19

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‌CHAPTER 19

19 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

In fact there is no meaning to any word; all meanings are arbitrary. Language itself is arbitrary. It is a human invention. We give meaning to words; words don’t have any meaning. Mm? That’s why so many languages are possible. There are three thousand languages on the whole of the earth; and sometimes the same word means one thing in one language, another thing in another language. Words are given meanings: they are useful but they have no intrinsic value.

Sounds are not created by man; they are there. Even if man disappears from the world, sounds will continue. In the mountains the falling rivers will create sound, and the waves of the ocean will create sound, and the wind passing through the pine trees will create sound, and the birds will go on singing; but there will be no meaning.

Meaning as such is a creation of the human mind; and one has to transcend meaning, only then is the mind transcended. If one can drop meaning, the mind is dropped automatically.

So it is good that there is no meaning in your name. Remember this thing, that meaning has to be dropped. This constant search for meaning creates anxiety. People go on asking absurd things. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ they ask. ‘What is the meaning of love?’ they ask. ‘What is the meaning of a rose flower?’ and ‘What is the meaning of a bird on the wing?’ And because in language questions seem relevant, people go on searching for meaning.

There is no meaning anywhere. And that is the beauty of existence, that it has no meaning – because meaning will be a limitation. Because it is without meaning, it is unlimited, infinite. And because it is without meaning, it is closer to poetry than to mathematics. It is closer to love than to logic. The way of love is not that of meaning; it doesn’t care at all about meaning. It lives moment to moment, purposelessly, because it is its own purpose.

Meaning means that the purpose is somewhere else. Meaning reduces life to work: it becomes business, and everything is reduced to a commodity, saleable, purchaseable. All that is beautiful and all that is true and all that has some ultimacy about it, cannot be reduced to a commodity. It cannot be sold, it cannot be purchased. It is, but it has no business. It simply is, and that is-ness is vast. That is-ness has no meaning but is significant, tremendously significant, incredibly significant, because it brings grandeur, grace, to each moment of life.

To be a sannyasin means an effort to transcend language, an effort to transcend meaning, an effort to transcend mind.

[The new sannyasin says that she is not in touch with her sexuality since she was a teenager and started suppressing it... now she feels it is too late.]

No, it is not late!... It is never too late – not even on one’s death-bed. It is never too late! And you have a long life yet ahead.

Living in suppression is living in a prison unnecessarily. And I can understand why you are afraid of Tantra. If a person has lived in a prison for many years, the very idea of becoming free frightens him, because in the prison there are a few things which are very secure, safe; in fact prison is the best place for those who want security, safety.

Everything is secure, safe; there is no responsibility, no worry. Nobody can come and kill you, thieves cannot come and steal things from you: the guards are always on duty, you are protected. And you need not worry about tomorrow’s bread; it will be supplied. You need not worry about clothes.

A person who has lived in gaol for many years becomes very afraid when the day that he is going to be free and back in the world comes closer; it frightens him. He will have to earn bread, and he will have to think of a house; he will have a thousand and one worries to face.

That’s what happens in inner, psychological prisons too: if you have suppressed for many years, you are afraid. But that fear has to be dropped, and the only way to drop it is to go into situations where you have to drop it.…

Do Tantra and then Encounter, and after Encounter remind me again. In these five months you will be out of the gaol; don’t be worried about it. That’s my whole work, to pull people out of their gaols.

And it is not late, it is really just the morning, evening is very far away. You have come in at the right time!

One of the most fundamental secrets of life is: whatsoever you want in yourself, start creating it. That’s the only way to attract it. If you want misery, then the first seed has to happen within you. You have to become miserable inside, you have to create the space for misery to enter. Then from every nook and corner of existence misery will start flowing towards you. You have created that space, you have asked for it; and god is very generous, so whatsoever you ask is fulfilled.

If you want bliss to happen in your life, create a small seed inside yourself. Create the space for it to happen, and then it starts coming in torrents; it starts coming from everywhere, from all dimensions. One is simply surprised that it is the same world: from where is so much bliss coming?

Jesus says that those who have will be given more, and those who have not, even that which they have will be taken away. This is one of the most beautiful sayings ever uttered by any man. In it is contained the greatest secret of life. It looks very anti-communistic on the surface. It means that those who are rich will become richer, and those who are poor will become poorer. But it has nothing to do with economics, it has nothing to do with the social structure; it has something to do with an inner law of consciousness.

This is how it is: the blissful person becomes more blissful and the miserable person becomes more miserable, because whatsoever we are, we are given more of it. We are guests; the existence hosts us. And this is the problem: people want bliss to happen but they don’t create the space for it. They don’t want misery but they go on creating space for it.

If the mind remains negative, you create space for misery; if the mind is positive, you create space for bliss.

Remember it, live it, and you will be surprised: this single key can open all the locks and all the doors.

Deva means divine, gathen means a story a divine story. Life is a divine story. It is an unfolding of something that has always been there but which was hidden. It is an expression of something that was in a seed form. It is evolution, and there is no end to it; peaks beyond peaks and universes are waiting. Man is not the end, in fact he is only a beginning.

We have not really started the journey yet. Man is only a preparation for the superman. Man is a preparation for a Christ, for a Buddha, for a Krishna. Man is a blank canvas: the painting has to happen, and it cannot happen without your co-operation. It cannot be forced to happen; you have to help your inner unfolding. You are not to become satisfied too early and you are not to be satisfied as you are.

Man is an arrow, and the arrow has to reach the target. Man is on the way, man is a pilgrimage. That is the beauty of man, because only man is evolving.

For millions of years, lions have remained lions and tigers have remained tigers, the rose has remained the rose and the lotus has remained the lotus. Only man is changing, only man is growing. With man nothing is static, everything is dynamic. That is the beauty and the glory of man.

Man has some great responsibility. Existence has trusted man tremendously. It is on the shoulders of man that existence is hoping something great is going to rise. Man is the hope, and every man has to help this unfolding. All is there, but it has to be decoded. All is there like a seed, but the seed is only a potential; man is only a potential .

The greatest calamity that is happening in the world today is that people have started forgetting, completely forgetting, that they have to transcend themselves, that they have to surpass themselves, that man is blissful only when he is surpassing himself. Man is the only animal who surpasses himself, who can surpass himself, and if he does not do it he remains miserable.

Misery is in not growing and bliss is a by-product of growth.

Anand Joseph – blissful Joseph. It reminds one of the father of Jesus. And everyone has to become, in a certain way, the father of Jesus. Christ-consciousness has to be born in you. You have to father it, you have to mother it. You have not only to be a Joseph, you have to be a Mariam too.

The Christ child is waiting to be born in everybody, and unless we become very very conscious of it, it cannot happen – because it is not a physical birth, it is the birth of consciousness. It is a jump into consciousness. It is a quantum leap from matter to god, from the outer to the inner, from the mundane to the sacred, from mind to meditation. The story of Jesus becoming Christ is the story of everybody; everybody has to become a Christ. Christ simply represents the ultimate flowering of consciousness.

Anand means bliss; the ultimate state of consciousness is naturally blissful. Its very intrinsic quality is bliss. We suffer only in the measure to which we are unconscious; suffering is a by-product of remaining unconscious, robot-like. Suffering means that man, who is meant to be a Christ, is confined to being a machine: that’s suffering.

Consciousness needs expansion; and the body is very small, the mind is very small. To look into existence through the mind is looking through a keyhole. That is misery: confined, locked, only looking through the keyhole. So whatsoever we see through the keyhole is never the truth, but only parts and fragments. Everybody shouts that he has found the truth, and everybody is sitting close to his own keyhole. No two people can agree on what truth is, because everybody is seeing different things. Different keyholes make you available to different fragments of life. Hence the conflict between Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans, and everybody trying to prove that ‘My truth is the ultimate truth and what you are saying is just stupidity, superstition, nonsense.’ But all are claiming the whole, and they only know a very small tiny part.

When you come out of the mind you come into the open, under the sky, and then for the first time you become aware of what truth is, in all its multi-dimensionality. Then it is so vast that you cannot say it, it is so huge that no word can convey it.

So Buddhas don’t say what truth is. They only take you by the hand, under the open sky, and they say ‘Now you can see it!’ Buddha says again and again to his disciples ‘Ihi passika: come and see!’ He does not say ‘Come and believe’, he says ‘Come and see.’

And that’s my effort too, helping you to see. I don’t give you any belief, any dogma, to believe in; I only make you aware that you are unnecessarily looking through the keyhole. The keyhole is just to open the door: the key is with you, it is already provided. There is no need to look through the keyhole, there is no need to be a thief. This is your world and your existence, and all is yours: open the door and come out. Be in the sun and the wind and the rain, and see what it is. Ihi passika: come and see. In that seeing is transformation. That seeing is consciousness and that seeing is bliss.

Anand means bliss, satyarthi means a seeker of truth – a blissful seeker of truth. Truth can only be searched for by blissful people; it cannot be searched for by anxious people, by people who are worried, who are miserable, who have started the search because of their anguish and anxiety. They are not really searching for truth, they are searching for a certain consolation.

If you seek out of pain, you will seek a pain-killer; you would like to have some metaphysical aspirin that relieves you of the headache. That’s why millions of people become caught up with some consolation, with some belief, with some dogma, because it consoles, it soothes. It is like a lullaby, it helps you to remain asleep. It makes your life comfortable – not true, not authentic. It makes your life more convenient. It functions as a lubricant, life becomes more smooth. It does not give you truth; it simply gives you buffers, protective buffers, shock-absorbers. And that is really going against truth. The more shock-absorbers you have, the less is the possibility of seeing the truth.

The real truth-seeking cannot start with a suffering mind. It can start only when you are so blissful, so happy, that you would like to enquire into reality, out of playfulness. That enquiry has no anxiety in it: it is a playful enquiry. It is more like art – art for art’s sake. One enjoys enquiring – not that one is worried about truth, not that if one cannot find it then one will not be able to live. One will still live and one will still live happily, but because there is energy and there is joy and there is childlike curiosity, out of that childlike, innocent enquiry, one starts playing games with one’s own consciousness. Those games are what religion is all about.

Once you start playing those inner games of consciousness, slowly slowly, great visions start happening. Slowly slowly you come closer and closer to your home, and one day, suddenly, out of your blissfulness it is there.

Anand means blissful, unmesha means opening of the eyes – a blissful opening of the eyes. It is not with any effort, not with strain. It is just as one opens one’s eyes in the morning when one becomes aware that the sun-rays have started falling on one’s face, that the birds are chirping outside, that the traffic has started on the road, that the people in the neighbourhood are awake. One starts hearing the noise, the morning noise. all around, and one opens one’s eyes: it is morning! There is no effort.

Truth is attained by no effort. Those who make too much effort and become strained by the effort, become more and more tense. And the more tense you are, the farther away you are from truth, because truth happens only when you are utterly relaxed. In utter relaxation, and only in utter relaxation, truth simply bubbles up in your being, it wells up.

It is while you are in rest that it happens – not when running after it, but sitting silently doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. No effort is the fundamental key.

So that is the meaning of your name. Unmesha means opening one’s eyes without any effort.

Prem means love, artha means significance love, the significance. Love is the very soul of all that is, and unfortunate is the man who misses love. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people miss it; only very rarely does a person come to know what love is. It should not be so; it is a very unfortunate state of affairs. But the society is anti-love, the church is anti-love. All churches and all societies that have existed up to now are war-oriented, hence they cannot be for love.

Up to now man has lived in a world of hate, enmity, jealousy, possessiveness, a world of politics. We have not yet been able to create even a small oasis of religion, hence the whole establishment of the church, of the state, of education, is basically anti-love – because they want soldiers, they want slaves, they want servants, they want efficient machines, not men. And the moment love happens, you cannot remain a machine.

This is something very significant to be understood. Now whatsoever a man’s mind can do, computers can do. The only thing left to man is love – that no machine can do. Thinking can be done by the computers, maybe in a far better, more accurate way. The only thing left which can be still called human is love. No machine can do it, no machine can even understand it.

Down the ages, for thousands of years, man has been prepared, conditioned, hypnotised, in such a way that the whole potential of love remains a potential and never becomes actual. Hence you don’t see beautiful people in the world, but all kinds of uglinesses. Even in beautiful faces you will see uglinesses beautiful eyes full of ugliness, beautiful bodies but already poisoned by the society.

And because love is missed, life becomes a drag. It loses the quality of dance. It becomes very prose-like; the poetry is murdered. It is only love that brings poetry to life. It is only love that makes you live, not separate from existence but as part, part of this whole, in a kind of tremendous exchange, communion.

That’s the function of love, to help you to commune. You love a woman and communion happens; you love a friend, a communion happens. Slowly slowly, as ripples of love start growing bigger and bigger, wider and wider, you start touching more and more people. Slowly slowly, as you become more and more attuned to love, even animals enter into the arena and then trees and rocks. One day suddenly you have touched the whole existence with your love energy. Then you throb, then you pulsate, then you are in harmony with existence. And that harmony is god.

[The new sannyasin says that since he first visited India seventeen years previously, he had met many gurus and read much, but it was not until seeing a film of Osho that he felt deeply moved to surrender to him. He asks if a sannyasin can become complete away from the master.]

Mm mm, perfectly. There is no problem, because if your heart is with me, then wherever you are, I am with

you. You will not miss me.

The physical distance is irrelevant. You will see it, you will come to feel it every day, that physical distance does not make any difference. It makes a difference only if the contact is intellectual; then it makes a difference. The intellect is part of matter, and matter exists in space and in time. But the heart is not part of matter. It is the most non-material thing in you, the most elusive thing in you; it exists beyond time and space. Once your heart is in tune with someone, then space and time don’t matter. Then wherever you are, you will find me with you.

The work will continue, and you are going to become complete. Just remain in love and remain in trust and remain in surrender. And that will also grow every day, because the more you experience what is happening, the more trust grows. It is not an intellectual conviction, it is something far deeper; so there is no need to be afraid. Wherever you are I will follow you. Don’t be worried. Once the disciple starts following the master, the master follows the disciple!

Just help my people there, and sometimes whenever you have time, go to [the centre] and remain in contact with my people. And whenever you can come, come back. I will wait.…

[A sannyasin who is leaving said he was sick most of the time here with dengue fever from mosquito bites. He feels a little sad that he can’t get to know Osho better.]

Mosquitoes disturb you?... They are very ancient enemies of meditators!...

Come back, mm? and next time I will protect you from mosquitoes! They are good people; if you persuade them, they don’t trouble you so much.

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