central, essential. Without love a man can only pretend that he is beautiful, because deep down lovelessness creates ugliness. One can hide one’s ugliness in many ways: the body can have a beautiful form, the body can be proportionate, but that doesn’t matter ultimately. What matters is your inner core, whether it is beautiful or not. A body which is beautiful and without the light of love is a beautiful house with no light.
Once love arises a kind of luminosity starts happening. The body becomes transparent. The eyes are no more one way: they don’t only take something from the outside in, they start pouring out also; they become two-way. And all the senses change in the same way. The beautiful person is one who is pouring out his heart into the world in all possible ways, so whatsoever he touches turns into gold and wherever he moves the place becomes sacred.
To be beautiful with the arousing of love gives tremendous contentment. If one can share one’s life and love with people, with existence, then all is attained; there is nothing more!
Peter means rock, divyo means divine – become a rock for the divine. People are living in dreams. And to live in dreams is to make your house in the air. At the most it can be a sandcastle. It is perfectly okay if you are just playing on the beach for the sheer joy of it, but people are very seriously playing the game, too seriously in fact. They are ready to kill, they are ready to die for it; and it is just a sandcastle!
Unless a man starts moving beyond dreams and desires and thoughts. he cannot find the rock on which the true temple can be built. The rock is there, we are made of it. Our essential core is eternal; it is not temporal. Time makes no difference to it. It is never born and never dies. But we don’t look inwards, we look outwards; and outwards you will find just sand and sand. It is a desert, and whatsoever you build there will be destroyed by death. Any wind and the castle is gone, and with it all your efforts, your energies, you yourself.
Let sannyas be the beginning of the search for the rock. It is there, it is our very life: it just has to be discovered, or rather rediscovered.
Deva means god, alex means a helper of mankind. It is the short form of Alexander, Alexandra. Your name will mean god is the only helper of mankind. Nothing else can help. Man tries in many ways to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. The effort is bound to fail. Every human effort done without the help of god is absolutely certain to fail. Man cannot succeed alone: man can succeed only with god, through god. To say it in a more correct way will be: it is always god who succeeds through man; man can only become a vehicle, a medium.
My teaching essentially is based on this idea, that you have to become a medium so that god can flow through you unhindered. Then you will help yourself and you will help everybody else who comes in contact with you. Then you will be blessed and you will be able to bless the whole of humanity.
Deva means god, ralf means protector – god is the protector. But this century has completely forgotten this fact. This century is the first in the whole of history which is suffering from great anxiety; man has never suffered so much with anxiety. Because god was the protector, with god, man was safe. Just at the beginning of this century Fredrich Nietzsche declared: God is dead. And it was not only an individual’s opinion; it became the very foundation of this century. And if god is dead, then man is left alone in the immense infinite darkness of the universe, unprotected. Then there is nobody to look to, then there is nobody to pray to. There is nobody; the whole universe is just an eternal darkness, not even a small star to hope by, to live by.
Naturally man started feeling very anxious, a great trembling arose in man; such anguish as this century has known has never been known before. And the only reason is that we have forgotten a
certain truth – that we are protected. Even while we are suffering so much anxiety we are protected; our anxiety is unnecessary. It can be dropped, but it can be dropped only if the vision of god arises again in your life, if yoU again start living with the idea that god is.
My effort here is to help you feel that god is. My effort is not to teach you: my effort is to make you feel My effort is not to give you a belief but an experience
By becoming a sannyasin you are opening your heart to me. Sannyas is a gesture from your side that ‘I am available’, that ‘I will not resist’, that ‘I will not keep my doors closed’, that ‘My doors are open and if some breeze from the unknown comes in, it is welcome!’
Prem means love, Maria is the mother of Jesus, and the message of Jesus is love. Jesus means love; just as Moses means law, Jesus means love.
Become a Maria and give birth to Christ-consciousness, to the consciousness that is full of love. Everybody has to become Maria. It is easy to give birth to a child; the real problem is how to give birth to yourself, how to become a womb to yourself. Certainly, that birth will be out of a virgin mother.
That is the meaning of the virgin Maria giving birth to Christ; it is a parable. You cannot give birth to a real child by remaining a virgin, but you can give birth to Christ-consciousness only if you remain virgin. But then virginity has nothing to do with your body or your biology; then it has something to do with your inner purity, innocence. Only an innocent consciousness can become the womb for Christ-consciousness to arrive.
We can invite Christ-consciousness. In the East we call it Buddha-consciousness; it is the same. All that it means is that something from the sky can penetrate into the earth, that something immaterial can penetrate into matter and the material, that something can be pulled forth from the beyond. Then our darkness is no more darkness, then we have a light. That light is Christ, and that light has the quality of love.
[A sannyasin, leaving, who is writing his autobiography, says: Thank you! My whole life has changed.]
Yes, it has changed and I am very happy. It is really beautiful to see anybody changing so fast and so easily. Whenever any sannyasin goes through such a change I feel as happy as a gardener when he sees a new flower bloom.
But this is just the beginning: much more, much deeper, much higher, is going to happen. So don’t settle with it. Be happy, thankful, grateful; but this is only the beginning, remember it, just the tip of the iceberg.
Man has unlimited potential to grow. Man is absolutely unaware of who he is, of what he can do, of what he can be.
My basic approach is to slowly slowly make you aware that you are not an island but a vast continent. There are still many dark parts of your own world where you have never penetrated, never travelled.
There are peaks which have to be climbed and there are depths which have to be fathomed, and it is a non-ending process.
Religion is a pilgrimage, a non-ending pilgrimage; one is always arriving but one never arrives. The day you understand it, then the sheer beauty of it is so ecstatic that you are always arriving and never arrive, that life goes on expanding just as the universe goes on expanding.…
But the seed has sprouted; protect it, help it. You have to finish your autobiography, because now your autobiography is my autobiography; now I am part of you. It will be of immense help to people in understanding me. So now it is not only your work, it will be a great help to my work, because what is happening to people here, many people would like to happen to them. But they have to be made aware that something is happening somewhere, that a door has opened somewhere, that a new hope has arisen somewhere, that god is not dead, that yet somewhere something can make you feel the existence of god, that there still exists a field of energy which is the need of everyone.
So write it, and pour your whole heart and all that has changed in you and all that will be changing in the coming months, into it. Think of it as my work!
[A sannyasin, leaving, says: I just feel discouraged, Osho. I feel my heart loves everything that you say and I try to move in the direction that you give me, but I feel I go through a lot of changes and... no transformation.]
What is the need of transformation?
The mind just goes on creating new desires, new ambitions. And what I go on saying every day is: try to understand the tricks and the strategies of the mind. Now transformation becomes the goal. If it is not money, if it is not power, it is transformation, enlightenment, this and that. I am not saying that the transformation does not happen: I am saying that it cannot happen if you desire it; then only frustration happens.
This has to be understood, there is no way to escape from this understanding. Sooner or later, and it is better if you do it sooner, one day you have to come to this understanding, that the mind and its desires are all futile, all desires – transformation included. Then one simply lives! Then if transformation happens, it happens; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Then one does not care a bit this way or that. That moment, when you don’t care a bit for enlightenment, suddenly it is there. If you run after it, you will never never reach it.
You have to forget it. You are too anxious about it, and creating unnecessary misery. When the anxiety is for transformation it is heart-rending; nothing else can give you so much pain as this desire. Money can be achieved. it is not so difficult; millions of stupid people are able to have so much money. So you can have it – that’s not a problem at all, not much intelligence is needed. Power is possible; you can become the president of a country or the prime minister of a country; so many stupid people already are, that is not a big problem. But when the idea of transformation becomes the desire then you are hankering for the impossible. And you will suffer unnecessarily, you will create a hell for yourself.
So don’t be an enlightenment-seeker. Forget all about it – it is all nonsense!
[The sannyasin answers: It feels more that I just can’t even stop my mind, I can’t even be present – never mind transformation.]
You will have to, sooner or later, that’s all. A little more suffering, a little more pain... how long can you go on?
There is a limit beyond which one simply gives up; and that is the moment of liberation. One day you will fall on the ground and you will say ‘I give up.’ That very moment you are no more the same, because in that giving up the mind disappears. The mind can remain only if there is a desire; any desire will do for it to survive.
I can only go on telling you that this is the fact. And I understand your trouble also; that has been my trouble also for many lives, so I am in all sympathy with you.
I am not ridiculing it, but it is ridiculous. I have suffered from it, everybody has to suffer it, and it is really very difficult to drop it. It drop on its own accord one day, when enough is enough. Maybe that day is coming closer. You are becoming more and more worried about it and more and more tense; soon you will reach to that point beyond which there is no hope. When hopelessness is absolute, one gives up; and to give up is to be enlightened.
[You are] capable of giving up, because what else?... how long can you carry this burden? One day or other you have to simply drop it or it drops with its own weight!
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