12

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‌CHAPTER 12

12 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Prem Udgita – love song]

Love is a song, the song of the heart, the song of your very innermost core; and unless love is born one is not born. It is through love that one attains the soul. It is only through love that one starts feeling something that is beyond the body, beyond matter, beyond form beyond words; and that beyond is god. So love becomes a bridge between this and that, between this shore and the further shore. And it is only through love that one can go to meet the divine.

You can practise a thousand and one things, and still if love is missing the bridge will not be created between you and god. One can become very saintly, but all that saintliness will be just like a corpse without a soul in it; it will be an unlit lamp.

Remember it, because that is the greatest thing to remember in life. And if one remembers it, the very remembrance starts changing one on its own accord. Slowly slowly you start leaning more and more towards loving attitudes, loving approaches. Slowly slowly the ordinary life, the life of prose, starts changing into extraordinary life, into the life of poetry. And suddenly one day when enough poetry has gathered into being it suddenly bursts forth into a song.

That is the meaning of udgita: when love bursts forth as a song. Deva Hiromi... will mean divine, open, beautiful space.

The open space is bound to be beautiful and the open space is bound to be divine. It is the closed that is ugly, it is the closed that is dead, it is the closed that becomes stagnant and stinks. The closed means that we have separated ourselves from existence, we have erected a wall around ourselves; we are no more in communion with the whole. The open means in communion with the whole, with

no wall dividing. We are meeting and merging into the whole, and the whole is constantly pouring itself into us. The exchange is utterly open with no conditions, with no strings attached; and when one is totally open, one disappears. As an ego, as a personality, one is found no more.

Buddha has called that open state anatta: no-self. But that is the true self, that is the supreme self. Buddha has been very much misunderstood. Because he gave it a negative name, down the ages it has been thought that he denied the self. How could he deny the self? – he is one of those few people who have known the self in its ultimate glory, splendour, beauty. What he denied in the name of self is the ego, the personality; that is what we think is the self. We think that the walls that are creating our prison are our selves, our home; we are identified with the walls.

To help people so that they could drop the identity he told them: Drop the self. There is no self. Totally forget that you are; be in a state of non-being.

On one hand the false self disappears like darkness, and on the other hand, immediately, instantly, the true self arises in you as light. But the true self has no centre in it; it is pure light, you cannot catch hold of it. It is infinite light, it is the very spirit of light, the essence of light.

Obviously, it becomes the beginning of the true journey of life. Now you know what this existence consists of. Once you have known yourself, you have known the true self of the whole existence. Knowing it, all fear disappears; knowing it, all ignorance disappears; knowing it, all misery disappears; knowing it, death disappears – because all death, misery, ignorance, are part of our personality.

So drop the personality and be ! All ideas about yourself that you have carried up to now, drop in toto, because they are all false. So don’t hold on to anything, just let them disappear. Then suddenly you will see a contentless consciousness arising in you. It can be called no-self, because there is no ego; it can be called the supreme self, because it is divine and it is eternal. It was there before birth and it will be there after death: it is your original face.

Anand means bliss, dino means religion: a religion of bliss, a philosophy of bliss.

Bliss is my basic message. If you can be blissful you will automatically be good. In the past it has been said again and again that if you are good you will be rewarded by bliss. That is utterly wrong. Bliss is not a reward; goodness is a consequence. When a person is blissful he is naturally good, he need not practise it, because a blissful person cannot create any misery for anybody. Only the miserable creates misery for others, because we can only give to others that which we have and that which we are. The moment you are feeling blissful you can bless the whole existence.

So the past and its teachings have been very topsy-turvy; hence man has remained unchanged. We have to put things right.

Learn to be blissful. And don’t bother about virtue, goodness, saintliness; forget all about them! If you can manage only one thing – to be tremendously blissful, blissful moment to moment – then all those qualities will follow you like a shadow.

The word ‘dino’ comes from a root, an Arabic root: din. Din can mean religion; it can also mean faith, it can also mean trust, but those are all the meanings included in the word ‘religion’.

Deva means divine, madita means madness: divine madness. And that is the true path to god.

Reason has to be dropped. Reason is a good instrument if you are moving in the world, if you are moving in the without towards objects; but the same thing becomes a hindrance if you are moving inwards. For the outer journey it is a tremendously important means, but for the inner journey it is a hindrance. For the inner journey one needs to have courage to drop reasoning; and that is the meaning of becoming mad.

All the people who have attained to god were not sane in the ordinary sense. They were all madly in love, and they were ready to sacrifice everything and all for god. Only when one is ready to that extent does god happen – not that one needs to sacrifice, just the readiness to sacrifice is enough. It is not a question of god requiring sacrifice; that would be a very wrong god, some kind of a sadist, pathological. No, god does not need your sacrifice, neither does he demand it, it is not a requirement. But if you are not ready to put all your energies into the search your search remains lukewarm, so-so. It never has the intensity that can take you like an arrow into the infinite. The more intense your search is, the more you become like an arrow; and when you are arrowed towards god in tremendous love, that great happening happens.

Jesus is mad, Francis is mad, Eckhardt is mad, Buddha is mad, Mohammed is mad – mad in the sense that they are not after the worldly things which so-called clever and cunning people are after; mad in the sense that they are risking something that is familiar and known for something that is unknown; mad in the sense that they are dropping that which they have for that which may be, may not be, there is no guarantee about it.

It needs real guts to be religious. The greatest adventure in life is to be religious. Religion is not for cowards; it is not for people who are continuously defending themselves in some way or other. It is not for people who never take a single step into darkness, into danger.

To be religious is to live dangerously; and all that is implied in the word ‘madita’.

Udbodha means awakening. Sannyas is nothing but initiation into a new kind of awakening. We know only one kind of awakening: the extrovert. We don’t know another kind of awakening: the introvert. We know how to open our eyes to the outer world; we don’t know how to open our eyes to the inner, and unless one becomes capable of seeing both, one remains in the darkness. Unless one is easily capable of going in and coming out, one remains stuck with the outer; and the outer is peripheral, it is just the surface of things. It is not the centre of existence, it has no meaning in itself.

Meaning comes only when one has penetrated the inner world. Then meaning comes flowing, and then even outer things become tremendously meaningful. Then an ordinary pebble is as valuable as a diamond; when you have inner eyes to see it, it is luminous.

Then the ordinary world is no more ordinary, it is psychedelic, it is very colourful. But the change does not happen in the world; the change happens in you. And this is the change: being able to see inside one’s own being.

In the beginning it is all dark; one simply wants to avoid that darkness. That’s why people go on remaining occupied in the outside; that is a way of avoiding oneself. And in the beginning one only

comes across snakes and scorpions and things like that, because we have been repressing them so they have become part of our unconscious world. The moment we look in, they all start raising their heads. All that is ugly, and it is ugly because we have repressed it; otherwise it is not ugly. It has become sour, bitter. It would have been beautiful if it were expressed, but our culture prepares us to repress, not to express. Our culture is not creative, it is basically destructive. And the repressive person is a destructive person: only the expressive person is a creative person.

So in the beginning it is dark, and not only dark, but there are all kinds of monsters. So one feels scared, frightened; one does not want to go in. One wants to cling outside somewhere, holding on to something so that one need not go in. This has become the state of the ordinary human being all over the world, this avoidance of oneself has become almost the norm; and that has to be broken.

That’s what sannyas is all about – a breakthrough. The encounter with one’s nothingness, with one’s darkness, has to happen; one has to face it and one has to go into it. The deeper you go into it, the more and more light-filled it becomes. When you have reached the deepest core all darkness disappears and all the monsters with it. In fact a totally new vision arises. All those things that were looking like monsters you can now see in a better perspective, in a better light: they are your energies, unused, suffocated, stifled, but they are your energies. Those energies can be released, and when they are released with awareness, they create. And only a creative life is a religious life.

Udgatha is a form of poetry. Life has to become a form of poetry. One can live life as prose or as poetry. Those who live life as prose miss the whole point of it. Unless life is lived as poetry you will never know the splendour of it.

What do I mean by life lived as poetry? I mean discarding logic and accepting love, I mean discarding seriousness and accepting playfulness, I mean basically dropping the head and being the heart. Then there is great grace, and god is not far away but very close by. One starts breathing him in and out, one starts hearing his footsteps in one’s heart-beat.

It is because people are living a life of prose, mathematics, logic, calculation, that god looks so far away. The calculative mind can never know god; only the lover knows. Love is true knowledge: everything else is only information.

[The new sannyasin says she has cancer, which doctors are unable to cure.]

You should take treatment, but a few things can be done here which will be of immense help.…

No, just one thing will be of help: take a few Acupuncture sessions and a few private Hypnosis sessions; and you can still go by the end of January. But if these sessions help you and you start feeling better, then stay one month more. There is every possibility that Acupuncture and Hypnosis together may help you and there will be no need for the treatment. But we have to make an effort and see what is possible.

So do these two things, mm? If you feel good, then stay one month more. And don’t be worried: something is always possible!

[A sannyasin asks: How can I keep the journey inward, being involved in doing things outside all the time. I find I get lost.]

No, slowly slowly you will start finding that you are not lost. It is just a knack to not be lost. One has to continue doing things: one is not to renounce the world. The world is beautiful, something just has to be added to it; a quality of awareness, a quality of self-remembering, so that you are not lost – committed, involved, yet not lost. And that is the whole art of life.

It is easy to escape, it is easy not to do things; then certainly one is not lost, that is very easy. Or the other thing is easy: be drowned in the world and be completely lost. Both are very ordinary things. The worldly man and the monk have both chosen the path of least resistance. But great things are not born that way; you have to choose the way of challenge.

This is what is meant by my sannyas: be committed to a thousand and one things and yet don’t get lost. Many times you will feel that you have forgotten. Remember again, and slowly slowly, gradually, the knack is learned. And it is only learned by trial and error, there is no other way. One has to go astray many times to come back again and again to the right path. In fact each time you go astray and come back, your coming back has a different quality: you have learned something by going astray too, and when you come back your awareness is more intense, more clear, more solid.

Each error helps in finding the truth, so one should never be afraid of committing errors. There is no way to knock on the right door unless you knock on a thousand and one wrong doors.

[To a sannyasin who is leaving Osho says:]

You have to share much, and the more you share, the more you will have.

So don’t be a miser in sharing. Many people have to be helped and many people are in need. And because I am not going anywhere, my sannyasins have to do all the work.

It is only through you, through my sannyasins, that I can reach millions of people. Remember that that is the only way I have – to use everybody’s hands.

[Another sannyasin says: I feel that I have become more and more silent, but at the same time I feel an emptiness, dullness. It’s like I am in a bowl and it’s hard to reach out to other people and to nature.]

It is perfectly good; you should not try to get out of it. Get deeper into it and then you will come out of it, but you are not to make any effort. If you make any effort you will have missed something valuable.

Whenever silence starts happening it feels sad because there is no excitement in it. It also looks dull because there is no challenge in it, your intelligence is not needed, hence you feel dull. And silence has only one taste: there is no sensation happening again and again. nothing new is happening; there is no news in silence. They say that in heaven there is no news, only in hell; nothing new ever happens in heaven. So silence is non-sensational, hence you feel sad. And you have always lived a life of sensation.

People are sensation-hungry. Something new is needed every day, only that keeps them rolling, moving. Silence looks dull because there is no challenge for the intellect, so the intellect goes to sleep, there is nothing to keep it awake. But this is beautiful in the beginning; it is how it has to be.

Go deeper and deeper into it and soon you will see, sadness has disappeared; on the contrary, a depth is felt. But only at later stages when you have gone deeper into it does sadness turn into depth. Then you know that all those sensations were very shallow. Then the depth creates a challenge which is not like the old challenges, the old problems, that you used to solve and against which you used to sharpen your intellect. This is a totally new challenge. It does not challenge your intellect: it certainly challenges your wisdom. But that is a totally different phenomenon; you are not aware of it.

Intellect is sharpened by outer challenges and wisdom arises through inner challenges; but those will happen only slowly slowly. If you try to come out of it you will destroy the whole thing; you will kill something beautiful that is growing. And when you have really reached it and there is no desire for anything else, you are so contented. out of that contentment you will start relating with people.

That relationship will also be totally different to what you have ever known. It will be sharing, it will not be a need. If somebody is available, you will be able to share; if nobody is available, you will still remain in the same contentment. Sharing or not sharing will not make any difference to you – although you would like to share because it is so much that a natural desire arises to give to people, to those who have nothing of it. But that is a natural desire, it is not something like an obsession.

I can understand your problem: you may be feeling a little lonely, that you are not reaching to people, not relating to people, not feeling like relating at all. This is perfectly good in the beginning. When the energy changes the gestalt, when it starts moving from the outer to the inner, this happens. This is just an interim period, a transitory period. You will have to be a little patient; it will go.

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