5

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 5

5 January 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Love is the only true prayer. Prayer is not something formal, it can never be formal; if it is formal it is not prayer. Prayer cannot be taught. and if you learn a prayer you will miss the whole dimension of prayer for your whole life. That’s how people have been mis-educated.

All religious education is a mis-education, because religion cannot be taught. It is something to be caught, it is something to be imbibed. Nobody can teach it to you, although you can learn it; but when it is learned on your own it has a beauty, it has some authentic truth in it. The Hindu prayer, the Mohammedan prayer, the Christian prayer, are not prayers; they are conditionings. Children have been taught, forced, bribed, made afraid. They have learnt, and they will go on repeating whatsoever they have learnt, but it will be just like a gramophone, a tape, in their heads; their hearts will not be with it. And only when your heart is with your prayer does it communicate, does it commune, does it become a bridge between you and the whole.

There is no need to call the whole ‘god’, because that word has become very ugly, it has fallen into wrong hands. It is a beautiful word in itself but it has been very wrongly associated – with the church, with the temple, with the mosque, and with all the murders and the butcheries that have happened in the name of it. Religion has not proved a blessing, it has proved a curse.

So say that prayer is a communion between the part and the whole, between the wave and the ocean. But that communion can only be that of the heart, it cannot be of the head.

Learn love, be more loving to all that is: the people, the animals, the birds, the trees, the mountains, the stars. And if you can go on connecting with existence through love, it is prayer, it is namaz. Namaz is a Sufi word for prayer.

[The new sannyasin asks: How will I know that I am on the right road to enlightenment? Will I feel it, or...?]

You will feel it in many ways. It is like you are approaching a garden. You cannot see it yet, maybe it is behind a mountain range or behind houses. You cannot see it yet, but as you come closer to the garden the wind is cooler. You can guess that you are moving in the right direction. As you come closer the wind is fragrant; you can be more sure that you are moving in the right direction. As you come even closer you can hear the birds singing. Although you have not seen it yet, small indications, hints, start arriving.

The whole way towards enlightenment is full of tremendous experiences, and those experiences are self-validating, they are self-evident. They are so tremendously moving, they are so overpowering, that you need not ask anybody. You know it, that it is happening.

Thoughts start disappearing; that’s a sign. Love starts flowing more and more, for no reason at all, just for the sheer joy of it. One starts feeling more and more musical, melodious; a great harmony is felt inside. Everything starts falling into one whole, fragments disappear into unity. A kind of mystic union starts happening inside. You are not many persons, you start becoming one, individual; you are o more a crowd. Something starts settling, centering; a crystallisation starts happening. And you are cheerful – again, for no reason at all. If somebody asks why you are so cheerful you cannot answer, because there is no reason for it. One is irrationally cheerful.

Life starts having a meaning, a significance; it is no more ordinary. Even ordinary things are no more ordinary: they start radiating something extraordinary. Just a small rose flower, and you are thrilled, you feel like dancing. The sunset, and you feel like praying. Just a bird on the wing, and tears of joy start flowing.

These things go on deepening every day, and at the ultimate point you disappear as an ego. You cannot find any I inside, but there is great light, divine light, showering. When you disappear, you have arrived. That is the ultimate criterion. When you are and yet you are not, you have arrived. That is a very paradoxical experience. One cannot say ‘I am’ yet one is for the first time.

Sukhma means ultimate bliss. Happiness is caused from the outside, hence it can be taken away from outside. Its cause is outside, hence it makes you dependent on the outside. It creates a kind of addiction, a slavery, a dependence, and also a great fear because it can be taken away any time, it can be destroyed any time. It is very precarious: you can be robbed of it, it can be stolen. And the source that is giving you happiness can withdraw.

For example, you fall in love with a man and you are feeling very happy. He can withdraw, and all your happiness disappears; not only that, it leaves you tremendously unhappy, terribly unhappy.

Bliss is that which arises in your own being, it is a welling up of your own sources. It is not dependent on the outside, hence it cannot be taken away. There is no fear of losing it, it is impossible to lose it.

There are only two ways in life: one that goes outwards in search of happiness and the other that goes inwards in search of bliss. To be a sannyasin means that now you will be searching for bliss instead of happiness, that now you will turn inwards. Sannyas is a decision to move into one’s own being, to see one’s own inner sources. It is a conversion, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. It is trying to face oneself, trying to know ‘Who am I?’ The moment you look into your own being a great surprise is waiting for you. There is great joy waiting for you just to turn in and tune in. It is yours, and then no-one can take it, even death cannot take it away from you. It is eternal.

Niyaso. It is a Sufi word. It means prayer; but there is a difference between namaz and niyaso. Namaz means a prayer expressed through words: it is a verbal communication, it is an I-thou dialogue with god. Niyaso is a silent prayer, non-verbal: just utter silence, a deep gratitude, but not in words, only in the feeling. Nothing has to be said, because what can be said? And god knows no language other than silence, so whatsoever we say is pointless. It may satisfy us, it does; it may console us, it does; it may give great inspiration, it does – but really, what can be said to god? What is there to say? One can only bow down in deep silence, in gratitude, in thankfulness – that is niyaso. That is the very heart of prayer.

Words give it a body, then the prayer becomes embodied. Without words, when there is absolute silence, it is like an unembodied spirit, but that reaches to god far sooner. Words are heavy, they cannot go very far into the sky. Words are continuously being pulled by the gravitation of the earth, they belong to the earth; but silence is something of the beyond. The moment you are silent you are no more here on the earth: you are already in paradise.

The parable that Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden because they had eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge is very significant. It simply says that they had learned the ways of knowledge, they had become verbal; they attained to a mind. They lost their silence, and because they lost their silence they lost paradise. The moment you again attain silence you are back in paradise.

Adam and Eve have not really been expelled, because where can god expel them to? All is paradise, there is no other place. But they have fallen asleep in a kind of verbal dream; that is the expulsion. And the moment we awake from the verbal dream we are back.

In fact we had always been there; it is just that we had forgotten. We were so lost in our own thinking that we lost contact with existence as it is, we lost contact with that which is.

Niyaso means becoming utterly silent. So that is going to be your key. Whenever you have time just become silent, sit silently. If tears come, good. If in that silence you start feeling like dancing, dance. If in that silence something starts happening to your body energy, allow it. Much happens. If you don’t control, you will be surprised, you will not be able to believe your eyes when you see what is happening. You may dance, you may cry, you may laugh, but all will be utterly silent, and that silent communion is niyaso.

Veet means beyond, gyan means knowledge – beyond knowledge. Truth is beyond knowledge. It can be experienced but it cannot be known. Why can it not be known? Because basically it is the knower, and the knower cannot be reduced to the known. It is your very subjectivity. You cannot reduce it to an object; only objects can be known. Hence the word ‘science’ is right; science means knowledge. It is perfectly true: science is knowledge. Religion is not knowledge, religion is experience. It is not knowing but being.

Truth is not something outside you. It is in your very subjectivity. Looking at me, just meditate for a moment. Who is looking? What is this consciousness inside you? That is truth. One has to come to one’s own source to feel it; scriptures won’t help. I cannot give it to you, nobody can give it to you. Truth is untransferable because it is not knowledge; knowledge can be transferred. That’s why science can be taught, religion cannot be taught.

In science there are teachers, in religion there are masters; and the difference is great. The teacher is one who teaches; the master is one who infects. The teacher is one who makes you more and more informed; the master is one who makes you more and more aware of who you are. Nothing can be said about it.

So no scripture, no philosophy, no system of thought, is of any use as far as truth is concerned. Then what is to be alone? One has to learn how to forget knowledge, one has to learn how to forget scriptures, one has to learn how to drop systems of thought. One has to come to a point where all thinking has evaporated. One simply is, without a single thought. In that very moment truth is experienced: it is an existential experience.

Belief means you have not known and yet you have believed, either out of fear or out of greed – the fear of hell and the greed for heaven. That is the old trick of the priests, and because of fear and greed one starts believing. But to believe without knowing is insincere, dishonest. that’s why the whole earth is full of hypocrites. These hypocrites are all religious people: they believe in god, they believe in the after-life, they believe in the soul, but because they believe, they remain hypocrites.

To believe is to live in a lie. Belief is borrowed, it is not our own understanding. The man who knows, who has experienced, need not believe either. So belief is irrelevant in any case. If you don’t know, it is irrelevant. If you know, it is irrelevant, because when you know, you know; there is no need to believe. Beware of belief.

The real seeker has to be an agnostic. The beginning of real seeking cannot be rooted in belief or disbelief. One has to be utterly open; one should not start with some a priori idea. One should start in utter innocence, one should start without any conclusion. Only then can one move into truth and one day come to know it. That’s why I say that the really religious person cannot be a Christian, cannot be a Hindu, because those are all beliefs. The really religious person has a quality of agnosticism. He is not a disbeliever, because disbelief is nothing but belief. One believes in god, one does not believe in god; both are the same. There is not much difference between the Catholic and the communist; Kaaba, Canterbury, and the Kremlin. are very close by – neighbours.

I teach you neither belief nor disbelief. I teach you an opening, a sincere search; one has to grow into it unprejudiced.

Consciousness can be in two states: one is mind, the other is no-mind. Mind is the state of consciousness when everything is in a turmoil; the lake is full of waves. It is the same lake but full of waves; then it is mind. When the waves have settled and the lake is utterly silent – it is the same lake, but with no ripples, no waves, no disturbance – then it is no-mind.

Consciousness can express itself as noise – then it is mind; or as silence – then it is no-mind. When consciousness is full of thoughts, desires, memories, imagination, it is mind, because these are all waves. When all desires and thoughts and imaginations and memories have become silent, have settled, have disappeared, it is the same consciousness but now it has a totally different quality, the quality of no-mind.

Mind lives in the past and the future: no-mind lives in the present. Mind is perfectly good if you are exploring the outer world, the objective world, the dimension of science; mind is needed because

doubt is needed, thinking is needed – those are instruments to enquire into the objective reality. But if you are moving in then they are not needed at all, they become hindrances.

The inner is not an object, and the inner can be known only when your consciousness has become just a mirror, a silent mirror, with no dust, a silent lake with no waves. Then the lake reflects the moon in its utter grandeur, in its total beauty. When the consciousness is in a state of no-mind it reflects truth as it is, it mirrors existence as it is.

That is the meaning of your name and that is the meaning of meditation, and that’s what sannyas is all about. One has to shift from mind to no-mind; that’s the real revolution. The change from mind to no-mind is the only revolution there is.

Deva means divine, utsava means celebration – a divine celebration. Religion in the past has been very sad, serious, and that’s why humanity could not become religious. If religion is going to remain serious and sad then only pathological people will become interested in it, ill people, sick people, people sick of life. If religion is serious and sad then only masochists and sadists become interested in it, because a sad religion is life-negative. It doesn’t affirm life, it does not celebrate life. It knows no laughter.

Christians say that Jesus never laughed. Now this is utter nonsense! If he really never laughed then he is not worth anything. In fact only he can laugh, only he can sing, only he can dance. But Christians have painted Jesus as very serious, with a long face, suffering for the whole of humanity. This whole thing is pathological. That’s why the cross became more important than Christ.

I call Christianity, Crossianity: it is a religion of the cross, not of Christ. It is a suicidal religion; but that is more or less true about other religions too. All the religions up to now have been suicidal. Organised religions, churches, all have been suicidal. You can leave a few exceptions – a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ, here and there. They are exceptions; they only prove the rule.

My vision of religion is of those people who are living in a festive way. A religion has to be life- affirmative, it has to root itself in the earth. It is god’s world, his creation. It has to be enjoyed, loved, appreciated. It is a gift: we have to celebrate it in thankfulness, in gratitude. It is a great gift: to be alive, just to be alive, to be able to see the night full of stars, to be able to hear the sound of running water in the mountains, to be able to see a rose flower, is more than enough. What else is needed for one to be happy? The whole existence except for man is celebrating. The dance is everywhere and the sound is everywhere except in man.

Man needs a healthier religion, a religion which really helps people to laugh, to love, to live; and that’s my effort are – to create dancing sannyasins. The old sannyas was that of renunciation: my sannyas is that of rejoicing. Rejoice and rejoice and rejoice. If you can rejoice wholeheartedly, you have prayed, you have meditated. You are accepted by god only when you are in a dance.

Vidheya means absolute positivity. Life cannot be lived through no, and those who try to live life through no simply go on missing life. One cannot make an abode out of no, because no is just empty. No is like darkness. Darkness has no real existence; it is simply the absence of the light. That’s why you cannot do anything with darkness directly: you cannot push it out of the room, you cannot throw it into the neighbour’s house, you cannot bring more darkness into your house. Nothing

can be done directly with darkness, because it is not. If yoU want to do something with darkness, you will have to do something with light. If you want darkness turn the light off; if you don’t want darkness put the light on. But all that you have to do has to be done with the light.

In exactly the same way, yes is light, no is darkness. If you really want to do anything in your life, you have to learn the ways of yes. And yes is tremendously beautiful; just to say it is so relaxing.

Let it become your prayer, your meditation. Sitting silently, simply say yes, yes . . . as totally as possible. Sway with it, dance with it, let it resound in you from one end to the other end: yes! And you will be surprised; it becomes a mantra, it will create great music in you.

The root of the word ‘amen’ simply means yes. When you finish your prayer and you say amen, you are saying ‘Yes god, yes god, yes god.’ But people go on saying amen without knowing that it means yes; then it is meaningless. Change it; it is better to say ‘Yes, god’ and to say it so totally that your body says it, your mind says it, your soul says it. Let it become your very life style. Say yes to the trees and the birds and people, and you will be surprised: life becomes a blessing if you are there to say yes to it. Life becomes a great adventure.

That is the meaning of vidheya: the capacity to say yes.

Deva means divine, prasado means grace. There are things which can be achieved through effort, but there are also things which can never be achieved through effort. The things that can be achieved through effort are always mundane – money, power, prestige; and the things that cannot be achieved through effort are always sublime – love, prayer, meditation, god, truth.

All that is really significant always comes as grace from god. You have only to become capable of receiving it. You cannot achieve it: you can only receive it. You cannot make any positive effort towards it. Our hands are very small, our reach is not much, but we can wait, and we can wait with great expectancy, although without expectations. We can wait throbbing tremendously, pulsating. In that waiting the beyond penetrates, eternity penetrates into time; the sky comes to the earth.

One has to learn how to wait, one has to learn how to be effortless, one has to learn how to be in a state of surrender. One has to learn how to be in a let-go. The greatest secret in life is the secret of let-go, of surrender, of trusting existence.

That is the meaning of prasado: god comes as a gift and all that is great always comes as a gift.

Don’t strive for it, otherwise you will miss. Lao Tzu says: Seek and you will never find, do not seek and find it immediately. Lao Tzu’s statement is of great import, the very foundation of tao: relax, be in a let-go, go with the river, don’t push the river. Allow the river to take you, and you will arrive.

Anand means bliss, Buddha means one who has become awakened – the blissful, awakened one. The name is to remind you constantly that there is no difference between a Buddha and you, no qualitative difference between Christ and you. The only difference is that Buddha is awake and you are asleep, but that is not much of a difference. One who is asleep can become awake any moment, and those who have become awakened have themselves been asleep for long. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. so there is not much difference.

But religions have been teaching people that there is much difference. that Jesus is the only begotten son of god, that you can never be like Jesus. That is very inhuman. That creates a kind of hierarchy; it is very undemocratic, unjust, unfair. Everybody is as much god’s son as Jesus is. Yes, there is a little difference: he knows it and you have not yet come to know. But that is the only difference. Otherwise you are as much in god as Jesus, as Buddha, as anybody else. They know; you are unaware, so just a little effort to become aware – that’s all that is needed.

A thin layer of sleep is dividing you, a very thin layer. Once this is understood you start working in a totally different way. Great self-confidence arises and great respect for oneself; and that’s what the priests have destroyed. They have destroyed all self-respect in people, self-love in people. They have condemned you so much and for so long that the condemnation has entered into everybody’s mind. Everybody hates himself; and how can you transform yourself if you hate yourself? If you think yourself worthless you will not be able to move upwards, it will be impossible.

I declare that you are as valuable as Buddha, as Krishna, as Christ, as Mohammed, as anybody else. And you have to respect yourself, you have to love yourself, because only if you love and respect yourself will you go in. If you love and respect yourself only then will you start working to transform yourself. And the difference is so small that it can be broken in a single moment. If intensity and a passionate search for truth are there, it can be broken in a single moment, the awakening can happen in a sudden way.

There are two possibilities of awakening: the gradual and the sudden. The gradual simply means that your intensity is not much, you are lukewarm, so you will take years and years, maybe lives. But if you are passionately in search, afire, at a one-hundred-degree temperature, then you can evaporate this very moment – that is sudden enlightenment. There is no need to go into the gradual process. Why postpone it for tomorrow when it can happen today? Why postpone it for the next moment if it can happen this moment?

[Osho gives a name for a meditation centre.] Start now – you are ready to help people!

This will be the name: Madira. Madira means that which intoxicates. All the drunkards reach to god, and only drunkards. The so-called rational people, the so-called sane people, never reach. They cannot reach; their sanity won’t allow them to go into the unknown, into the insecure. They cling to the familiar, they cling to all that is known, because with the known there is safety, security; with the unknown there are all kinds of dangers. So only a few drunkards, only a few madmen, are capable of knowing the ultimate bliss.

So help people to become drunk! Just come close to me so I can make you a little intoxicated!

< Previous | Contents | Next >