1/08/07

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Query:-

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Talks given from 1/10/80 to 31/10/80

Darshan Diary

31 Chapters

Year published:

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #1

Chapter title: None

1 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010015

ShortTitle: THUNK01

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

1/08/07

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Query:-

Prem Jan. Prem means love. Jan is a form of Hebrew, John. John the most beloved disciple of Jesus, hence his name has become a symbol of disciplehood.

Love is the most essential quality, the fundamental quality, without which nobody can be a disciple It is easy to be a student -- it needs no love, it needs only logic -- because the communication between the teacher and the student is from head to head. It is verbal, intellectual, logical. The teacher simply imparts information and the student accumulates it in his memory. There is no question of love. Love goes not arise between the teacher and the student, hence the relationship is impersonal; it is not a relationship at all. It is very formal.

But to be a disciple is totally different. It is not something formal. It is a commitment, it is involvement.

It is becoming part of the master. It needs not communication from head to head but a communion from heart to heart.

The verbal part is not that important. The non-verbal part is far more essential, because the master is not a teacher, just as the disciple is not a student. The master has no information to impart to you, he has something far more valuable: he wants to impart a transformation to your being. It is not a question of accumulating something in your memory, it is a question of a dying and being reborn.

The disciple disappears into the master, dies in a way; leaves the old identity, forgets all about his past and renews himself totally. It is a new beginning, a new birth. And without love it is not possible.

Only the miracle of love can make it possible, otherwise it is impossible. Being a disciple means falling in deep love without any motive, for no ulterior end because love is not a means to any end; it is an end unto itself.

Once love has started flowing then the master can trigger a process in you which can bring light, which .

can bring bliss, which can bring truth, which ultimately can bring god. It is a tremendous journey.

Prem Vinamro. Prem means love. Vinamro means egolessness.

Love is possible only in the climate of egolessness. With the ego love cannot grow. Ego is like a rock and love is like a rose flower: if you put a rock on the rose bush there is no possibility of its growing, no possibility of roses ever flowering.

The ego can do everything else. It can make you famous, it can make you a great scholar, very knowledgeable, it can fulfil all kinds of ambition for power, prestige, money. But it cannot do one thing which is the most significant in life: it cannot help you to grow in love. And without love all else is futile because without love you are dead. Love is life, the very secret of life.

Without love one starts shrinking and dying. Without it there is no significance at all. Without love why should one live at all? -- because there is no meaning. One can drag but dragging is not living. One can vegetate but that is not life. One can survive but one cannot reach the peaks of joy.

Love opens the doors to the divine, but one condition has to be fulfilled the ego has to be dropped. And it can be dropped because it is a very false phenomenon, it is our invention.

We come without egos. Ego is not a natural phenomenon, it is produced by society, by the church, by the educational system. It is a pseudo reality, but it is supported from every direction. The parents support it, everybody supports it, so naturally the child starts believing in it. It is a belief, it is a kind of auto-hypnosis.

Otherwise there is no ego.

When one becomes absolutely silent in meditation one finds that the ego does not exist at all and it has never existed from the very beginning. It was just an idea implanted in you by society.

Society needs it because society is ambitious. Without an ego nobody would be ambitious. Then where would politics go? Then where would they find warriors to fight, to kill, to murder And to be murdered?

Where would they find foolish people waste their whole life accumulating money. Where are they going to find all kinds of stupidities without the ego?

This whole society, this establishment, depends on the ego. And my work here is to help you see that ego is non-existential. Don't cling to it and don't feed it any more. That's what sannyas is all about, stopping feeding the ego. And then it dies of its own accord, it withers away; it does not even leave a trace behind.

And that is the state of humbleness.

When Jesus says blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god, by meek he means the egoless.

Not the so-called humble people, because the humble person still has an ego. Now it is upside-down but the ego is there standing on its head, doing sirshasan a headstand.

The humble person is not egoless; the ego has come in from the backdoor. He threw it out from the front door but it has come in from the backdoor. Now he brags about his humanity, his humbleness and you can 1/08/07

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see in his eyes, on his nose, that the ego is there. Now he wants to be the most humble person in the world, the greatest humble person in the world -- again the same competition, again the same ambition.

By meek Jesus means the egoless, not the humble -- because the egoless is neither an egoist nor humble.

He cannot be an egoist because there is no ego and he cannot be humble either, because without ego how can you claim humbleness? He simply knows that ego is non-existential and there the chapter is closed. It does not create a new kind of ego, a subtle kind of ego. And that is the meaning of your name egolessness.

If one can do this simple process of finding that there is no ego at all, then love bursts forth as if suddenly spring has come and all the trees are blooming and birds and singing, and life becomes a celebration.

Anand Panthen: a traveller of bliss.

Sannyas is a journey from misery to bliss. We are living in misery. Sometimes it is less, sometimes it is more; when it is less you don't feel it so much but the difference is only of degree. You are never really blissful and the moments that you call moments of happiness are only of less misery, less misery than your usual dose -- diluted, not so painful. In comparison it looks like happiness but it is only less misery.

Watch and you will find what I am saying -- because I don't believe in theories, I believe only in facts and whatsoever I say is simply factual. Just watch your moments of happiness and your moments of misery and see: is there any qualitative difference between the two or only a difference of quantity? If it is only of quantity it is not a difference that makes a difference.

Only a qualitative difference is a difference that makes a difference, but that qualitative difference is possible only if you start dismantling the roots of your misery.

People only go on changing symptoms. You are miserable with one woman or with one man; you change. And you completely forget that you were very happy with this woman. You have completely forgotten the honeymoon days and again you will do the same foolish thing with some other woman again the same honeymoon and the same excitement and again the same depression, the same boredom.

You can go on changing the woman again and again but it will be just the same routine, the same vicious circle.

If you really want to change your misery you have to go to the root cause. The root cause is that you don't know what love is, so how can you be a lover? How can you share love when you don't know what it is? The root cause is that you are not blissful so when you relate with somebody, in the beginning you manage to act blissfully, but how long can you act? As things settle you start coming back to your normal self because one cannot live continuously acting. Those honeymoon days when you are smiling, when there are songs on your lips, are just days of acting but soon they disappear, you come back to your natural and normal pace. One has to, otherwise it is very tiring; one cannot go on putting on a face for long.

And the same is true about the woman you are in love with, she also settles. And then both are miserable persons; then the reality suddenly is there and has to be encountered. And remember, two miserable persons together do not only double the misery, they multiply it. And then everybody throws the responsibility on the other but the responsibility is basically one's self.

First we should find the root causes of our misery and destroy them, burn them. Before you start growing roses you have to pull out all the weeds, you have to prepare the ground, remove all the rocks.

One should go deep into the causes of misery -- and they are not many. Basically the main root is ego and then others are offshoots. A man with ego is bound to remain miserable because ego can never be fulfilled, its thirst is unquenchable. And because it can never be fulfilled it always brings frustration. And that frustration accumulates and becomes your misery. It becomes mountainous. It destroys all joy, all love, all truth. You simply become a black hole.

As I see people they are black holes moving around in the world searching for other black holes. And just think of the calamity when two black holes meet -- and they call it marriage, love. There are simply two black holes meeting, and there is nothing else, nothing to share, nothing to give. And everybody wants to suck the other, to get as much as possible. Both are beggars.

First destroy the root of misery, the ego, and its offshoots -- jealousy, possessiveness, the desire to dominate -- and then you will be surprised that bliss has not to be achieved; it is your intrinsic nature. Once misery is removed it is as if clouds have disappeared and the sun starts shining forth. And when you are blissful your life is a pilgrimage. It is no ordinary journey, it is sacred. Then each step is towards god.

A blissful person cannot go anywhere else other than to god. He cannot go astray, it is impossible to go astray. If he has fulfilled one thing, if he has allowed his blissful nature to be expressed, then there is no 1/08/07

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problem.

My sannyasins have to be pilgrims of bliss: dancing, singing, rejoicing. And then god is not far away.

You need not bother about god; it comes in its own course, naturally. You need not even Reek and search.

(Dhyanprem means meditation and love, and they are key words, worth remembering, Osho says.) Meditation means the art of being alone. And love means the art of being with people, the art of being together. But meditation comes first.

First one has to learn to be blissfully alone. If you are blissful in your aloneness you can be blissful in togetherness. If you are not blissful with yourself how can you be blissful with anybody else in the world? It is impossible, it is against the law of life. But that's what millions of people are trying to do, just trying to do the impossible, and then there is misery, frustration, failure, despair, anguish.

Start with meditation and then move into love. First be blissful independently of others, so you need not ask that they should make you blissful; you are already blissful. And once you are not dependent on others you are never possessive. It is dependency that creates possessiveness, and possessiveness is poison to love.

Only a non-possessive consciousness can be loving. But to be non-possessive you have to fulfil the first requirement be blissful with yourself, at ease, at home. Then if somebody is there and you happen to be with somebody you can share your joy. Then it is a sharing, not a begging. And love is beautiful when it is a sharing, then it is a sheer gift. And the joy of giving is the greatest joy in life. -- How long will you be here? (Haridas translates) -- She doesn't know.

- Be here as long as possible. Germans ordinarily don't leave the place! (laughter) Good!

Antar Gyano. Antar means inner. Gyano means wisdom.

Knowledge comes from the outside, wisdom comes from within, hence knowledge is of no use. It creates bondage for you because it is borrowed. And truth can never be borrowed. The moment you borrow a truth it becomes a lie. The truth to remain true has to be your own experience.

The Buddha has his truth, Jesus has his truth; Christians and Buddhists are simply living with borrowed knowledge. Hence after two thousand years of Christianity not a single Christ has come. Two thousand years of imitation and not a single Christ has been created. And the same is true about the other religions: not a single Buddha has happened in twenty-five centuries, not a single Krishna has happened in five thousand years. And the reason is simple; people are simply creating a bondage by accumulating knowledge from the outside.

A Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Mohammedan -- these are all slaves, slaves of words, knowing nothing of truth. Truth is hidden inside you, it is the kingdom of the within, and you have to go in to look for it -- not in the Bible, not in the Koran, not in the Vedas, but within you. And all that I teach is a simple process of going in. It is so simple that people think it is very difficult.

The obvious always seems difficult. It is just a question of closing your eyes and not doing anything; relaxing, resting. Yes, in the beginning the mind creates havoc, but don't pay any attention to it. It cannot disturb you. Let it fool around. It will do all kinds of gymnastics to attract attention. Just rest, utterly indifferent; it doesn't matter. You can tell the mind "You go on doing your thing and I am going to do my thing." If one can just go on remaining indifferent to the mind slowly slowly it becomes so bored with its own work that it commits suicide. When there is nobody to pay it attention it dies of starvation. And one day suddenly you find that the buffoon is not there! You look all around and it is all silence.

In that silence wisdom is found, in that silence you start having a great insight into things. And then whatsoever you do is right, because wisdom liberates and makes you capable of seeing what is right and what is wrong. And once you know on your own what is right you cannot go against it. Then an inner discipline arises. And that's what sannyas is, an inner discipline.

I don't give you any discipline, because that would be an imposition. I certainly help you to find your own wisdom and then you have to live in that light accordingly. I am not here to make you a slave. My whole longing is to help as many people as possible to be liberated from all bondage.

(Veet Udaseen means going beyond sadness.)

I can see a deep sadness in you and you have to come out of it, you have to transcend it. In fact everybody is sad but people go on pretending that they are not. You are a sincere person, you cannot pretend; you are sad and it is written all over your face (Udaseen smiles). It is good that one does not wear a mask, it is good to be true, sincere, authentic, because only through sincerity a revolution is possible. I can 1/08/07

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see a deep sadness has settled in you. There may have been reasons for it but it can be transformed, it can be changed.

Religion for thousands of years has been sad. Except for the Roman gods all the gods of the world have been sad. And Roman gods were not very godly -- they were playboys! (Udaseen chuckles) The Roman name for god was Jove. In English we still say "By Jove", and from Jove comes "jovial" -- humorous. Jove is a laughing god, but otherwise all the gods in the world have been sad. And even the Roman joviality has been destroyed by the Christians. Rome became their centre. And Christians say Jesus never laughed.

Certainly they murdered Jove, they destroyed the idea of a laughing god. For them it was sacrilegious to think of god as laughing.

But my whole effort here is to create Joves, laughing gods. My sannyasins have not to be sad; they are not Christian monks and saints, not Hindu nor Jaina nor Buddhist. My sannyasins are of a totally new category, it has never existed before. Only once in a while have a few people been like my sannyasins -- a Bodhidharma, a Lao Tzu, a Chuang Tzu -- but it has been such a rare thing in the past. I would like it to become the very quality of the humanity that is going to come, the very future of humanity. Religion should learn the ways of laughter, religion should become closer to singing and dancing and festivity. I don't teach fasting, I teach feasting!

So drop your sadness -- enough of it, there is no need to carry it. And if you are sad here everybody will think that you are a Christian saint -- and "saint" is a dirty word around here (Udaseen laughs) Good. So start laughing, enjoying. -- How long will you be here?

Udaseen extends his arms, grinning broadly, in an extravagantly relaxed gesture, and shrugs his shoulders. -- That's good! (more laughter) Be here!

(Prem Gathen, means a beautiful love story.)

Shakespeare says 'Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' And that is the life of the millions, of almost ninety-nine point nine per cent of people. It is really ridiculous that people should live such a futile life, such a tale told by an idiot.

People can live joyously. Their life can have significance, meaning, tremendous meaning, great joy, great splendour. Their life can be a song, a beautiful story -- not told by an idiot but by a Buddha. But some basic change, some radical change is needed.

People are living through the head, and the head is an idiot because it is a mechanism. People should live through the heart because it is only the heart that feels. The head does not feel. It is really thick, it has no feeling, no emotion, no sensitivity. People should live through the heart -- and that is the meaning of your name.

Live through love, live as love and your life will have a beauty, a blessing, a fragrance surrounding it.

Drop logic and revive your love. Die to logic and be born as love. Of course to be in love in this insane world will make you look as if you are mad, because the people you are surrounded with all live in a very calculated way; to them you will look mad.

But those who understand -- and of course there are very few people in the world who understand -- for them you will be a sane person, because for them the whole humanity is insane.

And the criterion is: if your life is miserable, then it is insane. If your life is a rejoicing, then it is sane, than it is wholesome, then it is healthy. Then you have found something in which you can rejoice.

There is a beautiful story in the life of one of the great kings of India. His name was Akbar -- a great Moghul emperor -- and he had collected in his court all kinds of geniuses the greatest painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, scholars. He had the topmost musician of the country, Tansen, in his court. Tansen is the most important name in Indian music, in the whole history of India -- and India has a glorious history of music.

Tansen was Just a magician as far as music is concerned. One day Akbar asked him, 'Last night when you departed you played so beautifully on your Veena and your song was so haunting that I could not sleep; the song continued, the music continued. You left but it was such a haunting experience. Then suddenly a thought came to me that if Tansen is so beautiful, what about his master? He must have learned from somewhere. Music is also learned in India through masters because it is one of the meditative sciences.

What about his master if his disciple is so great?

And he told Tansen 'I could not imagine that something could be greater than your music or somebody could be greater than you are. Is your master alive? If he is alive then invite him to the court.'

Tansen said 'He is alive but he won't come. You will have to go to him. He is a beggar and he does not 1/08/07

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care for anything. Even if somehow I persuade him to come he never sings. If somebody asks 'He never plays on his instruments, he plays only when he feels to. So if you really want to listen you will have to follow according to his ways. And he is an eccentric man; one never knows when he will play. But I will enquire and I will make arrangements.'

And after two days he informed the king 'He is just close by in Agra where the Taj Mahal is, just by the side of the river; he lives in a hut. And I have come to know that almost every morning, early, at three o'clock in the morning, he plays -- all alone. Nobody hears it -- only the river and the trees. So if you really want to listen we will have to go and hide behind his hut and listen.'

Akbar was so enchanted that he said, 'Okay, I will come.' They went. It was a cold winter night and Akbar was shivering and like a thief he was hiding behind the hut. The master started playing at three o'clock. Akbar could not believe it, it was so unearthly. Many times he thought he was dreaming; and tears started flowing from his eyes and Tansen was watching what was happening. Akbar did not utter a single word, he was in such awe.

When they were returning he remained silent the impact of the music was such. When he was entering his palace he said only one thing to Tansen, 'It is unbelievable. If you had told me I would not have believed it. I thought that there was nobody who can surpass you, but now, what I have heard and seen is so superb that I don't thing you could ever reach that point.'

The name of the master was Haridas. Akbar said, 'Haridas is simply not of this world, but what is the secret? Why there is such a gap between you and your master?' Tansen said, 'There is no secret about it, it is an open secret: I sing to get something -- money, power, prestige. He sings not to get anything, he sings because he has already got something; he has got his inner silence. Those songs, that music, is born out of an inner experience. It is a by-product, it is a consequence, it is something that has happened within him and is flowing outside in the form of music.

As far as I am concerned I am a technician; I know how to play but nothing has happened within me. I am singing to get something, he sings because he has already got something.'

My sannyasins have to live in a totally different way to the way ordinary humanity is living. They have to live love -- that is the inner kingdom, the inner richness. Then your whole life will be full of songs, music, poetry, joy, dance.

The world will call you mad, but who cares about the world? You will know that if this is madness then madness is far better than the so-called sanity. -- How long will you be here? -- I want to stay forever.

-- Forever is the best! Good.

Your name is beautiful: Ma Brigitte. It comes from the same root from which the word 'bridge' comes.

Man is a bridge. Man is not the goal but only a ladder, a passage, a bridge, between the animal and the divine. One should not be satisfied by being just human; that is not enough. That is making your house on the bridge. It is not safe as the bridge is not meant for that purpose. The bridge has to be transcended, passed over. Its function is to take you to the other shore.

Man is not a being but a bridge. Animals have being and Buddhas have being, but man is only a bridge.

He has no being, he is a becoming. He goes on becoming, changing, moving from one point to another. He is a journey, a pilgrimage.

This has to be remembered: unless you become enlightened, don't be satisfied. Remain in divine discontent to the last moment when you explode into light, when you become light, when light becomes your being.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #2

Chapter title: None

2 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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Query:-

Archive code: 8010025

ShortTitle: THUNK02

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Her name means consecrated to god, Osho tells a social worker from Italy. And he adds the word

'anand' -- which means bliss -- to it.)

One can live one's life in two ways. One is that of fighting against the whole; it is the way of the ego.

The other is surrendering to the whole; that is the way of love. And bliss happens only on the second path.

The first path is full of misery, frustration, failure. It is bound to be so because the part cannot win against the whole. It is utterly stupid for a wave to fight the ocean, it is doomed to fail. Maybe for a few moments it can enjoy the idea -- and that's what happens to every man: we waste our life in enjoying the idea that we are separate from existence. Then life is tragic.

To be a sannyasin means to choose the other way, the way of love, surrender, let-go. One does not fight the river, one simply goes with it; one becomes more and more natural. And when there is no fight there is no tension, and when there is no fight there is no question of failure. One's victory is absolutely certain.

Without fighting a battle one is victorious -- that is the miracle of love.

Isabella means surrendered to god. And bliss is the flowering of that surrender.

(Goldie means golden -- and that's just what love is, Osho begins in his address to the next for sannyas.) Because gold is the most precious metal it represents the most precious treasure in you. It is only through love that one's life is transformed, transported from the dark valleys to the golden peaks, the sunlit golden peaks.

Without love a man lives in darkness, without love a man really does not live but only dies slowly, gradually. It is only through love that one becomes aware of what life is all about. It is a communion, it is a meeting and merging with the whole. Love gives you a glimpse of the merger.

And love has many planes -- of course, the first is biological love, between mother and child, lover and beloved, brother and sister. These are biological aspects of love; it is the lowest kind. A little higher is the love between friends. It is higher because it is more subtle; it has no biological strings attached to it. And there is some consciousness, some awareness, some choice in it.

When you love your mother there is no question of choice. You happen to be the child of a certain woman. If it were somebody else you would have loved that person. It is accidental that a certain woman is your mother, that a certain man is your father, that a certain person is your brother or sister. It is just accidental; there is no choice in it.

Even when a lover falls in love with a woman, of course it appears there is some choice; then too there is no choice. It is instinctive. You suddenly feel a deep longing for a certain person for no reason at all. You cannot explain why it is so; it is unconscious. It simply happens. You can only shrug your shoulders -- there is no explanation.

If it is a conscious choice then there is an explanation, then you can say why. With friendship a little awareness, consciousness, and choice enters. It is not a question of biology, of instinct, at all.

Friendship is more explainable. When you love a person biologically as a wife, as a husband, there is possessiveness, jealousy, domination. You would like to possess the whole person, you would not like to share the person with anybody; you will be afraid. You can have many friends, but you cannot have many women, you cannot have many men as lovers, otherwise you will be in a continuous misery, there will be constant turmoil and chaos because all their egos will come into conflict. But you can have many friends.

That's the beauty of friendship -- it is less possessive, it is less egoistic. You don't want to possess the 1/08/07

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person; he can have other friends. In fact if he has many friends you will find him more friendly towards you. A person who has no friend other than you will not be very friendly, because he will not have any experience of friendship.

The same is true about love too: in a better world, when man has become a little more mature, he will start sharing love too, just like friendship. But that needs a more mature humanity. A woman who can love many men will have an enriched quality of love, and the man who can love many women, of course, he learns from each love. And no two persons are alike. Each person gives a new aspect of love, a new vision, a totally new experience which cannot be possible with anybody else.

So the more you love, the more dimensions your loving quality starts having. If you love a poet certainly his love will be different than the love of a mathematician. If you love a musician his love will be different than the love of a dancer. If you love a painter his love is going to be different than the love of a sculptor.

Their attitudes, their approaches, are different. They will love you for different reasons -- and naturally when a person loves you for different reasons that aspect of your life surfaces.

For example, a sculptor may love you because of the proportion of your body. The painter may love you because of the colour of your face, the colour of your hair, the colour of your eyes, becase his approach towards life is that of colour. A musician may love you because of your voice, your sound. That will not be taken into account by the painter at all, but to the musician, to his attuned ear, the most lovely thing is the voice. And when a person loves you because of your voice, your voice will become beautiful because his attention will be pouring on that particular aspect of your life.

In a better world we will change biology into something higher; we will make love affairs also affairs of friendship. And that's my effort in this commune -- that love also should be raised a little higher. It should go a little beyond the instinctive; it should start having some aesthetics about it. It should become more compassionate, less jealous. It should allow freedom.

A love that does not allow freedom is not much of a love. It is just an ego number and sooner or later that ego is going to destroy the whole thing. It is poison, pure poison. It simply kills, it is never creative.

Friendship is a little higher. Prayer is even higher, because in prayer the other is no more thought as a person but as a divine manifestation. He is no more thought of as a body or as a mind. The first love, the biological, thinks of the other as a body. The second love, friendship, thinks of the other as a psychology --

the other is a mind. And the third love, prayer, thinks of the other as divine, godliness. Now all limitations disappear, then the whole existence is a divine manifestation. And that is the state which can be called golden, goldie.

(There is a song that is wordless, tuneless and singerless. Its name is meditation, Osho tells Dhyangit.) Meditation means no-thought, no-mind, no words. They have all been left behind; one has come to an immense, infinite silence. But that silence is not dead, it is a singing silence. It is throbbing, pulsating with life. It has a dancing quality to it.

You cannot see the dance, you can only feel it. You cannot hear the song but it reverberates in your whole being. Your every cell becomes bathed in it.

It is a tremendous experience of beauty, of bliss -- but it is inexpressible. It is so vast that no word can contain it. The thing that comes closest to it is music, but that too just expresses it approximately, not exactly. Obviously music is also sound -- it is very harmonious sound, but the sound is there. In meditation there is no sound, it is soundlessness. Everything has stopped, no movement, one has come to a complete halt. But the experience can only be described as a song, as a tremendous harmony. All these words fall short but these are the only words that give little bit of help. They are only fingers pointing to the moon.

They are not the moon themselves, just fingers pointing to the moon.

But I emphasise its dancing quality for a certain reason -- because many meditators have become dead; they have tried to silence the mind. And if you persist you can silence the mind. You can repress it and there will be a certain kind of silence, but that will be the silence of a cemetery: forced, violently forced.

Something has been crushed, something has been killed. a beautiful experience. That's why so many of your so-called saints look so sad, so serious. They have lost laughter, they have lost love, they have lost life.

They themselves have committed the crime, they themselves have committed suicide. They are sincere people but a little bit foolish too. They missed the point.

They followed it literally but they did not understand the symbolic message, Meditation is silence, not an enforced silence but a silence that comes out of deep understanding, not repression. And then the quality is totally different. When silence comes out of understanding it is a singing silence, a dancing silence, and 1/08/07

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your life immediately bursts into creativity.

Everybody is carrying a song in their hearts which has to be sung, whatsoever it is. One cannot know it beforehand, one knows it only when one goes understandingly into meditation. With awareness, when one reaches to one's core, one finds that there is something which has to be shared. It may be painting, it may be dancing, it may be cooking -- it may be anything. It does not matter what it is, but one always discovers that there is something which one has to share. One has to create, one has to participate in existence through it.

To me that is true prayer. That is true worship -- when you participate in existence by creating something. God is the creator; then the only way to commune with him is to be a creator in your own way, in a small way of course. But you have to do something creative.

And this creativity should not be thought up by the mind, otherwise it won't be true to your innermost core. It has to be discovered in meditation. Everybody has to discover their song. And the moment you have discovered it your life becomes a blessing -- not only to you, it becomes a blessing to others too.

And that's how a sannyasin has to live: in a dance, in a trance, sharing whatsoever he has with no miserliness, with no possessiveness. Just pouring oneself whole-heartedly into existence.

And that is the only offering that is accepted by god. All other offerings in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques are pseudo.

('God' was once a beautiful word, but it has become polluted by the priests. He prefers the name truth, Osho says to Satyash. And then he explains why.)

'God' has taken on a wrong colour, a wrong association. It reminds you of rotten religions, of superstitions, dogmatic creeds. It reminds you of the whole ugly history of religions, of massacre, murder, violence against each other. It stinks of many inhuman things.

People have been burned alive by Christians, by Mohammedans, by Hindus. The religions in the past have proved not a blessing but a curse. Jesus is beautiful but Christianity is ugly; Krishna is beautiful but Hinduism is ugly; Buddha is beautiful but Buddhists are just his enemies -- they go on doing things that he was against.

It is better to call god truth because then different ideas arise in your mind. It does not remind you of religions and the chaos that they have created in the world. It reminds you more of a scientific approach, it reminds you more of enquiry than of worship. It reminds you more of going into a deep exploration rather than following a certain creed.

The word 'truth' is very inviting for those who have courage to explore, for those who are ready to go into the unknown and the unknowable. It is not for the cowards, it is only for the courageous. The cowards worship and the courageous enquire. The cowards believe, the courageous discover. The cowards cling to others' ideas and the courageous insist, 'Unless I know, all knowledge is worthless. Unless I know...

knowledge is just a cover-up to hide one's ignorance.

My sannyasins are not to be believers. They have to be explorers of the unknown, adventurers.

Whatsoever the risk, whatsoever the danger -- it has to be accepted. The challenge has to be accepted because it is only through challenge that one matures, ripens. It is only through challenge that a certain integrity happens to you. The greater the challenge, the greater the soul, the greater the birth of a new being in you.

(We've all tasted of pleasure and of happiness, so we think we know what bliss is. But it's incomparable.

Osho gives Stefan the name Anand Apurvo to remind him of the unique quality of bliss.) All that we know about pleasure and happiness is of no help in making us understand what bliss is, because the difference between pleasure and happiness is only of quantity but the difference between pleasure, happiness, and bliss is of quality. It is entering into a totally new unknown dimension.

So when we talk about bliss we naturally understand it in terms of pleasure. That is the lowest --

physiological, biological. Or at the most we think of happiness -- psychological. But neither pleasure nor happiness can give you any idea of bliss.

Once a blind man was brought to Buddha and he was a very great philosopher of immense logical acumen. The whole of his village had become exhausted and tired because nobody could convince him that light exists; he would refute everybody. And the problem for the villagers was that they know that light existed but they were incapable of convincing the blind philosopher. On the contrary he used to convince them that light does not exist and his fundamental argument was. 'I am ready, bring the light to me so I can touch and feel it just the way I feel things. Or if you say that it is not like a thing, then let me taste it; it must 1/08/07

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have some taste. If it has no taste it must have some smell. Even if that is not possible then you can do something so that some sound arises out of it. You can beat it like a drum so I can hear it.

'These are the four possibilities: touching, tasting, smelling, hearing; there is no other! And I am ready --

convince me.'

Now, you cannot touch light, you cannot taste light, you cannot smell light, you cannot hear light. So when they heard that Buddha was coming to their village they were very happy. They brought the blind man to Buddha and they said 'Only you can convince this fool. We are tired of him. He convinces us that there is no light, and he is really convincing. We are absolutely impotent, incapable of convincing him, although we know light exists and he does not know, he has no eyes. But how to convince him? He says on the contrary

"Just to prove me blind you have invented this idea of light -- and you are all blind!"'

Buddha looked at the blind man, he heard all his arguments and he said that the villagers were wrong:

'The blind man is right because in his blindness what else can he do? He is absolutely available to being convinced by you but he has only got four senses. That is not his fault. The fault is yours. The very idea of trying to convince him is basically wrong. You should not have brought him to me. It is better you take him to a physician.' And Buddha suggested 'Take him to my personal physician; he is the best in the country.'

Jivaka was the name of the physician. He was given to Buddha by a great emperor as a gift and the physician used to follow Buddha wherever he would go. So he said 'The physician is here. Take him to the physician and let him be treated -- it is not a question of arguing.'

The blind man was treated and within six months he started seeing. He came to Buddha with tears in his eyes, fell at his feet and said 'If you had not been there I would have died a blind man with the idea that there is no light, and all these people of my village are just fools: they themselves are hypnotised by the idea and they are trying to hypnotise me. I thought that I was clever but I was a fool.

And it is good that you did not try to convince me, because then I would have argued. And now I know that nobody would have been able to persuade me. Now I know that I cannot convince a blind man because it is not a question of arguing, it is a question of seeing. It is a totally different sense which was lacking in me.'

The same is true about bliss: it is not pleasure, it is not happiness, it is totally different. It is so unique that nothing in your experience can help you to understand it.

So one has to go in search of bliss with an absolutely empty mind, with no idea of what it is exactly. If you go with the idea of pleasure you will miss the point, if you go with the idea of happiness you will miss the point.

And that's what meditation does: it makes you utterly empty, empty of all your experiences and ideas, just a pure nothingness. And only in that nothingness do you start experiencing for the first time something new of which you would not even have dreamt. It is so unique, it is so incomparable. No other experience can give you any hint of it, not even a small indication. One has to look for it without any a priori idea, without any prejudice, without any conception.

And that's my whole work here: to dismantle all your ideas, to remove all the junk from the mind so you become absolutely empty. Emptiness is so pure, so innocent, so clear and transparent, that nothing can be hidden from it. It opens your inner eye, your inner vision. It gives you a new sensibility, a new sense, and suddenly a new world opens up. It was always there but you were closed to it because a certain sense in you was not functioning.

Metaphorically we have called that sense the third eye. It is a metaphor. It is not that there is a third eye, actually, literally, but a new kind of seeing, a new kind of perceptibility opens up and then the world is just pure bliss. It is ecstasy and nothing else.

(He calls her true love -- Lore from Germany.)

What is ordinarily known as love is always something other than love. It masquerades as love, it pretends to be love but it is not so, because if it were love then the world would be full of love, because everybody is loving. The mother, the father, the brother, the sister, the husband, the wife, everybody is loving. Each person is being loved by many people. Each person is being poured on with love from many sides. Each person would be a reservoir of love, so much love is given, and each person would be ecstatic.

But that is not the case. Everybody looks so miserable, so utterly in gloom, so sad, that there is no need to think of hell somewhere else; it seems it is on earth.

Why are people living in such hell? If there is so much love this place should be a paradise. It is not so.

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simply a longing, a wishfulfilment.

All the cultures, all the societies of the world, think of heaven as being somewhere above, far above, never here and now, for the simple reason that there is nothing here and now to prove it so we have to postpone it until after death. And nobody comes back from the dead to say anything. Once a person is dead he does not come to visit us and tell us where he is, so it is easy to postpone it beyond death, above the clouds, far above the clouds.

It is just a trick, a strategy, so that we can tolerate our hell in the hope that it will end soon, it is not going to last forever -- just a seventy eighty-year life; nothing to be worried about. In the eternal existence what is seventy years, eighty years or even a hundred years? -- nothing. Just a dewdrop in the ocean of eternity. So it is bound to pass, there is no need to be worried about it. And sooner or later paradise will open up with all its joys and blessings, with the celestial music and angels dancing all around you.

These are just dreams; they are religious dreams, but dreams are dreams. And dreams prove only one thing, that something is missing in our life. We are aware that something is missing and we have to invent some idea to console us.

Love has not existed on the earth. Hatred has existed. There are immense proofs of it. The whole history is a proof of human insanity but it is not a proof of human love. Love exists only in poetry -- a wishfulfilment.

My effort is that love should be a reality in your life, not just a poem, not just a dream. It has to be actualised. And the first step in actualising love is to know that whatsoever we have thought of as love up to now is not so; this is the first step and of great importance. No other step is going to be of that much importance. The first step is always the most important step, because if you go on believing that this is love then there is no way to find true love. The moment you become aware that this is not true love because this is not giving us any bliss... Bliss is the criterion and this so-called love gives you only jealousy, gives you all kinds of pains, agony, but no ecstasy. At the most it is some type of consolation on the physical plane --

which is not much, it is very momentary; a little cosiness, a little warmth in the cold world, but it is not much.

Life has to reach something higher, has to attain to something higher. Life has the potential to reach to the peaks and we are crawling in the valleys. Yes, once in a while a ray of light comes, but we should not be satisfied with it.

I call it divine discontentment. We should not be satisfied with the so-called ordinary life. We should become discontented with this, only then is there a possibility of enquiring, of searching, of discovering that which is true.

Contentment is possible but the beginning has to be discontentment. One should not remain satisfied with the so-called world that has been given to us. And the beginning is to be courageous enough to see things as they are.

Our love is not true love, our knowledge is not true knowledge, our personality is not our individuality.

It is not authentic, it is pseudo, it is a mask. It is not our original face. And we have to withdraw all that is inauthentic. We have to destroy all that is false and pseudo -- mercilessly, only then will we be able to discover our true being. And with that discovery many things are automatically discovered. The moment you discover your true being, your unique individuality, suddenly many things become available to you: true love, true knowing. No problem arises. Once you have discovered who you are, whatsoever you do has a truth about it, has a sincerity about it, has some authenticity about it.

Meditation is the key to discover your true being and through it to discover true love, true wisdom, the true god, otherwise people are worshipping only invented gods.

All the idols of the gods in the temples are anthropocentric; man has invented them according to himself. That's why the Chinese statue of god looks like a Chinese man and the Indian statue of god looks like an Indian man: these are just projections. And all our theories about god are just tricks to hide our ignorance.

My sannyasins have to uncover their ignorance. It hurts but that's how one can start moving towards the healing of the wound. If you keep it covered it will never heal. It has to be open to the sun, to the moon, to the wind, to the rain, to existence as such, then it heals.

A sannyasin is one who has attained spiritual health. Then his love is true, his seeing is true. Then whatsoever he does has a grace. And then he lives in freedom, absolute freedom, because now he knows that even death cannot destroy him, so there is no fear. When there is no fear then there is freedom.

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I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #4

Chapter title: None

4 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010045

ShortTitle: THUNK04

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(His new name contains the meaning of sannyas -- meditation and victorious peace, Osho tells Dhyan Siggi.)

Sannyas means entering into the inner world your being -- and that entry brings both meditation and peace. And wherever these two meet there is victory.

Meditation without peace is dead, forced, not really meditation but only some kind of concentration.

And that is one of the greatest errors committed by many people: they think concentration is meditation. It is not. Meditation is just the opposite of it.

Concentration is a tense state of mind, meditation is a relaxed state of mind. And the miracle of relaxation is that when relaxation is total the mind disappears. Mind can only exist with tensions, anxieties worries. It feeds on them; hence concentration never leads you beyond the mind. It can manage to give you a certain strength of mind, it can make your mind function more efficiently, more powerfully, because you will be less distracted, but it won't help you to attain a state of no-mind.

Meditation is a state of no-mind. And only in meditation, in true meditation, does peace happen. It is just a natural fragrance of meditation.

One can also be peaceful without meditation -- then again something goes wrong. That peace remains only on the surface and deep inside there is always turmoil, one is sitting on a volcano -- sitting peace-fully, but the volcano is there and it can erupt any moment. Any excuse will do.

Never force yourself to be peaceful and never force the mind in any way, on any subject, in any direction. Enter relaxation, total relaxation, doing nothing -- just being -- and in that moment, when you are a pure being, doing nothing -- no effort to be peaceful, no effort to concentrate -- when there is no effort at all on your part, in that effortless moment meditation and peace happen simultaneously. And that brings victory, inner victory. It makes you the master of your own soul, of your own destiny.

(Osho adds Deva, to Lothar to make his full name mean divine vastness and glory. To be vast is glorious, Osho observes.)

To live within limitations is to live in gloom, in a state of indignity. It is a humiliation because our being needs the whole sky, only then can it dance, sing, be. Otherwise everything is crippled, paralysed; there is no space to fly, no space to move. And man lives in limitations: the limitation of the body, the limitation of the mind, the limitations of emotions, moods. Those are all limitations upon limitations. And all these limitations have to be transcended.

That's the function of meditation, to help you to go beyond all boundaries. It is a voyage into the 1/08/07

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unbounded. Then all glory is yours; then life is a benediction, a sheer festivity, a pure joy. And to me joy is the only thing that is godly, because it brings all other godly qualities -- love, truth, consciousness, silence.

It brings everything that is needed, that is a requirement for spiritual growth. Without joy nobody can grow.

In misery one shrinks, in joy one expands.

And that is the meaning of your name, Lothar: expansiveness. And man should never become contented with any boundary. Whenever you come to a boundary try to go beyond it. When all boundaries are transcended, when you have reached infinity, you have come to god, you have come home.

(The new sannyasin's name is Swami Antar Ueli. Antar comes from the same root as the English word

'inner' Osho tells us.)

There are two worlds. One is on the outside, the other is on the inside. They are two only for the ignorant, they are two only because you have not yet seen the unity, because the ego is standing between the two like a dividing line. Once the ego evaporates, disappears, there is only one world. Then it is neither subjective nor objective, neither outer nor inner, but to begin with we have to accept the state in which we are; hence I say there are two worlds. I mean for you there are two worlds -- the outside world and the inside world.

To enter into ultimate truth first one has to explore the inner. And we all explore the outer -- we begin with the wrong step. Then everything else goes wrong. If the first step is wrong then everything else is going to be wrong.

First one has to explore oneself: 'Who am I?' Once you are settled with that, once you have seen your reality then the whole world can be explored, but then you will be standing on solid ground. Otherwise the stupidity is that you don't know who you are and you go on knowing everything else. Your own house remains in darkness and you go on and on looking at all kinds of lights available on the outside. That is not going to help.

No outer light can be brought in. You have to find your inner source of light first. That's why Socrates says 'Know thyself.' That is the very essence of all the religions, the very soul. That's what I mean by Antar: your interiority. Explore it -- and it is one of the most ecstatic adventures. In fact, the greatest ecstatic adventure. No other adventure can be compared with it, everything falls short. Even going to the moon or to Mars falls short. It is nothing compared to the journey that Jesus made or Buddha made. They are real adventurers.

And your name, Ueli, means a noble ruler. If you rule somebody else you cannot be noble. Take it as a categorical truth: if you rule others you cannot be noble. The very idea of ruling others is ignoble, it is ugly, because by ruling others you reduce them to things. A slave is destroyed completely -- not only his body, not only his mind, but his soul is destroyed. In all the countries slavery has existed in the past and slaves were treated like things. One could kill one's slave, it was not a crime -- because if you dismantle your chair, what is the crime in it? Nobody can take you to court. If you destroy your car that's up to you; it is your car.

The same was true about slaves: one could destroy them, one could murder them. There was no appeal for them, no court, no justice existed for them. They were not thought to be human beings.

The same has been true in the past about women: they were also treated as slaves, as property. In China it was not a crime to kill your wife. You could sell your wife in the marketplace, there was no problem about it -- she belonged to you.

Whenever one rules others one is being very immoral, very irreligious, one is being a criminal, a sinner.

One can be a noble ruler only in the inner world. That means you rule your own mind, body, soul, you have mastery of all that you are, you are not a victim of unconscious instincts any more. Hence the real mastery is of the inner, not of the outer.

Alexander conquered the then-known world, but all his victory was simply violence, murder, arson, destruction. He was a calamity to humanity. All the great conquerors, the so-called great conquerors of course, have been calamities, curses. But a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Krishna -- they are pure blessings to humanity. But their rule was of a totally different world: they ruled themselves. They were in absolute inner discipline. There was no conflict within them, they had come to understand their whole conscious and unconscious, their totality. And in that very knowing one becomes a master.

So be a noble ruler, but the only way to be a noble ruler is to go in. Possess yourself, be absolutely rooted, centred, integrated, so that you can move according to your light, so no unconscious instinct forces you to move in a certain direction, so you need not go into something into which you never wanted to go.

But this is really the situation. That's why in all the languages phrases like 'in spite of myself' exist. It simply 1/08/07

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means you are not the master. You become angry and then later on you apologize and you say 'I never wanted to be, but I became angry in spite of myself.' What does it mean? What are you confessing?

You are confessing that there are forces inside you over which you don't have any mastery. They can do things which you don't want to do. But what kind of a life is this, where you don't have any idea of your own forces. Anger can come and one can commit murder in an enraged state, and then guilt comes, naturally, because you have done something which you never wanted to do in the first place.

Modern psychology has come to a decisive conclusion that only one part of our mind is conscious, nine parts are unconscious. So just a very small fragment, just a very small part of your being, is conscious, but the major part, nine out of ten fragments are unconscious. It is just like an iceberg: only one-tenth is above the surface of the ocean, nine-tenths is below the surface. How can one-tenth decide for nine-tenths? --

impossible. But meditation helps you to make your conscious slowly bigger and to slowly reduce the unconscious to a point where it totally disappears. Then your whole being becomes conscious, full of light.

That is the meaning of the word 'enlightenment': when nothing is dark inside of you, then the master has arisen in you. You are no more a victim of unconscious forces, you are totally in control. And without any enforcement, just by being aware, conscious, has this mastery happened.

This mastery has a beauty, a grace. Of course such a man will help many people to be masters of themselves. That's my purpose here. A sannyasin is not a follower, he is a fellow traveller. A sannyasin is not to imitate me, he has just to understand me, that's all. Nothing else is expected. In that very understanding he will slowly come out of the darkness. And as one comes out of darkness life starts having a meaning, tremendous meaning, significance, splendour.

(The words evolution and revolution are immensely important, Osho tells newly named Veet Vikas --

going beyond evolution.)

Evolution is an unconscious phenomenon. It is a natural phenomenon. The scientists say man was born as a fish in the ocean. Millions of years have passed between the stage of the fish and that of the human being. It took really long to get to the stage of a human being. Man had to pass through almost all kinds of animal stages. The last stage before man was something like the ape, the monkey.

All this has happened unconsciously; no deliberate effort has been there. But since man became man that evolutionary process seems to have stopped. It seems it has come to its culmination, because man has been man for thousands of years and nothing has happened, no further growth has happened. It definitively shows one thing: that nature has done all it could do; now we have to take the whole course in our hands.

We have to move from evolution to revolution.

Evolution means unconscious, revolution means conscious. Evolution is growth but because it is unconscious it takes millions of years. Revolution is also growth but because it is conscious it is like a quantum leap, like a jump. It is not gradual, you don't go slowly step by step. It all depends on you, on how courageous you are. Even in a single step one can move from a human being to a god, to a Buddha, to a Christ, just in a single leap. It all depends on your intensity, your commitment, involvement, your totality.

Sannyas is significant only because the process of evolution has stopped, it has come to a full stop. Now man will not be growing naturally. There is no possibility of man growing naturally any more, he will remain man unless he decides to grow consciously, deliberately, purposively. That's what sannyas is, a conscious decision to grow. And that is the beginning of revolution.

Go beyond evolution and start a revolution in your life.

(Hans, a woodcutter from Holland, receives the name Dhyan Veetesh. It means, meditation is transcendence -- of the body, of the mind and even of the heart, in the final analysis.) Think of man as consisting of four things, The first concentric circle is of the body -- that is the outermost part of man. The second concentric circle within the first is of mind. The third is of the heart --

emotions, feelings. And the fourth is your very centre -- that is your being.

Millions of people live only on the first circle. They think of themselves as their physiology, so eating, drinking and being merry is all that they think life consists of. They think that life begins with birth and ends with death and there is nothing more to it -- the materialist's standpoint.

Nothing is wrong in eating, drinking and merrying, but to stop there is stupid. There is much more to life. And one need not renounce the body; one has to use the body as a stepping stone to reach higher planes, as a jumping board to reach depths. The body is beautiful, I am not against the body, I am not anti-body; I am not anti-anything. I want everything to be used because whatsoever god has given to you 1/08/07

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has a purpose; you may know it. you may not know it. That's why I don't teach any renunciation. But man has to know that he has to go farther than the body, otherwise he will remain unfulfilled.

He has been given a palace and he just lives in the porch. The porch is beautiful, the porch is needed, the porch is part of the palace. But you need not make it an abode when the whole palace is yours. This is sheer foolishness, not to live in the palace and to just go on living in the porch.

The body is just the porch, a connection between you and the world, that's all, but it is not your total reality, just the most superficial layer. Go a little deeper and there is mind. And the joys of mind are higher than the joys of the body. The body needs only two joys: sex and food. That is the lowest kind of joy, the animal kind.

Mind knows better joys -- of music, of painting of poetry, of literature. Then the whole world expands.

Suddenly you start enjoying the subtle things of life. What can food give you compared to the great music of Mozart? What can sex give you compared to great literature, poetry, painting? Once you have started enjoying the world of the mind, the body becomes just a small part in it. You can still enjoy food, in fact you will enjoy it better than before because some aesthetics will enter your eating. You can still enjoy your sex but now your sex will have a depth which was missing before. Something of music will be in it, something of poetry will be in it, something of the paintings that you have enjoyed is bound to be there, because whatsoever you enjoy enters your very fibres, your very cells.

A man who knows only sex and food knows nothing. His sex is very rough, mundane; it has no sacred dimension to it. And his eating is animal. He cannot enjoy eating with others, he cannot share.

Have you watched animals? -- when animals get food they hide themselves so no other animal can partake of their food. And if there are other animals they keep them behind them and they somehow go on stuffing themselves fast, because the fear is always there that some other animal may attack them, it is dangerous.

The same is true about the man who knows nothing higher than the body.

Mind gives you a new depth but mind is also not the end; there is a still higher and a deeper phenomenon. And always remember: whatsoever is higher is always deeper and vice versa; whatsoever is deeper is always higher. Then the world of the heart, of love, of emotions, sentiments, opens up. Now you are reaching the subtlest core.

A man who has not known what love is has missed the whole point of life. His heart has remained unopened. And when the heart opens, only then does spring come to you, then you blossom. But even the heart is not the end.

Buddha used to say to his disciples 'Charaiveti, charaiveti.' Charaiveti means go on, go on, don't stop anywhere. Till you come to the very end where the road ends and where there is no further to go, go on, go on: charaiveti, charaiveti. And at each stop you will feel that this must be the end. What more can there be?

When you are in love, when love is flowering, you cannot conceive of anything greater. But there is something still greater which will make you aware of your centre and that is meditation. And at the centre we are joined at the universe. Your centre and my centre are not separate, your centre and Christ's centre are not separate. At the centre we all meet; we are different only on the periphery.

When you have come to know the centre you have come to know god. There the road ends. Beyond that there is nothing. But before that one has not to stop anywhere. That is the meaning of your name: go on, go on, go on transcending. While anything remains to transcend, go on. When you come to the end and there is nothing left to transcend, only then rest at peace. That is paradise.

(He doesn't believe in believing, Osho tells Dhyan Darshana, he believes in seeing. He pauses till the laughter subsides and then resumes.)

Unless you see, never believe, because the danger is that one can believe in something very easily if the belief is comfortable, consoling; if it fulfils a certain need in you, you can believe. But belief stops enquiry.

The moment you believe, there is nothing to explore.

So don't believe in god and don't believe that there is no god either; both are beliefs. One is positive, one is negative, but both are beliefs. Neither be religious nor be irreligious, neither be an atheist nor a theist.

Remain open. That's what I mean when I say don't believe: remain open.

Remain aware: that 'I don't know.' It is difficult to remember 'I don't know' because it hurts the ego. The ego wants to claim knowledge, the ego wants to make claims about everything. That's why if even to the ugliest person you say 'You are beautiful,' he will believe you; even the ugliest person will not deny it.

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not deny it. He will smile at you patronisingly. In fact he will say to you 'You are the only intelligent person because you have recognised me. Fools don't recognise me.' That's why it is easy to buttress people --

because nobody denies anything. The ego is always hankering to be supported. And knowledge is one of the greatest supports of the ego, so one goes on believing in things because it creates knowledgeability.

There are Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans and Buddhists and almost everybody belongs to some religion, to some political ideology -- communist, socialist, fascist. These are people who know nothing, but they believe because belief gives them the idea that they know -- and everybody wants to be in the know.

Belief is the cheapest way, at no cost. And the person who believes in end... look at him when he comes across a person who does not believe in god, see how superior he feels, that 'I believe in god and you don't believe in god.' He really feels great sympathy for you, pity for you that you will fall in hell, that you will not be saved. Deep down he says 'poor fellow.' He himself is in the same state, but the belief hides his ignorance. And hiding is not getting rid of; it is in a way really protecting.

My sannyasins have to be open -- no belief, no belief system,,neither against nor for. Religious, political

-- all kinds of ideologies have to be put aside so that you can move with a clarity, an innocence, a childlike innocence. And that is meditation: to remain open, silent, aware, watchful, so that you can see whatsoever is the case. You don't project anything on it. Because you don't have any belief you cannot project, you can see that which is. And that is the meaning of darshana.

In the East we don't have any word with exactly the same meaning as philosophy. In the East philosophy is called darshana, but it has a totally different meaning.

Philosophy means thinking about truth and darshana means seeing the truth, not thinking. What can you think about the truth? What can the blind man think about light? What can the deaf think about music? It is impossible to thing anything. What is needed is not thinking but a restoration of your eyes so that you can see, an opening of your eyes so that you can see. Only seeing liberates.

And it is not so difficult as people think it is. It is not so difficult. Once you decide that you will not believe unless you know, it becomes very easy. Once all the rubbish, the rotten accumulation of beliefs, is removed you have a clarity, a transparency, and you start seeing things as they are. And that's what god is.

The word 'god' is a code word; it does not mean anything literally, it is a code word. G stands for that, O

stands for which, and D stands for is -- that which is. That is the meaning of the word 'god'. It has no literal meaning at all, it is simply a code word: that which is. And the only way to know it is to have clean eyes.

Meditation helps you to remove all garbage and makes you capable of seeing. And the moment you see, you are liberated, because the moment you see, it is your own truth, it is not borrowed, and only your own truth can become liberation. It is bliss and it is love and it is prayer, because when one is free there is bliss and when there is bliss one wants to share it. It is a natural phenomenon, to share it. And that's what love is: sharing of your bliss.

Freedom brings bliss, bliss brings love, then life becomes a fulfilment, a deep contentment.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #5

Chapter title: None

5 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010055

ShortTitle: THUNK05

Audio:

No

Video:

No

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Love needs courage -- that is the meaning of his name, Prem Andreas, Osho tells the first sannyasin tonight.)

Love is a potential in man but not an actuality. Everybody is born with the seed but very few people are capable of transforming it into reality. That's why you don't see so many joyful people in the world, blissful people in the world. Everywhere there is great misery, darkness. People are somehow managing to live but there is no dance, no song, no music in their lives. They are living life as a curse, not as a blessing, for the simple reason that they have taken it for granted that love is a reality. It is not. It has to be realised.

Of course the potential is there, the possibility is there, the seed is there, but one needs courage to grow it. And why courage? -- because the basic requirement for love's growth is dropping the idea of the ego.

Both cannot be together, ego and love. If one remains enclosed in the ego love remains only a potential, a hope, a promise which is never going to be fulfilled. If one comes out of the imprisonment of the ego then suddenly there is great rejoicing in your being, love starts growing.

To be in a growing state of love is to be a sannyasin. To realise the ultimate in love is to be awakened, to be enlightened, to be a Christ or to be a Buddha.

(Meditation is a holiday from the mind, Osho tells Dhyan Catherine.) Otherwise all holidays are false because the mind goes on running. In fact on holidays it is more crazy because it has all the space, all the time, to go as insane as possible. On holidays more people go insane, more people commit suicide, more people murder. There are more accidents on holidays, of course, because everybody has space and time and somebody is bound to get into trouble.

It is good that people are continuously engaged in routine work. The greatest problem that the future humanity is going to face is when machines take all the work over and man has seven days holiday per week; then the real trouble will arise, Then you will see everybody going berserk; people will not know what to do. And they will do all kinds of things because the mind is always there racing, running, becoming more and more speedy.

When this whole functioning of the mind ceases there is silence. And in that silence is purity -- that is the meaning of Catherine. Catherine means purity. To be without mind is to be pure. Mind is a pollution, a contamination, it is a poisoning process.

When the mind is put aside you are your natural self, your spontaneity is there. You have clarity, perspective, vision. And out of that many things grow. These three qualities are associated with the name Catherine: beauty, grace, devotion.

Beauty is of the body, grace is of the heart, and devotion is of the being. And the only disturbance is mind. If mind is silent suddenly your body attains to a beauty which it has never known before. And your heart is full of grace and your being is full of devotion, prayer.

These are all manifestations of beauty on different planes. And when all the three are there -- beauty on the physical plane, grace on the heart plane and devotion at the very core of your being -- life becomes a tremendous ecstasy. A great harmony is born in you, and that harmony is our search. That harmony has been called by different names: god, nirvana, enlightenment, tao, truth, but in fact what man is constantly searching for is a state of immense harmony with no discord, so all is functioning in deep attunement within one and also with existence. Then you are no more separate.

First you become an organic unity within yourself, then the second thing happens: you become a part of the whole. And that is the ultimate goal of sannyas, to become harmonious within and without.

(Fight against the false within you -- this is the message to Anatto Gunar.) We are not one, we are two -- the real and the false. The false has to be defeated so we can become one.

And we can become one only when the real alone is left within and the false has been completely discarded.

But the society teaches us hypocrisy. It goes on teaching us manners, etiquette, civilisation, culture; and all these things have to be imposed from the outside. The ultimate result is that you become split. You want one thing but you do something else. You do things according to the expectations of others but your longing is 1/08/07

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not that.

For example you may not feel like smiling, you may be full of tears, but if some guest comes you have to welcome him with a smiling face. Your smile is false, it is a Jimmy Carter smile (laughter). You may show all your teeth but that doesn't make it real -- just an exercise of the lips. There is no heart in it, it is painted: you are full of tears inside. And that's how we are living in every dimension: the false is hiding the real. And the false seems to be more important because it pays and the real is ignored because it creates troubles.

If you assert your reality you will be in trouble. It is better to be false and live a comfortable life, Of course it gives you many conveniences, but to live conveniently, comfortably, does not mean that you are living blissfully. And one can never find bliss with a false personality, repressing the real individuality.

A sannyasin has to come out of the false -- this is the real battle -- because the false has got its roots deep in you. It has become almost unconscious. You will have to dig very deep to uproot it. And that's what my work consists of: helping you to uproot the false, because a man can rejoice only when he is utterly his own self, authentically his own being. Otherwise life remains a misery -- convenient, comfortable, but miserable, sad -- sad because you have not been able to sing your song, sad because you have not danced your dance. You have been dancing to other's tunes; they whistle and you dance.

The politicians, the priests, the pedagogues, the parents -- the whole society around you goes on pulling your strings: dance this way. Slowly slowly you start rejecting yourself and accepting what others expect from you.

A sannyasin has to live according to his own light, whatsoever the cost. In the beginning it is really a struggle, but once you are passionately involved in the battle you are going to win; the victory is absolutely certain. You should not hesitate, because the false cannot win; the false is bound to collapse. You just have to be persistently alert, aware, not to support it any more, not to co-operate with it.

Humanity up to now has lived in a very stupid way. And that's why as far as I am concerned I don't consider the past of humanity worth anything. Just a few names I respect: a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Krishna -- just a few names, they can be counted on one's fingers. And the millions have lived only in a false way, pseudo. They have only been carbon copies of carbon copies, of carbon copies, of carbon copies. They don't know where the original is, nobody has heard about the original. They just go on copying some carbon copy.

You imitate your parents, your parents were imitating their parents and so on and so forth. Adam was following the dictates of Eve and since that time every Adam is following Eve's dictates. The very beginning went wrong. And Eve herself was not living originally; she had been seduced by the serpent. One does not know who seduced the serpent -- because serpents are not known to be that wise. There must have been some other agency behind the serpent. So on and on it goes.

A sannyasin has to live an original life. He has to discover his original face. This is the real battle, this is the real war. It has to be won, and it can be won.

(There's a wine that awakens -- Osho tells Anand Denise.) Denise is a beautiful name. It comes from Greek mythology. In Greek mythology Dionysius is the god of wine; Denise comes from Dionysius -- so you have come to the right person (laughter). I am a drunkard and I help people to become drunkards.

Dionysius has completely disappeared because of Christianity. Christianity condemned Dionysius like anything. In ancient Greece he used to have temples of his own, and he was one of the most beautiful of all the gods. What can be more beautiful than the god of wine? But Christians totally missed the point. They thought in a literal way; they could not understand the metaphor. It is a metaphor of tremendous import.

Sufis have also used it: wine represents the ultimate bliss. You become drunk and at the same time you are fully aware, more aware than you have ever been before. That's the miracle of meditation: it brings two polarities together simultaneously. Logically it looks contradictory, but existentially it is not; it is complementary. Meditation brings both into such a heightened synthesis that it is incomprehensible to the mind.

The mind can either conceive of somebody utterly drunk and unconscious or somebody fully aware but not drunk. Meditation is paradoxical: you are fully drunk and fully awake. But the wine does not consist of the ordinary wine that you can purchase. It is not a commodity. It is not made out of grapes, it comes out of your own innermost core, it flows from there. It is already there, you just have to find a way to reach there and you will be drunk and awake at the same time -- drunk with the divine. And of course when one is 1/08/07

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drunk with the divine one reaches to the highest peak of awareness. There is bliss and there is silence both together. There is dance and yet everything is centred. The circumference dances but the centre is absolutely quiet and calm. To find this centre of the cyclone is the whole process of sannyas.

(Osho talks to Iris about the difference between mentation and meditation.) Mind is one dimensional and meditation makes you multi-dimensional. Mind can only move in a linear way, on a single track. The name of the track is logic. It cannot feel, it can only think. It cannot experience, it can only think. It cannot act, it can only think. That's why thinkers are inactive people. That has been a calamity in the past because the great thinkers are inactive. They come to beautiful conclusions but those conclusions are impotent because they never act on them. And the fools are very active; they never think.

So Adolf Hitlers and Joseph Stalins and Lao Tse Tungs -- these are very active people and these are the fools. So it has been a strange history. The people who think and come to beautiful conclusions go on thinking they never act, so their thinking remains futile, a sheer exercise in futility. And the people who cannot think at all, who have no capacity to think, simply go on acting.

In fact Adolf Hitler was winning in the beginning of the Second World War for three years continuously for the simple reason that he was a fool, an idiot. All the generals -- American, British, Russian -- thought logically, wondering what to do with this man, because war is a science and they were moving scientifically and that man was an absolute fool -- he knew nothing about military science. His generals had no say, even they were very much puzzled because he was going against all the rules.

For example, the enemy attacks where you are the weakest, the weakest point has to be attacked. That's simple logic, that if you are going to attack some country you attack from the weakest point; there is more surety of winning. Hitler would attack the strongest point. And he went on winning for three years for the simple reason that the others thought logically. So they would collect all their forces at the weakest point and he would attack at the strongest where their military was absent. But after three years of continuously fighting with this fool they became aware of his method or his methodlessness and then they started behaving in a foolish way themselves, then they started winning.

Fools are very active people -- they manage to do things; and thinkers are impotent.

Meditation is going beyond both; it is going beyond thinking, it is going beyond stupidity. It is moving into a silent, relaxed state. In that state you are open to everything all directions become available, all dimensions are yours; you are not linear. You are simply clear so wherever you look you have clarity. And that's the meaning of being a rainbow -- all the colours, all the seven colours. That means all possibilities should become available.

A meditator is not a thinker, he is not a fool either; he is beyond both. He acts but he acts out of his multi-dimensionality or he remains inactive, but that too is out of his multi-dimensionality. Sometimes action is good and sometimes inaction is good. Sometimes it is good to say something and sometimes it is better to be silent. The meditator simply allows his spontaneity to take over. He does not force himself into a certain pattern, he has no pattern, he lives naturally. If action is needed it happens, if inaction is needed it happens. And whatsoever happens he goes totally into it. If he is doing something he is doing it totally; if he is not doing he is not doing totally; but he is never half-half, he is never divided. In that undividedness there is great beauty and great power, great insight and great understanding. And out of that insight, understanding, power, clarity, life becomes a piece of art. Then one lives with sensitivity, awareness. And the man who is sensitive and aware in all the dimensions possible can only experience god, because god simply means the whole existence.

And you cannot experience god by being one -- dimensional because god is a totality and you also have to be total to experience totality. You also have to be whole in your smaller way, on a small scale of course, to know the whole. Once you are total you are bridged with the whole.

In ancient mythology the rainbow is a bridge between god and man. That is significant. Iris is the name of the god of the rainbow. Iris is the messenger from god to man and from man to god, because the rainbow joins the sky with the earth. It is a bridge, an over-bridge.

That mythological idea about the rainbow is beautiful. To me it means that to be multi-dimensional is the only way to be bridged with god. Then this very earth is paradise, then to live herenow is to live in heaven.

(Addressing a psychologist from Germany Osho points out that modern psychology hasn't yet figured out just what meditation is.)

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Meditation means a state of no-mind, a state of no-thought, but not a state of sleep.

Thoughts are not there but you are fully conscious and alert, you are just awareness. Of course there is nothing to be aware of. This is one of the most significant things to understand, because modern psychology has a notion that if there is no content then you cannot be aware, you will fall asleep. That is absolutely wrong.

Modern psychology has not yet been able to understand meditation. That's why this wrong idea has persisted for fifty years continuously, for half a century. Psychology says you can be aware only if there are thoughts; if there is nothing to be aware of you cannot be aware. You cannot be simply aware, you need something to be aware of. But they can be logically proved wrong. Existentially, of course, they are wrong.

I say through my own experience that thoughts disappear and I am still aware. But psychologists will not understand somebody's experience, they will understand only logic. And logically also they are wrong for the simple reason that you can be asleep and thoughts are there, so thoughts are not necessarily part of awareness.

You fall asleep, you become unconscious, but thoughts continue as dreams, your mind continues to be active. If the content can be without consciousness why cannot consciousness be without content? It is a simple logic. They are not inevitably together. In sleep consciousness disappears but thoughts continue; in meditation thoughts disappear, consciousness continues. Meditation is just the opposite of sleep.

And Rainer means advice. When you are pure awareness then you need not ask for any advice from anywhere; the advice comes from your very innermost being. You find your inner master. And the outer master is only a help to find the inner. The outer master has not to dictate any discipline to you; he has just to give you a few hints so you can search for the inner master. Once you have found your inner source of knowing, seeing, then there is no need for any advice from the scriptures, from the masters -- from any source. You start living according to your light.

The real advice comes only from your own being but for that your mind has to go into complete non-functioning, otherwise it is so noisy that you will not be able to hear the very still, small voice within. It is almost a whisper and mind is a maniac, an Ayatollah Khomaniac, and your being speaks in such a whisper that there is no possibility of the mind over hearing it.

Mind is a disturbance. It distracts you from your own source, from your own wisdom. Meditation puts the mind into silence and suddenly for the first time you start hearing inner advice. And the miracle is, it is always right, it is never wrong. So you are never guilty and never feeling repentance. And when each and every step is right your life starts settling into a deep accord.

(Celebration -- that's sannyas in a nutshell.)

I don't teach you any philosophy, any dogma, any creed. I simply teach you a blissful way of living moment to moment. I don't ask you to believe in god or in anything else whatsoever. There is no need for any belief. All that is needed is a capacity to rejoice -- and it is there in everybody.

Life has it intrinsically, it is rot something added to you. It has to be only discovered. Every child is joyous and for the child life is festivity; it is always a celebration. And he celebrates small things. Collecting seashells on the beach how cheerful the child is, as if he has found diamonds. He is just collecting coloured stones or seashells or just making a castle of sand, and he is so absorbed, so totally in it.

Every child brings with him the capacity to enjoy, to celebrate, but we destroy it; we make him serious, we make him as serious as possible, as quickly as possible. We are at ease only when he is serious, then we know we have succeeded, then we know that now he is growing up. In fact we have killed something of immense beauty but now we are happy because he is just like us -- serious, sad, moving around with a long face and no has become interested in our stupidities: ambitions, desires, money, power, prestige. And in his whole life now ho will never be so happy as he was before he was destroyed by society.

My function is to help you regain that quality again. That's why Jesus says 'Unless you are like small children vou shall not enter into my kingdom of god' -- and he is right. A sannyasin has to be a child again.

Erase all that society has done to you, become again a clean slate and start from ABC anew. Let sannyas be a new birth, a new beginning, and you will be surprised that suddenly a great rush of energy comes. And you will see my sannyasins here dancing, rejoicing, singing. Listen! (Osho holds up his hands and pauses in his talk so that the singing from the music group in Buddha Hall is heard more clearly. We laugh, and then he resumes.) They have become children again.

If a man can remain a child to the very end of his life, if he can remain a child when he is dying -- even then -- then he has really lived. And then he has really known what life is all about, its wonder, its awe, its 1/08/07

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mystery.

(Love and nectar -- that's the meaning of Prem Amritam, Osho tells a German woman.) Amritam: the secret that can make man immortal, has been the search of the alchemists of all the ages.

In fact there is no need to search, it is already there. Love is the secret that gives you the first glimpse of immortality, eternity, timelessness, deathlessness. Only in the moments of love does one become aware of the immensity of life, aware that it cannot be contained in the small span that is there between birth and death. It is so vast it cannot be contained in this small life. This life is only one of the expressions. We have been before and we will be after. We have always been here and we are always going to be here.

Love gives you the first inkling and then from there you can catch hold of the thread and you can start searching. It is love that becomes prayer, it is love that becomes meditation. It is through love that the whole religious quest has arisen. Without love there would have been no religion at all and no Buddha and no Jesus and no Mohammed. It is because of love that people became aware of something transcendental in themselves -- and then the search started. Love triggered a process in man to search beyond the mundane, the ordinary.

I teach love. Love for love's sake, for no other motive, because any other motive destroys it. Any other motive and love becomes lust. Lust means it has lost its eternity, it has come into the very muddy world. It is no more part of the vast sky.

Love can either fall and become lust or can rise and become prayer. With motives it falls, with expectations it falls. With no motives, no expectations, it starts rising. It becomes more and more refined; it comes closer and closer to prayer and meditation. At the highest peak of purity love is prayer, love is meditation -- they are two sides of the same coin. And that is the moment one starts feeling the presence of god. That's why Jesus says god is love.

(Man can operate from his headquarters or his heartspace, Osho tells us.) Living in the noisy mind man functions like an animal or even worse, like a crazy animal. In the silence of the heart man functions like a god or a goddess. The whole question is how to shift your energy from the head to the heart. And it is not difficult. It needs just a decisiveness on your part, because it is your energy --

you can withdraw it, you can invest it in a different lifestyle.

That's what sannyas is, a different lifestyle. It is living life through the heart, through silence, through love, through bliss. And then god is not somewhere in heaven, then you find him within yourself and of course, within everybody else too. Then even in the rocks he is present, in the trees, in the rivers, mountains.

Then the whole existence is transformed. It becomes luminous with the presence of god.

(And more about head and heart to Veet Vivad.)

Mind lives in arguments; it is continuously debating, discussing, doubting. The way to reach the heart is to drop argumentation, to forget all discussions and debates, only then do you start living. Otherwise through all these arguments that mind becomes involved with your energy goes on leaking -- and they never lead you anywhere. The whole history of philosophy is proof, absolute proof, and it should be a reminder to every person that philosophy has not reached a single conclusion. Five thousand years of argumentation and no decision, no conclusion, has been achieved. Even after fifty thousand years there will be no conclusiveness. It is not in the nature of the mind to come to a conclusion, it is against mind's nature.

As you come closer to a conclusion it immediately creates new doubts, new questions, and again you are in the same trap. Each single solution brings at least ten more problems and the jungle becomes thicker and thicker.

The philosopher lives not, he only thinks, The mystic lives and he lives because he has understood one thing -- that thinking helps not -- so he disappears from the head and he merges into the heart. He starts functioning from the heart. The heart knows love, trust; it is absolutely unaware of doubts, arguments. There are no problems for the heart. The heart knows only solutions and the mind knows only problems. The mind knows only questions and the heart knows only answers. For the mind everything is problematic, for the heart nothing is problematic. Things are mysterious, of course, but not problematic. The heart enjoys the mysteries of life -- and life is full of mysteries. It all depends on you: if you make problems out of mysteries you will waste your life. If you listen to the heart and you approach life as a mystery, not as a problem, then you can live beautifully, gracefully. And then there is a possibility of knowing the truth, because the truth is the ultimate mystery, the mystery of all mysteries.

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Query:-

So remember this: go beyond argumentation. Slip out of the mind like a snake slips out of the old skin and immediately you will have a renovation. Your whole being will be resurrected. It will be a death, a death as far as the head is concerned, and a birth, a new birth as far as the heart is concerned.

Sannyas is both: a death and a birth, a crucifixion and a resurrection.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #6

Chapter title: None

6 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010065

ShortTitle: THUNK06

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(We have been appointed by god, but it's only through meditation that we realise that -- this is the meaning of Dhyan Jockel, Osho tells a new sannyasin.)

Man without meditation has no idea from where he comes, why he comes, or what is the purpose of his being here at all. And when one does not know the purpose of it, life cannot have any meaning; then life remains just like driftwood, at the mercy of the winds and the waves. Life without meditation is accidental; it has no sense of direction. There are events but they are not inter-connected. Life is just a pile of flowers but it is not a garland. There is no thread of meaning running through all the flowers to make it a unity. But once you enter into the world of meditation, your vision, your perspective, immediately changes. You start feeling that you are not here by accident -- that you are fulfilling a certain need of existence. That's the meaning of Jockel: appointed by God.

God himself is behind you, but this can be discovered only in deep silence when your thoughts, your mind, your ego, completely cease. In that clarity, when all the clouds have disappeared, the sun shines forth and in that light life is immediately transformed. It starts having meaning, significance, and with meaning and significance comes joy, bliss.

The greatest need of man is to be needed and the moment you feel existence needs you, you start having roots, you start having a kind of centering; an integrated being arises out of it. That's the whole purpose of sannyas: to help you to go beyond the mind and enter into meditation. Meditation is the door to God, mind is the door to the world. If you want to explore the world then mind is the right method. Hence science needs no meditation -- it is exploration of the world, of the objective world, of that which is outside you, the external. But mind is absolutely invalid as far as the inner journey is concerned. For the inner journey meditation is needed -- a state of no-mind, a state of absolute silence, quietness, calmness, tranquillity. But it is not that you have fallen asleep; awareness is there. In fact you are more aware then you have ever been because the whole energy involved in the processes of the mind is released. The whole energy becomes your awareness.

Mind is a parasite, it goes on sucking your energy, it goes on destroying your awareness. Once you start having the feel of silence your energy is saved, you become a reservoir of energy. And that energy itself is 1/08/07

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delight.

William Blake has said many beautiful things: one of those beautiful statements is that energy is delight.

But the mind leaves no energy for you. In thinking, in memory, in desiring, in ambitions, in jealousies, it destroys all the energy. Everything leaks out; you remain empty.

Make every effort to get out of the mind -- go beyond it.

(Amitgyan means infinite knowing, Osho tells an Australian. Then he indicates the difference between knowing and knowledge.)

Knowledge is always limited, always finite, always measurable. Knowing is infinite, unbounded, immeasurable. Knowledge is of the mind, knowing is of the heart. Knowledge is logical, knowing is not logical at all; it is something transcendental to logic. It is closer to love than to logic.

That's the meaning of wisdom; wisdom is knowing. But knowledge and knowing look so alike that many people are misguided. And because it is cheap they start accumulating knowledge thinking that this is the way to become wise. Knowledgeable they will certainly become, but not wise. Wisdom has nothing to do with knowledgeability. It is not that you are well-informed. Wisdom means insight; not information but clarity, awareness, spontaneity, responsibility, the capacity to respond immediately. The knowledgeable person always looks into his accumulation before he acts. If some problem arises the knowledgeable person goes into his memory reservoir, he starts searching in his basement for the answer -- something ready-made that he has accumulated. And whenever you respond to a real situation according to a ready-made answer it is not response, it is reaction.

And it is never adequate because life goes on changing every moment, it is always new and your ready-made answer is always old, always out of date, so knowledge always falls short. Knowing does not go into memory, it simply opens its awareness towards the situation. It simply allows the situation to enter, and out of consciousness, not out of memory, arises the response. You act here and now, not according to a ready-made answer.

Even you are surprised by it because you don't know what is going to happen. When you are constantly surprised by your own actions then it is knowing and then it has tremendous beauty and life remains an adventure. Ready-made answers are always full of dust, ordinary, boring and always fall short of the situation.

The knowledgeable person is very stupid. He may have a Ph.D. or a D.Litt., but no Ph.D., no D.Litt. can cover up your stupidity. And whenever a new situation arises you can immediately find the fool hidden behind all the certificates.

Yes, he is perfectly able if you are asking something which is not real; if it is bookish then he is perfectly able. He can give the right answer to every question which is not real. If it is real then he is at a loss.

Meditation gives you knowing, not knowledge. It gives you the capacity to respond spontaneously, immediately, herenow. And then your life is always renewing itself, it is fresh, like dewdrops in the early morning. It is young. Even at the moment of death the man of knowing remains young fresh. He has the same quality as the just arrived child, the same purity of the eyes, the same innocence. And that's the definition of a sage: if one becomes again a child, if one is born again, if one becomes a twice-born, if one attains a second childhood in this life then he is a sage.

Knowing is infinite, immeasurable. It knows no limits, no boundaries, and because it has no limit, it makes you unlimited. And then life is a constant wonder to live, a constant awe, a continuum of discoveries.

You are always at the point of shouting 'Eureka!'

(Osho talks more about wisdom to Valerie, who he renames Gyaneswari -- Goddess of wisdom.) We are born wise and then we deteriorate. Every child is born a Buddha and the society, the whole education system, civilisation, culture, destroy his innocence. They throw so much dust into his eyes that he becomes almost blind. But society needs blind people, the politicians need blind people to follow them.

People who have eyes will not find any need to follow anybody.

The priests need blind people, then they can be Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, otherwise who would bother about these stupid priests? The leaders, the politicians, the priests, the pedagogues -- they are all in need of millions of blind people. So every child has to be forced to become blind through superstitions, through stupid ideologies. And the thing is done at such an early stage, when the child is so delicate that he can be moulded in any way. It is just like a young plant: you can bend it in any possible way 1/08/07

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that you want. Once it becomes a big tree it will not be possible to bend it according to you; then it will have its own individuality. So if the gardener wants to bend a tree in a certain way he has to do it as quickly as possible.

In Japan there are trees, three hundred, four hundred years old and just six inches high. The trees belong to a species that could have risen one hundred feet, two hundred feet high -- and they are just six inches high. It is thought to be an art; those trees are thought to be very valuable. The trick is that they go on cutting their roots. They are planted in pots without bottoms so whenever their roots start coming out of the bottom, they are continuously cut. When the roots cannot grow, the tree cannot grow. The tree remains small, it becomes a pygmy, retarded. But they think this is an art. And that's what has been done to humanity.

Every human being is a retarded person. His roots have been cut. But this is called education. This is what is being done from the kindergarten to the university: go on cutting the roots and bending the branches and pruning the leaves; give it a shape. Of course the shape is given according to the establishment, not according to the child. Nobody bothers about what the child would like to be, nobody takes any not of the child's individuality.

Up to now humanity has been very murderous. It is strange, very strange, that a few people somehow escaped -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a Lao Tzu. There are very few people, but it is almost a miracle that they escaped and society could not manage to cut their roots and they grew to their full height. But they are proofs enough that everybody can grow to the same height.

My sannyasins are not my followers; I am not a leader nor a priest -- just a friend. And because I know how one can get rid of all the nonsense that has been imposed upon you, I simply share my understanding. It is not in any way a conditioning, it is just a sharing. And then it is up to you to decide. I give you total freedom. I don't give you any outer discipline -- that you have to act this way, that you have to behave this way, that you have to follow a certain pattern, a certain style. All that I give to you is meditation, and meditation means becoming aware of all the conditionings that have been given by society to you.

The moment you are aware you can drop those conditionings. Once you have dropped all that the society has done to you, once you undo it, you are again as pure as a child, as fragrant as a child, as graceful as a child. And that releases your intrinsic wisdom, that releases your imprisoned splendour. It makes you wise.

And to live life according to your wisdom is the greatest gift of god. There is nothing higher than it.

(Gyan Anatto) Wisdom is only possible in the absence of the ego. Ego is the hiding place of all kinds of ignorance. It is a shelter for ignorance. It prevents you from bringing light into your being. It is afraid of the light because the moment light comes it will have to go, it will have to leave.

A sannyasin has to be very clear about it: either the ego can exist or wisdom. Ordinarily we all choose the ego and we sacrifice everything for the ego. And the ego never gives you anything. It promises but it never delivers the goods. It is a great politician, always promising, and whatsoever you ask it immediately promises that it will give it to you. If you look back, it has never fulfilled any promise -- it cannot, it is impotent. But it is a braggart, it goes on bragging. And it always finds excuses for why you failed last time; this time you are not going to fail, just take a few more precautions. And each time you fail it will find some rationalization, some excuse, and again will convince you to go on along the same route.

People waste their whole life hoping against all hope that something will materialize. Nothing ever materializes out of the ego. It is like a desert, nothing grows in it.

A sannyasin has to decide to drop the ego with all its ambitions, dreams, projections. Once you drop the ego you will be surprised, amazed at what was being prevented by the ego: the whole kingdom of god. It is like a rock preventing all the flow of your life energies. Once the rock is removed you become a beautiful stream and you start moving towards the ocean. And then the meeting with the ocean is not far away. Once the movement has started you will reach the ocean. Every small stream manages to reach it.

This is what is happening here. All these sannyasins are small streams; now they are becoming a big river, joining together. That's why communes have existed -- for the simple reason that a single individual is such a small stream that he may be lost somewhere, he may not be able to reach the ocean. But if even a small dewdrop becomes part of the river and then the river becomes part of a bigger river, then there is no fear: it is absolutely guaranteed that the dewdrop will reach the ocean.

So small streams of sannyasins are gathering together -- it is becoming a big, wide river. And then god is not far away and everybody is going to find him. But the first and the most important thing is to drop the 1/08/07

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ego.

Here, be as egoless as possible. Taste egolessness and you have already taken the greatest step towards god and towards wisdom, realization, nirvana, liberation. These are all different names for the same reality, the same truth.

(To Marc, a craftsman from Holland, Osho gives the name Shivanand, which means god is bliss.) God is not a person but an experience: the experience of bliss, of joy, of benediction. The idea of god as a person has been a calamity, a curse. The very idea has created the temples, the mosques, the churches and it has led man astray from true religion.

True religion can only be one -- and there are three hundred religions on the earth. True religion cannot have any adjective to it -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. Science is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, how can religion be Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan? Science investigates the objective reality, religion investigates the subjective reality. Both are searching for the real, one in the external world, the other in the internal. If science cannot be Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian, then how can religion be? Religion is nothing but a quality -- religiousness.

I teach a religionless religiousness. And the whole thing depends on your dropping the idea of god as a person. Otherwise if god is a person then you start worshipping, praying; then you start persuading him to do some favours for you and you go in an absolutely wrong direction. No worship is meaningful, no prayer is meaningful because there is nobody as a person to answer you.

God is an inner experience. When you have reached your innermost core, to the very roots of your being, a great explosion of bliss happens. It is like an atomic explosion. Your consciousness explodes and you are showered, bathed in a totally new kind of splendour of which you have never dreamt before. That experience is god. It is not that you encounter somebody who is a god, you experience something inside you which is divine, godly.

Remember this, then the whole approach changes. Then instead of worship, prayer, meditation becomes important -- because prayer means god is somewhere outside you. You have to talk to him and of course you have to be very nice, otherwise he may get angry, he may throw you into hell; you can't be nasty to him.

You have to be nice and nagging -- both things have to be done. That's what prayer is, nice and nagging. Be nice so he cannot punish you and continue to nag: 'Do this, do this, do this,' so he gets tired, and one day thinking that enough is enough, he says 'Let me do it and be finished with this man.'

But there is nobody -- whether you are nice or nasty does not matter. What you are doing is a monologue, it is not a dialogue because there is nobody at all. It is a kind of insanity.

True religion begins with meditation, not with prayer. Of course it ends in prayer but never begins in prayer. And when it ends in prayer the prayer has a totally different meaning. When the light has exploded in you, when bliss has exploded in you, when you have arrived home -- then of course a deep gratitude to existence arises in you. That is prayer: just gratitude. Nothing has to be said, you just feel gratitude -- that is prayer. You feel prayerful, you feel a kind of tremendous thankfulness to the whole universe for all that it has done to you because suddenly you can see that what has happened is so infinite, so profound, that you don't deserve it at all.

Out of that experience that you don't deserve it, you have not earned it and yet it has happened; what else can you do other then feel grateful? That gratitude is prayer. It is a silent bowing down to existence.

(In explaining the meaning of his new name to Dhyan Veeten, Osho explores a theme he has been touching on several times this week -- the different layers of himself with which man can identify and the way to go beyond them.)

Man can live as a body, then he lives only an animal existence. Then sex and food are his only interest.

And ninety-nine per cent of people live that way. They are not yet human, they are still part of the animal's kingdom. Of course they have the shape of a human being but the shape does not matter at all.

The second style of life is that of living through the mind or as the mind. It is higher than the first, deeper than the first. It makes you a human being. Then your interests become wider, not that you don't enjoy food, not that you become anti-sex, but even sex starts having a new dimension to it; it becomes more and more gesture.

As far as the animal is concerned sex is but a process of reproduction. At the most it releases certain physical tensions, it is a relief, because the body accumulates sexual energy and you don't know how to transform it so you have to throw it out, otherwise you fool burdened.

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With the second stage, the second plane, your sex starts becoming more and more free from reproduction. It becomes a loving gesture. Sex becomes secondary, love becomes primary. You love a person in many ways -- sex is one of those many ways. You still enjoy food but that too starts having new dimensions. You enjoy food more with your friends. You like to share, to invite others. It starts becoming a new kind of experience. It is not just stuffing yourself with food, sharing becomes more important. That too is part of love.

And new interests suddenly arise on the horizon. You become interested in poetry, in music, in dance, in many forms of aesthetics, in literature, in sculpture, in gardening. You have now a bigger world. But this is not the end.

Meditation brings to you a third plane which is transcendental to both body and mind. It makes you aware of god or better to say, of godliness. It is the deepest penetration into reality. You suddenly become aware of the centre of existence. First you become aware of the centre of your own being and that leads you to the awareness of the centre of the whole. Now you can see that body and mind are temporary abodes and that you have been in many bodies and many minds, that you don't begin with birth and you don't end with death, that you are eternal, timeless, deathless. This awareness makes you free from all fear, all tension, all misery, all anxiety, all anguish.

Suddenly the sun has risen and all darkness disappears and flowers start opening up and birds start singing. That's the meaning of transcendence. And meditation is nothing but a process of transcendence. It simply takes you to a higher plane than the mind. And that is the highest plane.

Man is a three-storied building; ninety-nine per cent of people live only on the ground floor, a few live on the second, the higher floor than the first, and only very rarely a Buddha, a Jesus, a Lin Chi, a Bodhidharma, reach to the highest, the third. But it is everybody's birthright.

And my sannyasins have to use every possible way to reach to the third. And I am making all kinds of ladders available here. These are all ladders. And I am not much worried about you sticking to a particular ladder. You can even climb up the waterpipes (laughter)... but enter the third! How you enter does not matter. If you have to bribe the guard, bribe him! (laughter) By any means enter the third. I am not much interested or obsessed with any particular method.

All the religions in the past have become obsessed with one method. So whosoever comes to this commune feels a little bewildered because people are doing Vipassana and people are doing Sufi dancing too -- and nobody has ever conceived that there could be any meeting between Sufism and Buddhism.

People are using Yoga methods and Tantra methods -- and they have been enemies for centuries -- because my emphasis is to enter the third. Use a ladder, use a rope, climb up on somebody's shoulders.... The whole point is to reach the third plane.

Gurdjieff used to say that if right means don't help use wrong means -- don't be worried. He emphatically said, and I completely agree with him, be a sly man. Even if you have to be a thief be one, because sometimes thieves have entered the third floor before the saints because they know how to climb walls and how to enter through windows and how to break down walls -- they know everything. If they don't have the right key they don't bother; they will break the lock.

So if you need to be, be a master thief but enter the third floor. Make it a point that in this life you have to reach the third floor. once this commitment is there and one remains constantly aware of it, it is not difficult.

And my experience is that once you have reached the third then all the means that you have used are valid.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #7

Chapter title: None

7 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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Archive code: 8010075

ShortTitle: THUNK07

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Dhyan Andy means meditation and courage.)

Meditation is the art of enjoying your aloneness, the art of transforming loneliness into aloneness, solitariness into solitude.

Ordinarily you are not alone, you are lonely and of course loneliness is a state of misery. There is a constant hankering to be with the other, to be together. The lonely person is constantly asking for love.

Asking simply means that he is not at ease with himself, he wants somebody else to be occupied with. And of course this kind of love is not true love.

If it is a need then there is a motive, if there is a need then it is businesslike. The other is being used as a commodity and the other is using you as a commodity; hence the continuous conflict between lovers.

Nobody wants to be reduced to a thing, nobody wants to be used as a moans. That is a humiliation, it is a great insult, it is disrespectful. But that's what lovers are doing, hence anger arises. They are constantly at each other's necks. Excuses may be different but the fundamental thing is that both are incapable of being alone. Out of that incapability they are trying to be together.

But if you cannot enjoy yourself in your aloneness you cannot enjoy yourself in togetherness either.

Hence meditation is a first stop towards love.

Andy means courageous, and great courage is needed to do this miracle. It is almost a miracle. It is the greatest change that can ever happen to a man: transforming loneliness into aloneness, transforming the negative into the positive, transforming darkness into light. But it is not impossible -- difficult certainly, arduous certainly, an uphill task, but not impossible. All that is needed is courage to risk, to go into it.

People are so afraid of being lonely that they never go into it, they never allow it to happen in its totality and that's why they go on missing. If they allow it to happen, if they penetrate into it, if they make it an adventure, an exploration, without any prejudgement about what it is ... because how can you make any judgement if you have not experienced it? So going with no notion, with no idea of what it is, but just entering into that space of aloneness, slowly slowly, one starts enjoying the beauty of it, because it is the most beautiful thing in existence.

But we are constantly running away from it in every possible way -- thinking, desiring, imagining, going into the past, going into the future, visiting people, going to the clubs, to the movies, sitting before that idiot box called television for hours together, just somehow not facing the reality of your aloneness. But one cannot avoid it. Death will bring it to you because everything will be taken away. And if you have not learned the art in life what are you going to do when death takes the television, the movie, clubs, lovers, everything away from you and leaves you alone? That's why people die in misery, otherwise death is the ultimate culmination of joy.

If you know how to enjoy your aloneness you have transformed death into something totally different.

Then death will not come as a calamity, it will come as a blessing. The meditator dies rejoicing. There is dance inside his being because he already knows what it is to be alone, and what a beauty it is and what a benediction it is.

Courage is a basic requirement to penetrate the innermost core of your aloneness. And once you have known the joy of being alone you can share it -- and that is love. Love is a fragrance of the flower of meditation. Without meditation is just an empty name, an empty word; it has no meaning, no content. It hides something else and not only something else but something totally opposite to love: it hides lust.

So this has to be the work of every sannyasin, this is the work, to go into your aloneness. Find moments 1/08/07

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when you can be alone. There is no need to escape to a monastery or to the mountains; one can find a few hours every day. And the best thing is to find it in the world, amongst all kinds of distractions, because then nothing can destroy it.

If you find it in the Himalayas when you come back to the world it will be destroyed. It was something contributed by the Himalayas, it was not something that has grown in you. It was a gift of the Himalayan peace. It was just a reflection in you, it was not really yours at all.

So my insistence is that my sannyasins have to live in the world and yet work silently to create the space within themselves where the whole world disappears, where one becomes profoundly silent. Out of that arises love. And when meditation and love are both there you have achieved your destiny, you have fulfilled the task given to you by god. And then naturally there is great contentment, the joy that comes after reaching a peak.

Now you can rest, now you are at home, now you are at peace with existence. Neither meditation alone is enough nor is love alone enough; both are two aspects of the same coin and for both courage is needed, but the basic thing is meditation.

Begin with meditation and end in love. That defines the whole journey of sannyas.

(Dhyan Angelika: only through meditation can truth be unearthed.) Truth is not a conclusion of logical thinking, it is a realisation of absolute silence. It is a realisation, not a conclusion. Truth is not something that you have to invent, truth is something that is already in your being; you have brought it with you.

Everybody brings the truth hidden deep into one's being. It has not to be invented, it has only to be discovered. Whatsoever is invented is a lie, it cannot be true. Truth is already there, you just have to uncover it. And that's what meditation is all about: uncovering all layers. Particularly there are three thick layers and you have to penetrate those layers.

The first is the identity with the body -- we think we are our bodies. That's a wrong notion, it has to be broken. We are in the body but we are not the body. The body is a beautiful temple, but it is a temple and you have lived in many temples before. This is not the first time that you are in a body, you have lived in thousands of bodies. Bodies change but the traveller remains the same. You are a guest, the body is a host, but never become identified with the host.

The second layer is identification with the mind, with thinking. People think we are our minds -- that's why people become so much obsessed with ideologies. Somebody is a Christian and somebody is a Hindu and somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Communist and they become so attached to these ideas that they are ready to kill or be killed for them. And these are only thoughts, just soap bubbles -- nothing much in them. You are not your mind, but people become very much identified with the mind -- and more so than with the body, because it is very rare that you have a really beautiful body.

So people are very rarely at ease with their bodies, but they are always at ease with their minds, for the simple reason that mind is not observed by others. Even if it carries many ugly things nobody can observe it. And even those ugly things you can keep to the back; you need not observe them yourself. That's how repression happens: people go on repressing whatsoever is not of their liking, they go on throwing it in the basement of their mind and the basement has become so big, it is ninety per cent of your mind. Only ten per cent at the top you decorate with beautiful ideas, morality, mannerism, etiquette -- nice things. It is a decorative piece in a show window where you receive guests and welcome friends. But that is not your reality. That's why psychologists have to go into your dreams -- for the simple reason that your dreams show much more reality about you than your conscious mind. The conscious mind is arbitrary, artificial. It is managed for the simple purpose of exhibiting.

It is just as you make a beautiful drawing room in your house with paintings and chandeliers. And you keep it clean and do everything because you will be receiving people there. The rest of your house may be dirty -- who bothers about the house? -- but that shows more about you.

With the body very few people are at case because it is so obviously there that you cannot repress it.

And women are more identified with their bodies than men because certainly they have more beautiful bodies. Men are not so much identified with the body, they are more identified with the mind. Women are not much interested in isms and ideologies; they think these are just foolish things.

Men are very much interested in communism, in socialism, in fascism, in religions, in philosophies. The woman is much more interested in the mirror where she can see her body. And of course she takes more care of the body.

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The problem for a woman sannyasin is how to get unidentified with the body and the problem for a male sannyasin is how to get rid of the identity with the mind. But these are not absolute things. There are women who are more identified with the mind -- they must be ugly women. And there are men who are more identified with the body -- they must be stupid men, mediocre minds.

So this is just a general observation; I am not making a definite statement about it. This is not something universal. But whether you are identified with the mind or with the body, it makes no difference: identification is the problem.

And there are a few people who are identified neither with the body nor with the mind but who are identified with their feelings -- the poets, the musicians, the painters, the artists. They are more identified with the heart, the so-called lovers ; that is the last citadel of identification.

One has to get out of all these three and then meditation happens. When you have gone beyond the three, when you know you are not the body, not the mind, not the heart, suddenly your being explodes. That is meditation: the whole process of destroying identifications. The moment there is nothing to be identified with, when your consciousness is just pure, unidentified, unadulterated, you have achieved meditation and in that moment truth is discovered.

Angelika also means a messenger of god. Only a meditator can become a messenger of god because only a meditator can reveal truth, only a meditator can live truth. Only a meditator can radiate truth, nobody else -- not the philosophers, not the theologians but the mystic. One who has reached to the innermost core of his being, starts living his truth. And that truth radiates, it starts reaching others, it starts vibrating other peoples' beings. It creates a kind of synchronicity. If whosoever comes close to the person who has attained the truth is open, he will immediately feel a movement in the innermost soul. Something is triggered, music is heard, a light has penetrated. There is a communion -- and that communion is the whole purpose of sannyas.

By becoming a sannyasin you simply expose yourself to me. You withdraw all your resistance, you withdraw all your defences, you become available to me, vulnerable. And then something invisible starts functioning. Nobody will be able to see it.

There are many people, particularly journalists, who when they come to the ashram ask sannyasins

'What is happening to you?' because they can see something is happening. And sannyasins say it cannot be said, it has to be felt. You have to be here and participate. But the journalist comes here to be an observer --

detached. He cannot participate because he is afraid that if he participates then he is no more a detached observer. So he has to be just a detached observer. Then there is trouble: he cannot understand what is happening. Then he invents things, saying that may be it is some kind of mesmerism, hypnotism, witchcraft, some black magic. Then he goes on inventing things because he can see that something is happening but he cannot analyse it. Rationally he cannot find what it is exactly. Whomsoever he asks invites him to participate and that he cannot do.

Everybody says to him, 'Can't you feel the energy? Can't you feel the Buddhafield?' And he cannot feel it because he is closed. Then he goes away with invented stories -- all lies, but he is not lying intentionally.

He may not like to do any harm but that's what he really does, because he starts saying things, writing articles, books, spreading rumours that he was there but nothing happened to him so how can he believe all those people? And he is right in a way, nothing has happened to him, but he is wrong in his conclusion.

It is like carrying a radio with you without putting it on. You can go on carrying it, it will not catch any station. You have to put it on. You have to bring the needle to the exact position, to the right position where it will start catching a certain station. That's what sannyas is. It is turning yourself on and then trying to bring your needle into a deep attunement with me. Then suddenly the message starts penetrating you.

This cannot happen to detached observers, hence journalists are always going to be reporting something wrong. This is a process which they cannot become part of and hence, they cannot understand it. It becomes very elusive for them.

By becoming a sannyasin you start participating in my being. It needs a certain attunement, a certain silence on your part, a certain opening so that you are no more objecting, resisting, fighting, defending.

That's what I mean when I use the word 'surrender'. It is not surrendering your being, it is surrendering your defences, your resistances, it is surrendering your negativity. It is opening your doors to the sun, to the wind, to the rain. Then miracles are possible, and everybody is entitled to miracles.

I simply feel pity for those people who come here as observers. It is good to be a detached observer if you go to a scientific lab, but this is not a scientific lab; it is a subjective phenomenon. Here, only participants will know, others will miss the whole point.

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(Another theme Osho has been emphasising this week is that of erasing the ego so one is a zero. Then you become a medium, a vehicle, a passage, he explains to Shunyo Reinhold.) You are no more, you have been left behind, far behind. That is the meaning of becoming a nothing, a no-thing, a zero: you have abandoned your ego. And in that very moment you are in for a great surprise: here you abandon your ego and something tremendously powerful starts flowing through you -- oceanic, vast, tremendous, immeasurable. It gives power to you but not to the ego. It gives you power but it is no more yours; it is divine, it is god's. It gives you wisdom but it does not come from any outer source -- from Christ, from Buddha, from Krishna, from the Koran, from the Bible, from the Veda -- no. It does not come from any outer source, it comes from the unknown and it comes through you. From the very rock bottom of your being it comes. It is like a fountain that suddenly erupts.

It is both power and wisdom. Of course, wisdom has to be powerful, but this power is not the ordinary power we are accustomed to. It is not power which is violent, it is power which is love, compassion. It is power which becomes service.

It is not the power of Alexander, it is the power of a Buddha. And it is not the wisdom of the professors and the priests, it is the wisdom of a Jesus, of a Krishna of a Mohammed.

Mohammed was absolutely illiterate, he could not even sign his name, but the Koran descended through him. The ways of god are very strange. He didn't choose some scholar -- and there were great scholars available, even in Mohammed's place there were great scholars, imams. But he chose Mohammed for the simple reason that this was the man who had abandoned his ego.

In Jesus' time there were great rabbis, very scholarly, great historians who knew all the scriptures, who could quote all the prophets of the past -- but god chose the son of a carpenter. He also was illiterate, uneducated, from a small village, and the village was very notorious; it was known that nothing good had ever happened. But god's ways are mysterious. He chose this carpenter's son for the simple reason that Jesus was capable of putting his ego aside.

One becomes god's chosen person if one can fulfil a simple requirement: just put the ego aside. Nothing else is needed. Then power flows through you, wisdom flows through you, love flows through you. You yourself become blissful and you become a blessing to the whole existence too.

Yogen means the art of meeting and merging with god. Yoga simply means meeting, merging.

Ordinarily we are separate from the whole. We live like islands -- and that's the cause of our whole misery, because the more separate from existence we feel, the more alienated we become. And then of course we are outsiders and strangers and we don't see any significance, any meaning in life. Then everything is boring.

Soren Kierkegaard, the founder of existentialism in the West, says that boredom is the most important problem. But it is an important problem only if you are living in a separate world of your own, a private world, alienated from existence, inimical to existence. Otherwise, Buddha says there is no question of boredom -- there is bliss, ecstasy.

Now to whom to listen? Is Kierkegaard right -- that life is boredom? Or is Buddha right -- that life is infinite bliss? Both are telling their stories. Kierkegaard lived like an island, He was in absolute isolation, he never met people, he had no friends. He loved a woman and he wanted to marry her but at the last moment he escaped. At the last moment he rejected her for the simple reason that he was always afraid to be so close to somebody.

That closeness was creating a trembling in him. He never wanted anybody to look into his private world.

He was trying to hide his misery, he was not ready to share or expose himself to anybody, so he lived imprisoned in his own world. Naturally, he felt life was a boredom.

And Buddha opened himself up to the stars, to the ocean, to the sky, to the trees, to the birds, and he knew life as bliss. It all depends on how you relate to existence. Are you trying to be an egoist? -- then misery, boredom, anguish is going to be your fate. If you meet and merge with existence, if you start destroying the walls and creating bridges... because the same bricks can be used: you can make a wall or you can make a bridge. If you start destroying the walls and making bridges, that is yoga. That is creating as many meeting points as possible -- a multi-dimensional unity with existence, with all its beauty, with all its celebration, with the millions of forms that life has taken.

One should be able to relate with trees, with rocks, with animals, with rivers, with mountains. One should be able to relate with the whole of life in all its forms. The more you relate, the more rich you are.

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And when your relationship becomes so deep that you don't feel an island, you become part of the vast continent that god is, then life is sheer ecstasy.

That is the meaning of your name. Bliss comes out of meeting, merging with the whole.

(Natural or spontaneous love, is the meaning of her name, Osho tells the last person for sannyas.) We are brought up in such a way that we even forget how to be loving naturally, spontaneously. Even love -- the most significant value in life -- becomes something artificial. The mother says to the child 'Love me because I am your mother.' She does not allow the child to grow towards a spontaneous love. She enforces on the child the idea that he has to love, he must love. Now this is sheer stupidity.

Love cannot be made a duty, and the moment you make it a duty it becomes artificial, superficial. Then it is not even skin deep. The father says 'Love me because I am your father.' They are giving reasons why the child should love them, as if love needs any reasons. They are not creating a situation around the child in which the child spontaneously flowers into a loving person; they are enforcing the idea.

If the child does not feel love naturally he feels guilty -- because he is not loving the mother; the father, and this is bad, this is not how this should be. He starts feeling condemnation for himself. And if he tries to love just to avoid guilt then he knows that it is just hypocrisy, but he has to learn the hypocrisy because he has to survive. It is a question of life and death for him. Then he has to love the brothers and the sisters and the uncles and the aunts. He has to love and he completely forgets that love could have been a natural growth. Now it is a duty, a commandment to be fulfilled, so he goes on doing it. It becomes an empty gesture. And this becomes his pattern for the whole of his life.

In fact, the first seven years of life are the most important time. If the person is going to live seventy years then those first seven years are going to be decisive for seventy years because he will repeat the same pattern on different planes. He will pretend to love his wife, he will pretend to love his children, he will pretend to love the friends. And the pretension will go so deep that he will not even feel that this is a pretension; he will think this is what love is supposed to be. This is love. That's why everybody in the whole world is loving and the world is turning into a great madhouse. If everybody were loving the world would be a paradise, not a madhouse. People would be blissful -- if there is so much love in the world everybody should be flowering. Nobody seems to be flowering. Something very basic is missing.

My effort here is to help you become aware of all your pretensions. Once you are aware they can be dropped. They can be dropped very easily -- the whole thing is to become aware of them, They have gone deep, their roots have reached very deep into your bones, into your very marrow. So one has to be very alert, very aware, to find all the roots. Once you have found all the roots of your false, pseudo, love, you can uproot it. You can uproot all the weeds and you will become again a child and you will start your life afresh from the very beginning in innocence, and then there will be spontaneity, naturalness.

And to be spontaneously loving, naturally loving, is to be religious. Religion has nothing to do with worshipping Jesus or Buddha or Krishna. It has nothing to do with chanting mantras, it has nothing to do with all kinds of rituals being done in the churches and the temples. It has nothing to do with all this nonsense. True religion is simply spontaneous love -- and the whole society has been against it. Hence my sannyasins will be facing; many many challenges, but those challenges are beautiful; they can be transformed into opportunities.

When you accept a challenge it gives you integrity, it gives you sharpness, it gives you intelligence. And every challenge becomes a new adventure. We have to use all challenges as stepping stones.

But remember one thing: until spontaneity of love is achieved life is going to be a sheer waste. People are born with great potential and they die like beggars; the potential remains unfulfilled, unrealised.

My sannyasins have to die as rich emperors, emperors of the inner world, that Jesus calls the kingdom of god. Love is the door to that kingdom of god -- but spontaneous love, natural love, not a love enforced by others but something that arises within you for no reason at all. Love for love's sake, then love has such beauty, such grace, such incomprehensible depth and such heights that the Himalayan peaks are nothing compared to it.

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I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #8

Chapter title: None

8 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010085

ShortTitle: THUNK08

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Anand Shari. Anand means bliss and Shari means princess.) Bliss immediately transforms beggars into emperors because bliss opens the doors of the inner treasures, the doors of the real kingdom.

One can be rich on the outside -- that does not necessarily mean that he is rich inside. In fact the very effort to be rich on the outside simply shows an inferiority complex; deep down; he suffers from inner poverty and is somehow trying to cover it up. But the project is doomed; nobody has ever been able to be inwardly rich through outward richness. Just the opposite happens: the more rich you become on the outside, the more you become aware of your inner poverty, because of the contrast. The outside becomes a contrast and your poverty comes to your vision more clearly, more loudly.

Hence the paradox: the richest person is the poorest in the world. Even poor people are not so poor because they don't have any contrast to compare. That's why poor people will look a little more contented.

They have nothing to be contented about but they appear to be contented; the rich people seem to be very discontented for the simple reason that now they know that the outward richness has taken up their whole life and the inner poverty has not even been touched by it; their life has been a wastage. Hence the great despair that grips rich societies, that is gripping the whole West now.

Science has given people richness -- technology, industry, thousands of gadgets -- and suddenly it has made them aware of an inner emptiness, meaninglessness. But taken rightly it can be a good beginning. It can be a blessing in the form of a curse because then one can start moving inwards.

When the outer project has completely failed, entirely failed, when all hope is shattered, then there are two alternatives: either one remains in despair, becomes suicidal, goes mad or one turns in. And that is the beginning of sannyas, the point of turning in.

Shari is also a beautiful symbolic name. In the Song of Solomon the rose of Sharon appears as a symbol of the beloved. And the song of Solomon is one of the greatest songs that has ever been composed, ever been uttered. But it is one of the most misunderstood songs too. Christians particularly are embarrassed by it. It is part of the Old Testament and they are incapable of comprehending its meaning. They are afraid, very much afraid, because it talks about beauty, love, joy, and their idea of religion is that of sadness. The cross seems to be perfectly fitting to them, but a rose of Sharon, a beloved and a song of love seems to be too materialistic, too worldly. So no Christian commentary exists on the Song of Solomon. Jews are a little more earthly people but even they feel embarrassed because the symbols that are being used are of love.

My own experience is that love is the only word that can describe something of the divine. The meeting of two lovers is the only experience that can say something about the indescribable, of the indefinable, that can at least indicate, give a hint of the tremendous ecstasy that happens when an individual merges with the 1/08/07

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whole. It is like two lovers merging into each other, it is a deep embrace of love. Of course it is far greater, far more profound, qualitatively different, on a different plane than that of ordinary lovers. But ordinary lovers come closer to it than anything else. No cross can come close to it.

For me the Song of Solomon is the most beautiful part of the Bible, of the old and the new Testaments, but it needs a totally new vision to explain it.

My sannyasins can live the Song of Solomon and their life will become a real commentary.

Bliss, industrious, is the meaning of Anand Jurgen.

It is not something to be added to us, it is not an achievement. We have brought it with us from the very beginning and it is not separable from us. It is our very soul.

But a problem has arisen for the whole humanity and now even to discover our innermost core, our very nature, industry is needed, great effort is needed, because the society has created so many barriers to reaching it. It has put so many rocks in the way and the source is completely covered with rocks. Those rocks have to be removed.

Bliss does not need any effort, but those rocks are there and they certainly need great effort, great industry, great perseverance, persistence. Once they are removed bliss is natural and spontaneous. But the society has done the wrong already and it has been doing it for so long that we have completely forgotten what wrong is being done to every child.

His blissfulness is being methodically destroyed. The parents destroy it, the priests destroy it --

everybody destroys blissfulness because there is a danger in it. A blissful person has a few qualities which are very dangerous to the establishment.

First, a blissful person becomes non-violent. You cannot force him to be a soldier. You cannot make him do any cruelty to anybody. In his blissfulness he has known that all is one. It is not a belief, it is his experience that the whole existence is one. He becomes non-destructive -- and society is violent, politics is violent, nations are violent, the state is violent, the church is violent, because they are all political games.

Politics is political -- and that can be understood -- but even religion is political.

Every religion is trying to defeat other religions. There is a constant struggle going on, a cold war. And how long can you go on fighting a cold war? Sooner or later it becomes heated up, then a hot war erupts.

The society needs soldiers, violent people, murderous people; and a blissful person cannot be that. He would rather die himself than kill anybody. He willingly would be ready to die because he has tasted something of immortality so he does not care about death. But he will not destroy anything.

Even plucking a flower from a tree would be difficult for a blissful person. That is destructiveness -- you are killing the flower. A blissful person naturally becomes intelligent because when you become natural in one sense you become natural in all senses. It all happens simultaneously, it cannot happen in parts, in installments. It is not possible that you are naturally blissful but not intelligent.

If you are naturally blissful you will be naturally loving you will be naturally intelligent -- and the society does not want any intelligence in people because intelligent people are not easily enslaved. They create all kinds of resistances: they will fight to the very end but they would not like to be enslaved by anybody. And intelligent people cannot be Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans. They have enough intelligence and in that light they will live their life and they will search for god. They will not look up to the stupid priests to guide them. The intelligent people will not follow the mediocre politicians.

The politician cannot allow intelligence, the priest cannot allow intelligence. Even parents don't like an intelligent child because he asks embarrassing questions and he is not always reliable; sometimes he may say no. He will follow his intelligence. You cannot reduce him to a yea-sayer. Yes, when his intelligence feels it is right he will say yes. He is not saying yes to you, he is saying yes to his intelligence. So whenever something does not fit with his intelligence he will say no. And no parents want disobedient children.

These are the problems. That's why they have decided -- unconsciously, of course -- to destroy all possibilities of intelligence. And the only way is to put many rocks around the source so it becomes covered; even your own eyes cannot see it. And they teach you to look for it on the outside, to search in money, in power, in prestige. And once you start searching for bliss in the outside world you are finished.

Life is too short and the world is too vast. By the time you realize that you are doing something impossible and bliss has to be found within, life has gone down the drain, nothing is left.

Alexander died crying, with tears in his eyes, realizing that he had been a fool. In conquering the whole world he completely forgot that the real victory is to conquer oneself -- but then it was too late.

It is good that young people are coming to me. I am interested in young people, because they have more 1/08/07

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time, something can be done. They have energy and they are ready to rebel and they are ready to throw away all the rocks. It only needs your readiness and those rocks can be dislodged from their places --

because they are not natural to you, they are just unnatural.

Bliss is something spontaneous but your spontaneity has been crippled. It is a very strange society in which we have lived for centuries: first it cripples you, then it gives you crutches. and then it sells crutches to you: go to the church, go to the temple, pray to god and read the Bible or the Koran or the Gita, listen to the priest. First it cripples you and then it starts supplying you with crutches.

My effort is totally different: I want you to throw away all crutches and regain your wholeness. You are not a cripple. It is only a belief that has been implanted in you, it is a kind of hypnosis. So I am going to be opposed by the religious people, by the politicians, by all the vested interests. And it is understandable; I don't feel that it could be otherwise. And my sannyasins have to remember that they are moving into a very revolutionary world of inner search.

(Then Osho talks of prayer.)

There are two kinds of prayer in the world. One, which needs no meditation as a prerequisite, and the other which needs meditation as a preparation, as a necessary preparation for prayer. Meditation is a means and prayer is the end. Meditation is the seed and prayer is the flowering of it. The first kind of prayer, which needs no meditation as a prerequisite, is false because it will be without any grounding. It will not have any roots.

Christian prayer, Hindu prayer, Mohammedan prayer -- these are prayers that you can learn like a parrot. You can repeat them and you can go on repeating them for the whole of your life. It becomes a ritual. If you don't repeat them you feel a little uneasy because it has become a habit; if you repeat them, that's all there is to it; nothing happens out of it.

It is just like smoking a cigarette, one can make it a habit; before a person goes to bed he smokes a cigarette. If he does not smoke he cannot go to sleep. That habit haunts him and forces him to repeat it --

habits are repetitive. And somebody says a little prayer before he goes to sleep. If he does not do it then he cannot fall asleep. It is the same, there is no difference; psychologically there is no difference -- for both it is a mechanical habit.

Smoking may be a little harmful physically and prayer may not be harmful physically, but prayer can be more harmful psychologically because you think you are being religiously just repeating a ritual. It is not so easy, it is not so cheap. And what are you doing? -- just repeating a few words to somebody in the sky. You don't know what kind of man this is and whether he understands your language or not -- because there are three thousand languages on the earth and there are at least fifty thousand planets populated with people.

Just think of all the languages. If god understands all these languages he must have gone mad long ago --

you need not worry, forget all about praying. Either he must have gone mad or he must have become deaf, just to defend himself.

It is a monologue. Your god is only a projection. You believe in god so you have projected a god somewhere above, in the sky, and you are praying to your own imagination. It is really stupid! It is just like a small child holding his teddy bear... without his teddy bear he cannot sleep, he goes on carrying the teddy bear. It is dirty but he does not bother about that, he goes on carrying it. Without the teddy bear he feels very alone, afraid. With the teddy bear things are okay, he feels adjusted.

All these ideas about god that people go on carrying are nothing but teddy bears a little refined.

To me prayer needs meditation as a basic requirement. Meditation means the art of becoming silent, the art of becoming thoughtless, the art of becoming a no-mind. When all thinking disappears, all words disappear and there is only silence, undisturbed by any desire, by any memory, by any dream, when the lake of your consciousness is completely without any waves, not even small ripples on it -- that is meditation.

Out of this meditation a great experience of joy arises in you because you discover your authentic reality, your original face.

Out of this discovery of inner bliss, beauty, grace, immortality, eternity, deathlessness, one feels thankful to existence, not to any person. One feels grateful to the whole existence because the whole existence has contributed in making you, in creating you. The earth has given something, the sky has given something, the birds have given something, the trees have given something. The air, the sun, the moon, the stars -- they have all contributed. Seeing this, knowing this, you feel grateful and a deep unspoken thankyou arises in you. Remember -- unspoken; you don't say it because there is nobody to say it to. Just a thankfulness pervades you, permeates you. Your whole being feels a tremendous gratitude. That is prayer, 1/08/07

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true prayer.

(Due to a technical problem the next sannyasin's initiation is no recorded.) Prem Nirmala: love purity.

The mind is very much polluted. Only the mind can be polluted through education, conditioning, propaganda, but the heart fortunately remains beyond the propagandists, the pedagogues, the priests, the politicians; they cannot contaminate it, they cannot reach it. But they have played a trick, they have made everybody ignore the heart. They are afraid that if you live through the heart then you will live an individual life, the life of freedom. And the heart cannot be conditioned, they can condition only the head, so they have played a trick on everybody: they force your energy to go directly to the head, ignoring the heart, leaving the heart aside.

And my effort here is to rechannelise your energy: it should move through the heart, then it can go to the head, then there is no trouble. Love should be the first thing, logic should be secondary to it, then logic cannot harm.

But if logic becomes the foremost, it will destroy you; it will destroy all your loving qualities, because it is too calculative to be loving, it poisons. And if a man becomes incapable of love he becomes incapable of prayer, incapable of meditation, incapable of finding himself or god.

So the first thing is, the first step is to revive your heart; hence my emphasis on dancing, singing creativity, painting. So something that needs your heart and put the mind aside as much as possible.

To be here with me simply means to commune with me through the heart. It should not become an intellectual relationship, it should be a love relationship. The relationship between the master and the disciple cannot be intellectual. First it has to be a loving relationship, heart to heart -- and then finally it has to be an existential relationship, even deeper than the heart. These are the three centres.

First, the most superficial, is the head; the second, is the heart, which is just in between the three centres; and the third is your being. A sannyasin has to start with the second and reach the third, Those who remain in the first cannot be disciples, they can at the most be students. But I am not interested in students at all because I am not here to impart knowledge to you, I am here to trigger a process of inner transformation in you.

(Osho explains the difference between knowledge and wisdom.) Knowledge is very ordinary, mundane. It is information about the outside world, about the objective world. It is about things. Wisdom is the experience of your own being. It is self-knowledge, and for it to happen you have to learn a certain method to transcend the body because the body belongs to the outside.

That's why it depends on food, water, air.

Secondly, you have to transcend the mind because mind is also an agent of the outside world. It accumulates information given by others. It is not at your service, it is serving some other purpose -- the vested interest, the establishment, the church, the state. It is not in your service. It is a very illusory thing.

People think the mind is serving them, it is not serving you. Its whole function is to serve the establishment in a very indirect way; hence every religion is interested in bringing new children into the fold as quickly as possible. Baptise them, make them Christians, Jews, Hindus, Mohammedans, and be quick so that the children are completely unaware of what is happening to them. And these people create the mind.

Of course in Soviet Russia the child is conditioned as a communist, as an atheist. That's what he thinks he is and for the whole of his life he will thing that he is an atheist -- he is not. He has been forced by the state to be an atheist. The same is true about everybody else: somebody is forced by others to be a Catholic, somebody else to be a Protestant, and so on and so forth. The mind is not yours -- that is the first thing to understand -- and it has to be transcended.

When the body and mind both are transcended, when you know that the body is not you and the mind is also not you, only then for the first time do you start moving into the real world of your inner being, your subjectivity, your interiority. And that's what Jesus calls the kingdom of god.

It is so full of light, so full of bliss that there is no fear possible, no anxiety, no worry, no anguish. It is constant ecstasy. And because it gives you a glimpse of the eternal even death disappears. Death happens only to the bodymind structure, not to you.

Meditation is the method which helps transcendence and meditation simply means awareness. Be aware of the body and you will see that you are not it, be aware of the mind you will see that you are not it either.

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And when both these are transcended, suddenly your own being explodes. Then there is the realisation of who you are.

(Bliss and freedom happen simultaneously; attain one and you immediately get the other into the bargain, Osho tells Anand Vimukta.)

All the methods that have been used down the ages can be divided into two: the methods that search for bliss and the methods that search for freedom.

For example, Socrates' search is for freedom, Gautam the Buddha's search is for freedom, Mahavira's search is for freedom -- to be free of everything so no boundary remains around you and you become unbounded, so that you can have the whole sky to yourself, the whole space to yourself. Or Krishna, Jesus, Kabir, Jalaluddin -- these are the masters who are in search of bliss, of being blissful, utterly blissful, cheerful, constantly rejoicing. Jesus says again and again to his disciples to rejoice.

But one thing that is very significant is that both have to use meditation. Whether you search for bliss or you search for freedom it is not possible without meditation. So whatsoever the goal is it is just an excuse; one has to start with meditation. And meditation is simply a state of awareness where no thoughts exist. The mirror is utterly empty, reflecting nothing because nothing is passing in front of it.

When thoughts are passing in front of your consciousness, your consciousness becomes overflooded with thoughts and you forget the mirror -- because you always find some thoughts, some feelings, some mood, some emotion, you can never see the mirror as just itself. It is always coloured by something else.

Meditation simply means to stop this whole traffic so that you can see your mirrorlike consciousness in its purity. And then both things happen together. Whatsoever you were searching for, freedom or bliss, they both come together. Both are flowers of the same bush.

I teach my sannyasins only one thing -- I don't give any outer discipline but only an inner process of meditation. So while you are here put your energy totally into meditation. There is nothing else to be done.

Life can become such a bliss and such a freedom that you cannot even dream about it right now. What ecstasies are waiting for you, you cannot imagine; you can only know them. Even those who know cannot describe them; they are indescribable, no word is adequate enough to say anything about them.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #9

Chapter title: None

9 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010095

ShortTitle: THUNK09

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(To Thomas's name Osho adds bliss, so his name means the greatest bliss is in seeking and not in finding.)

The finding is secondary, the seeking is primary; hence never thing of the goal but think of the journey 1/08/07

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-- the whole journey has to be ecstatic. And the goal is not something static at the very end of the journey, it is spread all over the journey. Each step is a goal in a certain sense, because life is eternal so there cannot be a fixed goal to it. Because life is eternal the pilgrimage is eternal. And one has to learn to love each moment, each step, each phase of the journey.

The people who become goal-oriented become oblivious of all the beauty that is on the way. The goal-oriented person is future-oriented and he misses the present. And the present is the only reality there is.

He loses that which is for that which is not.

A sannyasin is not to be goal-oriented, he is not to be ambitious. He has to drop the achieving mind, root and all. Only a non-achieving mind is capable of enjoying each moment to its fullest, Then the very means become the end and there is no division; the journey becomes the goal and there is no division. And when there is no division between the means and the end there is no division within you; you become for the first time united, integrated, one organic whole -- and that has tremendous beauty.

To be one organic whole is to know what truth is. Truth is not somewhere else, it is within you, it is your very nature.

(Her name means innocence -- and that's just what meditation creates in you, Osho tells Dhyan Ines.) Meditation is a state of absolute innocence -- no thought, no desire, no memory, no fantasy, no dreams.

When all this crowd has left you and you are utterly alone, spacious, infinitely spacious, that is the moment when the experience of innocence happens for the first time.

Every child is innocent but he is not aware of it. He is innocent but without any consciousness. The difference between a child and a Christ is only of one thing... Both are innocent, as far as innocence goes they are in exactly the same space -- the difference is of consciousness. The child is unconscious and the Christ is conscious.

If innocence is unconscious it is bound to be lost. You cannot have it for long in the cunning world; you have to be as cunning as possible. Where everything is politics, where everything is conflict, where everything has to be snatched away before somebody else snatches things from you, where the only right procedure to defend yourself is to attack, you cannot remain innocent for long. In the marketplace one has to learn the ways of cunningness and for that our schools, colleges, universities exist. They make you cunning.

Of course they call it by different names, beautiful names. They say that they are making you clever, not cunning, but in fact what they do is to make you cunning. That's what is called cleverness in the world.

They destroy your simplicity, they destroy your innocence. They destroy real roses in you and they go on handing over false, plastic things.

Real education has yet to be born, it has not happened yet. Real education will make you consciously innocent. The child is innocent -- real education will add consciousness. Right now what it does is to destroy innocence. Rather than helping you it harms you; of course it goes on saying it is for your sake. But the tree has to be judged by its fruit. The whole world living in such a cunning mess, in such a chaos, is enough proof, because this is the by-product of all our education, civilisation, culture. This is enough proof; these are the human beings we have created -- and they are all in anxiety, despair, anguish, and they are all bored, tired, exhausted, not feeling any joy, not feeling even any meaning in their lives, almost always on the verse of committing suicide. A little push from any accidental event and they will commit suicide or they will go mad.

This is what we have made of human beings: we have pushed them into such a place from where either they have to go on living a stupid life utterly devoid of meaning, or they have to commit suicide or go mad.

Only three alternatives are left for them and none of them is of any worth.

My work here consists in creating a real education. And to me real education means your innocence has to be protected, respected, honoured, because it is a gift from god. It is immensely precious. In fact there is nothing more precious than it. Out of that innocence you will attain to love, to bliss, to godliness; out of that innocence all great values are going to be born. Hence it should not be destroyed, it should be protected, it should be helped and nourished. And the best way to protect it is to give you some sort of awareness. And that's what meditation is all about: creating awareness in you so your innocence is no more in darkness but in full light.

You can lose your treasures if you are unaware of them, you will be cheated. Somebody is going to deceive you. But when you know your treasures and the immense value of them you will be on guard; then you cannot be cheated. You will risk everything but you will protect your treasures. You will die if it is needed but you will not allow anybody to destroy your innocence because it means all that is significant. It 1/08/07

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means love, it means bliss, it means a life of celebration.

So learn awareness, become more and more alert about everything that you are doing and about everything that goes on in your mind and moves in your heart. Be aware of all these three layers: the body, the mind, the heart -- actions, thoughts, feelings. Be aware on all those planes and slowly slowly that awareness starts settling and the fourth is born in you. When the fourth is born god has penetrated you. The fourth is your soul, your innermost core. And the revelation of it reveals to you that you are unborn and that you are not going to die, that you are part of eternity.

And the very feel of eternity is ecstatic. Your whole perspective changes. It is the same world but it is no more the same because you are no more the same. Jesus says again and again 'Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god. But that does not mean that children are in the kingdom of god, otherwise they would not lose it. Who can lose the world of god, the kingdom of god for mundane things? They are not in it, they are unaware of it, hence the emphasis: those who are like small children.

Remember the word 'like'; he is not saying those who are small children, he is saying like small children.

One thing is certain, they are not children, they are like small children.

That's the definition of a sage: he attains to a second childhood. And that's what sannyas is -- the birth of a second childhood, this time with awareness. The first time it was without awareness and you lost it but with awareness it can't be lost.

Once you are aware it is yours forever.

(There is a second Thomas at darshan. Osho adds the word 'atit' to his names and then explains why.) Thomas has two meanings. One is, a seeker of truth -- but that meaning won't apply to you (laughter).

The second meaning is doubting Thomas (much laughter). I have been watching you...! But nothing is wrong in doubt. Doubting Thomas became one of the apostles of Jesus.

In fact in a way it is related to the first morning. A seeker of truth can move in two ways; one is doubt, another is trust.

If one moves through doubt one becomes a philosopher; doubt is the base of all philosophy. If one moves with trust one becomes a saint, a sage. Trust leads towards religion, doubt leads towards philosophy.

In both ways one is seeking truth but a philosophical search can at the most give you a few ideas about truth. And remember the word 'about'. It is never the truth but only about and about; and the word 'about'

means around, around and around. You go in circles, never reaching the centre.

So philosophy makes much fuss, it is very noisy, but nothing comes out of it. You go on digging, you dig the whole mountain and not even a rat comes out of it (laughter). You are as empty as you were before, in fact more empty, because at least before there was some hope. Now even that is gone. Philosophy leads to hopelessness.

Stop your toe -- that is a sign of doubt!

(Osho has glanced at Thomas' feet, and now looks up at him, grinning broadly.) You were just moving your big toe! (Thomas grins; the laughter from the group of sannyasins behind him is so deafening that Osho's next words are quite drowned.)

Just look at my feet. You can go on watching them for the whole day and you will not see any movement. That's what trust is! (much laughter)

Nothing is wrong in doubt. If you want to become a philosopher it is perfectly okay. Because you cannot move your head, you are moving your toe -- it is the other end. But I am watching both ends! (much laughter)

You have to go beyond doubt -- that is the meaning of the name I am giving you: Atit Thomas. Atit means go beyond and Thomas means doubting Thomas: go beyond doubt, because sannyas is not a philosophical adventure, it is a religious phenomenon.

Here you will be able to learn only if you love and trust. It is a love relationship with me. If some doubt exists between me and you that doubt will function as a wall. And I am not at a loss so it is not a problem for me. If one decides to doubt one can go on doubting -- I am not losing anything through it -- but one will be missing the whole point of being here.

Doubt creates a wall, trust creates a bridge. And the same bricks have to be used. Out of the same bricks you can make a wall or a bridge -- then why not make a bridge? when you make a wall you are disconnecting yourself from existence, and of course you will feel suffocated, you will feel imprisoned.

Create bridges. Trust and love create bridges, and the more bridges you create, the more enriched your life becomes, because existence goes on pouring its joys into you more and more.

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Truth can be found but not through doubting, truth can be found only through trust. Then it is not about truth, it is truth itself. It is like a taste. You can talk about light to a blind man -- he will know about light but not light itself. He can know light only if he has eyes.

My function here is not that of a philosopher but that of a physical. I would like to help you to see, to cure your eyes, to help you open your eyes, so that you can see light. It is needless to talk about light, it is a sheer wastage of time. One can make a blind man immensely informed about light, still he will be blind and he will be unaware about the experience that light is and all those colours that light reveals.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that a man lives eighty per cent of his life through his eyes.

That's why we feel so much compassion for a blind man. You don't feel so much compassion for a deaf man; you don't feel so much compassion for any other kind of retarded person as you feel for a blind man.

One person may be dumb, another may be deaf, someone else may have lost any sense of smell -- you don't feel so much compassion for these people, but the blind person gets greatest sympathy from every nook and corner.

Once a blind man came from Kashmir to see me and I was puzzled about how he had travelled alone because he was blind and Kashmir away. It took him six days to reach me -- travelling by train, changing train after train, because coming from Kashmir one has to change trains many times.

I asked him 'How did you manage it alone? You don't have anybody with you.' He said 'Because I am blind everybody takes compassion on me, so everybody helps me. In fact if I had eyes it would have been far more difficult to reach... because tickets have to be booked four weeks or six weeks ahead and then too, on Indian trains you cannot rely whether you will get a seat or not. But because I am a blind man nobody even asked me whether I have got a ticket or not. Even the ticket collector helps me to find a place without asking for the ticket.' And he told me 'You can see the rickshaw-wallah who is standing outside; he has refused to take money from me, he has taken me from the station and he is waiting there for me so that he can take me back to the hotel, to some hotel where I can stay. And he has refused to take money.'

The reason is that a blind person suffers the most; eighty per cent of his life is closed. He lives only twenty per cent, only one-fifth he lives. And that is about the outer eyes, what to say about the inner eyes?

One hundred per cent is missed.

Unless your inner vision opens up you will be missing the real life because you will be missing god, you will be missing your own soul, and it is only a question of decisiveness, to drop doubting. Just looks back: what has it given you? The problem is that our whole education prepares us to doubt. It goes on indoctrinating everybody in doubt because it is basically a scientific, philosophical approach, and both philosophy and science depend on doubt. It is perfectly valid for scientific research, for philosophical enquiry, but it is absolutely invalid for the inner journey. It is a hindrance, not a help. For the inner journey you need a totally different methodology, and that is trust.

So while you are here learn a little bit of trust and you will be surprised how much you have been missing. and you will also become aware how much more is possible if your trust goes on growing.

Sannyas simply means approaching life with trust, love, and creating bridges. It is possible. And I can say so more emphatically because I myself have lived through doubt. I began my enquiry through doubt and I went to the very end of doubting -- because I never do anything half-heartedly; when I do something I do it madly. Then I don't listen to anything, I simply go on and on until I come to the very end.

So I went to the very end of doubt and I have seen that the road suddenly ends in nowhere. It leads into an abyss where you can only commit suicide or go insane. So I know the whole journey of doubt and its futility.

When Ramakrishna says this he has no experience of it; he never doubted. When Ramana says it he has no experience of it; he simply followed the path of trust from the very beginning. Hence I can be more in tune with the modern mind than anybody else, because I have lived through doubt and I abandoned it.

Reaching the very end of it and seeing that it is simply nonsense I had to come back. The whole journey had to be gone back over and I had to start again from ABC.

So my sannyasins need not go on the journey of doubt, I have done that journey for them. They can start through trust, through love.

Premesh means god of love -- and in fact there is no other god. Love is god.

Jesus says god is love -- and that was one of the greatest revolutionary statements made by him, particularly in the Jewish context, in the context of the Old Testament... because the Old Testament god is not love at all. That god himself declares in the Old Testament, 'I am a very jealous god. Worship me. And 1/08/07

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those who are not with me are against me.' This is the way Adolf Hitler speaks, but the Jewish god spoke the same way.

And in the Talmud it says 'God is not nice, god is not your uncle -- beware!' Particularly in the Jewish religion before Jesus time the old god was fear-creating. That's why the word god-fearing exists for the religious person. In almost all the languages of the world there is something like this god-fearing for the religious person. It is ugly, it should be dropped.

Even Christians use this phrase 'god-fearing', not remembering at all that Jesus says god is love. But two thousand years have passed since Jesus declared god is love. Now something even more revolutionary is needed, so I say love is god. From the outside both the statements may look alike they are not alike.

When you say god is love that simply means love is an attribute of god. God may have many more things, god may be many more things. Love is only one aspect of god. When I say love is god I make them synonymous. Then love is not only an aspect, in fact god himself becomes only an aspect of love.

The statement of Jesus makes god the centre and love only an aspect. I declare love is the centre and godliness only the fragrance of love, nothing more. My whole teaching is rooted in love.

A religious person is not a god-fearing person because fear and love cannot exist together; that is psychologically impossible. If you are afraid of somebody you cannot love him, and if you love you cannot be afraid. If you love how can you be afraid. And if you are afraid naturally you will feel offended, insulted, humiliated and deep down you will hate the person, you cannot love him. And that's what happened.

Nietzsche declared that god is dead. This is the outcome of the whole religious tradition of god-fearing people. The complete statement of Nietzsche is worth consideration. He says god is dead and now man is free. That second part is almost never quoted and the second part is very important: god is dead and now man is free. You can see the point, that if god is there you have to be afraid and if there is fear, how can you be free? With fear there is no freedom. So it is better to kill god, to destroy god, so at least man retains, attains, reclaims his freedom. It is out of sheer necessity. Friedrich Nietzsche is simply a by-product of the whole tradition of those people who have created fear in the human mind. They knew how to dominate the human mind; through fear it can be dominated. It is politics, it is not religion.

And a god declaring 'I am a very jealous god,' is not a god at all. Somebody else is speaking through god. The priest is using the mask of god to dominate people, to enslave people, to oppress, exploit people.

My emphasis is absolutely, categorically on love. A god-loving person is religious. In fact we can drop the word 'god'; it is unnecessary. A loving person is religious. A loving person naturally comes to know god

-- of course, never as a person but only as an experience, a presence.

Prem Shunyo means love and absolute nothingness.

Love is the fragrance of the lotus of nothingness. When one becomes almost a nothing, a nobody, no ego, then love arises. Love is already there, we just have to remove the hindrances. And the ego is the greatest hindrance, the greatest rock that destroys it. The seed is under the rock; if we remove the rock; then the seed can sprout and can bring great flowers.

The only problem is the ego. It is the root cause of all other problems. But we are taught in such a way, conditioned in such a way, that we become egos. We are told to be ambitious, we are told to be successful in life, we are told how to be great achievers. There are thousands of books written every year to help the ego.

Dale Carnegies and Napoleon Hills and so many stupid people all around the world go on writing such books -- and they sell! In America Dale Carnegie's books have sold next only to the Bible. And what kind of childish things! -- HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. The whole project is egoistic.

Napoleon Hill's books are there; one book is entitled THINK AND GROW RICH, and there are positive thinkers who go on telling people that you can achieve everything just by the magic of positive thinking by affirmative thinking. You just have to project that you have become the President of America. Go on projecting it, go on thinking 'I have become the President of America.' And if you absolutely affirm it, it will happen, because this will create a certain magic around you, a certain vibration around you. And there are foolish people who go on reading these books and go on trying and they never ask 'Is Napoleon Hill rich?

How many friends has Dale Carnegie got? He has not even been able to win me and influence me... But they go on spreading these things and the whole idea is that everybody has to be a great achiever. This creates ego.

My approach is just the opposite: the ego has to be totally dropped. You are not to be achievers.

Whatsoever you need is already given, it is already the case; all that you need is to let it grow. Your potential is there; you have to remove hindrances. You can call my thinking negative thinking, against the 1/08/07

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positive thinking. The positive thinking says project your idea of who you want to be; I say god has already made you what you are, only negate hindrances.

That has been the most ancient teaching of the great mystics, of all the Buddhas. We call the method neti-neti. Go on saying 'This is not me, this is not me' And go on removing everything till nothing is left to be removed. When absolute nothingness has happened, in that nothingness the lotus opens up. For the first time, when you are not, you are. And to experience this paradox is the greatest experience in life.

Shakespeare says the question is to be or not to be and I say that is not the question at all. Not to be is the way to be, so it is not a question of choosing. If you decide not to be, the outcome is going to be that when you disappear something far more beautiful, far more significant, meaningful, descends in you. When you are an absolute nothingness you create the space in which god can start flowing. It is a deep let-go.

(The name Anand Dhyano, represents the synthesis he is striving for with his sannyasins, Osho tells the next for sannyas.)

It is easy to be blissful without meditation; it is also easy to be meditative without bliss. But then the person becomes lopsided, then he is not whole. Then he has chosen only one pole of his being and the other pole will be missing. And without the polarity life loses all that is great. Everything becomes flat.

Bliss will be there but sooner or later it will become boring tiring, exhausting. Or meditation will be there but sooner or later you will start feeling a kind of deadness, a coldness. You will start shrinking there will be a kind of withdrawal, you will lose interest in life, you will lose interest in people, you will become enclosed. It is not a food state; but this has been done in the past. A few people searched for bliss -- they found it at the cost of meditation. A few people searched for meditation -- they found it at the cost of bliss.

I want to create a synthesis in my sannyasins because my observation is that the whole man has not yet existed on the earth or has existed only very rarely, once in a while -- a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus. But these are exceptional people, they don't represent humility. They are so exceptional that; whether they existed or not makes not much difference. The vast humanity has remained in a lopsided way.

It is just like walking on one leg or a bird flying with one wing: it can't go very far. You can hop a few feet but you cannot go on a Himalayan journey, you cannot reach Everest. The bird can take a little jump from one tree to the other but he cannot reach the moon or the stars.

One wing is silence, coolness, awareness, and the other wine is blissfulness, dancing, singing, rejoicing.

And you need both wings together. When both are together a beautiful harmony arises in you. When silence and song meet, when awareness and celebration meet, something higher than both is born. It is like cross-breeding: the child is greater than both parents. And my sannyasins have to prove this new arrival, they have to herald the new arrival of the whole man in the world. He is neither Christian nor Hindu, neither worldly nor other-worldly, neither materialist nor spiritualist, but both and more, both plus.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #10

Chapter title: None

10 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010105

ShortTitle: THUNK10

Audio:

No

Video:

No

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Yoshiko has lots of different meanings, Osho says. They are: joy, love, clarity, brightness, goodness and fragrance -- in fact almost the entire gamut of qualities that arise through meditation.) The moment one puts the mind aside all these things start happening spontaneously. It is not that you have to bring them into existence, they come of their own accord. And that is the most significant thing to be remembered: if you make any effort to be loving your love will be false the very effort will make it false.

The same is true about virtue, about joy and about all the ultimate values. They have to come effortlessly, only then are they true and authentic.

Meditation does not bring them in, it only prepares you to receive them. It only opens the doors so the sun can come in, the moon can come ing the stars can come in and the wind, the rain. It simply opens you up. It does not create anything. It is basically negative, it removes the barriers. And these are the barriers: desires, memories, thoughts, fantasies, dreams, the whole past and the whole future.

Once you drop the past and the future and you are just here and now, that is meditation; to be in the present is to be meditative. And in that immediate experience of the now, of the here, one opens up and all these qualities simply start coming on their own. And they have a tremendous beauty when they come of their own accord. You cannot feel egoistic about them because you have not manufactured them; they are gifts from god or gifts from the whole, hence one feels tremendous gratitude. And that gratitude is religiousness, the very essence of religiousness.

(Love-meditation is the meaning of the name of the next Japanese sannyasin.) Love means the heart, the world of trust. The head means doubt; it is the world of logic. And these are the two things, one has to choose between. If you choose the head you have chosen the outside reality.

Then you can have many achievements, you can have wealth, power, prestige, respectability and all that, but deep down you will remain poor; internally you will remain empty. Hence all those achievements are really in vain, they don't fulfil you.

If you choose love, if you choose the heart, you have chosen the inward journey. Then you will possess immense richness, great power. But it will not be of this world, it will belong to a totally different plane.

The words are the same and because of the words many times mystics have been misunderstood. Jesus is a case of misunderstanding. He was talking of the kingdom of god and the woman rulers who were dominating Jerusalem in those days became afraid of him; they thought he was a political revolutionary. He was talking about the inner kingdom but they thought ho was just trying, to hide his politics behind religious words. That's why they conspired with the Jewish rabbis to kill him. And Jesus was absolutely innocent as far as politics was concerned; he was not interested at all in the outer, in the external reality. His whole concern was inner. All the awakened people of the world have always explored the inner, but they have to use the words, the same words, that are used for the outside reality: richness, power, kingdom.

Love opens the door. One has to be very loving, only then can meditation blossom. With doubts one cannot meditate. One can think about meditation but one cannot meditate. With doubts how can you drop ideas?

Doubt brings more and more ideas in. Doubt functions like a magnet: it attracts thoughts from everywhere. And no thought is impotent, remember; each thought is very reproductive. Thoughts are almost like Indians, they don't believe in birth control. Unless you have at least one or two dozen children you have not proved your manhood.

Thoughts are continuously bringing in more and more children, so when you allow one thought you will find a queue, an almost endless queue. And each thought will create more doubts and more doubts mean more thoughts.

Logic can ultimately lead only to insanity. It is not an accidental thing that in the past many philosophers have gone mad. It is a natural consequence. Those who have not gone mad simply prove one thing, that they were not great philosophers, just mediocre people, half-heartedly trying doubt. To me Bertrand Russell is mediocre. Friedrich Nietzsche is a great philosopher; he goes to the very end -- and at the very end of logic there is insanity. Insanity is the only proof that the philosopher has been truly a philosopher, true to his vocation.

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nothing that can drive you mad. It is impossible to go mad when there are no thoughts; nobody has ever been able to manage it. No Buddha can go mad, it is simply impossible. Even if he tries, nothing will come out of it because the basic roots of madness are destroyed.

Choose trust, love, the heart, so that you can become a meditator. And once you are a meditator nothing is missing; then everything settles in a deep harmony, in an infinite accord. Life becomes a melody, a dance, a celebration.

Satya means the ultimate truth. Amritam means eternal, immortal, deathless, timeless.

The definition of truth is that which is eternal. That which is not eternal is only a fact, not a truth. And the difference between a fact and a fiction is not much. That which is a fact may have been a fiction just a moment before and that which is a fiction right now may become a fact in the next moment.

When you are dreaming about something it is fiction; but you can materialize your dream, then it becomes a fact. The difference between fiction and fact is only of degree; hence all facts sooner or later disappear again and become fictions. They can be real only for the time being. They are momentary, just like soap bubbles: they are factual when they are there but they are there just for a moment and then the bubble bursts and nothing is left behind, not even a trace. But it was there just a moment before and it was beautiful. And if the sunrays were penetrating it, it may have been tremendously colorful, psychedelically colorful. A rainbow is a fact but it is very momentary, any moment it can disappear. And in life we live like a pendulum moving between facts and fictions, continuously moving from fact to fiction, from fiction to fact.

Neither fiction is truth nor facts are truth. That's why in the East we have never bothered about history very much -- because history consists of facts. Nobody knows exactly when Krishna was born -- the year, the time. Nothing historically is known for the simple reason that we have not paid any attention to history.

The West is very fact-oriented.

The East has paid great attention to the inner meaning of Krishna's life, we have penetrated the deepest into his very being, into his truth. But that truth is timeless, so it does not matter when he was born, it does not matter whether he was born or not. What really matters is whether something like Krishna-consciousness is possible or not -- and that's a tremendous difference. We are not concerned about whether Christ was really a historical person. He may have been, he may not have been; it doesn't matter.

What matters is, is Christ-consciousness a possibility? Can a man rise to those heights of being a Christ? If that is possible then what does it matter whether Jesus became a Christ or not? If you can become a Christ, then Jesus of course must have become a Christ and many others must have become Christs too.

The Western mind lives in time-consciousness, the Eastern approach is towards timelessness; hence our definition of truth is that which is beyond time. So unless you go beyond time you know nothing of truth. In time you only see a film on the screen -- it can be beautiful and for the moment you may become enchanted with it, but deep down you know that it is just a fiction. You may become engrossed in it, you may completely forget that it is just a fiction, you may start taking it for real -- and if it is a three-dimensional film it can give you the notion, the feeling, that it is real. But then the end comes, and the screen is left behind and then suddenly there is the realization that for the whole time only the screen was real and the film was just a projection.

The world of facts is only a projection, the screen is the reality; but the screen is hidden behind the projection. The screen is god and the world is just a film moving on that divine screen. How to penetrate the real -- that which always is and will always be and has always been? The method that we have discovered in the East is meditation. Meditation simply means dropping all fictions and facts, cleansing the mind of fictions and facts both, so that only the screen remains. The screen of consciousness is pure and empty, clean and white, and nothing moves on it. All movement has disappeared because all movement is in time.

Time has stopped, the clock has stopped. Suddenly you are transported into another world, the transcendental world. And that is the world of truth. To know it is to know all and to know it is to be it, because then the knower and the known are no more separate; then the knower is the known, the seer is the seen, the observer is the observed. That is the ultimate experience which liberates, which liberates you from all the fantasies of the mind and from all the mundane facts of the world. You still live in the world but now you know that it is a game, a play: play as beautifully as possible but don't get identified with it. Remain in the world but remain absolutely untouched, unidentified.

That's what sannyas is all about: living in the world and yet not being in the world, living in the world but not allowing the world to live in you; passing through the world fully aware that it is all momentary, so 1/08/07

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you need not get disturbed, you need not get distracted.

Then calamities and blessings, failures and successes are all the same. And when you can see that darkness and light, life and death, are all the same, a tremendous tranquillity, an equilibrium, a balance, happens to you. That profound silence is truth.

How long will you be here?

Till springtime.

That's good. Everybody has to be here till springtime!

(Osho gives the name Sat Prabodhi, and talks about how it's possible to imagine you've become enlightened when you haven't really.)

My sannyasins have to be aware of it because I am continuously talking about enlightenment and trying to help you to move towards it. And the mind can play tricks. And it has happened to many sannyasins: they start believing they have become enlightened, they start a kind of dream and they believe in it. By believing in it they are trapped by the mind again. Rather than getting out of the mind they have got even more deeply entangled with it.

So one has to be aware not to allow the mind to play this last trick. This is the last trick the mind can play upon you. It call deceive you that there is no need for anything, no need to meditate, no need to be a sannyasin -- you are enlightened. And the mind can always rationalise.

Just the other day I received a letter from a sannyasin -- from California, of course, such things happen more in California; all the fools of the world are gathered there! It is the fools' paradise. She has written to me 'It has happened, Osho. What you nave been talking about and you have been telling us -- that we are already enlightened -- has happened. So I dropped the mala, I dropped sannyas, because you have said

"When you meet me on the way kill me!"' But then after a few hours she started feeling guilty, afraid. So she writes 'Then I took the mala back and it felt very good and I felt relieved and great gratitude arose in me.' But she still thinks that she is enlightened.

Enlightenment does not come that way. When it comes there is no idea that it has come. In fact the master has to tell you that it has happened. If you yourself think it has happened then thought is still there.

One of Buddha's disciples, Manjusri, became enlightened; he was his first disciple to become enlightened. For days Buddha waited for him to come because he could see that the man was totally transformed, but he never turned up. Buddha would see him sitting under a tree listening to his discourses and doing all the routine work. We watched him for a few weeks, then he went to him and he said 'Manjusri, what is the matter? Why don't you tell me!' He said 'What?' And Buddha said 'It has happened!' Manjusri said 'What are you talking about. What has happened? I don't know anything. All that I can say is that I am feeling tremendously silent. There is not even the idea that this is it. There is no idea. So if you say so then it must have happened -- it is up to you. If you say so then it must have happened. If you say it has not happened it must not have happened, but I have nothing to say about it.'

And Buddha related the whole story to his disciples, saying that this is the way it happens. If arises, the ego arises immediately; it grabs you. It says, 'Look, you are enlightened!'

True enlightenment is not a thought, it is an experience, a thoughtless experience. When it happens one becomes absolutely ordinary, nothing special. One does not start having that haughty attitude of holier-than-thou, 'I have got it and you don't have it yet.' It does not give you any nourishment for the ego. If it does it is false. Ir the idea arises in you that you have become enlightened, then it is false. So remember it.

And whenever I talk to anybody I am talking through that sannyasin to all of my sannyasins. It is nothing personal when I talk to somebody, it is always concerned with everybody.

(Bliss is beautiful -- and a beautifier too, Osho tells Anand Rupama.) Even the body is transformed through it, because the bliss starts radiating. It gives you a grace, both inner and outer, because whatsoever happens at the centre of your being starts affecting the circumference.

If your house is dark, of course your windows and your doors will all show darkness. And if you burn a candle inside, then from the window, from the door, the light will start reaching outside.

From far away a person who is lost in the jungle , in the darkness, will find solace, consolation, a direction, because your house is lit with a small candle; he will start moving towards you. But if the house is dark then he will not be able to find your house.

Whenever one becomes blissful one becomes full of light. Misery is darkness, bliss is light. And you can see the blissful person radiating; he is luminous. Something of his innermost core starts filtering out of the 1/08/07

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body too -- and that gives immense beauty.

There are two stories. One is about Moses. A king was very much interested in the teachings of Moses and he wanted one of Moses' portraits to be put in his bedroom, so he sent a great painter to paint a portrait of Moses. The painter went, and he took months and then he came back with the portrait. Everything was beautiful but somehow the face was missing something. What the emperor has seen was not there something else.

Moses looked as if he were a criminal, he looked as if he were a murderer. The king was very much puzzled because the painter was one of the best and he had known him and his paintings. He said 'What is the matter? Moses looks like a murderer! How have you painted him like that?' The painter said 'What can I do? Whatsoever I saw I have painted.'

They both went to see Moses and the king said 'I cannot understand how this great painter has missed something in your face?' Moses laughed and he said, 'Your painter is right because he has a tremendous insight about even small traces of the past on the face. What you see is only my present. Yes, I murdered a person once -- unknowingly. I was not intentionally murdering him but it happened. I hit somebody and he died, and something of it has remained in my face. I can see when I look in the mirror that my skin is still carrying some mark of it You cannot see it but your painter is really great because this thing happened thirty years ago. Nobody has ever been able to see it but your painter has discovered it.

'And I was afraid: the way he was painting, the way he was looking and trying to go deeper into my past, I was afraid he would discover this. He has and he is right. And you are also right because what you are seeing is my present face. Now my light inside is burning and I am luminous with it. He has painted my past, you are seeing my present.'

The same is true about Jesus. There are two kinds of stories about Jesus -- one, that he was an ugly man and the other that he was one of the most beautiful people. There has been a quarrel going on for centuries Christians. The anti-Christians go on quoting some old, ancient documents proving that he was an ugly man and Christians go on saying that he was a beautiful man -- and they have not come to any conclusion.

My own understanding is that both are right. The people who are talking about those ancient documents... those documents exist, they are there, but they tell about Jesus before his enlightenment. And what Christians are talking about 1s after his enlightenment, after he became full of light, full of joy. Both stories are true, there is no contradiction, but they don't belong to the same time.

The first story belongs to the factual people, those who believe in history. And the second story belongs to the poets, and the mystics -- those who believe in the truth, in the inner truth.

(Love is a small lamp -- and the meaning of his new name, Osho explains to a student from Germany.) Love is a small lamp, but it is enough, in fact more than enough. You don't need to carry a sun with you; just a small lamp is enough in the dark night. Of course it sheds light only a few feet ahead of you but that's all that is needed: you walk these few steps then the light goes a few feet ahead and it is always ahead of you. One can cover a long journey of ten thousand miles with a small lamp; one need not carry the whole sun. And love is a small lamp in the heart but it is enough; nothing more is needed for life's pilgrimage. And it goes on showing you the right path. listening to one's heart then there is no need to listen to any outer commandment. Then god goes on whispering within you and showing you the way. Because people don't listen to their own heart, they are being exploited by the priests and the politicians. They go on telling people what to do and what not to do, and of course they think of their own interests, they are not concerned about you. What they say you should do is for their own vested interests. Naturally -- why should they be worried about you. They are worried about their own vested interests. They enslave you through beautiful words -- morality, religion, spirituality -- but their whole desire is how to enslave people, how to imprison people.

Freedom comes when you start listening to your own heart. And my work here consists of only one things helping you to find your own voice, your own still, small voice. Once you have found it the function of the outer master is finished because you have found your inner master.

And the real master is always working so that you can find your own source of light. He does not want you to be dependent on him because all dependence is slavery.

(Osho calls closer to him the slim, curly-haired would-be sannyasin, last to be initiated.) This is your name: Ma Gyangit. (He's a swami! whispers Mukta, by Osho's side.) A swami? That's good! (laughter) Be thankful to Mukta!

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(Osho makes the correction on the namesheet, and then begins.) Gyangit means a song of wisdom. Knowledge is never a song. It is tedious, boring, it is heavy, it is a burden and the burden goes on becoming bigger and bigger. It goes on piling up on your head like a mountain. People are crushed underneath the burden, the weight of their knowledge. The so-called scholars and the pundits cannot move at all, they have to crawl. Their life becomes stagnant because movement becomes very difficult.

It is like swimming in the ocean with rocks hanging around your neck, they are bound to drown you.

Knowledge is a weight and an ugly weight. Wisdom is a song, it is weightlessness. It helps you to grow wings. It gives you the whole sky and the freedom to move. What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge comes from others and wisdom comes from your innermost core; it wells up, it is yours. Knowledge is never yours, but knowledge is cheap, easily available. Wisdom is arduous. You have to dig deep into your being. It is like digging a well in the earth. You have to remove many many layers of the earth, many rocks have to be removed; you may need to dynamite them. It is arduous, but if you go on digging with great totality, intensity, perseverance, patience, then one day you will find the waters rising up.

Many people start digging but very few people are patient enough.

Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the most important Sufi mystics who discovered the method of whirling dervishes, the Sufi dance, once took all his disciples to a field. The disciples were a little bit puzzled: why were they being taken to a field? For what? But the master insisted, so they went, and what they saw was something significant. The farmer seemed almost insane person but in a way he was very representative of humanity, of the average human being.

He was digging a hole in the earth and Jalaluddin said to his disciples to go around the field and see.

They counted; he had dug almost a dozen holes and nowhere had the water come up. They said to the farmer 'You have destroyed the whole field. And what are you doing? -- are you still digging another hole?'

He said 'I have been digging to find water but when I don't find water in one place then I start digging in another.' And Jalaluddin said to his disciples 'Look at this man. This man is very representative of humanity.

If he had keep digging in one place he would have found water long ago, but he goes on changing the places. His patience is very small, his perseverance is not there at all, so he has destroyed the whole field and he will still change. After a few days come again and see what he does.' After a few days they went there and he was digging another hole.

Many times people start to meditate, to pray, to search within, but they want everything so quickly, like instant coffee -- and it cannot be instant coffee. So they drop the whole project and after a few days again they start digging somewhere else. In this way they waste energy, they destroy many many places in their being and after each failure they become more and more depressed and hopeless.

One has to dig in one place with total effort, with absolute commitment. That's what sannyas is. It is a commitment -- categorical commitment, to find the source of wisdom in you whatsoever the cost and howsoever long it takes. But your decision is absolute and you are not going to turn back. Then it does not take long.

The paradox is that the more patient you are, the quicker it happens; the more impatient you are, the longer it takes. And once you have found your inner being, it explodes in thousands of songs -- songs like Solomon's song, songs of love and joy, songs of beauty and benediction.

(Osho adds 'Dhyan' to Hannelore and says that now her name is really international.) And that's what my sannyasins are supposed to be -- not bounded by any nationality, religion, race, color or creed.

'Dhyan' comes from Sanskrit, one of the most ancient languages. It means meditativeness, a quality of profound silence where mind dissolves just like an iceberg melting into the ocean and becoming one with it.

The mind is just like an iceberg: it can melt and become part of our being.

'Hannelore' consists of two words from two languages. 'Hanne' comes from Anna; Anna is Hebrew -- it means prayer, grace, mercy. And the second part, 'lore', comes from Helen; Helen is Greek -- it means light.

So now you really have an international name. One part comes from Sanskrit, the other from Hebrew and the third from Greek. The three most ancient languages of the world and the most cultured, the most refined.

Meditation brings all these qualities naturally. Prayer is an attitude. It means a loving quality, a loving relationship with existence. To be in love with existence is prayer and out of that loving relationship with existence grace arises. A man who is prayerful is bound to be beautiful; and his beauty will not be of this 1/08/07

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world, it will belong to the beyond, it will be grace. And when there is grace there is compassion, compassion for all those who have not yet arrived -- that is mercy.

And the last part means light. When one is absolutely silent, in meditation, when the mind has dissolved like an iceberg melting and becoming one with the ocean, great light is released; one becomes just light.

That is the experience of ultimate truth. But everything depends on meditation. Everything depends on a single phenomenon: how to be absolutely silent so that the mind melts and one becomes a flow of energy.

Mind is an obstruction like a rock. Once it melts there is great joy, a dance, a new kind of drunkenness: one is utterly drunk with joy and yet absolutely aware. This contains the whole message of my sannyas.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #11

Chapter title: None

11 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010115

ShortTitle: THUNK11

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Ingo is the first for initiation tonight.)

This is your name: Swami Anand Ingo. Anand means bliss, cheerfulness, joy, the state of celebration.

Ingo means luminous.

Misery creates darkness. Bliss brings luminosity, light. These are simple facts. We may not know about bliss but we certainly know about misery; everybody has known misery in some way or other. The moment there is misery you are surrounded by dark clouds; life loses all meaning, all significance. One feels suicidal. The future seems absurd, there seems to be no reason to live even for a single moment any more and once becomes closed, one starts shrinking inwards, one does not want to relate, to communicate. One wants to be left alone.

Exactly the opposite is the case with bliss. The moment bliss arrives life begins to have tremendous meaning, all darkness disappears. The dark night of the soul is over, the morning has arrived, and with the morning, the songs of the birds and the joy of the flowers and the colours on the horizon. Suddenly one would like to live for eternity, forever and forever. But people are not aware of bliss.

Yes, they have known something of happiness. Happiness is just a glimpse of bliss, a faraway glimpse, a reflection, rot the reality. It is as if you are seeing the moon reflected in the lake. The moon in the lake is not the real moon; it can be disturbed any moment. Just throw a small pebble into it and the reflection disappears.

The same is true about happiness; just a small accident is enough to destroy it. It is reflection, it is not reality. Reality is indestructible; only illusions can be destroyed. But when you have seen something of the reflection of bliss you have felt a little light. Even in the reflection the moon in the lake is full of light, it is luminous. The candle reflected in the mirror is also luminous.

We know something of happiness but those small glimpses can help us to move ahead, to seek the real.

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And it is not far away. One of the strangest, weirdest things about the human mind is that bliss is inside and it goes on seeking it everywhere else except inside.

Let sannyas be the point of a radical change, let it be a turning in. And immediately you are luminous.

And the moment darkness disappears, death disappears. Then life is eternal; then it has been always and it will be always.

To know it is to be free from fear.

(His name: Demian, is the name of a mythological person, a man who gave his life for his friend, so it represents friendship, Osho tells the new swami.)

Love can lead you to something higher than love. Friendship is that something higher. Love is rooted in biology, it is something instinctive. Falling in love with a woman or a man is nothing extraordinary. It is a natural fact. I am not against it but there are still higher altitudes of love free from biology.

The moment love is free from biology, from the instinctive, it becomes friendship -- and it is a rare achievement.

People ordinarily think that they are friendly. But whenever there comes a question of sacrifice they withdraw; they immediately find a thousand and one excuses -- and that is the only criterion.

Love is good but one should not settle at that. When two lovers become friends they have really loved each other. And it is very rare to find two lovers becoming friends. They can become enemies very easily, in fact they are, they are continuously at each other's throats jealous possessive, fighting, nagging, suspicious.

This is not friendship, this is the lowest form of love, it is lust.

Even lust is not bad. It is raw material -- you have to refine it I don't condemn it. The people who have condemned it have not helped humanity.

Just the other day the Polack pope made the statement that even to look at your wife with lust is a sin.

He quotes Jesus, and he quotes him wrongly -- because Jesus says to look at a woman with lustful eyes or even to think in lustful ways is sin. But Jesus says it about a woman, not about your wire -- otherwise why should one get married in the first place? But Polacks are Polacks! Even if they become popes they cannot change.

It is perfectly good between a husband and a wife because it is a biological relationship. It is instinctive.

But one should not settle there. One should rise, one should use it as a stepping stone. And unless your love becomes a friendship... And what are the differences?

The first difference is that friends are not jealous. If your wife moves with somebody, feels happy with somebody, you will feel good if you are a friend. There is nothing wrong in it. But if you are a husband you will feel very bad, you will feel hurt, wounded. Your ego suffers as if you are being rejected, as if you have not been able to prove your manhood, as if you have fallen short, your wife enjoys other people's company more than your company. Comparison, jealousy. anger. hatred -- all these arise. These are part of lust.

But if you are friendly you will feel happy because the person you love is happy. You will give freedom and you will give all the help that you can to make the other happy. You will not hinder them, you will not get in the way. Friendship has something spiritual about it. Love is biological, friendship is spiritual. And Unless love becomes something like friendship one suffers through it; rather than finding bliss one finds more and more misery. But the reason is not in the energy of love. The reason is that you have not been able to refine it, you have not been very artful about it. You have taken it for granted, as if this is the end. This is not the end.

Let your love become friendship, let your love become prayer. These are the two possibilities, two aspects. If you become friendly with the person you love then you can love many persons. Then your love spreads, then the circle becomes bigger and bigger. This is one aspect. The other aspect is that when you start loving many people with no clinging and you also allow the others the same, your love starts growing another aspect -- the aspect called prayer.

Prayer means loving the whole, the whole universe, becoming friendly with the trees and the rocks and the rivers and the mountains and the stars. When friendship reaches to the point of prayer one is religious.

(Love, and the new dimensions love opens up, seems to be a theme that Osho is emphasising this month.

Love is a great trouble-maker, Osho begins this address, and that's why so many people prefer to live without it.)

For centuries people have escaped from love to the monasteries, to the mountains, to the deserts, just to avoid all opportunities where love can grow. They have lived in solitariness in the caves, afraid of love. And 1/08/07

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there is a point in it: love creates much turmoil. Life without love has a certain calmness about it but if that calmness is cold, dead. Yes, there is a silence but that silence is of a cemetery; it has no song in it, it is not worth anything.

One has to transform love. And this cannot be done by escaping. One has to enter into the whole turmoil of love and still remain alert, watchful, aware, so that the turmoil remains only on the circumference and never reaches the centre and the centre remains still.

This is the way of a sannyasin: love has to be accepted and yet you are not to be disturbed by it. It will bring many problems and they are good because they create challenges in life. And when you respond to challenges you grow.

All your so-called saints who escaped to the deserts became retarded. They were not growing spiritually, they were really becoming more and more stupid. But we have worshipped that kind of stupidity for so long that we have completely forgotten that it is stupidity.

I have travelled all over this country. This country has more saints than any other country -- and they are all stupid, one hundred per cent stupid. I have never come across a saint who has dwelled in the mountains for long who has not lost all intelligence. One is bound to lose intelligence because intelligence needs constant challenges, only then does it remain sharp. It is like a sword: if you put a sword in a mountain cave it will gather rust; the sword will become useless. And the same happens to intelligence. So I am all for accepting the world and all its challenges -- and love is the greatest challenge because its requirements are so many.

First it requires you to drop the ego and there the struggle begins: the ego clings, you cling to the ego, the ego wants to dominate the whole thing -- and love cannot be dominated. If you cling to the ego love disappears. If you drop the ego only then can love grow. This is the first challenge and then one after another new challenges go on coming.

Love means that you have to learn to respect the other as an end unto himself, the other is not a means.

That is the only immoral act in the world. In fact the whole of immorality can be defined through this simple things if you are using the other as a means you are immoral; if you are full of respect for the other person as an end, then you are moral.

And sooner or later the other person wants his apace and fear arises in you. You would like to make the other a prisoner -- of course, with beautiful chains, golden chains, studded with diamonds. But you would like the other to be imprisoned so that you can be certain of the tomorrow. Otherwise who knows? -- your lover may leave you. One never knows what is going to happen the next moment so one wants to be certain about the next moment, one wants a certain guarantee -- and that very guarantee kills love.

Then there are husbands and wives -- these are the people who have butchered love, killed it completely.

Now marriage is certainly a far more permanent phenomenon, like a plastic flower. A real rose is bound to disappear, any moment it can disappear. Just a strong wind comes and the petals wither away. One has to accept this, that life is a constant flux.

Love creates all these challenges, but if you remain centred, alert and aware, then these challenges are immensely helpful; they make you rich.

If you can be a centre to the cyclone that love creates then your life starts growing. And as your centering becomes deeper with each challenge, as you become more grounded, more rooted, and nothing can uproot you -- no problem can shatter you and you remain integrated in all kinds of crises -- you will feel grateful to love, because it is only through all those problems that this integration has happened. And then one starts towering higher than love -- and that is what grace means. When you love and yet love cannot create any problem for you, then there is grace, then there is immense beauty of the body, of the mind, of the soul. And they are all joined together in that graceful harmony. But there is no way if you avoid love.

Never avoid love and its problems. Face them, accept the challenge and the trouble, but at the same time remain calm and quiet.

('Contentment is the foundation of the temple of bliss' is the meaning Osho gives to Paritosh Anand's name.)

People are constantly living in discontent about everything. It is a habit. It is not that if they have more money and a better house and a better wife or a better son or a better job they will be contented -- it is not that. Whatsoever they have they will remain discontented. Poor, they will be discontented; rich, they will be discontented.

Discontent is a habit of the mind. Mind lives through it, it is intrinsic to mind; mind can never be 1/08/07

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contented. Once you understand this a miracle happens; then you can put the mind aside because it is never going to give you contentment. That is not in its nature, so you are asking for the impossible. And what cannot happen cannot happen, it is futile. This has been the experience of the whole of humanity for centuries. Still everybody tries, hoping that he is an exception; nobody is an exception. And discontentment creates misery.

If you understand why you are discontented, if you don't find any excuses on the outside and you see that it is the functioning of the mind, then the functioning can be dropped. It is very easy. The question is to see it. Don't believe it because I say it is so; you have to see it.

Watch your mind. Look at the past. Many times you thought if you could get a certain thing you would be happy, and you got it and you were not happy. And you have not even taken note of it. This has happened so many times but you don't learn the lesson, nobody learns the lesson. People go on landing in the same pitfalls again and again.

A sannyasin has to learn. That's precisely the meaning of disciplehood, the capacity to learn. Learn that your mind is the cause of all discontentment and then there is misery and then there is hell. Drop the mind and with it all misery and all hell disappears and suddenly a revelation happens to you -- your innermost core is full of bliss. Just the layer of the mind has to be removed and bliss explodes. And bliss and contentment happen simultaneously. But first you will feel contentment because you will be removing discontentment. So the first experience of your interiority will be of contentment and immediately you will see bliss following it.

So watch the mind and all its tricks that it goes on playing upon you. To have a transformation nothing else is required, only watchfulness of the mechanism of mind. And through that understanding things start happening of their own accord, effortlessly, quietly.

(Japanese Satoru's new name, Sagar Deva, is to remind him that the experience of god is one of vastness, of infinity, Osho says.)

There are neither boundaries in space nor in time. There is no beginning, no end. And to experience it one becomes it, because that is the only way to experience.

It is not something that you can know by standing outside. You cannot be a spectator to it, not just standing by the roadside. You have to slip into existence Just like a dewdrop slipping into the ocean. Of course the dewdrop loses something -- its identity -- but it gains tremendously, it becomes the whole ocean.

All that a sannyasin is to lose is the ego. And once there is egolessness you have become a participant with the whole. You are no more, the whole is -- and that is the ultimate goal of all religious quest.

Meditation is just a method of encouraging the dewdrop to take the jump into the ocean. The function of the master is seductive: he simply seduces the disciple to take the quantum leap. He goes on encouraging him. Of course in the beginning the disciple tries in every way to escape, to avoid it, to find excuses, but once you are trapped by a master it is impossible.

And you are trapped, so don't waste time in escaping and avoiding! Rather take the jump as quickly as possible. And I know Japanese can do it more easily than anybody else. So please, do it!

(Osho speaks about another aspect of contentment.)

Life is such a gift that if we see how much has been given to us we will be just grateful. And we don't deserve it, we have not earned it; it is a sheer gift from the whole. We are not worthy of it but we have taken it for granted, hence we go on asking for more. So nothing ever gives us satisfaction, nothing ever makes us feel gratitude. The mind is always complaining, the mind goes on complaining continuously. From the cradle to the grave the whole journey is full of complaints. This is how we miss the great opportunity of growing, of loving, of being, of rejoicing. And there is so much to dance, so much to sing, so much to love.

But we have to change this habit of complaining. Instead of complaining learn the art of thankfulness.

That's what sannyas is, the art of gratitude. And it changes the whole of your life; once you shift from complaint to gratitude, from discontent to contentment, it changes your whole vision, whole perspective.

Suddenly spring bursts forth in your being, thousands of flowers bloom in your consciousness -- and the first flower is that of love.

A contented person is nothing but love. He is not even loving, he is simply love. He loves for the sake of love because that is his way of showing gratitude to existence. That's his thankfulness, his prayer. So he goes on loving each and everybody. He does not ask for anything in return; he simply gives because so much has been given by god that we should share it a little bit.

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And the miracle is that the more we share, the more goes on coming to us. Once you have learned the secret and the arithmetic of sharing you cannot be miserly about it; you will simply go on sharing as much as possible, because the more you share, the more you have.

Share your bliss, share your love, share your understanding, share everything that you have got -- all the inner riches. That sharing is essentially what I mean when I say that the contented man becomes love itself.

So change your mind from discontent to contentment and then see the miracle -- that love starts flowing through you in thousands of streams, in many dimensions, in many ways. And life becomes such a splendour, incomprehensible to the intellect, unfathomable for the mind, a tremendous mystery and the ultimate ecstasy. -- How long will you be here? -- I don't know. Maybe one year, two years. --

That's good -- be here forever. I can say it!

(Viola's new name is Deva Anuragini. It means divine and full of love, Osho explains. In fact to be full of love is to be divine, he says.)

One need not go to the church or the temple or the mosque, one need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; to be religious one has simply to be loving. God understands only one language, the language of love. If you love his existence you have said whatsoever needs to be said to him.

But people go on doing childish kinds of prayers. They are childish because when you were a child they were taught to you. Every child is told "Say your prayers before you go to sleep," so every child mutters a prayer, finishes it quickly, pulls up the blanket and forgets all about it once it is finished. Then it becomes a habit and people go on repeating it for their whole life. But this is not prayer, this is sheer stupidity. Using words with god is being stupid. The only language he understands is of love, of silence.

So love, existence and your prayer will go on reaching him. And then there is no need to pray at a particular time, with a particular ritual. Religion is not a ritual, and whenever it becomes a ritual, it is dead.

Religion is love alive, throbbing, pulsating. So love his existence, the manifest god, and the unmanifest will know about it, because the unmanifest is just hidden behind the manifest. Whatsoever you do to the manifest reaches the unmanifest.

See what so-called religious people go on doing: they pray to god yet Christians go on killing Mohammedans and Mohammedans go on killing Hindus and Hindus go on killing Mohammedans. They go on praying to god, all of them -- and they go on killing live people. They go on destroying, killing, what god creates -- and they all say god is the creator. But it seems they are just repeating words without knowing any of the meaning of those words. If god is the creator then to destroy is to be against god. Then the only way to participate with him is to be creative -- and that's my approach.

I teach my sannyasins to be creative. In your own small way... whatsoever you can create, be creative.

Contribute something to existence out of your love -- and that is prayer. Make life a little better than you found it. When you leave the world, leave the world a little bit better than you found it -- and you have lived rightly. You will be immensely rewarded.

(Marion becomes Anand Aruna.)

Aruna means the early morning sun, when it is just coming above the horizon.

Literally Aruna means red, because at that moment the sun is red and because of its redness the whole eastern horizon becomes red. And that is the colour of sannyas. It is the beginning of the day. It represents the end of the night and the beginning of the day, the end of darkness and death and the beginning of light and life.

Be blissful, only then can the sun rise within you, because it is only in bliss that you become receptive, open, vulnerable, because in bliss all fear disappears and you are ready to receive the unknown guest. You are not afraid of the unknown.

And the moment you are not afraid of the unknown the unknown immediately knocks on your door. If you are afraid then it does not disturb you. God never interferes in anybody's life because he loves his creation. So he leaves everybody total freedom, even to go against him -- that is part of freedom, even to close their doors to him -- that is part of freedom, even to deny him -- that is part of freedom. But it is foolish to use freedom in that negative way. Use freedom in a positive way, use freedom to receive the unknown guest, use freedom to create trust and love and bliss so god can penetrate you.

And the meeting between your being and the being of the whole is the beginning of light, the beginning of eternal life, the beginning of immortality. And that is the search that everybody is on, knowingly, unknowingly. Everybody wants to know something which is indestructible, which cannot be taken away.

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Everybody wants to come into the light, everybody wants to have eyes to see, to have clarity of vision, but people go on doing things which really prevent their vision, hinder their insight, cripple their being. A sannyasin has to trust existence and rejoice in the small things of life.

Life consists of small things, but if you rejoice you transform these ordinary things into something extraordinary. Even if you rejoice eating your food it becomes sacred. If you rejoice cleaning the floor it becomes prayer. If you rejoice cooking food for your friends, for your lover, for your children, for your parents, it becomes meditation. The secret is rejoicing. Rejoice in everything that you are doing and then it is done for god, then it is an offering to god.

And whenever the right moment has arrived and you are ripe and ready the sun rises above the horizon and all darkness disappears.

(Dhyan Priya means when you are a meditator you become a beloved of existence, Osho tells the former Ruth.)

Dhyan means meditation. Meditation is a state of absolute silence when there is no mind at all to disturb you, when you are simply alert, aware but there is no thought, no desire, no memory, when there is no ripple in the lake of consciousness, when the lake of consciousness is so quiet and silent that it is almost like a mirror. In that moment the whole existence is reflected in you as it is in its reality -- because thoughts distort, desires disfigure. They don't allow the real to reach you, they give their own colour to reality.

Scientists have discovered that ninety-eight per cent of information is not even allowed to enter; your mind prevents it. The two per cent that is allowed in is very much distorted. The mind has made it according to itself, it is no more representative of It simply shows something about your mind, it does not say anything about reality. That's why come to see something they will all report about different ways.

You have heard the story about the five blind men who had come to see the elephant. They were all great philosophers and they all reported differently. Blind people are philosophers, philosophers are blind people. They started arguing, great argument ensued because they were all perfectly certain that what they has seen was the real elephant. The person who touched the leg of the elephant said that it was like a pillar.

They all gave different descriptions, and they were all right in a way. But that part, that half truth is far more dangerous than a whole untruth because it has something of truth in it that gives it a certain validity, a certain quality to convince others.

Meditation simply helps you to drop all ideas so that you become totally open to reality as it is, not according to you. You don't have any prejudice, you don't have any a priori conclusion. You are simply available, open, and whatsoever comes you allow in; it reaches you as it is.

And Priya means a beloved. The moment one becomes a meditator, one becomes a beloved of the whole existence. The whole existence becomes so loving, so tender towards the meditator, that when it happens for the first time it is amazing. One cannot believe that trees are so loving, that rocks are so loving, people are so loving. The whole existence starts pouring love into the meditator.

It is said -- and It is a metaphor -- that whenever Buddha passed through a forest trees would bloom out of season just to receive Buddha! Trees would become alive and suddenly great foliage would start growing, just to receive the Buddha. It is a metaphor, it is not something historical, it is pure poetry but it is indicative of truth. And poetry is far more indicative of truth than anything else is. Truth cannot be described in a scientific way; it can be described only in a poetic way because it is a mystery. But those symbolic, metaphorical stories say one thing, that the meditator becomes a beloved to the whole existence.

About Mohammed it is said -- because he lived in the desert, Arabian desert, and of course the sun is very hot in the desert -- that a cloud would always go on moving with him just above his head to protect him from the heat of the sun. I don't think clouds will do that... but it is indicative, indicative of something far deeper. Of course the whole existence protects such a person; he becomes a beloved.

So be a meditator and become a beloved of the whole existence. Less than that is not worthwhile, less than that is not going to satisfy your thirst. It cannot quench your innermost thirst.

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I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #12

Chapter title: None

12 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010125

ShortTitle: THUNK12

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(A seeker of light is the meaning of Douglas; Osho adds 'anand' to it, then addresses the first new sannyasin.)

Douglas also means a dweller in darkness, but both are aspects of one phenomenon: you seek light because you dwell in darkness.

The search for light begins with the experience that 'I am in darkness;' that's the first step. To know that one is ignorant is the beginning of wisdom.

The problem with millions of people is that they live in darkness but they are not aware of it. They think this is light. They live in ignorance but they go on hiding it in such ways that not only are others deceived, they themselves become deceived. They don't want to recognise that they are ignorant. It hurts, it goes against the ego. And the first step for a sannyasin is to recognise the real situation, to figure out where one is, what one is, to be very straight about it, howsoever it hurts. And it certainly hurts because for the whole of our life or perhaps for many lives we have believed in just the opposite.

The person who is suffering from an inferiority complex starts believing in some kind of superiority.

Just to hide inferiority we have to believe in the opposite. The person who is afraid of death starts believing in immortality, just to somehow cover up the fear.

Our beliefs are indicators; they show what we are hiding, they are just the opposite of what we are hiding. Somebody believes that he is light, love, bliss... if these are his beliefs then he must live in darkness, in hatred, in misery.

The sannyasin has to expose himself, he has to stand naked in the sun, because the journey can only begin if we know where we are -- because the journey begins from there. You cannot begin your journey from somewhere else -- where you are not. Wherever you are, even if you are in hell, the journey has to start there. And this brings great authenticity to realise, recognise, whatsoever we are. If it hurts it hurts; it is natural; it has to be accepted. But out of that acceptance begins the enquiry.

The two different paths: the path of belief and the path of enquiry. Belief does not change you; it simply gives you a false idea of something that you are not, of somewhere where you are not. It is a false phenomenon, it creates hypocrisy. It is good to recognise that you don't know; at least it is authentic, sincere. And then don't start believing -- that kills enquiry. Enquiry means going into existence without any belief, discarding all beliefs. And almost half the work is done, half the journey is complete in the first step.

And there are only two steps, not more than that.

One step is to discard all beliefs because they are not your experiences; howsoever beautiful they are they have to be discarded for the simple reason that they are not your experiences. Once you have discarded all beliefs the second step is just of waiting, silently waiting, with the deep trust that whenever the right time 1/08/07

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comes It is going to happen.

The first step has to be taken by you, the second is taken by existence itself. So nothing can be done from your side, you can only wait in a receptive mood. And when your receptivity is total it happens. It always happens, it is never done. And then life becomes full of light and full of bliss and full of godliness.

Then all those beliefs that you have been carrying for centuries suddenly become realities, but now they are not beliefs -- you know.

Belief is irrelevant in any case. If you don't know, it is irrelevant; if you know, it is not needed. If you know, there is no question of believing and if you don't know what is the point of believing? In any situation belief as such is wrong. Enquiry is right.

A sannyasin is an explorer, an enquirer into the ultimate reality of one's own being and the being of the whole.

(God is less a personality and more a presence, a perfume, Osho reminds us.) The flower has a form, a personality. The fragrance is formless, it has no personality. It is there, it exists, but it exists not in a fixed form, it exists in a formless way. And that's what god is, a godliness. And the experience of this fragrance comes through meditation. There is no other way, there never has been, there never will be.

The really religious person has only one thing to do, and that is to become meditative. And by using the very word 'meditation' there is a possibility of moving in a wrong direction -- because English has no exact word for 'dhyana'; meditation only comes close to it.

English has three words: concentration, contemplation, meditation. Concentration is of the mind. You focus your mind on a particular object, you exclude everything else, you just go on narrowing your vision.

Hence in concentration everything can become a distraction. A dog starts barking and you will be distracted because you were excluding everything and now the barking dog has come in. Hence the concentrator is always angry because small things -- a mosquito -- can disturb his concentration. Anything is capable of distracting you because you are doing something unnatural. Concentration is unnatural. It is enforced, a regimentation. It is something military-like; violently forcing the mind to remain pinpointed on one thing.

And the nature of the mind is constantly flowing, moving. It is natural for the mind to move, it is a dynamic process, and you are trying to make this dynamic process stagnant.

Because it is against nature any excuse and the mind will immediately jump in and start moving. Even if you force the mind to be still for long periods you will be sitting on a volcano. It will be like a small child: you can force the child by saying, 'I will not give you food today. Sit in the corner and sit silently.' He can do it. You can tell him 'Close your eyes,' and he can. But just see: he is fidgeting, he is screwing up his eyes, afraid to open them but with every desire to. You can see the turmoil that is inside, but he is somehow holding himself back. He is in great trouble.

That is the situation, when one is in the process of concentration.

Meditation is not concentration; it is not contemplation either. Contemplation means you are a little more fluid, a little more flowing, but you have to remain tethered to a particular subject. In concentration you have to remain pinpointed; in contemplation you have a little longer rope. You can roam around but you are tethered. For example, you are thinking about love. Mm? -- you can go on but you are only allowed to think about love. Certainly it has more freedom than concentration but still the freedom is limited. You are in a bigger prison, that's all, but you are imprisoned. And still distractions will come -- less than in concentration but they will still come.

In English even 'meditation' gives a wrong idea; it is as if you have to meditate upon something. But

'dhyana', the word in Sanskrit out of which the Japanese word 'zen' has come, means there is no object, no subject, no concentration, no contemplation. You are simply sitting silently, witnessing whatsoever is. A dog starts barking, you witness it -- it is not a distraction. Music is being played, you listen to it -- it is not a distraction because you are not making any effort to concentrate. You are all-inclusive, nothing is excluded.

The freedom is absolute. The only thing that has to be remembered is not to get identified with anything.

Listen to the music but don't become the music, remain a witness.

So meditation can be defined as witnessing, not getting identified. Now this is a totally different phenomenon; there is no question of concentration, no question of contemplation. You are just sitting by the side of the road and watching the traffic of the mind; allowing the mind whatsoever it wants to do fearlessly, allowing It wherever it wants to go -- to Timbuktu, to Toronto... wherever it wants to go. You just remain alert, aware, watchful. And then a miracle starts happening: you start becoming aware of godliness in 1/08/07

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everything. Even the barking of the dog starts having a divine quality to it. maybe the dog is a little bit upside-down, but still the dog is god -- just written wrongly, that's all. You have to read it the other way, otherwise there is no difference. And then everything starts having a new message, a new feel, a new splendour. When the whole is transformed through your witnessing it becomes fragrant. There is no flower but there is immense fragrance. You have entered into the unmanifest.

This is the way of entering into godliness. And once you have tasted of godliness you are an emperor.

Then the whole kingdom of god is yours.

(Her name, Carmen, means a song of joy, Osho tells the next sannyasin. He adds 'dhyan' to it to remind her that meditation is the necessary preparation before one's heart can explode in song of celebration.) Without meditation it is not possible. Without meditation one is bound to live in misery. One can cover it up, one can find a few consolations, one has to find a few consolations otherwise life would be intolerable. One has to remain occupied so that one does not feel the inner emptiness. And people find a thousand and one occupations just to keep themselves engaged. They are very much afraid to be left alone, to be left empty.

These are the people who have invented the proverb that an empty mind is the devil's workshop. It is not so. The empty mind is the only door to god. The mind which is continuously occupied with thoughts is the devil's workshop. Out of an empty mind no harm has ever happened. Adolf Hitler is not an empty mind, neither is Joseph Stalin, nor is Alexander the Great, nor Ivan the Terrible. These are people full of thoughts, great thoughts of changing the whole world, of bringing a revolution.

Buddha is an empty mind, Lao Tzu is an empty mind. And out of these empty people -- Buddha, Lao Tzu, Basho -- god has been experienced. They have been able to sing songs of joy. Their life is a festival, a festival of lights; their life is a continuum of celebration.

Meditation means making the mind empty, empty of all thoughts, discarding all thoughts, remembering that 'I am not these thoughts,' that 'I am separate,' that 'I am just a watcher, a watcher on the hills, looking at the valley.' Creating a distance between the thoughts and your awareness is the whole process of meditation.

The more distance there is, the better, because when the distance is great you cannot feed those thoughts and they start dying of their own accord. They need your co-operation, your continuous co-operation. And meditation means withdrawing your co-operation, you are not fighting with the thoughts, you are allowing them to move, to have their life, but you are no more co-operating, no more nourishing them, no more getting identified with them. And as you become unidentified, Just a watcher on the hills, they start dying.

They are no longer getting any feedback, they are no longer invited guests. They start turning away.

A moment comes when the mind is utterly empty -- and that is the moment when the heart explodes into songs, because songs need space and the mind is taking up the whole space with all kinds of junk and furniture, rotten furniture. But people are such that they call rotten furniture antique. They go on collecting antiques. The more rotten it is, the more old it is, the more valuable. And the mind is full of all kinds of nonsense -- relevant, irrelevant, contradictory. Nothing has to be chosen out of the mind, all has to be categorically rejected: I am not it.

In the East we have defined meditation as a process of neti-neti. The word 'neti-neti' means neither this nor that; 'I am neither this nor that.' One goes on denying: "I am neither this nor that,' and a moment comes when there is nothing to be denied any more. A vast emptiness surrounds you, infinite emptiness surrounds you. Only that much emptiness, that much space, can help the heart to open up for the first time. The heart needs infinite space, it needs the whole Sky, only then is there bliss and there is singing and there is dancing. And that singing, that dancing, that blissful state, is the ultimate goal of sannyas.

Your name, Carmen, exactly defines sannyas: a song of joy.

(To Peggy Osho speaks of the differences between moonlight and sunlight.) Sunlight is masculine, harsh, taut, passionate, aggressive, violent. Moonlight is feminine, soft, tender, receptive, loving. And this is not only poetry, even science has become aware that there is a difference between moonlight and sunlight.

Mystics have been aware for centuries: more people have become enlightened on the full-moon night than on any other night. I have never heard of anybody becoming enlightened in the day. Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu -- they all became enlightened in the night. It cannot be just coincidence.

Night is feminine, day is masculine and enlightenment happens only in a very receptive mood, in a very feminine mood. Whether one is a man or a woman does not matter, but one has to be receptive. You cannot 1/08/07

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conquer god, you can only invite and wait.

And the feminine mind knows how to wait, how not to be aggressive; the masculine mind is aggressive, in a hurry. That's the difference between the East and the West: the West is masculine, full of sun energy; the East is feminine, hence it looks slow, lazy. In the East there is no desire for speed. The East is ready to wait for eternity. The West is continuously after speed. Nobody bothers about where you are going, everybody is thinking about how to reach there quickly. Nobody is interested in where, for what. The whole interest is in it being quick.

In the East we are not interested in quickness, in hurry, in speed, but we are certainly interested in where we are going. How long it takes does not matter; our concern is 'What is our ultimate goal in life?' It may take eternity -- there is no worry about that.

The night represents, just as the East represents, the feminine. And the full-moon night is the most feminine of all nights. It is not only that more people become enlightened on the full-moon night, more people also go mad. Hence the word 'lunatic': it exists in all languages. It comes from 'lunar', moon-struck.

It is not only the ocean that is affected by the moon, our whole being is affected. And in fact eighty per cent of our body is ocean water. That eighty per cent is certainly affected.

The moon is symbolically significant. It simply receives the sunrays and transforms them. Through the moon a miracle happens: the hot energy of the sun becomes cool, the passionate sex-energy becomes compassionate is love. The whole process of the moon is alchemical.

Your name has two parts; one is love, the other is child of moonlight. Love is a child of moonlight. Love is basically feminine.

A man has a need for love once in a while but the woman lives in love for twenty-four hours a day. The man has many other interests also; one of his interests is love. But the woman has no other interest, her whole interest is love. And out of that love other interests may grow but they are part of love, they are not competitors to love. Hence a man can always sacrifice love for his art, for his music, for his meditation, for religion -- he can easily renounce love. It is only one of his interests, it is not his whole being. But a woman cannot do that.

It is because of this fact that you don't find so many women enlightened because nobody has worked out from the woman's side how to attain enlightenment. Enlightenment has remained basically a masculine interest. And of course when it is a masculine interest love has to be denied; love is an unnecessary distraction. So all the religions have been against love.

My effort here is multi-dimensional. I am trying to do many things here. Now is the time for love to find a way towards enlightenment so that women can also be Buddhas. It has not happened in the past.

You see Jesus and Mohammed and Mahavira and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu and Zarathustra, but they are all men. And unless women start becoming enlightened humanity will remain lopsided, the balance will not be there. And unless women become enlightened they cannot be really free, because enlightenment is the ultimate in freedom. The freedom of women cannot come through stupid movements like Women's Liberation. It can only come through a totally different approach: women should learn how to become enlightened. If we can create a few women Buddhas in the world the woman will be freed from all chains an d fetters.

And there is no difficulty at all. In fact nobody has bothered about it, nobody has thought about it.

Woman was never taken into consideration, she has been ignored. She has never been given the same status as man; she was thought to be just secondary. But because of this the whole of humanity has suffered.

Enlightenment is everybody's birthright.

Man can easily make an approach through meditation but the woman can more easily make an approach through love. Love is going to be her meditation. To be loving, totally loving, unconditionally loving -- that is going to be her path towards light, towards godliness. And out of love the woman will have a new birth.

She will become a child of light, a child of moonlight.

Your name is significant. And you can see that thousands of women are gathering around me. It has never happened before. It has always been a male-dominated quest. For years even Buddha denied entry to women, he was against it. He was afraid, and I can understand his fear. His whole method was male-oriented, and he was afraid that if women were allowed to become initiates, sannyasins, then the males would find ways to be distracted. They might start falling in love and the whole method would be disturbed, the whole process would be disturbed.

Mahavira, another enlightened man of the same category as Buddha, who established Jainism, said that women can be enlightened only when they are born again as men. In this life when they are women all that 1/08/07

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they can do is to work to be born as men, only then is enlightenment possible -- not through the body of a woman. First they have to attain the body of a man. And I can understand what he means by it His method is such that there is no space, no place, for love in it.

Mary Magdalene loved Jesus more than any of his disciples did but she was not accepted as an apostle; those twelve fools became apostles! And they all escaped when Jesus was crucified. He was taken down from the cross by three women and all the apostles escaped. But still those three women are not respected.

Even Jesus did not show any respect to women, even to his mother he did not show much respect.

Once his mother came to see him when he was talking to a crowd. The people said 'Your mother is waiting outside to see you,' and he said, 'Tell that woman that nobody is my father and nobody is my mother.' Tell that woman... This is ugly, but this has been the approach of all the male-oriented methodologies.

My effort is to create a path for women also, because unless they are free religiously they will not be free in other ways. Religious freedom is the central core of all other freedoms. And even in the twentieth century there are religions that don't allow women in their temples, they don't allow women to be priests; no woman can be a pope.

This is ugly, unnecessarily violent. It is something of the rotten past, still a hangover of the past. It has to be completely finished.

As meditation can lead to enlightenment, love can lead to enlightenment. They are different paths but they reach the same peak.

(While she had been awaiting her sannyas, Brigitta was sobbing, so much so that Shiva, Osho's bodyguard, saw fit to move over to her and soothe her, whereupon her weeping slowly subsided. She is quiet now as Osho shows her her new name: Amrit Sadhya.) The goal of sannyas is to go beyond time and to realise the timeless, the unchanging, the eternal. Only the eternal can be true; the momentary is only a reflection of the truth, it is not truth itself. And whatsoever we know in the world is momentary. Everything begins at a certain point in time and then ends at a certain point in time.

The search is for that which has no beginning and no end. Unless one has found that one cannot be contented, one cannot feel fulfilled.

So remember, that has to be found, and it can be found because it is not far away, it is within you.

Because we go on looking outside we go on missing. We have to look in and all that we have been missing will be found. The whole kingdom of god is within you.

(She closes her eyes and slowly raises her arms so they are stretched out, one on either side of her.) Good, Sadhya. How long will you be here? (If she makes a reply it is inaudible.) Be here forever. Good!

(Mind is a moron: it is always demanding more. Give it more and it asks for still more, Osho explains to Anutosha.)

The moment you go beyond the mind suddenly there is contentment, nothing is needed. All that is needed is already given, it is already the case. We have been provided with all that is needed; it is waiting inside. But the mind goes on searching outside. All that is needed is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so that we can look within, and there is suddenly fulfilment. It is not gradual, it happens in a single moment, not slowly. In a single blow all discontent disappears and there is immense peace. There is no question of wanting more because one cannot imagine there can be more. It is impossible to imagine that there can be more.

The whole thing is to shift the energy from the mind to consciousness. Mind means content, it is not consciousness. And consciousness is a separate entity, it is not content. It is like a mirror, reflecting whatsoever passes in front of it. Many things pass, they are contents in the mirror; the them. When nothing passes the mirror is empty. It has no content of its own, it is pure nothingness. And that nothingness is our reality. And not only is it our reality, it is the reality, the unmanifest reality of the whole.

Once you have entered into the unmanifest within yourself you have entered into the world of god. And the by-product is immense contentment, bliss, fulfilment, the feeling that one has arrived home.

(Dorothy, billed as an astrologer from the States, is a plump, warm-faced woman, rather older than the majority of sannyas-takers. Osho gives her the name Anand Nityama.) Anand means bliss. Nityama means eternal.

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Happiness is momentary, bliss is eternal; hence happiness always brings misery. Before happiness there is misery, after happiness there is misery, and when happiness is there, deep down you know it is not going to last, hence there is misery. Before there is misery, after there is misery and in the middle too. So happiness remains just a very thin superficial thing, very superficial; deep down you know that it is going, it is going, it is already gone. You try to cling to it but it is impossible to keep it; it has to go.

But bliss is without any beginning and without any end, and unless we discover bliss our whole life is a wastage; chasing after happiness is an exercise in sheer futility. If the same energy is put in the search for bliss one can find it very easily. And even now it is not too late, because it is not a question of time, it is a question of totality. It can be attained in a single moment. Sometimes it has happened that a person has attained at the last moment of his life. That's my observation about Jesus himself, that he attained it at the last moment.

When he was put on the cross he was not yet a Christ, he had not yet realised it. And then he said to god

'Have you forsaken me?' That shows there must have been some desire, some expectation; he must have been waiting for god to do some miracle. That shows mind, expectation, desire. And there is frustration when he shouts 'Have you forsaken me?' There is frus-tration, there is anger. He feels as if god has forgotten him, completely forgotten him. Is this the moment to forget him? He has sacrificed his whole life and is nothing happening, no miracle? No hand has appeared from heaven to save him, to show the world that he is the son of god.

There is anger, there is complaint, but immediately he understood. He was a man of immense intelligence; he quickly understood, at the last moment he understood and he relaxed and he asked for forgiveness and he said 'Let thy will be done -- not mine but thine. Let thy will be done, let thy kingdom come.' The complaint has disappeared; there is no anger, no frustration, no desire, no expectation. He has surrendered totally. In that very moment when he surrendered his mind he became enlightened. It happened in a single moment.

That's why there are many statements of Jesus which are not those of an enlightened man -- because he had no time to make any statements after his enlightenment. Buddha lived for forty years after his enlightenment; enough time to say the unsayable. What Jesus said and what is recorded in the Bible is not exactly the truth because he himself had not known it. He was coming closer, but even if you are close to truth it is not truth. There is nothing like approximate truth. Even the approximate is a lie.

So there are many things about Jesus which cannot be explained as being of an awakened man. He behaved many times like an unawakened person and the reason is that he became enlightened at the very last moment.

I am saying this to you because now you are old and you will be getting older, so don't get depressed, don't feel hopeless. Even at the last moment it can happen.

In India we have a proverb: If a person gets lost in the morning and can manage to reach home even by the evening when the sun is setting, it is not too late; he has not to be thought of as lost.

There is enough time, there is always enough time, but intensity is needed. So now withdraw your energy from all non-essential things and put the whole of that energy into becoming silent, loving.

Remember these two words, silence and love. Be silent as far as you are concerned and become loving as far as the world is concerned. Let there be a synthesis of silence and love. And I feel you will be able to manage it.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #13

Chapter title: None

13 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010135

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ShortTitle: THUNK13

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(There are certain experiences in which one comes closest to knowing godliness; they are like four pillars of a temple, Osho tells Anand Michiel.)

Without these four the temple cannot exist. And they are all interrelated; if you create one the other three follow of their own accord. One need not think about all four, just choose one.

And for you bliss is going to be the choice. Become more and more cheerful -- don't miss any opportunity. People are very stupid, they never opportunity to be miserable. Even if there opportunity they create it. If they cannot find one they invent one, they fantasise. If it is not in the present they start searching in the past; if it is not in the past they will think of the future, but somehow they have to find something to worry about, to be miserable about. Then there is no wonder that the world is full of misery.

The same should be done about bliss: never miss an opportunity -- and there are a thousand and one opportunities every day. Once you are alert you will be surprised how many opportunities you have been missing up to now. At each step there are opportunities. One need not invent them, one need not imagine them, they are always coming -- god goes on showering. But we are accustomed to a wrong attitude, a wrong approach, a negative approach towards life. We choose the thorns and we ignore the flowers.

The sannyasin changes the whole gestalt; he chooses the flowers, he ignores the thorns. If you choose the thorns and ignore the flowers, sooner or later there will be no flowers for you, only thorns. Even flowers will become thorns because your whole approach will be such that even a flower will only remind you of some thorns. And the opposite happens: if you choose the flowers even thorns remind you of beautiful flowers. By and by thorns disappears the whole of life becomes full of flowers; it becomes a springtime.

And then god is not far away, he is very close. Once bliss starts happening you can feel him closer o than the heart, closer than your own heartbeat.

(Osho adds 'dhyan' to Peter's name.)

People without meditation are making their houses on the shifting sands of time. Those houses are bound to collapse and then there is misery, frustration, failure, darkness, gloom. And if all the houses that you create go on collapsing, naturally you feel depressed. Then life is no more a celebration, it is no more a song of joy. It is just a scream of deep pain.

But the house of life can be built on a rock, the rock of eternity -- that's what meditation makes available to you.

Meditation is the jump from time to no-time, from the momentary to the eternal. It is the greatest revolution possible and it can happen just by changing your focus. It is not an impossible task; all that is needed is a little understanding.

You may be standing before a wall and of course you cannot see the beautiful sunset outside. You have to understand that you cannot see through the wall so move to a window. And don't stand before a window if it is closed, open it! Or move to the door and open it! Or go outside the door. Standing before a wall don't expect to see stars, the moon, flowers, birds, people. You cannot see anything. Standing before a wall you will simply become bored, and boredom is one of the greatest problems every human being faces. But it is just because you go on standing in the same place. You don't learn to shift your focus, change your place.

The mind is like a wall. Meditation is an open window, a door. Mind is the thick wall; there are thousands of thoughts, layer upon layer. It is impossible to penetrate that wall. It is thicker than any wall can be.

Just move from mind to no-mind. And the strategy of movement is simple, very simple: just watch your thoughts moving. Don't make any judgement about those thoughts, don't call them good or bad, don't make 1/08/07

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any evaluation. Remain indifferent, as if it is none of your concern. Let them pass; good and bad, alike, relevant, irrelevant, all alike.

If you can remain in this indifferent state you are in for a great surprise: as your indifference towards the mind grows deeper, becomes rooted, the mind starts disappearing, the wall starts disappearing; a window opens, a door opens. Suddenly you can see the splendour of life and the eternity of life. Time has been transcended. And just a single glimpse is enough. Then you know the secret, then the key is in your hands.

Then you can go on moving deeper and deeper into that experience.

Meditation is the beginning, samadhi is the end. Sannyas begins with meditation and ends in absolute ecstasy.

(To Michael from America -- billed as a Kung Fu teacher and a rabbi -- Osho talks of love and of god.

There is no proof for god logically, intellectually. Intellectually the atheist is in a far better position; the theist is bound to get defeated because the theist has no proofs for god. The atheist can disprove all the proofs that the theist supplies, but the theist is right and the atheist is not right because god is not a question of intellectual argumentation, it is an existential experience -- just like love.

You cannot prove that it is. If somebody insists, it will be impossible to prove. You fall in love with a woman and she insists if she is logical -- which is rare and that is good... If she is philosophical she can create trouble for you. She can ask for the proof: 'What proof have you got that you are really in love? And what is love in the first place?' Intellectually you cannot convince her. You will be at a loss, you will not be able to answer. Whatsoever you say will look absurd.

One of the great Christian mystics, Tertullian, is right when he says 'I believe in god because he cannot be proved. I believe in god because god is absurd: credo qua absurdum.' It is one of the greatest statements ever made, and only a mystic can make such a daring statement I believe in god because he cannot be proved.

Life needs a few things which cannot be proved. Only because of those few things does life become meaningful. Things that can be proved never give life meaning. Science cannot impart meaning to life; it proves everything. No scientific statement is unproved. It is proved logically, intellectually, experimentally.

You can experiment in thousands of ways and the result will be the same again and again without any exception. But science does not make life meaningful. It makes it comfortable, it makes life convenient, cosy, it gives you all kinds of gadgets. But they are all on the outside; deep inside you don't have any meaning. Meaning needs something more than proof, something more than experiment. Meaning needs experience, not experiment.

God and love are on exactly the same plane. Begin with love because that is more natural. And if one can love that means one is ready to go into the illogical, one is courageous enough to put logic aside. Then in the next step one can move towards god, one can agree with Tertullian.

Love will give you the first experience of something that transcends intellect. So the real mystics don't give any proofs for god; the people who give proofs for god are theologians, not mystics, thinkers but not mystics; they have not experienced. And those theologians have created great trouble, unnecessary trouble.

In fact it is because of them and their stupidity that the atheist has always won the case. They provide things which he can disprove and easily disprove. I have never come across a single proof for god that cannot be disproved very easily, even by a child. Just a little intelligence is needed. The theologian has played into the hands of the atheist; he has not served god, he has not served religion. In fact he has done a great dis-service.

The mystic is in a far better situation. He will laugh at all the arguments both for and against. His existence is the only proof, his love is the only proof, his blissfulness is the only proof, his silence is the only proof. He can invite the atheist and he can tell the atheist to be with him: maybe at some moment you are open and something from me can enter you and trigger a process. But more than that is not possible.

If theologians stop proving god, atheists will disappear from the world because they will not have anything to disprove. They cannot disprove the mystic -- that is impossible -- because he never gives any argument. To disprove the mystic they will have to meditate. And once a person meditates, he himself will become a mystic.

My whole effort here is against theology. I am all for love and absolutely against logic.

(Compassion is the only criterion to judge whether one is a meditator, Buddha said. It is so, affirms Osho, because meditation happens in the most private recesses of your being.) 1/08/07

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It is so absolutely private that you cannot invite anybody into your world of meditation. It is not possible at all.

Meditation means your absolute aloneness, where only your consciousness exists, and there is no other so you cannot take anybody there. But meditation starts affecting your behaviour, it starts affecting your actions, your relationships, it affects everything. And slowly slowly whatsoever you do has something of your meditation in it -- and that is compassion. You start doing things out of great love, love for the whole existence.

So meditation is the inner phenomenon and compassion is the outer expression of it. Because of this a great calamity has also happened: knowing that compassion is inevitably there when meditation happens, people have tried to cultivate compassion. And that can be done, but it does not bring meditation. That cultivated compassion remains superficial, not even skin-deep. And that is what has happened to Christian missionaries for these past twenty centuries; they have been trying to do service and to love and to help humanity, to be compassionate, but they don't know anything of meditation; hence their compassion is plastic, synthetic, it has no roots. Just scratch any missionary a little bit and you will find an ordinary human being or even worse.

You can paint the circumference but that does not change the centre. But if the centre changes -- and the centre cannot be painted... The surface can be painted but the centre is not available; you cannot paint it. It is so deep inside that nothing can be done to falsify it. It always remains in its truth.

Once you have experienced your centre in silence, once you have realised yourself, the circumference is bound to change, you need not change it. Hence I am against creating any kind of character. Cultivating a character is superficial. It deceives others, It deceives you -- and life is too precious to waste in such stupid things as deceiving others and deceiving yourself. Death will come and destroy all your hypocrisy and you will be left alone and then except for meditation nothing can be of help. Only meditation can allow you to enjoy your aloneness. The meditator dies blissfully because he has really died before the ordinary death ever happens.

The moment he knows his centre he knows that he is not the body, not the mind either. That day the real death happens and he knows that by leaving the body nothing dies. He will be moving into a vaster space, he will be becoming far richer than he has ever been. He will be really freed from a prison. And when you feel this eternity, this joy of being part of eternity and the whole, naturally your life starts showing compassion for all those who are still struggling in the darkness, groping in darkness and who cannot find their way. But this is nothing cultivated, it happens naturally. When character comes naturally it has a tremendous beauty.

My sannyasins has to begin with the centre and leave the circumference; don't touch it. Once you have known your being you will see the miracle happening of its own accord: your life will become compassion.

Instead of passion it will be transformed into compassion.

(To Majsan from Sweden, Osho gives the name Prem Suvasa, which means love and perfume or fragrance.)

Love is a flowering, the flowering of your consciousness. The moment your consciousness opens its petals great fragrance is released. And once that fragrance is released one feels tremendously contented, fulfilled, because one has come to the ultimate peak of flowering. To remain a seed is to remain in misery; to become a flower is to become blissful. Then one has attained; one's potential is transformed into a reality.

That's the meaning of realisation: that which was only a possibility has become actual, a reality. Life has not been in vain, you have not missed the opportunity. One feels one has come home, and that very feeling gives a fragrance to the person. And those who are sensitive will feel it, those who are open will immediately recognise it. In fact whenever somebody's inner lotus opens people start coming from faraway places. In some mysterious way the vibe starts reaching the farthest corners of the earth. It has always been so.

That is the significance of the story in Jesus' life that when he was born three wise men from the East went in search of the child. They were guided by a star in the sky. Now, this is a parable. Stars cannot guide anybody. They have their own orbit; they cannot leave their orbit and start guiding somebody. But the meaning is great. The meaning is that some unknown force was guiding them, some miraculous magnetism was pulling them. It was as if a light was guiding, a star was guiding them. They felt that somebody for whom they has been waiting had been born. From different parts of the East those three wise men started moving towards the place where this miracle had happened.

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The same 1s the story about Buddha. When he was born a very great old sage came down from the Himalayas. He must have been more than one hundred years old. He was well-known all over the country, and for seventy years he had not left his cave in the Himalayas. And suddenly he came down. Buddha was born just on the border of Nepal and India, just below the Himalayas. The sage came running.

The father of Buddha fell at his feet because he was such a great, well-known saint and he said 'This is a great blessing. Why have you come?' The sage said 'Where is the child? I have come to see him because when he becomes a Buddha I will not be here.'

And the child was brought, just a one-day-old child. The sage touched the feet of the child and wept.

The king was very much puzzled and worried too -- why was he weeping? He asked 'What is the significance of your weeping?' The sage said 'Don't worry -- I am weeping out of joy and out of sadness too: joy for the child that a great Buddha is born and sad for myself because when he is really an opened lotus...

Right now he is just a bud. Only people like me can recognise him,' the old man said, 'but when he is recognised by thousands of people I will not be here -- I am crying for that. I am happy that he is born and I am unhappy because I am going to die; this is my last year on earth. That's why I rushed quickly: I may fall ill, I may not even be able to see the child, but I am happy that I have seen him. Although he is still a bud and it will take time, it is absolutely certain that he will become one of the greatest lotuses ever. His perfume will pervade humanity for centuries.'

My sannyasins have to learn the art of opening their consciousness. And one of the keys is love. To you I give the key of love. Be loving and that will help your opening. And everybody is carrying the perfume, it just needs the right effort to be released. Once it is released there is great joy not only in you, the whole existence rejoices in it.

(Prem Sagari is Lena's new name. Be miserly in love and you'll be miserable, Osho begins.) Love brings bliss if it is vast. If love is one-dimensional it becomes a bondage; if it is multi-dimensional it becomes a freedom. Almost everybody loves in his own way but it more or less creates hell. Nothing is wrong with the energy called love; what is wrong is that we are trying to focus our love in a certain direction, pin-pointing it -- which is unnatural. Then it creates jealousy, possessiveness, conflict, struggle, because the other is also doing the same and both are trying to do something unnatural. Humanity has lived under this shadow for centuries so it has become our second nature.

Love that can create great bliss is only creating hell. And many people are fed up with it and it has not been so just now; for centuries many people have felt the misery and they have renounced the world, but that is not the solution.

The solution is in a different directions love should not be confined and should not be conditional. It should be like the fragrance of a flower which spreads in all directions. It has no address; it is not that it has to reach a particular person; it is unaddressed. And when your love is also like an unaddressed fragrance you will be surprised: it only brings bliss it creates paradise around you.

My effort here is to help your love become greater. All the so-called religions have been trying just the opposite. Seeing that love creates misery they teach the renouncing of love. I also see that love creates misery but seeing that I teach the renouncing of limitations. Let your love become unlimited.

The so-called religious traditions and my approach begin from the same point but we move in different directions. They think it is love that is creating the trouble; I don't see that it is love that is creating the trouble. It is the limitation that you impose upon love -- that is creating trouble. Renouncing love is not the solution. Renounce the limitation. Just be loving. Let love be a spontaneous, natural phenomenon. Don't make it a relationship; relate but don't become confined to relationship.

The moment you free your love from limitations you are free. The moment your love is free your very being is free because your being consists of love, your soul consists of love.

(To a middle-aged woman, a child psychologist, Osho gives the name Chaitanyo -- pure consciousness.) Consciousness is impure if it is full of thoughts, desires, memories, fantasies, dreams. When all these contents are dropped, when consciousness is just empty of everything, it is pure. And in that purity god is experienced. That purity is the basic qualification for experiencing truth, god, liberation. The function of meditation is to destroy the content, to help you get rid of all the contents.

For example, if you watch your mind you will be able to see very easily that it is pointless to go on carrying the past; it is no more. It is non-existential, it is an unnecessary burden, useless luggage. And it goes on becoming bigger every day because the past goes on becoming bigger. As you live more 1/08/07

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experiences, more memories accumulate, and it becomes a mountain -- really heavy. People are crushed under it.

The moment you see that it is useless you can drop it. It is not clinging to you, you are clinging to it, so you simply take your hands away. Then the next thing that comes through watchfulness is that you become aware that the future is not yet so why be bothered about it? When it comes we will see, we will respond.

There is no need to be worried about it -- it may never come or it may come in such a way that you cannot imagine it right now. It is unpredictable. Whatsoever you think about it, ninety-nine per cent of it is never going to happen. And wasting your energy for that one per cent is sheer foolishness.

Once you see it you withdraw from the future -- and the past and the future are one hundred per cent of your mind, the whole content. Fifty per cent belongs to the past, fifty per cent to the future. In the present there is no content. If one is just herenow then consciousness is empty.

You can see, whenever you look in your mind either something from the past is moving or something from the future. As far as this very moment is concerned consciousness is pure. And the meditator by slowly slowly dropping the past and the future starts settling in the present.

To live herenow is to live a religious life. That is pure consciousness and out of pure consciousness whatsoever happens is virtue. Whatsoever you do is right. Whatsoever your response you will never repent for it, you will never feel guilty for it.

(Full of light is the meaning of Gudrun's new name -- Jyotirmaya,) Man ordinarily lives in darkness. We are born in darkness. In fact darkness is a basic need in the beginning. There is darkness in the mother's womb. It is needed because light will be a disturbance for the growing child. The child is so soft, so tender; it needs velvety darkness to surround it. And the child sleeps for twenty-four hours a day in the mother's womb: light will disturb his sleep, and sleep is a must. In those nine months the child is growing so much that there needs to be no disturbance, otherwise energy will be diverted. So darkness helps the child to remain relaxed.

Everything in the beginning grows in darkness. You put the seed in the ground you dig a little bit, then you put the seed in. If you just throw it on the ground then it may not grow because there is too much light there. It needs the womb, the womb of the earth to grow in -- there it is dark. Once the seed starts growing it starts rising above the earth. Then it starts reaching towards the sun, towards the moon, towards the stars.

The child is born physically he comes into light but spiritually he still remains in darkness. And that darkness can be dispelled only through meditation; hence meditation gives you a second birth. The first birth is physical, the second is spiritual. And that is the whole meaning of initiation into sannyas: it has to become a second birth. Physically you are in light, now you need another birth too -- so that psychologically, spiritually also, you are in full light. And there is no difficulty in it, it is just that people are not aware of it. They never think about it, they have never bothered about it, so they remain only physical beings. They never grow spiritually.

While you are here concentrate your whole energy on meditation so that you can learn the secret. It is a knack. Just by doing all the meditations here, one day you will find which meditation fits with you. And the moment it fits something clicks. Suddenly you know 'This is the method for me.' And the knowing is so absolute and categorical that no doubt ever arises. Then move with that meditation, then let that meditation become the central-most thing in your life, because you will be born into light through it.

Light is another name for god. And to be born into that light is the whole purpose of sannyas. One moment you are born into that light you are enlightened. That is the meaning of the word 'enlightened' --

because to be in that light means to become that light. One melts and merges and becomes one with it. You are not two; you are not the seer and the light is not the seen. You become one, you are the light.

The last words of Buddha on the earth were 'Be a light unto yourself.'

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #14

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Chapter title: None

14 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010145

ShortTitle: THUNK14

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Osho explains the significance of the name, Swami Dhyan Kurt.) One of the greatest problems that humanity always has to face is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge pretends to be wisdom -- it is not. But it pretends in a very cunning and clever way. It has deceived millions of people. And once a person becomes deceived by his knowledge he loses all track of wisdom, because they are polar opposites.

The direction of knowledge is just the opposite of the direction of wisdom. Knowledge is external and wisdom is internal. To seek knowledge one has to go outside oneself and to seek wisdom one has to go in.

Knowledge is information, wisdom is transformation. Wisdom does not happen through collecting information; it happens through getting rid of the mind itself. Mind is nothing but the accumulation of knowledge, borrowed knowledge. It comes from books, from schools, colleges, universities, from parents, from society, from tradition, church, priests -- from everywhere except from your inner source.

The more you become burdened with knowledge the farther away is your inner source of wisdom. My work here consists in helping you to get rid of all this burden, to remove all these rocks of knowledge so that the springs of your own wisdom can start flowing. And that's what meditation is all about. Getting rid of the mind is meditation, and the moment you are free of mind wisdom explodes.

Wisdom is light, wisdom is silence, wisdom is divine, wisdom is bliss and wisdom is all that one's heart longs for. It fulfils you totally.

(Love is wisdom -- that is the meaning of Premgyan, Osho tells the former Patricia.) The sannyasins has to shift his whole energy from the head to the heart. It is not as difficult as it seems in the beginning because the heart is a natural phenomenon and head is a social institution. To go back to nature is never difficult because it is natural. In fact it is more difficult to go to the unnatural. That's why the society needs every child to go through school, college, university -- almost one-third of life is wasted -- to force the energy towards an unnatural centre, the head, and to create barriers so that the energy does not go through the heart.

The natural process is that the energy comes from the being to the heart and from the heart to the head.

This is the natural process, and if the energy comes through the heart then the heart remains the master and the head becomes the servant. The whole trick of so-called education is to avoid the heart completely and to create a direct track between the being and the head and to ignore the heart.

It has been done; the heart is left by the side and the energy starts moving from the being to the head.

Then the head becomes the master. And the head as a servant is a beautiful serv an t but as a master it is very ugly.

My effort here is to undo what society has done to you. But it is not as difficult as society's work is; it does not take twenty-five years. It can happen even in a single moment. It only needs a clear-cut understanding.

Just the moment you understand what the society has done to you, you can immediately open your heart and the energy starts flowing through it, because that is the natural way, it is how it should be. If the society had not interfered it would have been that way. But the society does not leave anybody uninterfered with.

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he is efficient, a good servant, obedient, a slave -- and that's what society needs: slaves, efficient workers, good servants. The society does not need masters.

One of the great mystics of the West was Dionysius. He has been very much misunderstood in the West.

If he had been is the East he would have been one of the Buddhas. We would have respected him as much as we have respected Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, not a bit less. But in the West he was laughed at for the simple reason that there was no context in which to understand him. He was a very rare exception; he had no relevance to the society in which he was living. He was a contemporary of Alexander the Great.

He lived naked, and once he was caught by a few robbers. Looking at his beautiful body, they thought that it would be good to sell him as a slave, he would fetch good money. In those days all over the world men and women were sold in the marketplace like cattle; they were auctioned. Those robbers were talking together. Dionysius was lying by the side of the river enjoying the sun and he asked 'What are you whispering? What is the matter? What do you want? My feeling is that you are interested in me,' he said to them. They felt a little embarrassed and they confessed, 'Yes, that is true. We are thinking to catch you but we are afraid: although there are eight of us and only one of you, you are so strong that we are afraid that we may not be able to.' He laughed, he said 'Don't be worried. What do you want to catch me for?' They said

'We want to sell you in the slave market.' He said 'I am coming with you. There is no need to catch me. I am a free man, I am coming out of my own will.'

They had never seen such a man! He walked with them like an emperor and they looked like servants!

And he was ordering them 'Do this and do that.' He was a natural master and they were following his orders

-- what else could you do? He was so strange a man -- they had never come across such a man. They were a little bit puzzled. When they reached the marketplace he stood in the middle of the market and shouted loudly, 'A master has come to be sold -- is any slave ready to purchase me?' That's exactly what he said: 'For the first time a master has come to be sold -- is any slave ready to accept me?'

Once your heart is opened even if you are imprisoned you remain a master, even if you are enslaved you remain a master. Your mastery is so deep that nothing can take it away from you. But if the heart is not functioning you may be very rich, you may even be the emperor of a big country, but you are a slave.

So you have to do this miracle: shift your energy from the head to the heart.

Anand means bliss. Laura means victory; it also means immortality.

Victory and immortality are two sides of the same coin. The moment you know your immortality you are victorious, never before it. To think that you are the body is to remain in defeat. To think that you are the mind is to remain in the dark night of the soul. And to believe that you are the body and the mind is the root cause of all misery. The moment you become aware that you are something transcendental to body-mind, something more, something plus, immediately great bliss descends on you. The bliss is the beginning of your victory.

As you go deeper into this transcendental consciousness, the more you become aware of your eternity, your timelessness. You were here before birth, you will be here after death; death happens only to the body-mind structure, not to you. It is impossible to die.

Consciousness is immortal. And unless one knows it how can one live joyously? When death is the end of everything, everything becomes pointless. All your creativity is pointless if death is the end of it all, all your love is pointless if death is the end of it all. All your joys are nothing but occupations to somehow keep yourself occupied so that you can avoid the constant knock of death on the door. But for how long can one avoid? Whether you listen to the knock or not one day death opens the door and walks in. It does not even ask 'May I come in, sir?' It simply comes in.

And it does not give you a single moment to prepare. You cannot take anything of whatsoever you have accumulated and for which you wasted your whole life. Death simply dismantles your whole life's effort.

With death one cannot feel meaning in life. If everything ends in the grave, what does it matter whether you were a saint or a sinner, whether you were world -- famous or just a nobody, whether you were a president of a country or just a peon in an office -- it does not matter, it is all the same. Death equalises everybody. It comes like a bulldozer and goes on equalising, making everybody flat on the ground.

But if there is something more than that in you which defies death then life has meaning. Then what you are doing is significant. Then each act has value because each act is coming out of the immortal source, out of your being. It represents you. And it not only represents you, it also reveals you -- to others and to yourself. It is a manifestation of your being. Then your creativity is your manifestation. Then whatsoever you are doing has significance in the context of eternity.

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Then to be a sinner or to be a saint makes a difference, then to be a creator or a destroyer makes a difference. Then the grave is not the end and death is just superficial. In the depths you are deathless, timeless.

Victory is possible only if you come to know the deathless in you -- and it can be known. That's what sannyas is for. The whole search, the enquiry is for that which abides forever. Only a sannyasin can be victorious.

(He adds 'Sambuddha' to Flor's name so altogether his sannyas name means enlightenment is man's flowering.)

Man is a flower and unless he opens up he remains unaware of his own beauty, of the great gift that god has given to him. He remains unaware of the inner treasures which he has been carrying all along. He remains unaware of the kingdom of god within. The moment the blossoming happens and the flower opens up, you are transported into another world. Your life becomes full of light, joy, beauty.

Flor also means a flower of beauty. Not just a beautiful flower but a flower of beauty itself. And only a Buddha, one who has come to the total realisation of his being, can say 'I have blossomed, flowering has happened to me. I have come to the peak, my potential is actual. Now nothing is left. I have lived my life to the utmost.' And only when you have lived your life to the utmost and your whole potential is transformed into a reality are you worthy of god, never before it.

So many people seek and search for god without ever bothering about whether they are ready to meet him, whether they are ready so that he would want to meet them. They never think about that. My emphasis is: forget all about god, just prepare yourself. Whenever the time is ripe and you are ready god is going to happen to you. You need not bother, you need not even think about god; your thinking is not going to help.

Prepare, and to prepare means to rejoice, to blossom, to dance, to sing, to love, to meditate, so all the dimensions, all the petals of your being, start opening.

The eastern symbol of ultimate flowering is a one thousand petalled lotus. The one thousand simply represents it s multi-dimensionality and the fact that those dimensions cannot be counted. They are infinite.

Once you start opening the opening goes on and on; you go on opening more and more. And a moment comes when you are just pure fragrance. The flower disappears, only fragrance remains. That is the flower of beauty. The flower is no more there but only an experience, just like a fragrance -- formless.

It has happened only to very few people in the world -- unfortunately, because it could have happened to everybody, whosoever has ever lived. It is everybody is right but very few people ever try to make it a reality.

This initiation into sannyas should become a new beginning in your life so that you can gather all your energies and pour your whole being into flowering.

(His name, Dan, is from the name Daniel -- the Old Testament prophet who was thrown into a den of lions -- Osho tells the next for sannyas.)

The story is that he emerged unharmed. To me it cannot be a historical fact but it is far more important than any historical fact can ever be. It is a parable.

Lions are not so understanding. If man is not then what can you expect from lions? Because he was thrown in by men... And he emerged unharmed. It is not historically possible, unless the lions were not hungry at all, because lions don't kill they are not hungry; it is only man who kills without being hungry.

I have heard: once a missionary was caught by cannibals in an African jungle. They all are gathered together around him -- the second world war was going on -- and they said 'We are puzzled -- you are killing so many people, how do you manage to eat so many people?' He said 'What? Do you think we are cannibals?' They said 'Then it becomes even more puzzling. If you are not eating them, why are you killing them unnecessarily? We are far better: we kill only when we are hungry. For example, today, we have not killed you, we are preserving you because our feast day is to come. We are far more sane; you go on killing millions of people for no reason at all -- and you condemn us poor cannibals. We kill only when we are hungry but you kill without any reason, as if killing itself is an end?'

A cannibal cannot understand our wars.

Unless the lion was absolutely fed up with food and he was not interested at all this could not have happened. And I don't think that the people who threw Daniel into the den would have thrown him to lions who were fully fed; he must have been thrown to hungry lions.

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unharmed -- that simply means he remained undisturbed. His silence was not disturbed, his bliss was not disturbed. He remained centred and grounded, unshaken, unafraid. That's the true meaning of emerging unharmed. He proved that he knows the truth so he is not worried about the body or the mind, about life. He is not at all worried because he knows some higher life. He has experienced something higher, that's why he is ready to sacrifice his life.

You can sacrifice your life only when you know something higher than life, otherwise you cannot sacrifice it And then it is worth sacrificing, rather than sacrificing your truth. Nobody can sacrifice truth if one knows it. One will easily let go of life because any way life is going to end. Where it ends, in your bed or in a den of lions, does not matter; in fact a den of lions is a far better place than just dying in your bed. At least the hungry lions will enjoy it And Daniel must have enjoyed.

If I were to write the story I would write it in a different way. He must have enjoyed the fact that at least his body was being used and the poor lions were are enjoying it. He must have participated in their joy, he must have celebrated with them. And he would have remained unconcerned, his coolness unaffected.

But that is not the interpretation that Jews and Christians go on putting on Daniel. They think he did a miracle.

The Bible has fallen into wrong hands; it needs mystics to interpret it. It is being interpreted by stupid theologians who cannot understand the deeper meaning of things, for whom everything, if it is true, has to be historical. In fact just the reverse is the cases whatsoever is historical is just factual; it has nothing to do with truth. Truth is something higher than history because truth is something higher than time. History is time and truth is not temporal; it is timeless, it is eternal.

But it is a beautiful name. Remember that the truth has to be found so that even life becomes insignificant compared to truth. -- How long will you be here? -- Four months. -- That's very good.

This is the den of lions (laughter)... and you will not emerge unharmed! (Dan throws back his head and laughs boisterously.)

Good, Daniel. Good

(Anand Pratito means the experience of bliss, Osho tells Maria from Belgium.) Bliss is not a concept, an idea. It is an experience, something existential, not just intellectual.

We have become so accustomed to thinking of everything in terms of the mind that we go on missing the higher realities. Bliss, love, beauty, truth, god -- these are the higher realities, higher than the intellect.

The intellect cannot grasp them. If you want to grasp them you have to go higher than intellect.

Nobody can understand love without being in love. Yes, about love you can collect many many things but about love is about love; it is not love itself. About god much information is available, but to know about god is not to know god. Remember that distinction.

Many are living in deception. They collect information about bliss, about god, about truth, about meditation and they become so hypnotised by their information that they forget that those things have to be experienced. Unless you experience you have not known.

My approach here is totally existential. Intellect is being used as a stepping stone, as a ladder, to help you to go beyond it, but it is not the end, only a means.

This has to be constantly remembered, otherwise my words can become dangerous to you. If you cling to those words, if you start collecting those words, you will forget the real purpose of being here. The purpose of being here is to experience.

Avoid the old habit of getting addicted to words and always go on reminding yourself that the purpose of being here is to experience. And then it is possible; it is not as arduous as people think.

All great realities can be experienced. Everybody has the potential, the capacity, the opportunity, but if you become addicted to words you lose everything.

(Truth is the experience of absolute silence -- that's the meaning of Satyam Mauna's name.) All that a sannyasin has to learn is the art of being silent, calm and quiet. And the secret is to be watchful of your mind.

Nothing has to be done with the mind -- no fight, no struggle, no effort to change, just watch it without any prejudice. And just by watching, the mind starts disappearing, evaporating. watching creates enough heat for the mind to evaporate.

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desires, memories, ambitions. The same energy comes as anger, violence, destruction. When you watch, the co-operation is broken, the bridge is broken. Your energy remains with you, it does not move into the mind and you become a reservoir of energy. Great heat is created by it and the mind simply evaporates.

The moment there is no mind there is silence, and in that silence truth is experienced. And truth liberates; liberates you from all fear, from all misery, liberates you from all boundaries, limitations, and gives you the freedom of the whole sky. You suddenly become a bird on the wing.

Love and gratitude -- that is the meaning of Prem Anugraha and the two things that a sannyasin needs.

Have love for the whole existence and deep gratitude for all that existence has done for you.

Ordinarily we take everything for granted, as if we have earned it, as if we deserve it. Not only that, we are continuously complaining because we want more and the universe is not giving us enough.

People are continuously grumbling, they are grumpy. Their whole life is full of ungratefulness, they don't have any experience of gratitude. And without these two things -- love and gratitude -- there is no religion at all.

Love has to be the foundation and gratitude is the temple. Once love and gratitude are there the temple is ready for God to enter. One need not search for God at all, one should only prepare one's being. Love removes all that is wrong, all that is negative, and gratitude brings all that is right, all that is positive.

Love functions as a gardener preparing the ground, removing the rocks and the weeds, and gratitude functions as the gardener sowing the seeds. These two things are enough. Then when the right climate and the right season comes, those seeds start sprouting. And once a seed has sprouted the flowering is not far away, it is very close. The real problem is the beginning of the sprout -- the death of the seed into the soil.

Once the seed has died it means the ego has died.

The seed is covered with a hard shell and that is our ego. Once the ego is no more there our intrinsic qualities start growing.

So you have to do these two things: be loving and be grateful. And then nature takes care of everything else of its own accord. You need not worry, you can trust the whole.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #15

Chapter title: None

15 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010155

ShortTitle: THUNK15

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(A musician from Denmark, Martin becomes a divine warrior.) The sannyasin is a divine warrior. He does not fight for anything worldly, his fight is with his inner darkness. He fights for light, for consciousness, for enlightenment -- neither for power nor prestige nor money. He fights to realise his potential because that is the only way to know god.

1/08/07

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

The moment you have realised your potential god is revealed. And unless you know god -- and by 'god' I mean the whole, the essential core of existence -- unless we know it our life remains a hell. Knowing it transforms hell into heaven. Everything remains the same but we are transformed, our vision is transformed.

(John is a freelance writer and an opera singer. Osho reminds him, in explaining the meaning of Dhyan John, that meditation is the most valuable of all the gifts God bestows on us.) Even life is not more valuable than meditation. Love is there, bliss is there, beauty is there, but meditation is the highest gift. It is the greatest gift for the simple reason that if meditation happens then all else happens of its own accord. With meditation you become really alive, you are born anew. You become flooded with bliss, you become simply loving for no motive. Your life becomes radiant, it starts having the quality of godliness. It blooms; the flower of your being opens and the fragrance, the imprisoned splendor, is released. But it all happens through meditation. So there are many gifts but nothing compared to the gift of meditation.

It is a gift, remember; it is not an achievement. But also remember that one has to prepare oneself to receive the gift. That is your achievement -- preparation. Without the preparation the gift will not reach you.

Even if it comes you will not be able to recognize it. It may have already come but you will have ignored it.

Unless you are ready to receive it -- alert, aware, watching, waiting prayerfully -- you will go on missing it. So there are two parts in meditation. The first part is your achievement. That means creating a quiet, silent mind, creating a space within you -- it is too full of junk -- throwing all the junk outside, making yourself spacious inside. That is your achievement. And whenever you have done it the gift comes. That is the second part of meditation.

The first part is man's achievement, the second part is a gift from God. Those who have done the first part become ready to receive the second part. That's why it is said that meditation is an effortless effort.

When one hears it for the first time it looks like an absolute contradiction: "effortless effort?" It is effort and yet effortless. The first part is effort and the second part is effortless.

So one has to do much, remembering always that all this doing is only preparing the ground, and then when the ground is ready one has to wait. Wait for the right moment, because there is never any injustice in existence. Whenever your readiness has come to the right point, to the right degree, immediately the gift arrives; instantaneously it arrives.

(Ib is the father of Danish sannyasin, Lena. Osho explains the origin of his name as derived from two sources. In Welsh it comes from Ivor, which means god or lord, and in Hebrew it comes from Abraham.) The Hebrew Abraham becomes Ibrahim in Arabic and Ib is the first part of Ibrahim. Ibrahim is the ancientmost religious person in the Judaic tradition, hence he is called the father. He founded the first mystery school, the first religious tradition in the West.

Both meanings are beautiful. Ibrahim is the first prophet of god, and one can be a prophet of god only if one has realised god. Unless one becomes god himself one cannot be a prophet. Unless one becomes one with the divine one cannot deliver the message of the divine. Only in that oneness does the message start flowing.

Your name will mean bliss is god, or godliness to be more precise, to be more exact. The quality that comes closest to god is bliss. Love also comes very close because of bliss -- because love creates bliss.

Meditation also comes very close but because of bliss. Beauty also comes very close but because of bliss. If we look at all the doors of the temple of god they are very different -- the door called love, the door called meditation, the door called beauty. The poet enters from the door of beauty. Any creater -- painter, musician, sculptor -- enters from the door of creativity.

But one thing is common and that is bliss. Whether you are a painter or a poet or a dancer or a musician, whether you are a meditator or a lover, whether you practise yoga or zen, it does not matter, one thing is essential: whatsoever you are doing, its centre, the axle, always remains bliss. The wheel may be different but the wheel is not significant. The unchanging axle is significant and that is always bliss.

The poet finds it in poetry, the painter in painting, the meditator in meditation, the lover in love, but it is always bliss. Hence bliss is syonymous with godliness. To become absolutely blissful is to become divine.

Hence I don't teach renunciation; I teach rejoicing. Rejoice more and more because only when you are throbbing with joy do you ride on that wave of bliss and start coming closer to god. When the wave of bliss is a tidal wave it can land you on the farther shore, the ultimate truth, god, nirvana or whatsoever one may choose to call it. But it is always the tidal wave of bliss that takes you to the farther shore.

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Query:-

(Osho has fun with Diotama's name. He even mentions it again in discourse the following morning!) Dhyano means meditation. Diotama has two meanings. The first is very beautiful. It means priestess of love, but the second is just far out! (laughter) The second means a jar with a neck and two handles. That's what a woman really is! (much laughter) That is the actual meaning, but through meditation the second meaning is possible: the jar with a neck and two handles can become a priestess of love, because meditation is an alchemical process. It transforms the lowest into the highest.

But ninety-nine point nine per cent of women remain with the first meaning; they never reach the second. Becoming a sannyasin means now the second meaning has to be enquired into, realised. It is potentially there. And whenever a woman becomes self-realised her realisation is more full of love than any man's can ever be.

Whenever a man achieves the ultimate he calls it truth. Whenever a woman has achieved the ultimate it has always been known as love; that is the woman's approach. But it is the same experience. Truth seems to be a little dry, desert-like; love is an oasis. Love is full of song, joy, dance and celebration.

Millions of woman have missed for the simple reason that they have been following Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu -- and they all talk about truth, obviously. Their very language is male-oriented, and to a woman the very word 'truth' falls flat; it has no meaning. Just utter the word 'love' and suddenly a bell starts ringing in the heart of a woman. Because all the founders of the great religions were men, women have missed.

My effort here is to put the balance right. I would like many woman sannyasins to become enlightened

-- this will be happening for the first time -- so that the other approach also becomes very clear. Women need not go on following something which does not fit with their deepest longing, which remains a little distant.

I don't feel truth can ever be very close to a woman; some distance will remain. She can try to reach it --

and many women have tried and a few of them have even reached to the ultimate peak. But they remain secondary, they are bound to. They cannot compete with a Buddha. Even if they realise truth, even after their realisation, their expression will remain very ordinary compared to Buddha, because what he has found fits with his whole being. And for a woman truth remains a little bit alien, strange. Only love can release the woman and her energies.

So here I am trying to give men their methods and to woman, a totally different approach. Yes, there are a few men who would like to move through love and there are a few women who would like to move through truth. Those are exceptions, they need not be counted; they only prove the rule.

So whenever a man becomes realised he becomes s Gautam Buddha, he becomes a prophet of truth, but whenever a woman achieves she is bound to become a priestess of love.

Diotama is a beautiful name, but remember both meanings! The first has to be changed and the second has to be achieved.

(Ingrid becomes Prem Sugandho -- love fragrance.)

Love is more like fragrance than like a flower. A flower has a form -- but every form gives a limitation and love is unlimited, hence it can't have any form.

The flower has colour, the fragrance is colourless. Every colour makes you one-dimensional, but colourlessness makes you multi-dimensional. And love, to be truly love, has to be formless, unlimited, multi-dimensional. If it is linear it becomes lust; if it is multi-dimensional, it becomes prayer. It is the same energy -- love. The lowest it can fall is lust and the highest it can rise is prayer.

The energy is not different, it is the same ladder. Lust is the lowest rung and prayer is the highest rung.

The name of the ladder is love; it is all the rungs from the lowest to the highest. That's what I mean when I say it is multi-dimensional, formless.

But because of our unawareness we try to give it a form, a colour, a shape, a limit. We try to create a boundary, and the more we succeed in doing this, the more love is going to disappear, it will die. It has to be a bird on the wing, in the sky -- you cannot encage it. Even if you make a golden cage you will kill the bird.

The bird in the cage and the bird in the open sky are not the same; they are two different phenomena.

They look alike but the bird on the wing, in the winds, in the clouds, has freedom, and because of freedom it has bliss. The bird in the cage only looks formally the same but it has no sky, no freedom, no bliss. And birds don't bother much about whether the cage is made of gold or iron, whether it is studded with diamonds or just a poor thing -- it does not matter. These foolish things matter only to man.

1/08/07

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Query:-

Words like 'diamond' and 'gold' are human inventions; to birds they don't mean anything. What matters is freedom, and that is destroyed. Love is a bird and it loves to be free. It needs the whole sky to grow.

So remember never to encage it, never to imprison it, never to give it a limit and a form, a shape, a name, an address, a label -- never. Just let it remain a fragrance, invisible, and then it can take you on its wings to the ultimate.

(An indicator as to his path is Ed's new name, Sagarprem. It means love for the oceanic, for the unbounded.)

Anything that has a boundary will imprison you. All boundaries have to be transcended, surpassed.

When you have come to a point where no boundary to your being exists, when you simply are without any definition -- neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan, neither German nor American nor Canadian, neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, neither communist nor fascists... when you have transcended all these boundaries of the body and the mind you enter an oceanic world. And that's the search of sannyas: to go on surpassing till nothing is left to surpass, only then know that you have come home.

Before that everything is a caravanserai. You can stay to rest but don't cling to anything, nothing is your home, just an overnight stay and remember in the morning you have to go.

So, there is no need to cling, no need to become attached to anything. Remain unattached so that your flow is not hindered. Remain like a river. It passes through many many territories. In the mountains it comes from the Himalayan peaks, it passes virgin snow. If it clings it will remain there. And it is beautiful -- those virgin peaks, that virgin snow has a purity, an innocence, a beauty. But the river moves. It passes through many beautiful valleys, mountains, forests but it goes on moving. It passes through many beautiful scenes but without clinging; it goes on and on till it reaches the ocean.

Be like a river -- flowing, never getting attached, otherwise you will become a pond. And a pond can never reach the ocean, only a river can. So remain open-ended and go on flowing. If one can continue to flow one has understood the meaning of sannyas. If one can remain a river in life one has experienced the innermost core of sannyas. Then the ocean is not far away. Howsoever far away it is, it is not far away.

(To a psychology teacher Osho gives the name Prem Sugatha.) Prem means love. Sugatha means a beautiful story. Life can either be a tragi dy or it can be a beautiful love story. Either it can be just a series of miseries, nightmares or it can be just a continuum of celebration.

It all depends on us , what we make out of it. It is an empty canvas. We have to paint it. We can make a monster on the canvas and can become frightened by it or we can create a beautiful sunset or flowers and we can be enchanted by it.

Remember: man comes into the world as an empty canvas. God does not give any programme to you, you are not programmed. There is nothing like fate; it is the invention of the cowards, it is the invention of people who don't want to make anything out of their life -- who are so lazy, so cowardly, that they don't want to take any risk. They throw the whole responsibility on god. They call it fate, kismet, karma and thousands of names, but all are basically tricks to avoid the responsibility that 'My life is my responsibility.

Whatsoever I am I have made it that way and whatsoever I am going to be tomorrow I am creating today.

Nothing can be done about yesterday; there is no need to bother about it, it is finished. But today is still available and out of today all the tomorrows will be coming. And if one is alert just a small touch can change the whole story.

Two small boys were talking; one boy was the son of a great painter. He said 'My father is such a great artist. Just the other day I was watching him painting. He painted a picture and the man was looking so miserable that I said to him "Father, why are you making him so miserable?" He said "Okay, I will change it." And with just one stroke of his brush the man started smiling!' And the other boy said 'That's nothing, my mother does it every day: without even having a paintbrush, just one stroke and she can make me cry or weep. That's nothing much. Not even a stroke, just the way she looks is enough.'

We are absolutely responsible for whatsoever we are. By becoming a sannyasin this is the first thing to accept, that 'Whatsoever I am is my responsibility.' But in it there is freedom. In the beginning it hurts because the ego feels badly shattered: 'Is it my own responsibility? So I have made this whole mess, this whole chaos that I am?' It hurts the ego, but if we understand it then it can become the beginning of a new life. And just a few strokes and the sad face can become a smiling face. Just a few strokes, just little bits of changes here and there and the ugly painting can become a beautiful painting.

Sannyas is the art of painting rightly, meditatively, so that life can be a continuously growing love, bliss, 1/08/07

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dance. Unless it becomes the very crescendo of joy, one has failed. But it can become so because death is not the end of life but the highest peak of life, the very summum bonum of life. In a single moment of death the person tells his whole story, whether he has lived authentically or inauthentically, whether he has lived lovingly or violently, whether he has lived out of silence or has been just insane. The moment of death expresses his whole life condensed. And we have to prepare for that moment.

But whatsoever we have to do has to be done today, because yesterday is no more and tomorrow has not come yet.

All that is available to us is today, but today is enough.

(Change your orientation from accumulation to transformation, Osho tells Anandgyan.) Change only one thing, change from misery to bliss. from sadness to celebration. And it can be done very easily because misery is an unnatural thing.

We are making such a hard effort to remain miserable. People don't see it. When they do they will laugh at the whole ridiculousness of what they have been doing to themselves. They are really doing great work to create misery in every possible way. They don't miss a single opportunity; they jump upon anything that can make thorn miserable.

This approach has to be changed. And life gives both opportunities to you. It gives you the day, it gives you the night, it gives you the thorns and the roses, it gives you both opportunities. And it is always balanced, it is always fifty-fifty; it depends on you what you choose. And the miracle is that if you choose the thorns sooner or later you will find there are no flowers because your mind will become accustomed only to thorns. You will only be able to see thorns, you will miss the flowers; you will simply not take any note of them. And the person who chooses flowers, the same happens to him: he starts forgetting about thorns, he takes no note of them. His approach becomes so positive and so affirmative that his whole arithmetic is different.

There are people who have invented the saying that every dark cloud has a silver lining, and there are people who say that every silver lining has a dark cloud to it. Both are right. I am not saying that any one person is right and the other is wrong; both are right. But the problem arises of what it is going to give to you.

There are people who think there is only one day between two nights and there are people who think there is only one night between two days. Both are right; so far as being right is concerned there is no problem, but what is it going to do to you? If you think in a negative way then your life will be a misery and how can a miserable person be religious? What has he to thank god for? Only a blissful person can be religious because he has so much to thank god for. Every day flowers go on showering on him.

I have heard about a very beautiful rabbi who fell from a one-hundred-storey building. The rabbi was well-known; all over the building everybody knew him. And people looked from their windows and they asked 'How are you' And he said 'So far, so good!' He went on falling, saying 'So far, so good!'

That is the right thing so far, so good. And who cares what is going to happen next? -- if it is going to happen it is going to happen. But the man who can say 'So far, so good,' till the very end, his end will also be totally different because it will be the accumulation of his whole approach. It cannot come from nowhere, it comes from his being: his death will also be beautiful.

(Osho names Erik, Swami Raidas after an Indian mystic. Although he was of the same calibre as Buddha, Nanak and Kabir, he is not so well known, Osho explains, because he was poor; in fact he was an illiterate cobbler.)

In India to be a cobbler means to be an untouchable.

That is one of the greatest misfortunes that has happened to India; almost one-third of the population is rejected, as if they are not human beings. They are living not as part of society but as outsiders, on the fringes. They are not even allowed to live in the villages; they have to live outside the villages.

For centuries these poor untouchables were not allowed to drink from the same well as the whole village drank from. They were not allowed to move on certain streets, they were not allowed to come into the villages in the daylight, or if they had to they had to declare that they were coming -- 'Please move yourself away' -- because even their shadow was thought to be evil. If their shadow fell on you you had to take a bath to purify yourself. This is the ugliest thing that India has done.

Raidas belonged to those poor people, hence he never became famous -- there was no possibility. But he was of the same status as Buddha, Krishna, Mahavira. His statements are very simple, that of an illiterate 1/08/07

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person, but very straightforward too, very clear-cut -- no philosophising, no going round and round in circles.

His statements are few but they go direct, like an arrow, and simply hit your heart. He used to sing and dance his songs. Whosoever was courageous enough to come to him would come.

This man, Raidas, had only one message and that was: if you can dance and sing totally, forgetting yourself, lost in the dance and the song, you have entered into god. And that's my message too. Dropping the ego by any strategy is enough. The moment you drop the ego, the moment you forget yourself... Not that you become unconscious or you fall into a coma, it is simply that self-consciousness is no more there.

Consciousness is there more than ever but there is no self, no ego. In that very moment the meeting with god happens.

So his whole message was to dance so totally, to sing so totally, that the ego could be forgotten and you would enter into god. There is no need to go to the temple, he said, there is no need to worship any idol, there is no need to perform any ritual; do only one thing: whatsoever you are doing do it so totally that you are immersed in it. And that very action becomes prayer, that very activity becomes meditation.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #16

Chapter title: None

16 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010165

ShortTitle: THUNK16

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Osho explains to an Indian woman -- a lawyer working in Nairobi -- his concept of sannyas as opposed to the old idea.)

The old idea is basically life-negative. My approach is absolutely life-affirmative. To me life is god, hence life has not to be renounced but lived intensely, passionately, totally. It is only by going deeper into life that one can come to god -- there is no other way.

The old idea was cowardly, it was rooted in fear. It was escapist, and escaping from the challenging world is missing the whole opportunity of being born into it. God gives the whole opportunity of life in existence and we renounce it. We are trying to prove that god is wrong. The opportunity has to be used because only by using it will we become enriched. Our intelligence will be sharpened, our being will be integrated. The more one passes through the storms of life, the more one becomes centred. The only way to go beyond life is to go through it.

Secondly, the old idea of sannyas was to impose certain rules and regulations upon yourself, to try to cultivate a character. I am against cultivating a character. Character should come spontaneously. A cultivated character is a pseudo thing -- it has to be avoided. It is false; it may look like the real coin but it is not the real coin, it may even look golden but it is not gold. And never forget the old proverb: All that glitters is not gold.

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

If you cultivate a character of course you will be respectable, but respectability nourishes the ego and nothing else -- and ego is the problem. You will be honoured by people, you will be thought of as a sage or a saint, a holy man or woman. But deceiving others is not going to help ultimately. Before god you will be standing naked, naked of all cultivated character. You will have to show your true colours. So it is better not to miss the precious time, not to waste the precious time in false coins. When the real can be found why settle for the false?

And thirdly, because my sannyas is not escapist and because it does not approve of any cultivated character, any morality, it has to depend on only one thing, and that is meditation. So my whole idea of sannyas is synonymous with meditation. The whole energy has to be put into only one thing: how to be silent, and silent in the noisy world, how to be without mind in the thick, crowded marketplace.

It is easy to be silent in the Himalayas; the Himalayas give you the false idea that the silence is yours; it is simply part of the Himalayas. You can live in the borrowed glory, but when you come back down to the world it will all be gone, it will be shattered.

So I am not in favour of moving into certain situations whore silence is easy. Rather, live in all the situations where silence is really difficult. Take the difficulty as a challenge. And it is not destructive to silence. Once you know how to create meditativeness, how to create awareness, once you know how to watch your mind in a cool dispassionate way, then nothing distracts you. And when nothing distracts only then is something real there.

If these three things are remembered then nothing else is needed. One comes slowly, gradually, to the ultimate resting place, to the full-stop of all birth and death. One becomes part of the whole and the eternal

-- and that is the goal.

(Osho says about purity what he had said earlier this month about compassion -- that it can be cultivated as part of one's character or be the natural outcome of meditation. He addresses Dhyan Kathryn.) Morality cannot transform your being. It is just a kind of painted face, it is a beautiful mask. The problem is that one can be deceived by it. Others will be deceived -- that's simple because they will see your mask as your face -- but if you live with the mask long enough and you never know your original face without the mask, then there is the danger that you may get deceived by it yourself; you may start thinking that you are it.And that's a great tragedy because you are not it. It is not your original face, you have simply made it.

The second and the right approach is not through morality but through meditation. Meditation means discovering your original face first. The most fundamental thing for a sannyasin is to discover his original face. The Zen people say discover the face that you had before your parents were born -- not just before you were born but before your parents were born -- or discover the face you will have when you die and your body is burned and nothing is loft. Discover what face you will have then. And that is your face own now.

That which was with you before birth and that which will be after death is there like an undercurrent and that is your true reality. And it can be discovered.

It is just like water underneath the earth: you can make a well, you can dig a well and you can find the undercurrent of water.Just a few layers of the earth have to be removed.

The process of morality and meditation are opposite, diametrically opposite. In morality you go on putting more layers upon yourself, in meditation you start discarding layers. In meditation you discard, in morality you accumulate. In meditation you are just doing the same thing as when you peel an onion -- it is a peeling. Layer by layer you go on throwing away until nothing is left.

Buddha is reported to have said that your hands are full only when nothing is left. And he is right. When the onion has been peeled totally and all the layers have been thrown away then what is left? But that nothing is your original face and that nothing is absolute purity. Not a cultivated purity but a spontaneous purity welling up from your deepest core.

At the deepest core we are just absolute so pure -- pure space. And once that pure space is discovered your whole life is transformed. Then whatsoever is right is done spontaneously and whatsoever is not right i8 not done spontaneously. There are no commandments guiding you. You have clear vision, you have your own perspective; you go accordingly.

A truly religious person is absolutely free from all outer commandments, who is moral but in a totally different sense from the so-called moralists. His morality is not imposed, it is spontaneous. And whenever something is spontaneous it has tremendous beauty.

These three qualities are associated with the name of Kathryn: first is beauty, second is grace, third is 1/08/07

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devotion. If one discovers one's original face for the first time one knows one's beauty and the tremendous gift of god and one feels the grace -- because we don't deserve it and god goes on showering more and more gifts.

When you are absolutely empty then gifts go on arriving every moment from all directions and dimensions. One cannot be thankful enough; the grace is infinite. And out of this beauty and the experience of grace, devotion arises. That devotion is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan, it has nothing to do with any creed, any dogma, any priesthood. One simply feels like bowing down to existence -- to the trees, to the stars, to the moon, to the sun. One feels so grateful that there is nothing to say; all words fall short. One cannot even utter a prayer. One is prayerful but one cannot say a prayer; saying anything seems to be so futile, so inadequate. That is devotion.

Devotion is prayerfulness, so deep and so profound, so overflowing, that language, mind, thoughts, are left far behind. It is such a flood of love that it takes away everything. One is washed totally clean. This is the new birth Jesus calls the second childhood.

Jesus says unless you are born again you shall not enter into my kingdom of god. This is the birth he is talking about. Sannyas has to be just the beginning of this birth process.

(Prem Gabriele means love is the messenger of god, Osho likens love to a rainbow because it is a bridge between the earth and the heavens.)

It is only through love that one can understand what god is. And when one's love is perfect then one becomes a vehicle for god in the world. Then whatsoever one says is divine, whatsoever one does is divine, then whatsoever one is, is divine.

To be a messenger of god simply means to be full of love. It is so simple and so natural to be full of love but we go on missing because we put so many conditions on love. And love can exist only unconditionally.

The moment you put a condition on it you have already poisoned it. The moment you demand something out of love you are butchering it, killing it.

Everybody wants to love and everybody wants to be loved but very rarely have people experienced the joy of love, the music of love, the godliness of love -- very rarely, for the simple reason that everybody learns love from the parents. They don't know what love is and they go on putting conditions on the small child.

The mother says 'If you do this only then will I know that you love me. If you don't do this then it is certain that you don't have any love for me. Love me because I am your mother.' There is a because; they go on giving motives for love. And the child is not left to himself so that he can love when he feels like loving; ho has to pretend. When he does not feel like loving he has to create a facade because the mother is powerful and the father is powerful and he has to show his love. So rather than being loving he becomes a showman, he becomes a diplomat, a politician. Each child is destroyed by the parents, converted into a politician. He starts learning the tricks of how to pretend, how to smile.

When the child smiles at the mother she good, and the child starts knowing that if he wants to do business with his mother he has to smile. The truth is something else. Why the child smiles for the first time has been a long-debated question. My own understanding is that the moment his eyes become fixed and for the first time he sees his mother and his father, they look so ridiculous that he starts laughing. It is nothing else.

But the mother feels great and the father feels great: look -- their child is smiling at them. They don't know the real thing, otherwise they would feel very angry about why the child is smiling. But by and by the child learns that a smile is like a bribe. He is helpless and his parents exploit his helplessness. They go on putting their numbers on the child. By the time he becomes strong enough to stand on his own legs he has already been corrupted.

Now for the whole of his life he will go on playing games and he will never know authentic love. Of course he will be miserable because without love you cannot be blissful. Of course he will not have any sense of god. He may believe in god and he may go to the church and to the temple -- because that has also been imposed on him, that he is a Christian or a Hindu, that he has to go to church; he will say his prayers.

It will all become routine and ritual and he will perform it. It gives him a good feeling that he is doing everything that is expected of him. But it is not related to his being; hence his life becomes a hypocrisy.

My sannyasins have to unlearn all these tricks that they had to learn in their childhood. All that childhood have to be erased totally, cancelled, so that one can become innocent again and one can start from ABC.

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And even once if a little bit of real love happens to you, you will be surprised how much joy it brings and how much awareness and how much meaning and significance -- and one has moved towards god. God is the ultimate meaning.

Love is the beginning of the journey and god is the end of the journey.

(Osho gives the college professor from America the name Ma Anand Pritama, and explains its meaning, that in being blissful one becomes a beloved of existence.) The miserable person has to live a lonely life. Existence cannot commune with the miserable person, the trees cannot say hello to him, the stars cannot whisper to him, the winds cannot dance around him. He is so miserable that the whole existence is bound to ignore him.

Misery is bound to be ignored, at the most tolerated, because the whole existence is full of bliss and to be miserable is to be out of step. Where everybody is dancing and singing and you are just sitting like a Christian saint or a Hindu holy man, you are out of step. These dancers and singers can at the most tolerate you. They will have to ignore you because even your presence is annoying, it is irritating.

Just think of a Christian saint sitting in the middle of my sannyasins. My sannyasins can at the most do one thing -- forget all about him, because his very presence will be an irritant. He will be sitting there, holier-than-thou, egoistic, a deep condemnation in his eyes. The miserable person is always in deep condemnation. He cannot be grateful, he cannot be respectful, he cannot accept the other person's individuality; he wants to impose himself on them. He is miserable and he wants everybody else to be miserable too, only then can he be happy.

The moment you are blissful the whole existence starts coming closer to you. You are becoming part of the dance, you are joining the dance. Hence my whole effort here is to help you to be blissful, to help you to laugh with existence -- with no desire to impose yourself upon anybody. Living moment to moment rejoicing in small things is what sannyas is all about. And then miracles start happening. The whole existence starts pouring its love on you. One becomes a beloved only by being blissful.

(Nirmal Premo -- innocent love.)

Love cannot be calculating. If it is it is not love. It can only be innocent, uncalculating, illogical. Love cannot be cunning and clever; it is really a mad affair. But blessed are those who are capable of being madly in love with existence because those are the few chosen people who come to know the ultimate truth. Truth is not known through logic, it is not known by the philosophers; it is known only by the lovers.

But love has to be innocent. Love has to be just an opening of the heart in trust, risking -- because there is a danger that you may be exploited. But my observation is it is better to be exploited than to be cunning, it is better to be betrayed than to be cunning. One loses nothing by being exploited or being betrayed; one loses certainly something by being cunning.

What can people exploit? Maybe they can take your money, maybe they can steal your clothes, maybe you will not have so many gadgets, you may not have a big house to live in -- but these are non-essential things. But you will have a bigger soul if not a bigger house, you will have a richer soul if not a richer bank balance. And that is of real value.

So I suggest to my sannyasins: be innocent. Even if you are destroyed by the cunning world that is nothing to be worried about, because by being innocent you will find the indestructible in you, you will find god. And it is worth risking everything for that.

Sannyas is an adventure in love, in trust, in surrender. It is not for the cowards; it is only for the courageous few.

Be courageous and you will be rewarded infinitely, but those rewards will be of the inner kingdom.

(A man without meditation is like a house without a light, Osho tells Jyoti Dhyan.) With meditation your inner light starts burning, your being becomes a flame, exactly, literally a flame --

and it is no ordinary flame either. It has a few extraordinary things about it. One is that it burns but it has no fuel, hence it cannot be extinguished. Once it is there it is forever.

Secondly, it is smokeless, it does not create any smoke. Smoke is created only by the fuel. The more refined the fuel is the less smoke is created; the cruder the fuel, the more smoke. But if there is no fuel at all there is no smoke. Meditation is a flame without smoke, hence it gives you an absolute clarity.

Once the light is there inside you your whole world becomes luminous. Nothing changes on the outside, everything remains the same, yet it is no more the same because now you can see in a totally different light 1/08/07

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which you had never seen in before, They are the same flowers but now they have a beauty, something psychedelic; they are the same stars, the same rocks, the same rivers, but because you have a new vision, a freshness, an aliveness, the whole existence comes alive.

This coming alive of existence is what is meant by the word 'god'. God means the coming alive of the whole of existence. But if you are dead, if the flame is not there and you are just like a dark hole, then how can you experience god? God is light, you have to be light in your own small way. God is love, you have to be love in your own small way. God is life, you have to be alive in your own small way -- only then can life commune with life, can love commune with love, can light commune with light.

(Osho talks again of the difference between knowledge and wisdom, but this time from a slightly different angle.)

Love cleanses you of all rubbish -- and there is much rubbish inside. Everybody is almost a British Museum; all kinds of rubbish is collected there. They say that the British Museum has so many books that if you go on putting one book next to the other they will go around the earth three times. But that is nothing because when I see people... if you put their rubbish together it will go three hundred times around the earth.

It is almost infinite.

There are only two things that are infinite: the wisdom of a Buddha and the ignorance of a fool. These two things are infinite, there is no beginning, no end to them. But this whole nonsense can be thrown out.

All that is needed is a new functioning within you. Right now only the head is functioning, the heart is in a state of non-functioning. It has to be changed. The-heart has to become functioning and the head has to become non-functioning, then you are immediately transported into another world and wisdom arises. When there is wisdom you can start using the mind again, but now the mind will be a servant, not a master, because the master will have come in. Now you will be able to use the servant and now the mind can be of immense value, of great utility, but it will be a beautiful servant, a mechanism, nothing more than that.

Right now the mechanism has become the master. The servant is pretending to be the master and the master is fast asleep in the heart. The master has to be awakened, and love is just the awakening of the heart, the awakening of trust.

Sannyas is a change of the gestalt; the energy has to move from the heart not from the head. It comes from your being, it should go through the heart. First it should be refined by your love, it should be made fragrant by your love, and then it can reach the head. Then it will have enough understanding and wisdom to use the head.

But society has been trying to make a special arrangement in every person: it avoids the heart, it tries to join the being and its energy directly to the head, then the head becomes the master. And nobody leaves their mastery easily, hence the meditator has to struggle, to fight, but it is a fight for freedom, it is a fight to come out of a prison.

Sannyas means that now you will dedicate your life, your energy, to this struggle for ultimate freedom.

Logic has to be dropped and love has to be revived. The revival of love becomes a resurrection.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #17

Chapter title: None

17 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010175

ShortTitle: THUNK17

Audio:

No

Video:

No

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Barbara means a stranger, and, coming with joy. Osho relates both meaning to meditation. ) Man can live either through thoughts or directly, without the mediation of thoughts . To live through thoughts is to live very half-heartedly, because then the contact with life is only partial. Thoughts function as barriers , they don't allow much of reality to enter you, and even if they do allow it they distort it. They are constantly making commentary on it , they are giving it colour and meaning of their own. They don't allow it in its authenticity; they falsify.

To live without the mediation of thought is meditation -- to live immediately, directly, putting the mind aside. When Jesus says to the devil 'Leave me alone, go behind me,' in a metaphorical way he is talking about the mind: Leave me alone, go behind me, don't come in front of me. There is no other devil except the mind. That is an ancient way of saying it. He is saying 'Let me live directly. I don't need your interpretation.

I want to see reality as it is, utterly naked' -- and to experience reality in its total nakedness is to know god.

Barbara is a Greek name. It has two meanings; both are significant. One is a stranger. The man of meditation becomes a stranger in the world because everybody is living through the mind and he is living without the mind. He is moving with people who will not be able to understand his language. He will be able to understand their language because he has lived their way too. He has known both lives, life with the mind and life without the mind, hence he will be able to understand them but they will not be able to understand him, They are bound to crucify such a man, they will be afraid because he is an absolute stranger.

If you know only Chinese and you come to India where nobody knows Chinese, you are not such a stranger; at least you can manage through gestures. The basic gestures are the same. If you are thirsty you can make a gesture, if you are hungry you can make a gesture, if you want to sleep you Can make a gesture.

Slowly slowly you can get people to understand you and you can understand them. A bridge is possible.

Even if some day man reaches a planet where he finds a totally different kind of people, there will still be a possibility to Communicate. But when a Buddha or a Jesus or a Zarathustra walks on earth he is really an outsider. He Cannot make any gestures because the thing that he has come to know is inexpressible in any way, by any means, hence he looks very dangerous, so different -- qualitatively different.

But these outsiders are the salt of the earth. There is some joy on earth, some song, some splendour because of these few outsiders. They have brought something of god into the world, something of the beyond to the earth. Of course they have suffered much; still they have given to the world that which is the greatest treasure.

And hence the second meaning; the second meaning is coming with joy. Only a man of meditation can become a vehicle for joy, for bliss, for celebration. Meditation makes him a stranger in the world but at the same time, simultaneously makes him immensely blissful. Even if you take his life he loses nothing because he has attained to something which is far more than life itself; he has found eternal life.

(The Dutch name, Joop, comes from Joseph; and Osho sees significance in the fact that Jesus was born of Joseph -- a name which means faithfulness and trust.) I don't believe in all that nonsense about Jesus being born through the holy ghost, that he was born out of a virgin mother. He was the son of the poor carpenter Joseph. It takes on a significant meaning: a man like Jesus can be born only out of trust, out of faithfulness.

Whenever a person attains to Christ-consciousness he attains it through trust and faith. But remember trust and faith are not at all concerned with belief.

Belief is of the head and trust -- or faith -- is of the heart. Belief is an idea, faith is an emotion. The very word 'emotion' is significant; it means that which can move you, e-motion. Belief cannot move you, you remain the same. You can believe in the Bible or in the Koran or in the Gita -- you remain the same. Your belief never changes anything in you; in fact belief is a way of avoiding change. It is the way of the coward and the cunning.

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Only trust, faith, can transform you because it starts moving in your heart. Your heart starts beating with a new rhythm. A new source of joy, of knowing, of being, opens up with the faith. Belief is repression of doubt and faith is knowing of the truth. Belief remains ignorant, truth is full of light, the light that comes through knowing.

Know the truth and you will find great trust -- or allow trust to happen and you will find truth. It works both ways, one can begin from either end.

(Osho mentions the concept of Gurdjieff's work in his next address. First he begins by talking about meditation.)

Meditation is a battle against darkness. It is an inner battle. You have to fight against all that is dark in you. You have to dispel all darkness, you have to create more and more light, awareness, alertness, attentiveness, so that night disappears. This darkness that exists in everybody is really ancient, very ancient, it may be thousands of lives old. But one thing is good, that howsoever old the darkness is, even a small candle can dispel it.

Meditation is only a small candle in the beginning but it ends finally as thousands of suns rising within you. Just a small fire is enough to put the whole forest alight, but it is a battle because you have to fight to reclaim the territory that has become darkness.

Man is just like an iceberg, only one-tenth is above the level of the water and nine-tenths is below.

One-tenth of our being is conscious, nine-tenths is unconscious, and the one-tenth has to fight against the nine-tenths. It is a great battle but light has the quality intrinsic to winning. Light is always fighting a winning battle and darkness is always fighting a losing battle. Darkness cannot win by its very nature. That's the only hope -- but it is a great hope.

Begin the journey into sannyas with this hope, with tremendous joy. A great future is possible, a transformed life, a luminous life, but work is needed. In the East we have one word, 'sadhana'. It is untranslatable into English, but Gurdjieff has coined a word which comes very close to it. He used to call it

'the work', the work of inner transformation.

In the Gurdjieffian circles what is called the work is exactly what we have called sadhana in the East, the fight to move beyond darkness into the realms of light, the fight to move beyond death into the world of immortality, the fight to move beyond untruth into the world of ultimate truth -- because except for truth nothing liberates.

(The art of loving is not so much a question of accumulating anything but of discarding many things, Osho tells Prem Suviro.)

The greatest courage in life is to drop the ego, and the moment one drops the ego love arises. One cannot practise love, a practised love is bound to be false. One cannot do anything positively for love because love is bigger than us. What can we do? Love has to do something for us, we cannot do anything for love. We are just small waves in the ocean of love. What can the wave do? It can dance with joy in the sun, in the wind, in the rain; while it is there it can dance, it comes dancing, it goes dancing. All that the wave can do is celebrate the moment, but the ocean can do much for the wave because the ocean is the source.

Love is synonymous with god. Love is as vast as god so we cannot do anything positively. Anything done by us will be smaller than us. So the only course left is to remove the barriers; hence the whole work of moving into the world of love is negative. Drop the ego -- that is negative. Drop possessiveness -- that is negative. Drop jealousy -- that is negative. Drop hatred -- that is negative. Drop anger -- that is negative. All these are negatives, but if we can manage to do all these negatives the ultimate positive arises of its own accord. And when love comes of its own accord it is infinite. And only the infinite can make one fulfilled, less than that won't do. We are not made for that. Our innermost longing is for the infinite, the unbounded, the eternal.

Courage is needed to destroy the barriers. We cling to the barriers. Man is so stupid he clings to the ego and loses the tremendous ecstasy of love. He clings to small jealousies -- absolutely absurd. In your saner moments you even see the absurdity of them, but when those insane moments take grip of you, you forget all your understanding.

What are we trying to possess? In this world we come empty handed and we go empty handed so what is the point of being possessive? Just because one has mot a person on the way, just because for two hours you have been walking together on the same road, in the same direction, is it right to start claiming 1/08/07

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possession?

The same is true about all our relationships. A son is born -- it is just being together on the road of infinity. There is no need to possess him. Rejoice in being together, share your joy, but don't possess him.

The moment the child is possessed, the child is paralysed, crippled. You meet a person and you feel great love and immediately possessiveness comes in. Remember, just a moment before you were not even acquainted and still you were there and the other person was there. Nobody is indispensable for anybody.

You have existed up to now and the other has existed. Just as a moment before you were not together, there is every possibility after a few moments you may not be together again. So why insist that now you always have to be together? That will destroy things, that will make slaves out of you -- and nobody likes a slave.

Everybody hates both slavery and the person who is creating the slave. One may say so; one may not say, but it is bound to erupt in many ways: in anger, in hatred, in conflict.

If you see people who are in love you will be surprised -- they fight over such stupid things that one cannot believe that these people are sane, and still they believe that they are in love.

Love exists but between love and the world there are a thousand and one barriers. And by the time love reaches the other it is no more love, it has become something else.

Remove the barriers -- that is why courage is needed. And remember that we are basically alone. So it is good to enjoy when we are together -- with the son, with the friend, with the husband, with the wife, with the father, with the mother -- enjoy and feel grateful, obliged, that somebody walked by your side for a few hours, a few days, a few months. But there is no need to demand anything, there is no point in demanding.

We have no right to demand. When love is undemanding it is love. When it is just given with no idea of any return it becomes divine.

That's the way of the truly religious person. That's the way of my sannyasin.

(Her new name , Anand Pathika, is to remind the Turkish sannyasin that she is now on the path of bliss.) Bliss is the keyword to be remembered. Whatsoever you do, do it blissfully. Since you are doing it, why not do it blissfully? Either do it or don't do it. If you have decided to do it then do it blissfully. And by doing anything blissfully small things become tremendously beautiful.

It is not a question of what you are doing, the real question is how you are doing it. Prayer has nothing to do with going to church or the temple. You can just wash the floor and it can be prayer if it is done blissfully, joyously. You can cook -- a friend is coming, a guest is coming, then a very ordinary thing, cooking something for the guest, for the friend, starts having a spiritual dimension.

Spirituality is not other-worldliness. Spirituality is a way of living in this world meditatively, totally, blissfully. It is not against this world; in fact it enhances this world, enriches this world, it makes this world more beautiful, more blissful. But religions up to now have done just the opposite. They have made this earth a hell. I hold the so-called religions absolutely, categorically responsible for the misery that exists in the world.

If they had really worked in the right direction they would have transformed the whole world into paradise. But they thought paradise was somewhere above in the sky so they were in a hurry to reach there before others... and they have to stand in the queue. Everybody was in a hurry to reach there and nobody cared about this world. And this is the world which can be transformed either into hell or heaven; it all depends on how people live.

My sannyasins have to give a new perspective to humanity, a new spirituality, a new meaning, to the very world of spirituality, a new insight as to what it means to be religious. It simply means to be blissful twenty-four hours a day. of course one cannot be in a church twenty-four hours a day so life has to be transformed. Religion cannot be a separate thing from life, it has to spread all over life. Sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, swimming -- each small act has to be transformed into something sacred. That's what I call the path of bliss.

(Osho warns Gyan Atita about the danger of mistaking knowledge for knowing.) The first step of sannyas is to go beyond knowledge. Knowledgeability is the greatest sin. It hinders one's growth more than anything else because it gives you a false notion that you know -- and you know not.

It is like a person suffering from cancer but who believes that he is perfectly healthy: just by his belief the cancer is not going to change. His belief is going to do only one thing; he will not go to any physician, he will not take any treatment; he will miss that moment when it is curable and the cancer will go on 1/08/07

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growing. It does not bother about your belief.

Knowledge hides your ignorance. And the thicker the knowledge becomes, the more you are oblivious of your real state. Hence I say the first step of a sannyasin is to throw off this whole blanket of knowledge.

There is no need to cover yourself; it is better to know that you are ignorant, because from that knowing the journey begins. One cannot remain with ignorance. If one knows one is ignorant, one starts searching for ways, means, devices, to get rid of ignorance.

It is not a question of hiding it, it is a question of destroying it. Meditation destroys ignorance and knowledge covers it. Knowledge is deceptive. It gives you an illusion of something that you are not, of somewhere you are not and it keeps you unaware of the place where you are. Meditation simply reveals to you where you are, what you are, and out of that insight the journey begins. You start moving more and more deeply into meditation, more and more into silence. And a moment comes when the silence is profound; it becomes a flame and all ignorance is burned, is dispersed.

Transcend knowledge if you want to be wise. If you want to remain a fool then go on collecting knowledge. Fools are great scholars, fools are great pundits. They are great fool-osophers. Avoid fool-osophy, be innocent like a child.

(Nigel, a social psychologist from England. is given the name Anand Bhajan -- a sacred song of bliss.) There is a difference between an ordinary song and a sacred song. The difference is not of words, the difference is not of composition; the difference is somewhere within you, not in the song itself. One can sing a film song in a sacred way, then it becomes a bhajan. And one can sing a so-called sacred song in such a stupid way that it becomes very mundane.

My emphasis is always on you, not what you do but what you are, From you comes the quality. You are the source, the song becomes what you are.

I see these Hare Krishna people, they think they are singing devotional songs, sacred songs. I have seen many kinds of fools in the world but Hare Krishna people are at the top, nobody can defeat them, they are so stupid. I always feel that this man, Prabhupad, must have had in him a magnetic energy that attracted fools, because I have never come across a single Hare Krishna person who has any intelligence. It seems his appeal was only for the unintelligent. They go on singing sacred songs but their singing is just like parrots.

You can teach parrots anything.

A mother found out that her small child was teaching their parrot four-letter words. She was of course very angry and she said 'What are you doing? teaching four-letter words to the parrot?' He said 'No, Mummy, I'm simply telling him "These are the words you are not to use!" Just the way you tell me these words are not to be used, I'm telling the parrot!'

The mother has taught the child, now the child is teaching the parrot. And the parrot will learn. This is how mischief goes on passing from one generation to another generation.

For a song to be sacred two things are needed. One is silence in your heart. That is not possible without meditation. And the second is blissfulness. Silence alone won't do. It may be there but it will not explode into songs. When silence and bliss meet then there is bhajan, the sacred song. The meeting point of silence and bliss creates a miracle; your song has something of your silence and something of your bliss together.

Then whatsoever you sing... you may simply utter nonsense words but they will have sacred quality.

A Christian sect uses a certain beautiful method -- I like it. It is one -- of the secrets that has been followed by many mystics down the ages. It is called glossolalia. One simply relaxes, becomes silent, and then whatsoever comes one allows it -- gibberish, nonsense words, sounds. One has not to prevent anything.

one has to enjoy whatsoever is coming. The word 'gibberish' comes from a great mystic's name; his name was Jabar, a Sufi mystic.

You ask him a very rational question and he will utter some absurd words or meaningless sounds, you cannot figure out what he is saying, what he means. But you can see his joy and you can see his silence.

That is his message, whatsoever the question, that is his answer. It is from Jabar that the English word

'gibberish" has arisen. Gibberish is called glossolalia, a divine language, by this certain sect of Christians.

You are not speaking, something is speaking through you. You are simply silent, then an urge arises in you to shout -- you shout. An urge arises in you to jump and you jump, and you jog and you dance. You simply follow the inner feel, and then it is bhajan, then it is sacred.

And that has to be the method for you. I have been watching you -- it is possible for you, you can become a Jabar. Try it! -- How long will you be here? -- About six months. -- Do some gibberish.

(The group laughs. From Bhajan there is a pause of disbelief.) -- What now?

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(Osho chuckles.)

Right now! (With scarcely a moment's hesitation, Bhajan closes his eyes and babbles incoherently for a few seconds, then breaks off suddenly in laughter.) -- Good. You will be able to do it. Good!

(Dhyan Deva. Dhyan means meditation, Deva means god.)

The way to god is meditation. Meditation means a state of no-mind. Mind is the way to the outside world and no-mind is the way to the inside world. If you want to approach the world you have to become more and more of a mind. That's what a scientist becomes: more and more a mind, To reach farther into the exterior reality, that is the only way. For science it is the only valid method.

But if you want to go inwards you have to retrace your steps, you have to become less and less of a mind. Then the ultimate change, you start becoming a no-mind. When you have come to the full point of being a no-mind, when nothing is left of the mind, all the mind is gone, you simply are, just being. The throbbing of the heart is heard, even the pulsation of the blood is felt. but there are no thoughts, no feelings.

no moods -- all is quiet and calm. You are just sitting or just standing.

A Zen master was standing on a hilltop. Three people had come for a morning walk and they started arguing about what he was doing. One said 'As far as I know his cow sometimes gets lost so he goes to the top of the hill and from there he looks around for where the cow is -- it is easier from there to see all around.

So he must be looking for the cow.'

The second man said 'I don't think it is so because I don't see him moving at all. If he were looking for the cow at least his head would be moving, searching all around. But he is standing just like a statue, he cannot be looking for his cow.'My feeling is,' said the second man, 'that he is waiting for some friend who came with him but has been left behind.'

The third said, 'I cannot agree because if he were waiting for somebody then once in a while he would look back, wondering why he has not come yet, where he has gone, how long he is going to take -- but he never looks back. This is not the way of a man who is waiting for somebody.'

They could not agree so they all travelled to the peak, reached the master and asked him... the first man asked 'Are you looking for your cow?' And the master said ' My cow? I have come into the world without anything and I will go from the world without anything. Nothing is mine. Even my body is not mine, my mind is not mine. I don't exist at all -- what nonsense you are talking. What cow?'

The second man said 'Then I must be right, you must be waiting for the friend who came with you for a morning walk, who is left behind.' The master said 'Friend? But I don't have any enemy in the world so how can I have a friend? You can have friends only if you have enemies. The more friends you have, the more enemies you have.' And the master said 'I am not interested either in friends or in enemies. I have come alone and I will go alone. Between these two alonenesses why get into trouble unnecessarily? I am alone.'

The third man jumped up. He said 'Then I must be right. I told these people that he is not looking for his cow, not looking for his friend, he is meditating. The way he is standing, utterly still, he must be meditating.'

And the master said 'Meditating? Do you think meditation is an act? I am not meditating, I am not doing anything; I am simply standing.'

But that's exactly what meditation is: simply standing or simply sitting, simply being. The moment you are in that space you know what god is. And to know god is to know all, to know god is to be a god. And that is the unfoldment of your being, the ultimate flowering of the one-thousand-petalled lotus of your consciousness. That is the goal of sannyas.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #18

Chapter title: None

18 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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Archive code: 8010185

ShortTitle: THUNK18

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(A man to be really worthy of the name man has to go through not one but two births, Osho says to Rita from Switzerland. Then he explains why.)

One is the physical birth, the other is the spiritual birth. The physical happens to everybody but for the spiritual one has to work, one has to deserve it. The first is ordinary, it only gives you the material dimension, and because there is no spiritual dimension in it, it is utterly dark. Matter is darkness, spirit is light. Unless one is born again one remains in a dark night. The initiation into sannyas means the preparation for the second birth.

Socrates says the master functions as a midwife, and he is absolutely right. The function of the master is to bring your potential into the actual, to help you to come out of darkness into the light. And the moment you are born into light bliss also starts happening of its own accord.

Misery belongs to the first birth and bliss belongs to the second. So those who have not attained the second birth can hope for bliss but they will never attain it.

Remember, by becoming a sannyasin you are entering into great work upon yourself. But miracles are possible if we work and everybody is entitled to miracles.

Jesus has not got more potential than you have got, neither has Buddha nor Lao Tzu. As far as spiritual possibility is concerned everybody is absolutely alike, we just have to prepare the ground, uproot the weeds, remove the rocks, so that roses can grow in it.

(Osho makes of Amrit Gerhard the meaning; the search for immortality needs great effort.) In fact it is good that it is a great struggle because in that very challenge one grows. If it were easily available like any other commodity life would lose all depth, all height, life would become a mundane phenomenon. The things of the world are available easily but higher values have to be attained after an arduous climbing towards the heights. One needs to be a great warrior. But the fight is not with anybody else, the fight is inner, it is with the hindrances within yourself, with the rocks that are preventing your flow of energy, with the blocks. They don't allow you to function in a total, wholistic way.

Accept the challenge. At the innermost core of every human being there is a ray of light which immediately joins you together with the immortal world, with the eternal, which takes you beyond time and beyond death. But we have to go in search of it and there are many hazards, hindrances, many possibilities of going astray. like a jigsaw puzzle, One has to be very intelligent, alert, aware at each point because the possibilities of going wrong are many, and the possibility to be right is only one amongst the many.

But if one is alert and watchful and one is learning even from mistakes then the task, howsoever difficult it is, is not impossible. And the joy of reaching to that ultimate peak is infinite. Compared to that joy all that we do for it is nothing.

(His understanding of the real meaning of a Christian is one who is a Christ, Osho tells Dhyan Tina.) Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says that the first and the last Christian died on the cross twenty centuries ago. His insistence is worth meditating on: the first and last Christian. So the whole world of the Christians is just pseudo, it is hypocrisy more or less. It is the same with Hindus and the same with the Buddhists and the same with the Mohammedans, there are three hundred religions on the earth and it is true about all those three hundred religions.

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the whole turmoil of the mind disappears and the silence is so profound that one can hear the still, small voice of god within one's own being. It arises from your very depths. You are just a listener, you are just on the receiving end.

That's how all the great scriptures are born. The Upanishadas, the Koran, the beatitudes of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching -- these great documents are not written by somebody, they have been heard. The people who were writing were not writing on their own, they were just vehicles, they were writing on behalf of god. But that is possible only when your mind has completely gone, otherwise it will interfere. So the whole art of being a Christ or a Buddha is to be absolutely silent.

So learn to be silent, enjoy silence and whenever you have an opportunity to be silent just fall into it.

Make it a point that the most important thing in life is silence. Everything else is secondary. So everything can be sacrificed for it but it cannot be sacrificed for anything.

This is the foundational commitment of sannyas, that from now onwards meditation will be your religion -- and meditation is the essential core of all religions.

(Joost becomes Prem Satyo -- which Osho explains as meaning love is the beginning of the experience of truth.)

To love is to open a window unto the vast sky of truth. And remember that the frame of the window is not the sky and the frame of the window is not the frame of the sky either, the sky is far bigger. The frame has nothing to do with the sky.

Love is only a frame. It belongs to your heart just as the window belongs to your house. But when you open the window you can see the stars, faraway stars, millions of light years away. You can see the clouds, you can see the moon, the sun. Suddenly a great perspective becomes available to you. But one has to remember constantly that this is only a beginning. Love is the beginning, not the end.

Once you have felt the sky through the window then you have to go beyond even the window. And these are the three centres of man. The first is the head. Head means a house with all the windows and doors closed. The second centre is the heart -- the same house but the windows and the doors are open. You can experience something of the beyond. Although you are still in the same house it is no longer a prison, there are openings. If you decide to go out you can. And there is great pull from the outside world because now the wind, the rain and the sun reach you, and they are all indications of the beyond -- the birds sing and the flowers open and their fragrance flows to you. Everything is calling you out of your small cage.

The house is our body. The head belongs to that same body but it is closed. The heart also belongs to that body but it has openings, hence it is far better to live through the heart than through the head. Both belong to the body, but from the head there is no going beyond because there is no opening. You are not even aware there is something beyond. With the heart the beyond starts communing with you.

And then comes the third centre, your being. That means you have hoard the call of the beyond and you have gone out of the house, you have surpassed the house. You are no more inside the house, you are under the sky, under the stars. But to reach the third the second is a most essential preparation.

So love is the beginning; love means the heart. Logic is not the beginning; logic means the head. Logic is invulnerable. It is like a Leibnitzian monad -- windowless, completely enclosed. The heart is vulnerable, it allows the beyond to come to you. And that is the beginning. Something starts stirring in you, something of the beyond starts ringing bells in you. A challenge has come. It is irresistible, you have to go.

And the moment you leave the house, you surpass the house -- that means the moment you start forgetting the body-mind structure and look beyond -- you have entered into the world of truth, the ultimate truth. And it is truth that liberates, it is truth that brings bliss, it is truth that brings freedom. And these are our deepest longings, only truth can fulfil them. Without the experience of truth man remains unfulfilled, a tree without flowers, a barren tree.

A sannyasin has to become full of flowers and fruits. The very flavour of a sannyasin has to be that of tremendous contentment, fulfilment.

(Anand Shivam means bliss is virtue, Osho tells the former Michael from Trinidad.) Misery is sin, misery is immoral, misery is vice because the miserable person goes on knowingly or unknowingly creating misery for others. He cannot help it; he can give only that which he has got. Even if he does not want it he is a victim of his own misery. Even if he wants to do some good the ultimate result is going to be bad. In spite of all his good intention, his actions will bring misery to people because nothing 1/08/07

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can arise out of a miserable person that can bring bliss to people. That's the very definition of good, virtue: helping people to be blissful. But you can give only that which you have got, hence to me bliss is virtue, the only virtue.

Be blissful -- that's what I teach. I don't teach you to be virtuous because that is secondary, that is a by-product. I teach the real transformation within you. Move from misery to bliss and then whatsoever you do will be good; it cannot be anything else than good.

So I don't teach any service to the public. People think my sannyasins are selfish -- they are not. But my understanding is that unless a person transforms his energy from misery to bliss... and that is an inner work, it has nothing to do with the public or with serving the people, the poor, the ill. You have to go through a transformation within yourself and then, once the transformation has happened, it is inevitable that you will do something which will beautify the world, which will make the world a little better, which will help mankind to rise a little higher.

I am not concerned about that because it is inevitable, there is no need to talk about it. That's why I never talk about altruism. What is the need? If you grow roses fragrance is bound to come. I teach only how to grow roses. Why waste time with the fragrance? And if people become too interested in fragrance they will forget about growing roses. That's what has happened..

People like Mother Theresa of Calcutta or Vinoba Bhave -- and there are many around the world like these people who have wasted their whole life in serving others... But if you look at them you can sees what service can they do? They don't seem to be in a state of celebration. Mother Theresa is as dry and dead as Morarji Desai. Sometimes I wonder why they don't get married! (much laughter) They would make the most absurd couple in the world -- they look so alike! The world has missed a great opportunity.

Altruism comes on its own, and I certainly teach you to be selfish, selfish in the true sense of the word.

Know thyself -- that is selfishness; be thyself -- that is selfishness; and then act out of it -- that too is selfishness. But if one has fulfilled these conditions, of being oneself, of knowing oneself, of acting according to one's own light, then life becomes a great sharing, a great rejoicing. And one does not become egoistic about doing something good to people, one simply enjoys sharing one's own light. It is out of sheer joy, for joy's sake. One is not obliging anybody.

That is Shivam; it is a by-product of bliss.

(The Greek mystic, Heraclitus, says you can't step in the same river twice. Osho goes one further.) I would like to say you cannot step in the same river even once, because the river is moving so fast.

Life is a river, a constant movement. In this moving wheel one cannot find anything except love which can give a glimpse of the eternal, of the non-changing, of the immutable. Love seems to be the only rainbow bridge between time and eternity. There has to be some bridge because life in all its dimensions is an organic unity. Nothing is separate, nothing can be separate; it is all oneness. So there is bound to be some subtle link between time and eternity.

And my experience is that the rainbow bridge is love. I call it a rainbow bridge for three reasons. One: it is very fragile, very delicate? you can destroy it very easily. Secondly I call it a rainbow bridge because it has all the colours, all the dimensions, of both worlds, of this and that, of this shore and the further shore.

Because it joins both it has all the colours of both; it is multi-coloured and multi-dimensional. It is very rich.

Thirdly, I call it a rainbow bridge because you cannot possess it. If you try to possess a rainbow you will not find anything, your hands will be empty -- maybe a little bit wet, that's all. It is there in all its tremendous beauty but don't try to possess it. Enjoy it, dance it, sing it but don't try to possess it.

And these three things have to be remembered about love too. Don't try to possess it otherwise it will disappear. People destroy their love in the effort to possess it. The paradox of love is, if you want to possess it you will destroy it, you will miss it; if you don't want to and always yours. It belongs to the non-possessive person.

Love has all dimensions but I want to make it one-dimensional because we are afraid of multi-dimensionality. That too is a way of destroying it. You want the rainbow to be only of one colour -- it is not possible. You may have chosen the most beautiful colour but you cannot paint a rainbow just green or just red or just yellow. You cannot paint it, it has to be multi-dimensional. We kill love in trying to colour it.

For example, a man can love a woman for one reason and he can love another woman for another reason and still another for another reason. But lovers don't accept that. A woman can love one man for his intelligence and she can love another man for his physical beauty -- because the intelligent person may not always be beautiful. A few very ugly people have been known to be very intelligent. Socrates is one of the 1/08/07

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examples; he was one of the ugliest men... disgusting! (much laughter)... but one of the most intelligent who has ever walked on earth. One would love him for his intelligence, but for his body... one would have to keep one's eyes closed! (laughter)

And women know the secret: whenever they make love to a man they keep their eyes closed. Because many men are like Socrates, it is better not to see what they are doing! (laughter) It is better not to see their faces because they may be going through contortions and all kinds of things! If you see it you may freak out! That's why women make love in darkness. It is always good: under the blanket (in the deluge of laughter one can lip-read where Osho's words are drowned, 'in the darkness, with closed eyes...').

So let this Socrates do whatsoever he wants to and meanwhile you can think of some beautiful person.

In a bed you will always find at least four persons: the two real ones and the two that both lovers are fantasising about.

One can love one person for one reason, another person for another reason, but up to now we have not accepted it, and that has been one of the greatest causes of love not being able to transform the earth, of love dying so quickly.

We kill it. Our demands are so much. We cannot accept the simple phenomenon that the woman may love a man for his music or for his poetry or for his painting, for his body, for his intelligence, for his silence, for his coolness -- there are thousands of qualities, nobody can claim all of them. No woman can claim all the qualities either. It is very rare to find an intellectual woman -- intelligent, but not intellectual.

At least I have not found one yet and I must have known more women than any man in the world! (laughter) And I trust thorn only because they don't have much intellectuality. They function intuitively, that is the feminine form of intelligence. I have handed over the whole commune to women because one thing is certain, they cannot be cunning, they cannot be deceptive, they cannot betray me -- it is impossible.

Whatsoever they do they will do out of love. But the clever can become cunning at any moment. And sometimes you may find a woman who is an intellectual and you may love her for that. She shows one aspect of beauty.

Another woman may be physically beautiful and psychologically very nasty. That is almost always the case. People fall in love with the physical and once they are trapped then slowly they come to know about the psychology of the woman -- and she is just crazy, but now it is too late.

If we understand love as a rainbow of all the colours, then a totally different quality can exist on earth.

Then one can love many people, it becomes friendship. And one can love people for different reasons.

There is no reason to be possessive.

And thirdly, I call it a rainbow bridge because the rainbow is the only phenomenon in nature which joins the earth with the sky. It is an are joining the physical with the metaphysical, joining the material with the spiritual. Love joins two extremes which almost seem to be unjoinable, which cannot have any meeting ground -- but love makes that impossible possible.

So go deeply into love, non-possessively. Don't try to hold on to it, allow its multi-dimensionality.

Transform it more and more into a friendship so that no jealousy exists. And remember, it is fragile. It can be destroyed very easily. It is very difficult to create it and it is very easy to destroy it.

It is like a rose flower. This fundamental law of nature has never to be forgotten, that whenever the higher is in conflict with the lower, the lower will win. If you clash a rock with a rose flower you cannot hope for the rose flower to destroy the rock; the rock will destroy the rose flower. The higher is vulnerable, very fragile. Handle it with care. The lower in a brutal way, an animal way, is always stronger. And love is crushed by the lower realities -- anger, hatred, jealousy. They are like rocks and love is like a rose flower.

Or it would be even more true to say that love is like the fragrance that arises out of the rose flower. But it can lead you to immortality, to the world beyond change, beyond death.

(Simon, the son of elderly ashramite, Paritosh, after several visits to the ashram over a period of two or three years, takes sannyas tonight..Osho names him Prem Dinesh.) A life without love is a life of darkness -- and of unending darkness -- no dawn ever comes, no sun ever rises. Millions of people live in this dark night of the soul from the cradle to the grave. In fact they have remained unborn. They were in darkness in the womb of the mother; even out of the womb they are not in the light Physically of course they are in the light but spiritually they are still unborn. The miracle of the day has not happened yet, the sun has not risen, the eastern horizon has not yet become red. It can become red only when you start throbbing with love, when you start pulsating with love.

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towards nature, it may be between a person and music, poetry, painting. It can be personal, it can be impersonal, it can be universal. One can love the whole existence in its totality, as it is, with all the stars.

The greater your love is, the greater you become. The smaller your love is, the smaller you remain. Your love is the criterion of how big you are. So love without any other consideration because love means growth. Love more and more people -- birds, animals, trees, rocks -- include as much as you can in your love. One day it has to become all-inclusive so that nothing is left outside it, everything has fallen in and has become a part of it.

When love encompasses all it becomes divine, it becomes the experience of god. And that's what I mean by the beginning of the day: suddenly the sun has risen and that rising sun takes you into realms undreamt of. Otherwise man remains crawling on the earth just like a snake; he knows nothing of anything other than the dust in which he crawls. He is not aware of the stars, not aware of the vast beyond, not aware of the infinity that surrounds him, not aware of the eternity of which he is a part, an essential part.

We are not islands; we are part of an infinite existence. We have always been here and we will always be here. We have been in different forms, in different forms we will be. Birth and death are episodes in an eternity of life. Only when this is experienced is darkness dispelled an d the day has arrived.

It is because of this that for my sannyas I have chosen the colour of the eastern horizon in the early morning just before the sun rises. This is the colour -- the orange of the eastern horizon at that tremendously significant moment when night changes into day, when death changes into abundant life. It is the colour of that transition, that transmutation, that radical change, that revolution.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #19

Chapter title: None

19 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010195

ShortTitle: THUNK19

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(God can only hear that which isn't uttered, Osho tells Mouno David.)

... hence anything said in any language other than silence never reaches god. All prayers fall down --

they are futile. But in silence the miracle happens: you have not said a single word, god has not heard a single word but the message is conveyed; you have poured your heart, you have offered your being. That offering is true prayer.

Learn silence because that is the ultimate language. And only those who know how to be silent become beloveds of god.

(Osho adds 'Santosh' to 'Toby' and then links the two parts of the name together in his address to the actor from America.)

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is discontent. It is a facade. They are simply consoling themselves, they are repeating Aesop's fable of the sour grapes. Because they cannot reach anything more than what they have they start saying 'It is not worth reaching for. We are perfectly contented. We don't want money, we don't want power, we don't want prestige.' Not that they don't want those things -- they do -- but they know that they are not strong enough to fight for them all.

Just to hide their cowardliness, their weakness, they pretend, but that pretension is not real contentment.

A real contentment arises out of gratitude. God has given you life and you have not thanked him for it.

He has given you the capacity to love and you have not thanked him for that. He has given you intelligence to know and you have not thanked him for it. He has given a thousand and one things which we go on accepting as if we deserve them, as if we have a right to have them. We don't have any right. All is a gift. To know that brings a totally different kind of satisfaction. It comes out of gratitude. You feel grateful for so much that has already been done -- you cannot ask for more. Even that which is given to you is more than you are worthy of.

And Toby means god is good. When you start feeling this contentment a tremendous experience happens -- that life is good, that everything is good.

God simply means the whole. And to feel that god is good is to be religious. Now there is no complaint, no desire. One is utterly attuned with whatsoever is.

Contentment arises out of gratitude, and out of contentment arises the experience of god's goodness, his unconditional goodness. He gives to us and he asks for nothing in return.

This is the way of the sannyasin.

(To Beryl Osho adds Dhyan.)

Meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness: one is fully aware but the mind has ceased to function.

Ordinarily two things are known to us. One is when the mind is functioning but you are not aware. It goes on functioning, thoughts go on moving, but you are not aware of what is happening inside you. You never witness it, you never watch, you never observe. That's how we all function. This is a state of sleep.

And the second thing is when the mind stops functioning. In deep dreamless sleep the mind stops functioning. It happens almost every night at least for two hours -- in small gaps but the whole time is near about two hours every night, sometimes ten-minute fifteen-minute intervals when you dive deep into sleep.

Even dreaming stops; dreaming is also a functioning of the mind. But then too you are asleep. When the mind functions you are asleep, that is one state. When the mind does not function you are still asleep, that is another state. These are our ordinary experiences of the so-called waking state and sleep.

Meditation brings a third state: mind is non- functioning, just as it is in deep dreamless sleep -- that is one part of meditation, the circumference of meditation. And the second part is when you are not asleep, you are fully awake, alert, a flame of witnessing -- that is the centre of meditation. Whenever these two things happen -- you are aware and there is no mind, no thought, no desire, no dream passing through the screen of consciousness -- you attain to ultimate clarity. That is the meaning of Beryl: crystal clear.

In that crystal clarity one knows what truth is, what bliss is, what beauty is. And to know it is to have attained the ultimate flowering, to know it is to have come to the highest peak. Then one feels at home, at rest. Now finally there is nowhere to go, nothing to attain. One has arrived.

We in the East call it samadhi. Samadhi means a state of ultimate realisation, of truth, beauty, bliss, consciousness, freedom -- of all the higher values.

(Annamaria from Italy is next.)

This is your name: Ma Prem Sujato. Prem means love. Sujato means well-born.

The first birth is very ordinary, it is animal. It is nothing peculiar to human beings. Donkeys are born the same way (laughter) monkeys too. Only the second birth makes man special, and the second birth happens through love.

In the first birth you come out of the womb of your mother. It was a shelter for nine months, it protected you, but beyond nine months it is dangerous. If a child insists on remaining in that protected, secure space for longer than nine months he will be dead. For nine months it is perfectly beautiful, but then one has to come into the world.

In the same way the ego is also a shelter, a protection. In the beginning it is good, but there is a moment when one has to come out of the egg of the ego. That's what love is: dropping the ego.

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being.

(And more about love to Prem Michael.)

There are a few things in life which can be called godly. Love is one of those very rare experiences.

Silence is one of those experiences; awareness, bliss -- these are the windows of our house. We can keep them closed and remain unaware of the beautiful existence beyond, or we can open them.

The easiest to open is love. All other windows are far more difficult to open, hence my suggestion is to try to open the window which is the easiest because it is very natural.

The desire for awareness is not so natural. It comes only later on at a certain stage of evolution. The desire for freedom is also not immediately available. But love and the desire for love is born with you; hence love can become the key. And once you know how to open one window you know how to open other windows too, then it becomes easy. The art is the same; the method, the technique, is not different.

Start being more loving. Make it a decision not to miss any opportunity to love. And don't ask others to love you -- that is where people go wrong. Love. If love is returned, good; if it is not returned, then too it is good, because to love is good, to love in itself has an intrinsic beauty. It need not be rewarded. If it is rewarded that is something extra.

And the miracle is that if you don't demand, it is rewarded more and more. If you completely forget any demands it is always rewarded.

Everybody wants love. But people go wrong: from the very beginning they start asking for love rather than giving it. And the way to get is to give. So give whole-heartedly and don't be a miser, because it is not something quantitative, that by giving you will have less. It belongs to the higher realm where the more you give, the more you have. It is a totally different economics.

(But bliss is Anand Dwariko's way.)

Bliss is the door to god, so in becoming a sannyasin rejoice, be of great cheer, let the heart dance and sing -- in short, go cuckoo! (laughter) And Italians go cuckoo very easily! I have many Italian cuckoos here (laughter).

My sannyasins are not to be sad people. Enough of sadness! Throughout the whole past of humanity we have created sad saints and sages. It has been a nightmare. Now we need cheerful sages, saints who are capable of love and laughter. God is fed up with your old saints. He is continuously informing me not to send any more of the old type of saints. He needs a few dancers in heaven, the singers, lovers -- the old saints have made heaven look like hell. So I am preparing my people.

Once my orange people enter heaven they are going to make even the old saints turn on! (laughter) Either those old fools will have to leave or they will have to be ready to be turned on. I am trying to smuggle psychedelic people into heaven! (much laughter) Anand Nandan means a garden of bliss.

Man can either be a desert or he can be a garden -- both are the possibilities. But millions have chosen to be desertlike. They all wanted to be gardens but something went wrong and instead of becoming gardens they have just become deserts. Unless that basic wrong is put right one can never become a garden. And without becoming a garden -- full of trees, flowers, birds -- life cannot have any meaning, it cannot have any poetry, any music.

The most fundamental thing to transform life into a garden is meditation, and meditation is not part of our education at all. Neither the parents nor the schools, colleges or universities teach it, not even the churches, the temples, the mosques -- nobody teaches meditation. And it is only through meditation that the transformation happens.

If you live your life through the mind you will live in a desert, in a meaningless desert. You will feel bored, tired, exhausted, almost always on the verge of committing suicide or going mad.

So my emphasis is on meditation and on nothing else. Learn how to live directly, immediately, not through the mind. Mind can be used as a biocomputer for certain things: for factual memories, for mathematics, geography, history, science. It is a perfectly beautiful computer but you need not live through it, it has to be put aside. When needed you can ask for information but it does not have to be always there.

When you are meeting your girlfriend the computer is there, and there is not only one -- there are two computers between you and your girlfriend. In fact you are hiding behind your computer, she is hiding behind her computer, and those two computers are talking to each other. Now what can happen out of this?

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I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was a very busy man, so busy that one day he told one of his clients, "Today I am so busy I have left my tape-recorder here -- just talk to the tape-recorder. Later on at night when I have time I will listen." The client said, "Okay."

When the client was leaving he came to the office to say goodbye. He came so quickly -- just within a few minutes -- and it should have been a one-hour session. The psychoanalyst said, "Where are you going?"

The client said, "I have left my tape-recorder. In fact I was planning it so I brought it. Whatsoever I was going to say to you I have put onto my tape-recorder. Now my tape-recorder is talking to your tape-recorder. Why waste time? I am also a busy man and you are busy so this is a beautiful method.

Whenever I have time I will talk to my tape-recorder and whenever you have time you can listen to your tape-recorder. We need not meet again."

But this is what is happening, actually happening. This is not a joke, this is a reality!

Meditation simply means coming in direct contact with reality, face to face -- and that immediately transforms the desert into a garden.

How long will you be here?

At least three weeks but I'll be back.

Come back. And next time don't bring your tape-recorder!

(Tonight Osho has talked at length of love and of bliss. Now to a student from Germany he talks of the two together as being her path.)

For yourself be blissful, for others be loving. Bliss will take care of your subjectivity, interiority, and love will take care of your external life. And when both are there simultaneously they balance each other, otherwise man becomes lopsided. One has to be constantly balancing between love and bliss. More of love and you become an extrovert, more of bliss and you become an introvert. But when both are balanced, in that balance transcendence happens; you go beyond, beyond the inner and the outer, beyond all dualities.

And that is the target for a sannyasin: to go beyond all dualities -- darkness-light, life-death, matter-mind, this world and that world. One has to go on transcending all dualities.

When all dualities are forgotten, left far behind, then you have come to your ultimate essence. To experience it is to know the truth, and truth liberates.

(Trish becomes Gyan Arpan -- wisdom, offering.)

Wisdom happens only when you have offered yourself totally, when you are surrendered to the whole, when you relax and drop all your defences, when you withdraw all your boundaries, when you start meeting and merging with the whole like ice melting into the ocean.

Ordinarily we exist in the ocean like icebergs. We are made of water but we exist like icebergs -- cold, hard -- and we cling to our identities.

Sannyas has only one meaning: the dropping of your ego and its identity, the forgetting of the self so that you can experience the whole. And that very experience brings ecstasy, an ecstasy which is eternal. It comes but it never goes. Once it is there it is forever.

(In his address to the last sannyasin whom he names Veet Asmito, Osho reiterates the need to drop the ego.)

Ego can exist in three ways. The grossest exists on the physical plane, like a Mohammed Ali claiming to be the greatest. It is a very gross ego but in a way it is easier to get rid of the gross ego because it is so apparent. It is impossible not to see it, it is just on the surface. The second ego is a little deeper, it is psychological. A painter, a musician, a poet -- these people have a psychological ego. It is far more subtle and also far more difficult to see. From the outside the person may not look egoistic at all, he may seem a very beautiful person, but if you just scratch him a little bit you will find ego exploding.

And the third is the subtlest: the spiritual ego that exists in the so-called saints, mahatmas, yogis, siddhas. The third is so subtle that it wears the garb of humbleness, hence it is very difficult to find.

Thousands of people have lived with it absolutely unaware of its existence and others have worshipped them as humble people, as simple people, as divine, as godly. But if you watch accurately you will see: behind the humbleness there is a desire to claim 'I am the most humble person in the world. Nobody is more humble than me.' It is the ego, the same ego. It has come again but now it has come in such a way that one needs tremendous intelligence to find it.

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beyond the physical and the psychological, but I want you to be more aware of the subtlest because that is where all the old traditional religious people got lost. It wears the mask of humbleness, simplicity, poverty, meekness.

The really egoless person has no humbleness in him, he cannot have. He is neither egoistic nor humble, he is neither proud of anything nor its opposite. Humbleness is nothing but ego standing on its head -- but it is still ego. Whether it is standing on its head or on its feet, it makes no difference. The really egoless person is not egoistic and is not humble either, he is simply whatsoever he is. He claims nothing, not even humbleness.

Jesus says blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god. Because of such statements Christian saints went wrong. They started cultivating meekness to attain the kingdom of god. Now what kind of meekness is this? It is greed, pure greed, it is an ego-longing to enter the kingdom of god.

Jesus' purpose was totally different. When he said blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god, he was not talking in terms of cause and effect, he was not saying be meek so that you can attain to the kingdom of god. He was saying that the kingdom of god happens naturally to those who have lost their ego.

But he used the wrong word, 'meek'. His meaning is clear but only for those who understand. He simply wants to say 'egoless'; but 'meek' gives a different sense, it becomes humbleness. But humbleness isn't egolessness, it is ego pretending to be humble.

Egolessness knows nothing of humbleness. For example, I am not a humble man at all. I cannot be humble, there is no way for me to be humble. I am simply the way I am.

If one is simply the way one is, if one simply relaxes into one's nature, into one's spontaneity, then that is the kingdom of god. It is not a reward, it is not that you attain it because of your egolessness. To be egoless is it. It is the kingdom of god.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #20

Chapter title: None

20 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010205

ShortTitle: THUNK20

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

Anand Angelika.

God has a message to convey to us, but we're never home....

The message comes but we are not receptive. It does not reach our heart. The head does not allow it to enter, the head keeps it outside.

The head allows only the mundane; it is not a vehicle for the sacred. For the sacred one has to open another door, another center has to start functioning. And bliss is the key to start that other center functioning. In moments of bliss the mind disappears, there is only a heart full of dance, song, celebration.

And the message is immediately understood.

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My sannyasins have to learn how to be blissful in spite of all that is disturbing. Remember that: in spite of all. There are a thousand and one things which distract, disturb, annoy, irritate. This is the whole challenge of life, not to be disturbed by it. One has to become the center of the cyclone, then the night may be dark but deep in your heart a small candle goes on burning; and that's enough -- enough for you to stay full of light.

Sannyas simply means a cheerful way of living -- then everything else comes on its own.

(Osho adds 'Dhyan'' to Daniel's name, and talks of meditation in relation to the meaning of Daniel -- god is my judge.)

Dhyan means an absolute state of silence where no thought moves inside you; all the waves of the mind are gone, the consciousness has become a silent, undisturbed lake. In that very moment one becomes unafraid of the society, of the state, of the church, of all so-called outer authorities which are reducing every human being to a slave. In those moments of silence one stands naked before god. One knows that: except for god nobody is my judge.

Daniel means god is my judge.

The moment you experience that only god is your judge you become fearless of all other judges, of the opinions of others. The greatest fear in the world is of the opinions of others. And the moment you are unafraid of the crowd you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.

Buddha has actually called it the lion's roar. When a man reaches an absolutely silent state he roars like a lion. For the first time he knows what freedom is because now there is no fear of anybody's opinion. What people say does not matter. Whether they call you a saint or a sinner is immaterial; your whole and sole judge is god. And by 'god' a person is not meant at all, god simply means the whole universe.

It is not a question of having to face a person, you have to face the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the stars -- the whole universe. And this is our universe, we are part of it, there is no need to be afraid of it, there is no need to hide anything from it. In fact even if you try you cannot hide. The whole knows it already, the whole knows more about you than you know; hence the other meaning of Daniel.

One meaning is god is my judge and the second is even more significant; the second is, god has already judged. It is not something that is going to happen in the future, it has already happened, he has judged. So even the fear of that judgement withers away. It is not a question of some judgement day at the end. You need not tremble. The judgement day happened on the first day; the moment he created you he already judged you. He knows you, you are his creation. If something goes wrong with you he is responsible, not you. If you go astray he is responsible, not you. How can you be responsible? -- you are not your own creation. If you paint and something goes wrong you cannot say that the painting is the cause of it -- the painter is the cause.

So there is no need to be afraid of the crowd or of some imaginary god at the end of the world asking you what you have done and what you have not done. He has already judged -- that is really significant -- it has already happened so you are free. And the moment one knows that one is totally free to be oneself, life starts having a dynamic quality to it.

Fear creates fetters, freedom gives you wings.

(Bob is a college professor -- and becomes not Swami but Ma Anand Bob... because Bob's not a man but a lady!)

Bob has two meanings; one is brightness and the other is fame. Bliss brings both. As far as you are concerned it gives a tremendous upsurge to your intelligence, it removes all the hindrances, it sharpens your genius.

Everybody is a genius. Society makes people mediocre, stupid, because society needs the mediocres and the stupids. The mediocres become the heads and the stupids become the hands. But society is very much afraid of a real genius -- of a Buddha, of a Lao Tzu, of a Jesus. It is very much afraid. A genius seems to be a danger to all vested interests -- and in fact he is. The fear is not wrongly-founded, the is right, because society is dominated by ugly interests, and the man of genius can see so clearly the whole nonsense that has been perpetuated for centuries that he immediately rebels. It is not a question of decision on his part, rebellion comes to him naturally, spontaneously. He cannot be reduced to a slave, to a commodity.

Society wants everybody to remain miserable. Miserable people are good, obedient. Miserable people are good because misery destroys their intelligence. Miserable people are good because they are always 1/08/07

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more like machines than like human beings, more efficient. And that's what the society needs, machines, not men. But the people have to suffer hell for their whole life.

Bliss opens the doors of paradise. And paradise is not somewhere above in the clouds, it is within you.

The moment you start feeling blissful the doors of paradise open. In fact they are always open, there is not even a Saint Peter on guard -- you just have to be blissful to enter.

And of course the second meaning is also significant: whenever a person becomes blissful, without any effort he starts affecting other people's lives in some mysterious way. It is just like when a flower opens.

Somehow the bees come to know that the flower has opened and from miles they start moving towards it. It has been recorded that from at least four miles away bees can feel the fragrance and immediately they start moving in the direction of the fragrance, towards the source of it.

So whenever a person becomes blissful it means a flower of consciousness has opened, and those who you are thirsty -- and who is not thirsty? -- those who are starved -- and who is not starved? -- they all start moving as if some magnetic force is pulling them.

Bliss inside creates intelligence and outside creates a tremendous attraction for all those who are seeking and searching.

(You've got to drop knowledge to allow wisdom to surface, Osho reiterates tonight.) One has to be just like a child. It is a second childhood. Jesus says again and again 'Unless you are like small children you will not enter my kingdom of god.'

The rabbis, the pundits, the imams, the ayatollahs, the bishops, the popes -- they cannot enter the kingdom of god. Those are the people for whom a special arrangement has been made: hell. It is for V.I.P.'s, it is a V.I.P. treatment -- or V.V.I.P. Hell is not for poor sinners -- who cares about poor sinners? It is a five-star place. Avoid it!

My sannyasins have to learn how to renounce knowledge so that they can become like small children again.

(A star of love, Osho names the former Genevieve.)

Love is the only star in the dark night of the soul. But that one star is enough to transform everything; it can bring the day, the dawn.

One has to be totally loving, and the love has not to be something addressed. It has to be unaddressed like the fragrance of a flower. It is not a question of giving love to this person or that, it is a question of just being loving, and ultimately, of being just love.

These are the three stages: love as a relationship is the lowest, loving as a quality is higher than the first, and becoming just love -- not even a quality but love itself -- that is the highest. It is because of this that Jesus says god is love. It is the highest phenomenon, the ultimate transformation of your energy.

(Osho speaks of god.)

God is not an object; it is not something separate from you; it is not something that one day can become known.

Science divides reality into only two categories, the known and the unknown. But there is no qualitative difference between the two. That which is known today was unknown yesterday and that which is unknown today may become known tomorrow, it is bound to become known sooner or later.

God is neither the known nor the unknown. Then what is god? God is the knower, hence it will always remain beyond science. It is really so stupid that we only think of the object and never think of the subject.

Science seems to be very illogical about that one thing. The scientist is really very logical about objects but very illogical about himself. He goes on denying himself. He tries to know everything except the scientist himself. He never asks the question, 'Who am I?' He asks all other questions but the most important question is never raised by him. In fact he is afraid to raise it because no scientific method can be of any help in answering it. He will have to move in a totally different world, the world of mysticism.

God never happens as an object; it is your very subjectivity. The very energy that knows, is god. Hence the only way to know the knower is to discard all objects. That's what meditation is all about, putting all the objects aside. If the objects are there your knowing is focussed on them; if there is no object your knowing has to come back to yourself. There is no hindrance. A circle is created; it goes away from you but finding no object ultimately comes back to you. In that coming back you experience god. It is energy coming back to its own source.

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That knowing is the only knowing worth calling knowing; all else is superficial. To know it is to know all, not to know it is to know nothing.

(Hariprem is one of the thousand names that Hindus have found for god, Osho tells Hariprem.) A whole scripture is devoted only to names. In that great scripture, VISHNUSAHASTRANATH, The One Thousand Names of God, nothing else is mentioned; throughout the whole scripture only names are given but each name signifies some aspect of god.

The most loved by me is Hari. In no other language of the world, in no other tradition or religion does such a name exist. It is really extraordinary, of some tremendous intuition. Hari means a thief. Now to call god a thief needs courage. Only somebody who knows can do that. And certainly, god is a thief because he steals your heart.

And the surgery is done so silently that you never become aware of what has happened. Suddenly one day you find your heart is missing -- that's the work of Hari, the god! Suddenly one day your own heart is no more your own, it is god's; he has stolen it, he has succeeded!

Love that thief, invite that thief, pray to that thief, saying 'I am ready,' and leave your door open. Don't create any obstructions, help him in every possible way so that he can steal your heart, because that is the greatest experience that can happen to somebody.

Life becomes meaningful only when god enters it, before that it is just a drag. The moment god enters you it is a dance.

(To Cathy from France, Osho gives the name Haridasi.)

Hari is one of the names of god, it means the great thief. And he has already stolen your heart! (much laughter) It is already missing! Later on you can search for it but you will not find it. It happened quickly.

And dasi means one who is surrendered: surrendered to the ultimate thief. So now you are no more your own master, from this very moment become discontinuous with your past, it is no more relevant, it is a new birth. And now live in a surrendered way.

Surrender means the way of love. And the miracle of love is that through surrender it becomes victorious. And only love becomes victorious, nothing else ever becomes victorious. With god neither money can succeed, nor intellect, nor physical power -- only love, because love is not a fight, it is a surrender. One simply relaxes, one simply lets go of one's ego and one says to god 'I am yours, sincerely yours!'

And the moment you have said that totally -- that 'I am yours', -- a transformation happens instantly. It is not a gradual process, not that one changes slowly slowly. People change slowly because they are cowards.

They change slowly because they give up very reluctantly, chunk by chunk. They are very miserly, they go on holding back. If one is ready to give up then immediately, in a single moment, the miracle happens.

There is no need to be miserly because our life is god's, it is his gift. We are not giving anything to him, just offering what he has given to us. But people are strange; they cling to something that is not theirs. In that clinging they create misery. Once you accept that your life is not your own, it is god's, and you surrender it unto his feet, all burden disappears, all tension disappears, all anxiety, all anguish. Then life is a sheer joy, a beautiful song, a constant festivity, a celebration. -- How long will you be here? -- Five months. -- Five months won't do. Forever -- and a little bit more! Good, Haridasi.

(To Judith, the name Premdasi -- devoted to love.)

The quality that can make you transported from the mundane to the sacred is love. It is the bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the manifest and the unmanifest, between the circumference and the centre. One has to learn only one thing, the art of love.

It is certain an art. Everybody wants to love and wants to be loved, but nobody learns the art. A great misunderstanding prevails that just by being born you know what love is, so there is no need to learn it.

Certainly the potential is there, but even the painter with the greatest potential has to learn the art of painting even the greatest dancer has to learn the art of dancing. The potential is there but the art is needed to bring the potential into actuality, to transform it from the seed into a flower.

Sannyas means the art of love. Love in a multi-dimensional way because this whole existence is divine.

So don't make choices, love choicelessly. Love for love's sake -- that is the meaning of your name -- and then you need not search for god. God will try to find you -- it is up to him. And only he can find you, you 1/08/07

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cannot find him. Where will you try to find him? He has no postal address, no telephone number. In what direction is one going to search for him? -- so searching is futile.

Just prepare yourself, just be ready to be the host. That's what love does, it creates the host. And the moment the host is ready the guest immediately appears. It has never been otherwise. One can rest assured: whenever you are ready god appears, instantly, immediately.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #21

Chapter title: None

21 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010215

ShortTitle: THUNK21

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Osho ingeniously makes of Satyam Donna the meaning; truth can enter one's being only if one has the quality of feminine receptivity.)

Receptivity is always feminine. The male quality is aggressive, the feminine quality is receptive. It is not only physically that a woman has a womb, it is also spiritually true. When when a man attains to the truth he has to learn the art of being feminine. Hence you will see in the statues of Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Christ, a certain quality of femininity, a grace, a sensitivity, an availability, a vulnerability, because truth has to be received, welcomed. You cannot conquer truth, you have to allow the truth to conquer you.

There is no way to be aggressive as far as truth is concerned. Aggression is violence and the violent person becomes incapable of knowing the truth. One has to be utterly loving.

The feminine quality makes you a host and then the guest can come at any moment. Whenever your receptivity is ripe the guest inevitably arrives. Not even a single moment is lost.

(Shirley means a restful spirit. Osho adds 'Anand' to it, and explains to an American groupleader that if we could only calm down a bit we'd find bliss was already ours.) We have completely forgotten about it, it has become a forgotten language, but it is still there.

It is like when you see a person and you remember his face, you even remember that you remember him, you remember that you remember his name -- you say 'It is just on the tip of my tongue but it is still not coming.' And the more you try, the less is the possibility of it coming because your very effort creates restlessness, your very effort makes you tense, your very effort creates a turmoil and it becomes more and more difficult to search in that turmoil. And finally, you decide not to bother about it you become engaged in something else -- maybe listening to music or cooking food or working in the garden or just cleaning the floor or taking a shower -- and suddenly it pops up. You were not looking for it, you had completely forgotten about it You dropped the very idea and suddenly it is there. What happened? The moment you dropped the idea your rest was restored; you became calm and quiet, you became effortless, you became relaxed. And that's what is needed.

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Sannyas means living life in a relaxed way, with no hurry, with no worry, as if nothing is serious, living life joyously, playfully, from moment to moment, not bothering about the past, not bothering about the future either, not bothering at all; whatsoever happens is good and whatsoever does not happen is also good.

Taking things with such calmness and equanimity brings a restful spirit. Slowly slowly the whole turmoil settles and suddenly there is bliss, out of nowhere it starts welling up. You become flooded with light, with life, with love. Those are the three dimensions of bliss. It makes you more light-full, makes you more life-full, makes you more love-full. And when all these three L's -- these are the learned, one has arrived home. In the universities, colleges and schools they teach you three R's; and their three R's are worthless, mundane.

I teach three L's. The whole phenomenon happens only when you are restful spirits, at home, at ease.

(Richard becomes Swami Prem Svargo.)

Prem means love. Svargo means heaven, paradise.

Heaven is not something geographical, it is not something outside you, somewhere above the clouds; it is within you. The whole idea of a geographical heaven somewhere out there has led millions of people into all kinds of stupidities.

Heaven is a state of being, it is a state of love. When you are full of hate you are in hell, when you are overflowing with love you are in heaven. The English word 'paradise' comes from a Persian word 'firdaus'.

Firdaus means a walled garden with many flowers, streams, birds. That garden is your potential. Seeds are there, everything is there as a potential but you have to actualise it. God only provides seeds and the challenge of life to sow those seeds, to grow, to protect, to water, to nourish, to wait. And then spring comes and one day the mysterious has happened.

The seed has never given any clue as to what it contained; when suddenly lotuses bloom you cannot believe that they were hiding in such small seeds, in ugly seeds -- closed, windowless. They almost look like small stones, pebbles -- and such beautiful roses were hiding there. if you had cut open the seeds you would not have found anything.

That's where science is missing: it goes on dissecting, cutting seeds and trying to find roses, lotuses, marigolds. It finds nothing, not even a hint, because the potential is invisible. It needs many things, only then can it become visible

By becoming a sannyasin one is taking a step towards the actualisation of all the potential that has come with you from the very beginning. The potential should not die as a potential. That is the only sin, to have been living with such an opportunity and not to have used it. That's the only sin. To have used it to its maximum, its optimum capacity, is virtue.

(That we're alive proves we are loved, Osho tells Haripriya.) We are here -- that is more than enough proof that existence needs us. We are fulfilling a certain need; we are not useless, we are not accidental as science goes on telling people.

In these three hundred years science has created one great problem for every human being; the problem is that science has destroyed the possibility of feeling respect for oneself. And the moment a person loses respect for himself he loses all the joy of life, he loses his soul, he becomes soulless. And science has been telling and teaching everybody that man is just an accident, that the whole existence is accidental.

The very idea that we are accidental takes all sense out of life; all meaning disappears. Whether we are or not does not matter -- then why bother to go on living? For what?

The greatest need of man is to be needed. The moment one feels needed life starts having ecstasy. Even if a single person needs you it gives you significance. A child needs you as a mother -- that's enough to live for. A man needs you as a wife and that's enough to live for. A friend needs you... without you there somebody will miss you, somebody will feel lonely -- that's enough for you to feel meaningful. And the religious person is one who feels that the whole existence needs him, hence his joy is infinite.

If even one person can give you meaning by needing you, by desiring you, then you can imagine how much bliss can happen when you come to feel that the whole infinite universe needs you, that you are fulfilling some purpose. Suddenly life becomes poetry, a song. A dance arises in you, a celebration, a thankfulness. That thankfulness is prayer. That gratitude is the greatest experience. My whole effort here is to help my sannyasins to feel the significance of life.

And existence makes no conditions on you. It is not that if you do certain things only then will the love from the whole flow towards you. It is unconditional. It comes to the saint, it comes to the sinner; it makes 1/08/07

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no distinctions.

When a raincloud comes and showers it does not shower more on the saint's garden and less on the sinner's garden; it makes no distinctions. So there are no conditions from existence that you should fulfil this, that you should do that. Human beings make conditions and destroy the beauty of love.

Existence gives you love without any conditions. Whatsoever you want, you do -- that's your freedom.

God loves you as you are. But we have destroyed even the idea of god. The Old Testament god says 'I am a very jealous god. If you worship some other god I will take revenge.' Now this is not god's voice. This is so ugly, the very idea that some jealous man is speaking in the name of god, that some jealous priest is wearing the mask of god, is so stupid. It is not god's face, not god's voice; god's love is unconditional. And god is not a person, hence he cannot be jealous.

Jesus is far more right when he says god is love. But Christians misunderstood even that. They thought love was one of the qualities of god -- that is not so. Jesus is saying that god is love, not that god is a quality or that love is a quality; he is simply making both words synonymous. Saying that god is love means god equals love. It is the same energy called by a different name.

Existence is love -- and to feel it is to be transformed.

Anand Sagar.

Bliss is an unboundedness, just like an ocean. It is so vast that one is completely in it. Just as a dewdrop slips from a lotus leaf into the lake and becomes one with the lake, in the same way man has to slip out of the ego and become one with existence, only then is there bliss.

Ego is misery, the source of misery, the only cause of misery; and egolessness is the source of bliss. Ego gives you boundaries, identities, it makes you a certain person.

The word 'person' is significant. It comes from the Greek 'persona'; persona means a mask. In Greek theater actors used to wear masks. The word 'person' and the word 'personality' both come from persona.

The ego is a persona; it is a mask, it is not your reality. It has to be dropped, only then do you know what is real. And the real is always blissful. The unreal is against your nature, hence it creates misery. Unreal means unnatural, real means natural. And your nature is infinitely blissful, it is a constant celebration. Except for man you will not find any animal, tree, star, rock miserable, because only man creates the idea of the ego.

Only man can create the idea of the ego, he is the most highly evolved form of life. But as you grow higher the risk of falling becomes bigger. Animals cannot fall and become an Adolf Hitler or a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlaine or a Nadir Shah -- no animal can do that. A cat is a cat, a dog is a dog, a lion is a lion, a serpent is a serpent. They are simple people; whatsoever they are they are, neither more nor less.

But man moves on high peaks and hence the danger -- he can fall. If he falls he can fall below the animals, if he rises he can rise above the gods. With that possibility of rising above the gods also comes the risk of falling below the animals. The whole thing depends on this simple word 'ego'. If ego becomes too much you start falling, the weight of the ego starts pulling you downwards. If you become egoless you become weightless, and with that very weightlessness you start moving upwards.

Science knows only one law, the law of gravitation. But the mystics have known another law, the law of levitation. Just as things fall downwards things also rise upwards -- but for that one has to become absolutely weightless, one has to remove the rock of the ego. And that's the whole work of sannyas: removing the rock of the ego. Then you have wings and you can have what Plotinus calls the flight of the alone to the alone, the ultimate flight, the flight of man to god, the flight from the finite to the infinite.

(Love is a bridge, Osho had said some nights ago. And so is meditation, he tells Dhyan Divyam.) Meditation means becoming absolutely silent, still, serene, as if nothing moves inside, everything stops

-- the mind, time. There comes a full stop to all movement. In that full stop, when the ordinary movement of the mind stops, you start moving into a now dimension. The ordinary movement of the mind is horizontal.

When it stops, the energy cannot stop. Energy is basically dynamic, so when the horizontal movement stops, energy changes its movement to a new dimension; it becomes vertical.

Once the energy becomes vertical you are joined to god. That change from horizontal to vertical is meditation. You just have to drop all the old known movements of the mind so the energy accumulates and has to find a new path. It cannot remain static, remember. This is the whole strategy of meditation.

Because energy cannot remain static there is hope. If you stop the energy moving as it has always done, in thoughts, desires, memories, imagination, dreams, when you cut out all these, when you put a full stop there as if the road had ended... Energy cannot remain static, it is essentially dynamic. So when the old 1/08/07

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movement completely stops it takes a new turn, absolutely new -- you are not even aware that such a possibility ever existed. From being horizontal it becomes vertical.

That is the symbol of the Christian cross. Christians have missed its meaning, they think it is just a cross. But it is part of the old eastern symbol, the swastika; it is just a part of the swastika. The swastika is a cross with a few more things added to it; but the cross is the middle section of the swastika. The cross symbolises these two possibilities. One is horizontal -- Jesus' hands are crucified on the horizontal and the whole of his body is on the vertical. His hands represent work, action, and his whole body represents rest, relaxation. The vertical means relaxation and rest.

So once your energy stops moving in the old structure and pattern a new door opens for you. You cannot open it because you don't know where it is. All that you can do is stop the old flow and let it find the new route. Because energy can move only in two ways there is no problem; if the horizontal is blocked it has to move vertically; it will find its own way.

That's why I say meditation is the bridge between man and god -- it is divine.

Amrita Pritam.

Amrita means the immortal, the timeless, the deathless. It represents god because god is immortal, timeless, eternal, deathless. It represents the real.

The unreal is momentary, it s changing continuously. It is like a dream world, everything goes on changing.

You see a movie -- scenes go on changing, but something behind the scenes, the white screen, remains the same; it is hidden behind the changing scenes. When these scenes stop, when the projector stops, you suddenly become aware of a new thing which was always there when you were looking at the picture but you were not aware of it.

God is just like the screen of the whole changing world. The whole changing world is but a projection.

Hidden behind it is the immortal, the eternal.

So Amrita is another name for god. And Pritam means beloved: beloved of god, beloved of the eternal, the immortal.

This is the most significant thing that I want to insist on again and again for my sannyasins to remember, because the mind tends to forget it. In fact the mind has great investment in forgetting it, because if you remember it then the mind becomes useless. If you remember the eternal, if you remember the ultimate, then the mind becomes very insignificant, because the mind is just a momentary phenomenon. If you watch a thought it arises one moment, the next moment it is gone. If you watch any mood, it comes, it is there for a little while and then it is gone.

If you are aware of the eternal, attuned to the eternal, you won't care much about all these passing phases. And we become so much disturbed. A little bit of anger arises and we are completely clouded by it, we forget everything -- it becomes the most important thing -- and we know that tomorrow we will not even remember it. After few days it will look so insignificant.

There is a great Sufi story. A king asked a Sufi mystic, 'Can you give me some advice which will be helpful to me in the critical moments of life, in the dangerous moments of life?' The Sufi was wearing a ring he took off the ring and gave it to the king and he said 'Under this diamond there is a message, a small note, but don't remove the diamond unless a real need arises. Unless you feel that you have come to the moment where nothing else can help, only then remove the diamond and you will find the message.'

The king was tempted many times but he kept control. And then the moment came. His country was invaded, he was defeated, he lost all that he had. He was being chased by the enemy and he ran away on his horse. The enemy was coming closer and closer -- he could hear the noise, the sound of the horses. He knew that within a few minutes they would reach -him. And then he came to a cul-de-sac, the road ended. It was a mountainous region and suddenly there was a great abyss and there was no way to go further. He could not go back, the enemy was there, just on his heels, and their sound was becoming louder and louder and louder. Suddenly he remembered the message.

He opened the ring and removed the stone. There was a small note; it said 'This too will pass.' A great silence descended on him. 'This too will pass.' And it actually happened that slowly slowly the sound of the coming enemy receded -- they had taken a wrong turning, they had moved in another direction.

Finally he collected his army again, conquered the enemy, came back to his capital and was received greatly by the people. They were shouting with joy, dancing, celebrating, the whole capital was decorated, the roads were full of flowers and he felt very great, as if he had suddenly become young again. He was 1/08/07

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riding on that wave of victory with great pride and suddenly he remembered the message -- 'This too will pass'. A great calm descended on him again. And he felt it is all the same -- defeat, victory, nothing remains.

The people were puzzled -- after that day their king had changed, he was a totally now man. They asked him again and again 'What has happened to you? You don't look disturbed at all, you don't look rootless at all.

The old worrying, the old anxieties, have all disappeared. You look so calm and quiet and collected -- what is the secret of it?'

Finally he called his court and he showed them the ring. He said, 'There is not much secret in it. This ring is the secret, this is my only scripture. Now I don't need any other scripture. This simple message, one single sentence, "This too will pass", is enough. Whenever something comes to my mind -- anger, jealousy, hatred, greed -- I simply remind myself that this too will pass, and suddenly it is no longer there. It suddenly passes because it is bound to pass; and then I am again settled in my eternity, I am again rooted in the ultimate, in my very nature.'

To remember that we belong to the eternal, to remember that existence loves us, that we are beloveds of existence, is enough to get rid of all anxieties, anguishes, tensions, worries. Then life and death are the same, success and failure are the same. Then what happens does not matter. What matters now is of a totally different dimension: the beginningless, the endless, the immortal. To continuously remember this is the whole secret of sannyas.

The orange will remind you -- this is just like the ring -- the mala will remind you, my picture will remind you. These are just devices to keep you continuously aware that whatsoever happens on the outside is irrelevant. Let it pass and remain rooted, grounded in your own centre.

To be centred is to know what god is, to be grounded in one's nature is to become enlightened, is to become a Christ or a Buddha.

(Osho interpreted Dhyan as meaning silence this time, in talking to Dhyanprem about his new name.) There have been people in the past who lived in silence but they sacrificed love for it. There have also been people who lived in love but they sacrificed silence for it. And to me, both missed the wholeness of life.

The wholeness of life is possible only when love and silence go hand in hand together in deep harmony.

Silence is subjective, it is something that happens within you, it belongs to your interiority. And love is relating with others. Love is moving into the world, love is other-oriented.

A person who simply becomes an introvert becomes closed to the world, and to be closed to the world means to be closed to the sun, to the moon, to the flowers, to this tremendously beautiful existence. It is moving alive into a kind of grave. That's what your so-called monasteries were supposed to be: graves for people who were not dead yet. Monasteries gave them an opportunity to live a dead life. They escaped from the world, they were afraid of love, very much afraid of love.

There are Christian monasteries where no woman has ever entered and Christian nunneries where no man has ever entered. For one thousand years no woman has entered the monastery at Athos and once you become a monk in that monastery you cannot got out. You enter forever. There is an entrance but no exit. It is a grave; a communal grave you can call it -- many people living in one grave.

This is not wholeness, not health. And these people are bound to become stupid, imbeciles, idiots, because to remain intelligent you need all the challenges of life, all the problems of life. The challenges and problems go on giving opportunities for your intelligence to grow. They sharpen your sword, they don't allow any rust to gather upon you. And there have been people who have lived in the world, in the world of love, in relationships of all kinds, but they lived an insane life because there was no silence in them.

Up to now this has been the way for ninety-nine point nine per cent of humanity. We have existed in a lopsided way. My sannyasins have to bring a new synthesis; they have to live in silence and love together.

It should be easy: when you are alone be silent, be meditative, move to the innermost core of your being; and when you are with somebody, share your joy and love -- relate, sing, dance, love, laugh. They are not against each other. In fact just the opposite is the case: love will help you to attain deeper silence, and silence will help you to attain deeper love. They support each other, They are not antagonists, but complementaries.

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I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #22

Chapter title: None

22 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010225

ShortTitle: THUNK22

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Osho adds Deva to Ananda's name and explains that bliss is one of those things which is of the beyond.)

Love, awareness -- these are also of the same category. All these values can become doors to god because if you can catch hold of one ray of light you can reach the very source of it, you can use it as a bridge. And bliss is one of the easiest. Love is the most difficult because it requires the other. Things become complicated. Bliss is absolutely your own. You are not dependent on anybody else, you just have to choose to be blissful. It is basically your choice. They are not caused by anything outside you -- neither bliss nor misery. It is your choice.

There are people who are always choosing misery, and in the same situation there are people who will choose the bliss part. It is the same world in which you and I live. It is the same world in which Judas lived and Jesus lived, but from the same world they chose very different lives.

Jesus chose a life of bliss. Even in his crucifixion there was immense blissfulness. Judas chose the life of misery; even being with a Jesus he remained miserable. And he committed suicide the day after the crucifixion. That is the ultimate result of choosing misery; suicide is its logical end. And the logical end of bliss is resurrection. On the path of bliss even death becomes the beginning of a new life, of the eternal life.

My sannyasins have to be choosers of bliss. In spite of all try to find in every situation what is blissful.

And there is not a single situation in which you cannot find bliss.

(Osho reveals just why man prefers to live in lies and can't tolerate truth. ) False things are always cheap. You can always purchase a mask for your face, a beautiful mask. To transform your face into a beautiful face is an arduous journey. It needs great transformation in your being because your eyes will show that which is within you, your face will radiate your inner reality.

Unless your whole being is transformed you cannot have real beauty. Authentic grace is possible only when your innermost core becomes illumined, when it becomes a light unto itself. Then certainly from your eyes, from your face, from your hands, from all your actions and gestures, your inner reality is conveyed.

But that needs great work.

To purchase a false mask is very simple. You can purchase a mask and look like Buddha or Jesus or Krishna. And you can learn how to act like somebody else. Acting is not a difficult thing. To be a real Christ is one thing, to act as Christ is another. Millions of Christians are doing that act -- particularly the pope, the bishops, the priests. In their own way they are just acting.

Just a few months ago, the pope enacted the whole scene of Jesus' crucifixion. He carried a small golden cross on his shoulders -- a golden cross! Thousands of people followed him to a small hillock by the side of 1/08/07

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the Vatican, and there he washed the feet of a poor man who had already been cleaned and bathed and prepared for the whole scene. And the pope kissed his feet. This is all an act. And then he came back -- no crucifixion! (laughter) At least they should have crucified him -- then the whole act would have been done.

The real thing was left out. They should have crucified him and then waited for three days to see whether he resurrected or not.

Acting is so cheap, that's why millions of people have chosen the easier course, the short-cut. But once you choose a lie you will have to choose a thousand other lies to support it, and you will become afraid of truth because a single truth will destroy the whole edifice of your falsity, of your pseudo-ness.

It is because of this that the Jews had to crucify Jesus. He was destroying their traditional lies. Socrates was poisoned for the simple reason that he started talking about the truth, he started seducing people into enquiring what the truth is and not being blind followers, not being believers but enquirers. And that was a danger to the whole establishment. The establishment immediately took action. This man had to be stopped.

If he did not listen then he would have to be killed.

Why have people been so much against truth? Because of their investment in the lies. But the trouble with lies is that although they are cheap, simple, easily available... You can find all kinds of lies in the churches, in the mosques , in the temples, in the gurudwaras, everywhere. You can choose. They come in all shapes and sizes; whatsoever fits you, you can choose that kind of belief. But you will remain miserable.

That is the real price you are paying. On the surface they look cheap but ultimately you will come to realise one day that your whole life has been wasted, your whole soul has been destroyed -- and you have done it. It is a suicidal act, and your whole life will be nothing but a long tragedy, a sequence of miseries, from one misery to another. Of course one will be always hoping that something good is going to happen but it never happens. Lies can never deliver the goods; only truth can bring bliss to you, only truth can bring celebration to your life, only truth can bring spring.

I have chosen for my sannyasins the orange colour. In India it is the colour of spring -- when all the trees burst forth in red colours. They dance, they sing, suddenly their whole being is rejoicing. A tree flowers only out of overflowing energy. It is so overflooded with joy it has to share it with the existence. Flowers represent bliss, celebration, spring, youth, resurrection.

Remember, to be initiated into sannyas means to be initiated into truth. I don't ask my sannyasins to renounce the world; I certainly ask you to renounce all lies, falsehoods, hypocrisies -- that's enough. If you renounce all lies your whole past is renounced. You will be reborn; in that renunciation is a rebirth. And when life is fresh and clean of all the junk of the past you can again have the same wondering eyes of a child, the same innocence. And it is innocence that can have a communion with the ultimate -- not knowledge but innocence.

(Rumi is the name of a Sufi mystic, Osho tells the third initiate.) Rumi does not mean anything, it is a name of a place; because he came from Rum he was called Rumi.

His message is love, and he belongs to the highest categories of the Buddhas. He was the man who inverted a new method of meditation, whirling.

There have been hundreds of devices; Rumi has also contributed one special device. He became enlightened not by sitting silently like a Buddha, he became enlightened by dancing. And his dance is a special and of dance. You turn round and round, as if you are just a wheel moving faster and faster; you are both the axle and the wheel. Small children enjoy it very much. Almost all over the world parents have to stop their children from doing it because they are afraid they may get dizzy, but they don't know that the children are enjoying something very special.

When a small child goes on whirling he loses the sense of being a body, he starts hovering above his body, he can see his own body turning -- and that is the miracle of the method. But we are stopped by our parents very early.

Jalaluddin introduced that method. He himself became enlightened by thirty-six hours of continuous whirling; day in, day out he went on and on. He was riding on a cloud, he could not stop till he fell down.

But when he opened his eyes and got up he was a totally new man, the old was gone. People had gathered to watch him, thousands of people -- he was a well-known mystic. What had happened to him? dad he gone crazy or something. And he had told his disciples that he should not be disturbed.

For thirty-six hours he danced and danced. The dancer disappeared in the dance, there was only dance and no dancer -- the ego died. And he could see his own body from the higher plane dancing somewhere on the earth. He became a watcher on the hill, the body was in the deep dark valley. And that's how he 1/08/07

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introduced the method to his disciples.

His message was love and dance. Love the whole existence so you can dance, and dance to abandon so that you can love.

(And then there was more about love-dance one can have with life.) People are fighting with existence, that's why they create misery. Dance with it, sway with the wind, dance with the trees, whisper with the clouds, sing songs to the stars. Create a friendship. It is our existence.

Don't remain alienated, don't remain a foreigner, don't remain an outsider; become part, part of this great dance that existence is. Create a harmonious relationship with everything that surrounds you. Say hello even to the rocks. And don't think that people will think you are crazy. If they do, let them think you are crazy.

They don't know that if one really lovingly says hello to a rock, the rock responds.

If you hug a tree lovingly the hug is returned. The moment you start creating a friendship with existence you become a real sannyasin. To be at home in the world, to be rejoicingly part of this tremendous drama is to be a sannyasin. It is not renunciation of life, it is rejoicing in life, with life. It is a deep deep let-go, it is saying yes to all that is.

(Osho talked of the difference between faith and belief on the seventeenth of the month. Tonight he expanded on the subject.)

Faith is not belief. Many people misinterpret faith as belief. Religious people misinterpret it, anti-religious people misinterpret it; both are agreed on one thing, that faith means belief. Faith does not mean belief at all. Belief is of the head and faith is of the heart -- they belong to two different centres, they are really diametrically opposite.

Belief is a repression of doubt and faith is an expression of trust. They are as far from each other as two things can be. But priests played a trick. Because faith has been praised, and faith is worth praising, they played a trick upon the word; they made it mean belief and they go on telling people 'Believe, because the scriptures say if you don't believe you will never attain to god.' The scriptures certainly say if you don't have faith you will never attain to god, you will never know what bliss is, what truth is, what love is. But faith is not belief.

Belief means falsifying. There is doubt in you and you cover it up with a belief. It is as if you have a wound and you put a rose flower on it: it is not going to heal it but you can deceive others, they will not be able to see the wound. And the most dangerous thing is that you may be deceived by your flower yourself, you may forget about the wound and you will start believing that there is no wound at all -- look, the beautiful flower is there. Forgetting the wound is not going to heal it. And covering it is dangerous because it will go on increasing underneath the flower; it can become a canceric growth inside you.

That's what has happened to humanity: for thousands of years people have lived with doubt repressed by belief and now the doubt has grown so big that it is throwing all belief away, it is erupting everywhere. Now the whole humanity is in a state of doubt. Even those who pretend to believe know that that belief is only formal. It may be utilitarian, pragmatic, it is good for other reasons, not for religious reasons to go to church every sunday. It is a social affair, it gives you a good social status. People think you are religious, virtuous.

People give you respect and your ego feels good with the respectability that comes through it. But now almost half the humanity has gone communist, atheistic, and the other half is only formally religious, there is no true religion. And the people who are responsible for this whole nonsense are the priests -- they deceived humanity.

I am against belief because belief is a repression of doubt. I am all for faith because faith is an enquiry, it is not belief. It is trust in existence, it is trust in oneself, it is trust in one's consciousness, it is trust in one's intelligence. If I am intelligent it is a simple conclusion that 'How can I be intelligent if the whole universe is unintelligent? I come from the universe, I am part of it; if I am intelligent that simply shows that the universe is intelligent.' It is not a question of belief, it is a simple enquiry, it is a simple logical process.

There is no need to repress doubt.

Trusting one's intelligence, trusting one's enquiry, trusting even one's doubts -- that is faith. Because doubts are not bad. They are only question marks, and every question mark can lead you into enquiry, and every enquiry is good. If the enquiry proves that god is, it is good; if it proves that god is not, that too is good. Either way we will be discovering the truth. Whether god is or is not does not matter; whatsoever is the case has to be known.

Truth does not mean that god has to be. Truth simply means whatsoever is has to be discovered. In fact 1/08/07

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according to me, whatsoever is, is god. Even if there is no god then that universe without god is the truth.

Faith is enquiry into truth, and faith is courageous enough to go into every question without shrinking. It is not cowardly, beliefs are cowardly. With is courage. Only the courageous can go into the unknown, only the courageous can ask dangerous questions, only the courageous can dare the journey into the uncharted.

Faith is beautiful. And remember, the meaning of Joseph is faith. There is no such thing as increasing belief. Belief is a dead thing, it does not increase. It is a plastic thing, you impose things on it. It neither decreases nor increases; it is like a plastic flower.

But faith increases and goes on increasing. There is no end to it, it is an eternal pilgrimage. The more you go into it, the more it increases. It is a movement, a process. It is not a thing dead and complete, it is riverlike. It is not like a pond closed from everywhere, it is moving towards the ocean.

And to me it is significant that Joseph was the name of Jesus' father. A man like Jesus can be born only to a man like Joseph. I don't believe in the theory of his virgin mother. That is sheer nonsense. Joseph symbolises faith, simplicity, trust. A son like Jesus is possible only through such a man.

But somehow Christianity has been very unjust to Joseph. He has been completely ignored, not only ignored but insulted. The first insult is that they say that Jesus was born to a virgin mother. In fact it is an insult to Joseph, it is an insult to Mary, it is an insult to Jesus: he becomes a bastard. Who is this Holy Ghost? And if these ghosts go on playing tricks like this, can you call them holy? Then what is unholy? This Holy Ghost made poor Mary pregnant... and he is still part of the trinity. He should have been expelled -- he committed a crime!

But Joseph is the most ignored. Mary at least slowly slowly has been accepted but not much. Many times there have been efforts to make her part of the holy family; from three the family should consist of four. But Christian priests have not accepted that; a woman cannot be accepted in the holy trinity. They are all male, all three. It is the male chauvinistic attitude. But at least Mary has been worshipped for the simple reason that they could not deny that Jesus came out of her womb.

At that time test-tube babies were not available, otherwise I am certain Christians would have dropped Mary also; just as they dropped Joseph they would have dropped Mary. They would have tried saying that Jesus was a test-tube baby.

The whole idea is rooted in antagonism towards sex. Sex is unholy -- how can they accept a Joseph? But I accept Joseph absolutely. In fact without Joseph there would be no Jesus. We owe that much to Joseph.

And his name is so symbolically meaningful that it is also a metaphor: a son like Jesus can only come out of a father like Joseph -- out of increasing faith not out of belief.

I teach faith because faith to me is another name of love. Belief is ugly, heady; faith is beautiful, of the heart. And the whole energy of a sannyasin has to shift from the head towards the heart. If we can bring the energy from the head to the heart the miracle has happened. From there a totally new life starts, a life of bliss, a life of dance and song and celebration.

(Doubts are not bad, Osho told the last sannyasin, but we have to go beyond them, he tells the next person.)

But repressing is not a way of surpassing. We have to pass through those doubts, we have to use those doubts as stepping stones.

The ordinary religions teach you to believe. Belief means the repression of your doubts. But repressed doubts will remain there, they will accumulate, and one day they will erupt like a volcano.

My approach is totally different. Don't repress doubts. Use them as enquiries, as triggering points, so that you can use them as stepping stones.

Truth is, so there is no need to be worried; doubts can be used beautifully to reach truth. In fact that's why nature gives you doubts, so that you can enquire. Only an idiot has no doubts; the more intelligent you are, the more doubts you have. But to live in doubts is to waste your life.

Use them creatively, go beyond them and only then can you feel fulfilment. When doubts disappear because truth has arrived it is not repression, it is freedom from doubt.

That's the meaning of your name -- let it become a meaning of your life too.

(To Atit Gyano Osho talks of the difference between wisdom and knowledge. The first part of the address is similar to what he has said earlier in the month; but then he adds:) Knowledge demystifies existence because it gives you a false notion that you know everything -- and man knows nothing. Even our so-called great scientists know nothing. Whatsoever they know is very 1/08/07

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superficial. If you dig a little deeper you will find great ignorance. Nobody has yet seen the electrons, neutrons, positrons; nobody exactly knows what they are, nobody knows how they function, how they move. But the whole edifice of modern physics stands on this ignorance.

A sannyasin has to completely cut out all this rotten garbage and become clean, a clean slate, so that your innermost being can start giving you messages.

Living in the intellect is living in knowledge. The moment knowledge is dropped intuition flowers --

and that is the real revolution.

(Love gives you a little look at the timeless, the deathless Osho tells Prem Sanatano.) That's why when people are in love they are absolutely fearless, as if death disappears, it becomes irrelevant. But our love is a very wavering phenomenon: one moment it is there, another moment it is gone, again death enters. Many times we have a glimpse but it remains a glimpse.

As a sannyasin you have to work hard to make that glimpse a reality to yourself, always available. And it is possible because love is our intrinsic nature. It is not something accidental, it is our very source. So if we work a little, if we dig inside our being we will find the eternal source. And once love is flowing in you for twenty-four hours a day, irrespective of situations, circumstances, you live in the world but you are no more part of it; you have become part of god, you have become part of eternity. All fear disappears. Then you know that birth and death don't make any difference. Only the body is born and the body dies, not you; you are never born and you never die.

The moment it becomes your realisation you are released from all bondage, from all misery, from all limitation, from all prisons. Suddenly you become as vast as the whole universe, you become oceanic. Just a dewdrop of love can increase and become a great ocean. But one has to work deliberately, consciously.

Our ordinary love is an instinctive phenomenon, unconscious; it has to be made a conscious process.

And that is the whole work, the whole alchemy, of sannyas.

(Amrit Dhyana's special sadhana is to work on deathlessness.) The body is going to die, the mind is going to die, the heart is going to stop, so don't waste your time in remaining identified with the body, the mind, the heart, with action, thought and feeling. Beyond these three there is something in you which is immortal -- that is consciousness, awareness. Meditate on that.

In the East we call the process neti-neti, neither this nor that, eliminating; eliminating all that is not eternal so that only that which is eternal remains. And then, remain absorbed in it for as long as possible, as many times as possible. Whenever you have time just remember 'I am not the body, not the mind, not the heart' and go on entering deeper, rejecting everything outer.

These are the three circles: the body -- the outermost -- then the mind, then the heart. And within these three concentric circles is the centre of your witnessing, your consciousness. Just remain relaxed in that centre -- that's what meditation is all about. And once you start entering that centre you have come home.

Then life is a tremendous contentment. It is pure ecstasy, it is all light.

Prem Kundan

It is by passing through the fire of love that one becomes one's real self. Cowards are afraid of love as much as they are of death. It needs courage to go into love because it is a kind of death, in fact a deeper death than the ordinary death. Ordinary death only changes your body, your form, but not your substance.

Ordinary death only changes your shadow, your personality, but not your essence.

Love changes your very being, it gives you a new birth. Hence the fear; hence many decide not move into love. They can find many excuses. They can say "Love is blind;" that is a rationalization of the cowardly mind. They can say "Love is animal;" that is again a rationalization of the so-called religious mind. They can even deny the reality of love; they can they it is all poetry, just a fiction created by some imaginative people.

Either the coward finds some rationalization, some excuse, or he finds some substitute. For example, sex can become a substitute for love, and by just going into sex one can think, "I am a great lover." Or people can find even more subtle substitutes. For example, somebody is greedy for money -- money has become his love object. And he is not aware that he has fallen in love with something absolutely false. Or power can become his love affair. But these are strategies of the mind to avoid.

Beware of all these strategies and take a jump into love. It is fire. It will burn you, it will destroy you.

But it will also give you a new birth, a resurrection.

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Query:-

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #23

Chapter title: None

23 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010235

ShortTitle: THUNK23

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(To Muriel Osho talks of the three dimensions of joy -- pleasure, happiness and bliss.) One can have pleasures without meditation because pleasures are of the body, but one cannot have joy without meditation. Joy belongs to the spirit. Pleasures belong to the body, happiness to the mind and joy to the soul.

For pleasures everybody is equipped by nature, because it is our animal heritage, it is our past, it is instinct -- it is already there, fully developed. For happiness you have to do something. Happiness is human, a little bit above the anima. Pleasure con-sists of only two things, food and see -- those are the two polarities of pleasure. Happiness consists of many things, but for happiness one has to grow sensitivity and creativity.

To be happy is an art.

One has to learn music, then one can be happy with it. One can learn painting, poetry, sculpture, gardening . there are thousands of possibilities. As you rise above the mind and you start becoming a little artful and alert about the dimensions available and you start using all those doors, you learn something more than any animal can ever do. No animal can enjoy painting, no animal can enjoy poetry; it is not possible.

And no animal can be condemned for that. If it is not possible what can animals do? But if man is not able to enjoy music then he should be condemned; he is living lower than he is capable of.

Joy comes at the ultimate peak. It belongs to the soul. For that you have to learn to be meditative.

Pleasure is dual; sex and food are the two polarities. Happiness is multi-dimensional. Joy is one; it is neither two nor many. Joy has simply one taste -- the taste of silence, the taste of no-mind.

If one wants to be full of joy one has to nut both body and mind behind one, one has to transcend both.

Meditation is the transcendence of the body-mind structure, it is to become aware of both body and mind. The moment you are aware of both you are separate; the moment you are aware of both you are above both. That quality of beyondness is joy. -- How long will you be here?

(Her reply is inaudible, save to Osho.)

Then come back again... the day after tomorrow! (much laughter) Or any day after tomorrow! Okay?

(She nods laughingly as she rises to leave.)

(Osho explains the connection between Krista's name and the words 'Christ' and 'Krishna'.) The very word 'Christ' comes from the Sanskrit work 'Krishna'. From Krishna it has moved into many languages and ultimately it has become Christ. In its long journey from Krishna to Christ, Krista has been one of the very significant milestones. Krista is exactly halfway in the journey from Krishna to Christ. In 1/08/07

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fact in Bengali, one of the Indian languages, Krishna is called Krista, he is not called Krishna.

Christ is not a personal name of Jesus. His name is Jesus. The moment he attains to the ultimate he is called Christ. In the East we have called that state Krishna; it is the same word and the same state too.

Your name will mean Christ-consciousness. And that is the goal of sannyas, to become crowned wit consciousness.

Man lives in unconsciousness. He lives like a robot. The major part of his being is in darkness; just a little bit has come out of the darkness, just the tip of the iceberg -- and that too is very fragile. At any moment it goes back again into darkness. Somebody insults you and you lose your consciousness. It is very fragile. You become unconscious, you start behaving in an unconscious way, and later on you yourself recognise it. You wonder 'How did I do all this?' You start saying 'It happened in spite of me. I never wanted to do it.'

People have done things in anger which only insane people can do -- and they were not insane, they were as sane as anybody else, but in anger they lose consciousness, in passion they lose consciousness.

There are a thousand and one situations every day when we lose consciousness, so that small portion of consciousness is not very effective either. If one is alert about using it rightly the only purpose is to meditate with that small piece of consciousness that you have not, because through meditation more and more of the unconscious starts becoming conscious, more and more of your hidden darkness starts disappearing.

Right now ninety per cent is unconscious, ten per cent is conscious. As you meditate, slowly, fifteen per cont becomes conscious, twenty per cent becomes conscious. The moment there is at least fifty per cent of consciousness and fifty per cent of unconsciousness, then you can rely upon your consciousness because now there is a balance; the unconscious cannot easily take over.

When there is sixty per cent of consciousness and only forty per cent of unconsciousness, you can move with certainty in life. Somebody can insult you and you will remain unaffected. When ninety per cent becomes conscious and only ten per cent is left unconscious the first satori happens, the first glimpse of reality. And in that ten per cent many satoris happen; thousands of satoris can happen, but at least three are absolutely necessary.

As that ten per cent is transformed into consciousness it is transformed in three parts. The first part gives you the first satori, the second part the second satori, and the third part gives you samadhi. When one hundred per cent of your being is conscious we call it samadhi. The very word 'samadhi' means that one has arrived at absolute equanimity, at absolute equilibrium. Now nothing can disturb you, even death cannot disturb you.

That is the goal of sannyas, to arrive at one hundred per cent consciousness. At that moment one is a Christ, a Krishna, a Buddha, or whatsoever name one wants to use. These are just names, but the real thing is one hundred per cent consciousness. And it is possible; everybody is born with the potential, we just have to work upon it to change it. And that small piece of consciousness can be used to transform the whole being into consciousness. It can become a triggering point.

It is a small light but we can create more and more light through it. It is just a small candle but more candles can be lit by it. A chain of candles can be lit through it and your whole life becomes a festival of light.

In India every year we celebrate one night, the festival of lights. People burn thousands of candles and small lamps. The whole country celebrates the festival of lights. That night is the night when Mahavira, one of the greatest mystics ever, became enlightened. And it is a very special night in that way because Mahavira is the only person who became enlightened on the darkest night.

Buddha became enlightened on the full-moon night and Mahavira became enlightened on the no-moon night. That is very significant, it is a very rare phenomenon. Almost all enlightened people have become enlightened either on a full-moon night or very close to it. Except for Mahavira I have never come across another person who has become enlightened on the darkest night. Hence we celebrate that night, the darkest night, as the festival of lights.

But people have completely forgotten the significance; they go on observing the festival as a ritual.

There are thousands who don't even connect it with Mahavir. There are millions who don't even know the name of Mahavir or know that it has anything to do with Mahavir..

But it shows one thing, that even if you are living in the darkest night, there is a possibility that it can be transformed into a festival of light. So there is no need to feel hopeless -- even the darkest night has a dawn to it.

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(Sergio means to serve. Prem means love -- and the only real service is that which arises out of love.) One can serve without love, but then that service has no spiritual dimension to it. It may be rooted either in fear or in greed. For example, Christian missionaries go on serving humanity. It is not out of love but out of the fear of hell and the greed for heaven. They don't know what love is; their whole effort is to attain to heavenly pleasures. It is sheer greed and lust and they are also afraid of the pains and the agonies and the sufferings of hell. They are using poor people, exploiting them for some gain in the other world. But this is not true service. There are motives behind it.

The service is true only when it is unmotivated, and there is only one thing which is unmotivated -- that is love. So unless service is rooted in love it is false.

I teach love because I know if love arises in you, service will come as a shadow of it. And then you will not serve for some reward, you will serve because you enjoy it. Then there will be no end to your service, then your service will be an end unto itself.

And the greatest bliss is when your means and your ends are one, when they are not separated in time.

When whatsoever you are doing is an end unto itself, then there is bliss.

Anand Vinito. A miserable person is never humble. He cannot afford to be humble. He is so miserable that he has to hide it by projecting his ego. He magnifies his ego to hide his misery, his poverty, his inner emptiness. He goes on making the balloon of the ego bigger and bigger so it hides everything. The miserable person cannot be humble -- even if he tries to show humbleness, that will be just another way of proving his superiority. That will be just another trip of the ego, another number -- nothing else.

But the blissful person is naturally humble. There is no need for the ego. We need the ego to hide our emptiness. The blissful person is so full that there is no question of hiding anything; he can stand naked in the sun. The blissful person has so much bliss in his being that ego cannot have any appeal for him. What is there for the ego to give to the blissful person? He has got everything -- more than he needs.

There is a Sufi story....

A king had gone to hunt but he and his party got lost in the jungle. They were all searching for the way back to the capital.

A blind mystic used to live in the jungle with one of his followers. One man of the king's party came and said, "Hey, blind man, do you know which is the way to the capital?" The mystic laughed and he said, "Yes.

You are a soldier of the king, you must have come with his party. Go this way and after one mile you will find the road to the capital."

The follower was very much mystified because he knew his master was blind -- how did he come to know that this man was a soldier?

And then another man came. He said to the blind man, "Sir, can you show me the way? I have got lost in this jungle." And the blind man said, "Yes. You must be the prime minister. This is the way -- after one mile you will find the road to the capital."

The follower was even more mystified, but he kept silent and he waited. In the night, when they went to rest, he would ask the master how he knew -- because certainly this man looked like he was the prime minister.

And then the king himself came and he touched the feet of the mystic and said, "Please show me the way." And he said, "Yes, I know -- you are the king of this country. This is the way."

In the night, the follower asked the master, "This is the first time that you have behaved strangely, not like a blind man. And every time you were right -- how did you manage it?"

The mystic said, "There was nothing to manage. The soldier behaved arrogantly -- that simply shows he is a miserable person, he must be of the lowest rank. The prime minister addressed me as "Sir". That simply shows he belongs to a higher rank; he is a man of culture, education -- polished, rich. And the king touched my feet because he has nothing to lose and he has no need to show his arrogance, his ego. It was a simple inference, you need not be mystified," said the old man. "I cannot see-you know that perfectly well -- but I just inferred that the man who touches my feet and asks so politely must be the king. It was just a coincidence that my inferences fitted well; I cannot see who is who, but the way they were behaving showed something."

This story is beautiful: the most blissful person, the person who is a king of the inner world, will be absolutely egoless. He will be humble. Those who are beggars in their spiritual world are very egoistic, they cannot be humble.

So remember, your name means bliss, humbleness. Bliss has to be the foundation of all humbleness.

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Become blissful and you will find humbleness; there is no need to cultivate it. A cultivated humbleness is false. It is not humbleness -- it is all humbug! An uncultivated humbleness which comes as a fragrance of bliss is beautiful, is real, is true. And only that which is true is worth achieving. The false simply takes your time, your energy, and gives you nothing -- it is a sheer wastage.

(The last sannyasin, a Japanese woman -- a doll-maker -- had wept as she sat with the others awaiting her turn. Osho tells her that the meaning of her new name and the direction of her new life is the path of devotion.)

You don't need anything else!

There are three paths. One is of meditation, of awareness. The second is of action, of serving god. And the third is of devotion, of just loving god. The third is your path. Just totally love existence because it is visible god. Love the whole creation because everywhere is the signature of god. On the trees, on the birds, on the animals, on people -- everywhere you will find signatures of god.

One need not go to the temples and the churches to worship; god is available everywhere. It is not a question of finding an object to worship, the real thing is to find a heart which can worship. And you already have the heart. Wherever you bow down, that becomes the temple.

(Her head is bent down so that it touches the namesheet she holds in her hands. When she lifts her head her face is tear-stained.) -- How long will you be here?

(the translator) She wants to be forever here but she can only stay for three months.

Good -- that will do. Good!

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #24

Chapter title: None

24 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010245

ShortTitle: THUNK24

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Emanuela means god is with us. If you truly feel this, then you know bliss, Osho tells us.) The ordinary person remains in conflict with existence. That's what makes him ordinary. He is not in a state of attunement, he remains separate, surrounded by his own definition of his being. He remains enclosed, not open, not available. He is like a small island, and hence there is fear -- the ocean is vast and the danger is always there that the island may disappear any moment.

The initiation into sannyas means initiation into the wholeness of existence. It is the dropping of the ego and feeling one with the whole... because that's the truth: we are not separate. Even if we want to be, we cannot be separate, we are intrinsically part of this organic unity of existence. We are not outsiders; this is our home.

The moment this feeling arises, one knows god is with us. Then all conflict and struggle disappears; a 1/08/07

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deep relaxation, a tremendous rest comes. That's the moment when bliss explodes.

(But we live in a world which has come to such a sorry state of affairs that the blissful people are banished, Osho points out in his next address to Ireneo.) Society is capable of coping with mad people, with criminals, even with people like Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan and Nadir Shah and Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. It is capable of coping with these people but it has not yet risen to the level where it can cope with a Jesus, a Socrates, a Mansoor. The gap is so big that the society feels threatened. The very existence of a blissful person humiliates millions of people, they feel insulted. His presence makes them aware of their stupidity, hence they cannot forgive him.

It is very difficult, it has never been possible up to now to forgive an enlightened person, to forgive a Buddha. Society takes as much revenge as possible, for the simple reason that he has gone astray. Society is living in misery and he has become blissful; society is living in darkness and he has become a light unto himself. He has gone astray, he has left the collective crowd, he has moved on a path of his own; he is no more part of the mob. The mob has been creating every possibility for him to be miserable and somehow he escaped, somehow he managed to get out of the prison.

Because of this one has to fight for bliss, otherwise bliss is very natural. Misery is unnatural, bliss is natural... just as flowers are natural. If a tree does not bloom that means something has gone wrong -- either the soil is not right or the climate, or the water is not enough or there is not enough sun -- something has gone wrong. If nothing has gone wrong then the tree is bound to blossom. Flowers are natural, bliss is a flowering. If nothing goes wrong every person will be blissful, but the society up to now has been against bliss.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a risk, you are going astray in the eyes of the crowd. From now onwards the only work that you have to do is to be blissful, in spite of all the obstacles that society will create. And to be blissful is to be religious, to be blissful is to be able to know god because god is nothing but the ultimate peak of bliss.

(On the eighteenth of the month he'd talked of the two births man needs to pass through. Tonight Osho talks about them in greater depth.)

The first birth is the coming out of the mother's womb, the second birth is the coming out of the mind's womb, coming out of the psychological structure, pattern, gestalt.

The child first lives as part of his mother's body, not separate at all. His mother's breath is his breath, his mother's nourishment is his nourishment, even his mother's mood affects him: if she is happy he is happy, if she is miserable he is miserable. He is just a part of the body of the mother, they are joined, linked.

The second birth happens when you become unlinked with your mind. Otherwise people live in the mind, identified with the mind, thinking that they are nothing but the mind. Getting out of the mind, watching the mind, seeing it as separate, becoming more and more aware that you are not the mind, is the process of meditation.

The moment this becomes your absolute realization -- not just a thought but a realization, your experience -- the second birth has happened. Then one is well-born, only then is one noble. That is another meaning of Jena -- noble, aristocratic. Only then is one part of a totally different world.

To me, only Buddhas are real aristocrats, the awakened people of the earth; they are the salt. Because of them life is meaningful, significant. It has some poetry and some dance in it.

(Osho indicates that the seemingly contradictory meanings of the next sannyasin's name are actually intrinsically related, for victory comes not through fighting but through letting go.) One cannot be ambitious for victory. The ambitious person will live in misery and will die in misery. He may achieve many things but those things -- money, power, prestige -- will be of the world, and they don't fulfil you, they don't give contentment, they don't make you peaceful or blissful. Even Alexander the Great dies a beggar. He realised it but only at the very last moment.

He was told by Dionysius that he was wasting his life by conquering the world, he would die a beggar.

In India he visited many mystics and everywhere he was told not to waste his life in conquering the world because death would come and everything would be taken away, so it is just making a house of playing cards, a little breeze and the whole house collapses. He heard and yet he did not hear. At the last moment there was great pain in his heart because it was not that he was not warned -- he was warned many times --

but his ego wouldn't allow him to understand.

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Sannyas means putting your ego aside so you can understand. And sannyas is basically surrender, surrender to the whole.

The master is just an excuse..You surrender to the master because you are not capable of communicating directly with such a vast universe. You need some small window through which to look at the sky. The open sky is frightening, scary, but once you have looked through the window, the indication of the stars will take you into an eternal journey.

The master is only a window, a window to god. That's why in the East we have worshipped the master as a god, for the simple reason that he opens a small door through which you can enter into the whole. You learn the art of surrendering in the company of the master then finally you have to do it with the whole.

It is just like when you go to learn swimmings you first learn in the shallow water, very close to the bank. You cannot go into the deep water directly. But once you have learned swimming then you start adventuring towards the depths more and more. And then one day one knows how to swim; then it does not matter whether the water is one mile deep or five miles deep. It doesn't matter, it is the same for the swimmer, it makes no difference at all.

The master is just the bank, the shore where without any fear you can learn the basic art of surrender --

and then the journey begins. The master is only the first step in the journey, a triggering point. But once one knows how to surrender one starts becoming victorious because by surrendering you become one with god

-- and that's victory. Then there is no defeat possible. How can one be defeated if one has felt oneness with the whole?

(Another paradox seems to lie in the name Osho makes for the next sannyasin -- Shunyo Lothar.) The flower of consciousness opens up only when all the garbage that one has accumulated over many many lives is thrown out, otherwise there is no space for the one-thousand petalled lotus to open. It needs a space and we are so full of junk, useless junk, full of memories which are of no use any more. We go on piling up files and files of memories, not only of this life, of many many lives. They are all there, now absolutely useless, but the functioning of our mind is like the functioning of any bureaucracy.

I have heard that in the White House the president was very worried because so many files had accumulated. He told his secretary to destroy all those files which were useless and to only keep those which had any use. The secretary immediately started working. He ordered many many people to first make copies of the files in case something was needed sometime, and then to destroy the files. This is how bureaucracy works. Now, this is unnecessary work: you are destroying the file but keeping a copy -- then what is wrong with keeping the file?

We go on accumulating useless, irrelevant memories, imagination, desires -- desires that we know are unfulfilable, still we carry on, still we again start fantasising. We have fantasised many times and we know it is pointless. Sometimes even in the middle of the fantasy you realise what you are doing.

Taking your bath you start thinking that you have become the president of the country and that if you become the president you are going to do this and that.... And then suddenly the cold water reminds you what you are doing -- you are not the president of the country and you are unnecessarily getting worried.

But it will come again.

There are so many desires and so many thoughts and there is no space left; hence in the East our emphasis has been on how to empty the whole inside of our being. And there is no need to keep any copies because the more spacious we are, the more conscious we become, and that consciousness is enough to respond to any situation. You need not have notes, that consciousness is enough to tackle any challenge.

What is the point of carrying an unnecessary load?

As one empties oneself one becomes aware of two things: the less the burden, the more efficient one is; the less the burden, the more responsible, the more capable of response, one is. Now one is not carrying readymade answers, and because one is not carrying readymade answers one can be more in tune with reality, one can see reality as it is and can respond accordingly. Otherwise the mind always reacts, it never responds. It uses the old readymade answer, it may not fit at all; and then you fail, then you fall short.

A man of absolute emptiness always has the right response. He never fails, he never repents, he never feels guilty, he never looks back. Each act is finished so totally that there is no question of thinking about it again and again. He simply moves ahead, unburdened of the past.

That is the meaning of Shunyo emptying oneself totally. And then glory, ultimate glory, is yours. In that emptiness you have enough space for your consciousness to unfold. Symbolically we have called it a one-thousand petalled lotus. It is such a huge phenomenon that it needs the whole sky. Our inner being is as 1/08/07

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vast as the sky if we just get rid of the junk.

So I don't want my sannyasins to renounce anything except the junk, except the rubbish, the dust that one gathers on the way.

(Osho's vision is of love as being less a revolution and more a process of evolution. He explains why.) Revolution is drastic, sudden, like an earthquake. Love is evolution, very silent like a whisper. It works slowly, it works silently, but it transforms you totally; in fact because it is very silent it goes very deep.

An earthquake is more destructive than creative, hence the so-called revolutions have destroyed much; they have not been really creative. Love is far more creative. In revolution destruction becomes the goal, in love creation is the goal. If something needs to be destroyed it is destroyed only in order to create. In revolution destruction becomes the goal and if something is needed for destruction then it is created, otherwise there is no question of creating. A revolution is a little bit upside-down, evolution is a natural course.

A sannyasin has to change very silently without making any noise, without making any fuss -- and that happens through love. The very soul of sannyas is love.

Love as deeply as possible, let your love be as multi-dimensional as possible. Love as many things as you can; love music, love poetry, love dancing, love people, trees, birds. Don't make any limitation to your love.

The more you love, the richer you are; and if you love in a multi-dimensional way then from each dimension something new comes to your being. Poetry will give something to you which dancing cannot give and dancing will give something to you which poetry cannot give. Music will give something totally different and sculpture something still different. When all these gifts come to your being they become one.

Then whatsoever is given by dance and poetry and painting and people and animals and trees and clouds, all comes to you and becomes a tremendous orchestra. Your life becomes a sheer joy, a phenomenon of beauty.

That orchestra has been called god. That ultimate music, that multi-faceted richness is the goal of sannyas.

(There is a way to judge whether what you are doing is truly meditation or not. If it remains confined to the mind it's not the real thing, Osho says.)

There are many false meditations prevalent in the world because they are cheap, easy, and they fit with your mind; on your part they don't require any effort to go beyond.

Real meditation is an uphill task; you are climbing a mountain. The untrue meditation is like rolling down from a peak. It is easy, gravitation does all the work, you don't do anything. When your car is coming down you can turn off the ignition; no gas is needed, the car will continue going downwards just by the pull of gravitation.

What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaches is only such a meditation, a false meditation. It is just a repetition of a mantra -- and when anything is being repeated it simply means that the mind is being used. And by using the mind you cannot go beyond the mind, by using the mind the mind becomes strengthened. In fact the word 'mind' and mantra come from the same Sanskrit root; they are not two separate words. From mantra comes the Sanskrit word for mind, 'man', and from 'man', -- from 'man' comes the English word mind

-- from the same root. It means thinking.

You can repeat a certain mantra continuously -- it will hypnotise you, it is auto-hypnosis. You will fall into a peaceful sleep, that's true, and if you are searching fora peaceful sleep a mantra can be used. I am not against it. It is a good non-medicinal tranquilliser but it is not meditation and not at all transcendental meditation, because transcendence simply means transcending the mind, and that can be done only by one thing and that is witnessing the mind; not by doing anything, not by repeating a mantra, chanting or anything. Any doing will be part of the mind.

There is only one secret which is not part of the mind, and that is witnessing, watching. Thoughts are passing, desires are moving, memories are coming and going like clouds in the sky and you are sitting silently simply watching, not doing anything. If you do anything immediately the mind starts functioning.

What you do does not matter -- doing is part of mind. A non-doing witnessing, just witnessing, as if a mirror goes on witnessing whatsoever passes by -- that is awareness. And that awareness takes you beyond the mind. It is true meditation.

(Know truth and you know you are immortal, Osho promises Sambodhi Amrita.) Only the untruth dies. The untruth has to die, it is bound to be momentary. It is born, for a moment it is 1/08/07

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there and then it is gone -- it is a soap bubble. But truth is eternal. To know it is to know that we have been here eternally and we are going to be here eternally. The moment this realisation settles in one, all fears disappear -- because all fears are rooted in the fear of death.

The moment one realises this there is no anxiety, no anguish left and the whole energy that was involved in anxiety, fear, anguish, agony, misery, is released. And that released energy becomes a rejoicing, it becomes a dance in your being. Without any deliberation on your part you start a new kind of life, a life which can only be described as celebration.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #25

Chapter title: None

25 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010255

ShortTitle: THUNK25

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Osho talks of true nobility to Anand Heidi.)

Misery brings a callous quality, it brings cunningness. The miserable person is bound to be ignoble. He cannot afford to be noble; he has nothing to share, he is a beggar.

We can give only that which we have got. If we are miserable we are bound to give misery to others, whether we intend to or not is immaterial. Only the blissful person can be noble for the simple reason that he cannot harm, it is impossible for him to harm. And he has so much joy that he is bound to share it -- what else can he do with it? Just as the sun has to radiate its light the blissful person has to radiate his blissfulness; it is a natural, spontaneous phenomenon.

So to me nobility cannot be cultivated. A cultivated nobility will be superficial, pseudo, a mask, and behind it will be hiding an ugly face; hence my insistence is on bliss. If you are blissful nobility will come as a shadow of it, as a by-product. When a flower opens there is fragrance and when bliss opens there is nobility; we need not bother about nobility. The whole concern of sannyas is how to create bliss, then everything comes of its own accord.

So to me to be blissful is the only morality in the world, the only religion.

(Osho adds 'Dhyan' to Hannelore and says that now her name is really international.) And that's what my sannyasins are supposed to be -- not bounded by any nationality, religion, race, color or creed.

'Dhyan' comes from Sanskrit, one of the most ancient languages. It means meditativeness, a quality of profound silence where mind dissolves just like an iceberg melting into the ocean and becoming one with it.

The mind is just like an iceberg: it can melt and become part of our being.

'Hannelore' consists of two words from two languages. 'Hanne' comes from Anna; Anna is Hebrew -- it means prayer, grace, mercy. And the second part, 'lore', comes from Helen; Helen is Greek -- it means light.

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So now you really have an international name. One part comes from Sanskrit, the other from Hebrew and the third from Greek. The three most ancient languages of the world and the most cultured, the most refined.

Meditation brings all these qualities naturally. Prayer is an attitude. It means a loving quality, a loving relationship with existence. To be in love with existence is prayer and out of that loving relationship with existence grace arises. A man who is prayerful is bound to be beautiful; and his beauty will not be of this world, it will belong to the beyond, it will be grace. And when there is grace there is compassion, compassion for all those who have not yet arrived -- that is mercy.

And the last part means light. When one is absolutely silent, in meditation, when the mind has dissolved like an iceberg melting and becoming one with the ocean, great light is released; one becomes just light.

That is the experience of ultimate truth. But everything depends on meditation. Everything depends on a single phenomenon: how to be absolutely silent so that the mind melts and one becomes a flow of energy.

Mind is an obstruction like a rock. Once it melts there is great joy, a dance, a new kind of drunkenness: one is utterly drunk with joy and yet absolutely aware. This contains the whole message of my sannyas.

(Love is the foundation that makes for real beauty, Osho tells Prem Annette.) Without love one can be beautiful but there will be no grace in it. Something will be missing, something very essential will be missing. You can see that: you can find a beautiful prostitute -- physically she is beautiful but something is ugly, something is fundamentally wrong. You can see it in her eyes, her face, her body. She is beautiful but her beauty seems to be dead, it is not alive. It seems to be like a plastic flower with no fragrance. It looks like a flower but, it is not really a flower. Grace comes only with love, and because the prostitute has no love she cannot be blissful. Even though she is beautiful there is something fundamentally ugly, so the beauty will be only skin-deep and behind it there will be just ugliness.

Just the opposite also happens: even an ugly person can have grace. And then you will be surprised that his ugliness is not taken note of; he becomes beautiful in a subtle way, beautiful in a very profound way because he has grace. That happened with Jesus Christ.

There are two traditions about Jesus. One tradition says that he was one of the ugliest men who has ever walked on earth, and Christians say he was one of the most beautiful men. There has been a constant quarrel for the two thousand years about what the truth really is. Both the parties have their own reasons for their argument.

Those who were against Jesus saw only his physical part -- and I agree with them that he was not a beautiful man. His height was only four feet, five inches, and to add insult to injury he was a hunchback. He was certainly ugly as far as the physical form is concerned, but none of his disciples describe him as ugly; they describe him as one of the most beautiful men -- and I agree with them too. Because they were disciples -- available, open -- they could see deeper than the skin. They could see this man's profound beauty, they could see his grace.

So I don't see that there is any conflict between these two ideas. I may be the first person who says that both traditions are right. Those who thing he was ugly are right because they saw the outermost part and those who say that he was one of the most beautiful men who ever walked on earth, they are also right because they saw his depths, his heights -- and they were really of immense dimensions, in fact, immeasurable.

It is only through love that one becomes graceful. I teach very few things to my sannyasins; love is one of the most fundamental qualities. If you are full of love then grace comes of its own accord and following grace comes god.

God is not a person but the ultimate in gracefulness, the ultimate in beauty.

(And love is not a theory but an experience, Osho goes on to say to the next sannyasin.) And so is truth and so is god and so is bliss and that is valuable.

Beware of theorising, philosophising -- that is the only way to go astray. Insist on experiencing. Always remember that the only way to understand anything is to experience it. There has never been another way, there is none and there will never be -- just experience.

Just as in science experiment is the way, in religion experience is the way. Experimenting is extrovert and experiencing is introvert. Experimenting is done by the head and experiencing is done by the heart. And truth, love, bliss -- all that is really valuable -- happens in the heart, not in the head.

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whole emphasis has to be on experience -- then one cannot miss this great opportunity life has given to us.

Then miracles become possible, and everybody is entitled to miracles. If we miss, we miss because of ourselves. God has given us every opportunity to blossom, to flower, to become fruitful, but all that happens through experience.

There are foolish people who go on thinking about love. Love -- -never think about it. Thinking is a sheer wastage of time and a wastage of energy. Put the same energy into love and then you will be gaining something, some treasures will become yours. Don't think about meditation. There are many who go on thinking about meditation -- meditate. There is no need to think about dance -- dance, be realistic and then the impossible becomes possible.

(The teacher from America who is next becomes Ma Satyam Celia.) Satyam means the ultimate truth -- not the truth of the philosophers but the truth of the mystics, not the truth of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Russell, but the truth of Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Nanak, Kabir. These are two different approaches.

Philosophy thinks about truth, but what can you think about truth? Either you know it or you don't know it. Thinking about truth is like a blind man thinking about light. What can he think about light? He does not even know anything about darkness, what to say about light?

Ordinarily people think that blind people live in darkness -- they are wrong, because to see darkness you need eyes. Without eyes you cannot see darkness. And the blind man has no eyes so he cannot see even darkness. This fallacy persists all over the world that the blind man lives in darkness -- because when we close our eyes we see darkness; but to see that darkness the eyes are absolutely needed. Even when your eyes are closed, they are there so you can see darkness. But the blind man cannot see darkness, he cannot see light, because he simply cannot see; the seeing faculty is missing. What can he think about light? There is no possibility of thinking anything. And whatsoever you say to him will remain only in his head, it can never become his experience.

Philosophers are like blind people.

In the East we have the famous story of five blind men who went to see the elephant and of course they touched the elephant in different places. Somebody touched his leg and they said 'My god, this animal is like a pillar,' and somebody else touched the ear of the elephant and said 'What nonsense are you talking about? This animal is like a fan'... and so on and so forth. They quarrelled and they argued and they started wrestling with each other and a crowd gathered. The crowd somehow managed to pacify them and told them, 'Whatsoever you are saying is only partially true. None of you has seen the elephant, you just have touched a few parts -- those too you have not seen yet and you are trying to give a picture of the whole animal.'

In the East we say those five blind people were five philosophers. That's what philosophers have been doing down the ages from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, for two thousand years in the West and for at least ten thousand years in the East. They are suffering from the same disease. The disease is that they don't recognise that they are blind.

The mystics' approach is totally different. 'Socrates, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras or Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Jesus -- their approach is totally different. It is not a question of thinking about truth -- because thinking can lead you nowhere, it goes round and round in circles. Their approach is to see truth. The question is how to have eyes, not what to think about truth. The most fundamental thing is how to create eyes.

So when I talk about truth I mean the truth of the Buddhas, of the Christs, not the truth of the philosophers.

And Celia means from the sky. Truth always descends from tHe beyond; it is not an achievement. You can see light but light is not your achievement. It is there coming from the sun or from the stars or from the moon; it is coming from the sky, from the beyond. In the same way truth comes. All that you need is eyes and then truth descends. The light falls on the blind person too, it falls on his eyes too, but they are blind, non-receptive, unwelcoming.

I only teach the simple art of how to see. In the East we don't have any word exactly parallel to

'philosophy'. The word that we have is 'darshan', which is a totally different word.

Philosophy means thinking about truth and darshan means seeing the truth. So I never translate darshan as philosophy but as philosia. 'Sia' means to see, 'philo' means love -- love of seeing; not love of thinking but seeing. The truth is always there, coming continuously, knocking on your doors -- but your doors are 1/08/07

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closed.

Sannyas means the art of opening your doors, the art of opening your eyes, becoming receptive, available. All that is needed on the part of a sannyasin is to be available to the beyond, to be in a yes mood with the beyond -- and truth comes, it inevitably comes and liberates.

(And the seeker of truth needs no knowledge but innocence, Osho tells Nirmal Satyarthi.) One needs an absolute empty mind to know truth -- not a scholarly mind, not a bookish mind, not a mind full of scriptures, theories, philosophies, ideologies. The people who are too full of such junk and rubbish can never find truth for the simple reason that they already believe they know;and they know nothing, all their knowledge is borrowed.

So the first thing a sannyasin has to do is renounce knowledge, to just clean oneself completely of all rubbish -- and by rubbish I mean all that is borrowed. If it is your own experience, good; if it is not your own experience then simply throw it out -- it is unnecessarily occupying your inner space.

And when you are absolutely innocent, all scriptures burned, all theories dissolved, when you suddenly realise that you know nothing, a miracle happens: in that state of not-knowing, truth descends in you.

That's what Socrates says: I know only one thing: that I know nothing. That is the beginning of the true search, that is sannyas.

(Osho compares the state of meditation to an absolutely calm lake in which the sky above is reflected undistorted.)

The whole reality penetrates you.

It is the mind that does not allow that. Mind means the lake is disturbed by waves and winds. The moon may be there, the full-moon, but still the lake cannot reflect it. By the time the rays of the moon reach the lake the waves have distorted them. On the lake they spread like silver but no moon is reflected. If the lake were conscious it would not have any idea of how the moon looks unless it came to a silent state.

Dhyano means an absolute silent state of consciousness. And Lucretia means light. The moment you are silent suddenly the light from the beyond penetrates you. It is not just an experience of light; it also transforms you, so much so that by knowing light one becomes light. It is an alchemical change. One becomes part of the infinite light. Then there is no death, no anxiety, no fear, no darkness. Then life has no beginning and no end. In fact that beginningless, endless life is called god.

God is only a word denoting a certain experience, not indicating a certain person. There is no such person as god anywhere. It is the ultimate experience of light, of life of its eternity, of its deathlessness, of its immortality.

All that is needed on our part is:to be utterly silent so that knowing and seeing become possible.

(His name, Antun, has three meanings, Osho tells the psychiatrist from Yugoslavia, and they are : inestimable, immeasurable)

Of course their ways are very unconscious, hence the possibility that they will find it is very rare. But in that very effort they start moving upwards on higher planes. That's how man has happened.

Man has passed through all these stages. Charles Darwin was the first man in the West to introduce the idea of evolution but in the East it is one of the very ancient ideas. In the East it has existed for at least ten thousand-years, but in a very metaphorical way, in a poetic form. It was bound to be so because it could not be scientific in those days.

In the East the idea has existed in the form of the incarnations of god. The first incarnation is that of a fish -- and that's what Charles Darwin came to realise and later on what science started discovering and found out that life must have started in the ocean. The beginning of life must have been in the ocean; and that idea, that the first incarnation of god was of a fish, has existed in India for at least ten thousand years.

And then there were higher forms of life. A moment came in the long story of incarnations -- there are twenty-four reincarnations of god... In the middle of the whole story one reincarnation is called 'nari' -- half man, half lion. That seems to be the point where man was divided off from the animals.

It is far more true than the idea that man has come from the monkey. Even todays' scientists are working to find the link between the monkey and man because there must be a link, a stage which is in between both.

So far it has not yet been discovered. Many efforts have been made but all have failed. But in the East the idea has existed that there was a point where man was only half man and half animal. Maybe as far as the major part of humanity is concerned people are still at that stage -- half man, half animal. And the ultimate 1/08/07

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transformation is not only the creation of man but the surpassing of man.

The moment a man surpasses humanity he becomes pure consciousness. In the East we have called it satchidananda. Three words: 'sat' means truth, 'chid' means consciousness and 'anand' means bliss. That seems to be a far more beautiful idea of the trinity. Before it, the Christian idea of god the father and the son and the holy ghost just looks stupid, childish, good for the kindergarten to explain to small children, but satchidananda -- truth, consciousness, bliss... this seems to be the ultimate triangle. And bliss is the highest, bliss is the search.

Animals are searching unconsciously, and unfortunately ninety-nine per cent of human beings are also searching unconsciously. Sannyas means the search for bliss in a conscious way, deliberate, making it a target, making it your only target in life. And once bliss becomes your only conscious target it is not difficult to attain. Man remains unfinished for the simple reason that he never takes anything as a deliberate aim; he remains a victim of winds, accidental.

And the moment you start experiencing bliss it is inestimable; there is no way to measure it -- it is oceanic. It is priceless. You cannot purchase it, you cannot sell it.

The third meaning of Antun is beyond praise. No words can do any justice to it, no poetry can express it, no song can sing it. Even the highest music -- Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, even they are far away from it, are far away echoes. Even they fall short. But they come closest. My own observation is that music comes closest to expressing bliss but even that is miles away. Language is very inadequate.

One great Zen master, Rinzai, was sitting on the bank of a river. A seeker came and he asked 'Master, can you tell me very precisely what exactly one has to do to attain self-realisation?' Rinzai remained as if he has not heard, as if nobody had come, as if he were still alone.

The man was very much puzzled. He said 'Are you deaf or something?' He almost shouted and Rinzai said 'There is no need to shout, I have heard you. That was my answer -- remaining silent. I was telling you that's the shortest way to attain, and to express the ultimate only silence can do justice.'

The man said 'That is too mystical for me. Make it a little more clear.' So Rinzai wrote on the sand with his finger 'Dhyan -- meditation.' He said 'If you cannot understand silence try to meditate, then one day you may be able to understand silence.' But the man said 'Even that is not comprehensible to me -- just a single word, "meditation"?' So Rinzai wrote 'meditation' twice but the man was still insistent so Rinzai wrote

'meditation' thrice. And the man said 'You must be mad because you go on writing the same word again and again.'

Rinzai said ,'I know that it will look mad to you but what can I do? Lower than that I cannot fall. The first answer, to be absolutely silent, was the truest because it is beyond words. But if you insist then at the most I can compromise by saying 'meditation'. Lower than that I cannot fall, it is impossible. I cannot be so unjust to truth just because of your insistence. Rather than pulling me down to you, you start rising towards me.'

Move from meditation to silence and then bliss becomes possible. And bliss is the real god, the real truth, the real search.

(Osho puts across the same point in terms of victory over the inner kingdom.) The real victory is of the inner kingdom. The outer victory is absolutely useless. Even if you become Alexander the Great, if you conquer the whole world, still, it is pointless.

Alexander the Great died when he was thirty-three, and he died because of too much drink. He was an alcoholic. Why was he drinking too much? He was a successful man, the most successful man the world has ever known, the greatest conqueror -- why did he drink too much? He was feeling more and more miserable, more and more defeated, deep inside he felt like a beggar. All his victory was proving only one thing, that it was all in vain. And the more he realised the stupidity of his life and the wastage, the more he started drinking; he died of too much drink. He was young and healthy but he committed many crimes because of his drunkenness.

Many cities he simply burned down because he was too drunk; he just ordered them to be burned. He killed one of his greatest friends, murdered him, because he was drunk. Later on he felt very guilty but the man was gone. And the more victorious he became, the more he became addicted to alcohol.'

It is very significant. It shows the futility of outer success, the utter futility and the stupidity. But this is not told to the students in the colleges and the schools -- that he died as an alcoholic. Every effort has been made not to say it, because in the schools and colleges we are teaching nothing but ambition -- and Alexander's life proves the failure of ambition.

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My sannyasins have to become victorious over the inner world. That is the only true victory. All else is just a game, and a very dangerous game because you are wasting precious time and you will not gain anything out of it. Tomorrow is uncertain -- who knows whether tomorrow will come or not? -- so don't waste time. Put your total energy into the inner conquest. That's what sannyas is all about, a decision to make the inner conquest.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #26

Chapter title: None

26 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010265

ShortTitle: THUNK26

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Dhyan, meditation, is the art of centring, Osho tells the first sannyasin; and the second part of her name, Christine, means a follower of Christ, or, in Osho's terminology, one who has found his centre.) Ordinarily we are circling on the periphery of our being and we go on in circles; hence life remains a deep frustration. We cannot find any anchor, we cannot find any home. Everything remains a flux, and we cannot rest in this flux.

There is a point within our being which can give us eternal shelter, but it is not on the periphery, it is exactly in the middle of our life. So we have to search for that centre -- that search is meditation.

And Christine means a follower of Christ, but the only way to be a follower of Christ is to find your centre, there is no other way. By reading the Bible one cannot be a Christian. One can pretend, millions are pretending. By reading the Bhagavad Gita others are pretending to be Hindus, by readirg the Koran others are pretending to be Mohammedans. But unless you find your centre you cannot be a Christian, a Hindu or Mohammedan; and the moment you find the centre suddenly you realise the unity of all religions. Then being a follower of Christ or of Buddha or of Mahavira makes no difference at all; it is the same taste, the same flavour, the same fragrance.

One who has found his centre becomes simply religious. His religiousness is no more confined to any religion; he becomes religionlessly religious. That's why my effort is for my sannyasins to be religionlessly religious, neither Christian nor Mohammedans nor Hindus -- simply religious.

And of course when you are in a state of silence you know Christ from your innermost core and Buddha from your very being; Krishna starts playing on his flute. But it is no more something outside of you, it is happenirlg at the innermost shrine of your own existence. Then life is splendour, an ecstasy.

(As Angelica listens to the meaning of her name her hands instinctively move together into the classical prayer position, and remain there, quite still.)

Man can exist in two ways, either through logic or through love. Logic functions in the head and love functions in the heart. Logic can only give you hypotheses, never any conclusion; it remains inconclusive.

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At the most it can give you some ideas aBOUT truth but not truth itself; and ideas about truth are not truth.

Even the blind man can have ideas about light -- there is no problem about having ideas -- but the blind man knows nothing of light. And logic is blind.

The irony is that the head calls love blind. In fact the head is blind, not the heart, because the head is completely closed; not only metaphorically but literally too. It is closed within a skull, completely closed.

Yes, there are a few openings -- ears and eyes and nose -- to connect you with existence, otherwise it is completely closed.

The heart means an opening, a vulnerability, an availability. All that is beautiful happens through the heart.

Science happens through the head, technology happens through the head -- but not poetry, not music, not dance. And truth is closer to music, to poetry, to dance, than to technology.

Live through the heart. It is only through the heart that one comes to know the truth. And when you know, you can share it, you can become a messenger of god; everybody has the potential to become a bringer of truth. And unless that is fulfilled one remains in despair because one has missed one's vocation.

The head can give you occupation, business, but not vocation, not something that can make your life meaningful. It can give you comforts, conveniences, but still you will remain empty, empty of all meaning, shallow.

Love gives life. It starts movingyouinto the world of the unknown and the mysterious. Love is true magic, white magic.

(To want bliss is to miss bliss, Osho tells us.)

That's why all the awakened people have been teaching desirelessness, because if bliss is not an achievement you cannot make an ambition of it, you cannot desire it; your desire will become a hindrance.

Your very effort to achieve it will cause delay. The way to find it is to be totally desireless, utterly silent, not hankering for it, and in that very moment the miracle happens, when you are not desiring it, it starts showering on you. It is a gift, it is a gift of god. It is within god's pwer to give or not to give; it is not within man's power to get it or not to get it.

Yes, a certain groundwork is needed from man's side to prepare you to receive it. You cannot be aggressive about it. Hence the whole of religion as such depends on receptivity, sensitivity. You have to be open to receive the guest, you have to become the host. One thing is certain, the guest comes; if the host is ready the guest immediately comes.

An ancient Egyptian proverb says that when the disciple is ready the master appears. The same is true about god too because god is the ultimate master. When the disciple is ready the ultimate master too appears.

And John also has a metaphorical meaning. He was one of Jesus' most intimate disciples, so intimate that his name has become a symbol, a symbol of a beloved disciple. His surrender was total. He was not holding anything back, he was totally available to Jesus. That's what disciplehood is.

Sannyas is initiation into disciplehood. Today you are really becoming a John, a beloved disciple. Don't hold yourself back -- because one cannot be a part disciple or a part-time disciple; either one is totally a disciple or one is not at all. It is indivisible. Disciplehood is not possible in fragments, in instalments. Either you are a disciple totally or you are not. One cannot be calculative about it, one cannot be cunning about it.

So be utterly innocent, receptive, available. And the guest will find you, you need not go anywhere.

(Deva Connie means divine vigilance -- and that's just what sannyas is, Osho points out.) It is the key to the door of the divine. It is a master key. It unlocks all the mysteries.

So go on remembering again and again that your name has to become your discipline. Be watchful of three things: the body -- that means your actions; the mind -- that means your thoughts; and the heart -- that means your feelings. If you are aware of these three you will become aware of the fourth without any effort on your own. For these three you have to make an effort, but the fourth is a gift. Gne who has become aware of these three, of body, mind, heart, of action, thought, feeling, earns the fourth awareness; he becomes aware of his being. And that is the ultimate in joy. One has arrived home, one has found god, truth, nirvana.

(Antje becomes Amrit Sagaro.)

Man is a potential ocean of nectar, but he lives like a dewdrop and a dewdrop not of nectar but of poison. This is unfortunate but it happens to almost everybody for the simple reason that we are brought up 1/08/07

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as egos. The ego is a dewdrop of poison, and when we become identified with the ego we tend to forget our oceanic being. Then we totally forget that we are immortals, that we were before birth and we will be after death.

The ego gives us a very wrong impression of life. It makes us limited within life, between birth and death, and because of this a thousand and one problems arise. It is because of the ego that man becomes afraid of death. All fears are rooted in that basic fear, the fear of death.

It is because of ego that man becomes incapable of love, because for love you need to drop the ego, and that looks like suicide. It is because of the ego that man becomes like a rock -- hard, violent, aggressive, murderous. The ego is very competitive, jealous, possessive, dominating. And the ego is constantly in a hurry because death is coming close and nothing is finished yet. And wherever there is hurry there is worrry, tension, anxiety. The ego is the whole of our misery, our very hell.

When one becomes a sannyasin one has to learn the language of immortality, of one's oceanicness, of one's eternity. And it is just there; you have to learn the simple art of slipping out of the ego. It is just like a snake slipping out of the old skin: once you know it you start laughing about why it took you so long.

When Bodhidharma -- one of the greatest enlightened persons who has ever walked on the earth --

became enlightened, he laughed for seven days continuously. He could not even sleep! His friends became very much alerted: had he gone crazy? He was looking tremendously beautiful, blissful, but why was he laughing? They would ask him and he would laugh more. It was uncontainable. Finally when he became a little cooled down, came back to his senses -- he had gone beyond his senses -- he explained to his friends, 'I started laughing because for thousands of lives I have been searching for this experience and it was just within me! I looked in every nook and corner of the world, I did everything possible and it needed nothing to be done; I just had to slip within myself.'

All the people who have become enlightened have felt the problem: 'Why do we go on missing?' It is so close by, it is just around the corner, it is always within reach. No special effort is needed.

So here I don't teach great ascetism, standing on your head, doing all sorts of contortions of the body. I simply teach one thing: relax, relax into yourself. And just by relaxing one day it happens. Suddenly one day you find you are out of it. And then a totally different dimension opens up. That dimension can be called god or truth or freedom. These are different names for the same unnameable experience.

(Then Osho speaks further on the nature of the ego.)

Man lives in ego consciousness -- that is his misery. He can live in god consciousness and immediately the doors of heaven open. Hell and heaven are not geographical, they are not outside you; they are just ways of living. If you live as an ego, thinking of yourself as separate from existence you will live in misery. If you live with existence in deep unity, in oneness, in an inseparable love affair, in an organic unity, then you live in god-consciousness -- and that's what heaven is all about. It is very childish of religious people to look for heaven in the sky.

All the old scriptures are full of such nonsense. Hell is somewhere below the earth. In fact, in Indian scriptures hell is exactly below you; if you go on digging you will reach hell, in fact you will reach America

-- in a way they are right! But what about Americans? If they go on digging they will reach India. They are also right! And whenever people think of heaven they think of something beyond the clouds. It is all nonsense, these ideas are childish.

I have heard that when the first Russian came back from a journey to the moon Breshnev called him in private and asked him 'Did you see god there?' Just to have fun the astronaut said yes. And Breshnev said 'I always knew that he must be there, but now promise me not to say it to anybody, keep quiet about it; it is against our official philosophy. We have to go on denying it.'

And then the astronaut went around the world, he had many invitations to many receptions and had many prizes to receive. And of course he was received by the Polack pope in the Vatican also. The pope also took him into a private room, closed the door, locked it, and then asked 'Tell me one thing, please: did you meet god there?' And again just to joke the astronaut said 'No, there is no god.' And the pope said 'I always knew it... but please, don't say it to anybody. This is against our official philosophy. Keep quiet.

Whatsoever you have seen keep quiet about it, never talk about it to anybody.'

Communist or Catholic, Hindu or Mohammedan, they all think god is there somewhere -- and they will all be disappointed, very much disappointed.

God is within you, it is a state of consciousness, the ultimate state of consciousness. When nothing is unconscious in you, when all darkness has disappeared, when your whole being is full of light, that state is 1/08/07

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god. It is a state, remember, an experience, remember. It is not an object outside you, it is your subjective feeling. It is more like love.

(You can't have bliss in instalments; Akhilananda means total bliss, Osho tells the next initiate.) You cannot reach bliss by climbing a ladder step by step; it is a jump. You can only have it whole.

That's why very few people ever try for it -- because our minds are trained in a mathematical way. We would first like samples.

This is a very business-like world. People want even samples of god, truth, bliss, only then will they decide whether it is worthwhile or not. And in a way they seem to be logical, but no samples are possible.

You can have god but samples are not possible. You have to risk, you have to go into the unknown. And it is a jump. Even if you want to turn back from the middle you cannot. It is a jump -- you have to go the whole way. Once you have jumped, it is finished: you have to go the whole way. You cannot stop in the middle, you cannot turn back either. That's why very very few people ever try it.

People go on talking about god, praying to god, going to churches, temples -- that is done, it is formal.

Only very few, courageous people have ever tried to take the risk. It really needs guts.

And this is very fundamental for my sannyasins to understand, that courage is the greatest religious quality. Your so-called religions are based in fear, not in courage, in cowardice not in courage. Hence we have expressions like god-fearing. We call religious people god-fearing. That is sheer nonsense. God-loving maybe, but, not god-fearing. And in all the languages of the world we have such expressions.

They show one thing, that all the religions that exist on the earth, particularly the organised religions, exploit fear, they make you afraid. And in fact fear is the most anti-religious value.

The afraid person can pray, will be a victim to the priest, available to their exploitation but he can never know god, bliss, truth. That journey is not for him, that pilgrimage is not for him -- it is only for the courageous. It is a quantum leap. It is jumping from the ego into nothingness. But the moment you reach nothingness the nothingness turns into bliss. It looks like nothingness from the standpoint of the ego but when you really reach it, it is pure bliss, it is total bliss. That is the meaning of your name, Akhilananda: total bliss, absolute bliss.

(And bliss is actually another word for god, Osho tells the next sannyasin.) And it is more relevant than 'god' because the word 'god' falls flat, it does not ring any bells in the heart for the simple reason that it has become associated with the wrong people -- with the popes, with the imams, with the shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomaniacs. All kinds of mad people, all kinds of stupid people, have destroyed the beauty of the word 'god'.

Moreover 'god' has no connection with ordinary humanity. It has a meaning when one becomes a Buddha, otherwise it is meaningless. But bliss is not meaningless. Wherever you are, bliss has significance because everybody is searching for bliss; even the atheist who denies god is searching for bliss. Sometimes atheists come to me and they want to be sannyasins and they ask me 'Can we be sannyasins -- because we don't believe in god?' I say that is not the point at all, god or no god. If you are a seeker for bliss that's enough. And I have never come across a single individual wno is not searching for bliss. That is a natural, instinctive longing.

When you have found bliss you suddenly realise that this is what god is all about. But that is at the very end of the journey; in the beginning it is better to start with bliss, it is natural, simple, meaningful. And when it comes to the climax, then you will know it is god and nothing else. You were searching god in the name of bliss but that is only a latter recollection.

So begin with bliss and end with god -- this is the whole journey of sannyas. And this is your name, Anand Bhagwat. Begin with Anand -- bliss, and end with god -- Bhagwat.

(The music of silence is the meaning of Sangit Shunyam.) Ordinarily we are acquainted with the music of sound, but there is also a music which is soundless.

There is music but there is no sound. That's the ultimate music.

The Taoists in China for centuries have emphasized the fact that when the musician is perfect he throws away his instruments. Why? -- because those instruments were creating only sound, and when the musician is perfect he starts experiencing the music of soundlessness. Why should he carry his guitar, his sitar, his veena, his flute? He can be freed from all instruments, he can just live in the purity of silence, he can enjoy the soundless sound. Or they say that when the archer is perfect he breaks his bow; there is no need to keep 1/08/07

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it.

These are very strange statements, but mystics are known to make strange statements. Only they can make them, only they have the guts to make strange statements, but in a subtle way they are telling the truth.

Truth can be told only in a paradoxical way; you cannot make it logical. It has to be illogical because it is far bigger than logic, far more comprehensive than logic, far wider than logic. Logic is a very small phenomenon, tunnel-like, linear, one-dimensional. Truth is multi-dimensional.

And this is the experience of deep meditation: when all sound stops, when only your being is there, pulsating without any sound -- even the heartbeat is soundless -- only then are you totally in tune with existence. That is attunement or at-onement. Suddenly you are bridged, bridged with reality. All separation disappears, evaporates. You are part of this beautiful existence. Then you can dance with the trees, with the wind, with the rain, with the sun. You have become a member of the universe.

Ordinarily people are living as outsiders, not as members of the universe. Unless the ego disappears some noise will continue. Ego makes much noise, it is very noisy, and that noise disturbs your inner music, your inner dance.

Your name is the very essence of meditation: the music of silence.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #27

Chapter title: None

27 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010275

ShortTitle: THUNK27

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Whether man lives in the dark or enlightenment is his choice, Osho says first off tonight.) If people are miserable that is their choice and responsibility. If they really want to change they can change it instantly. They go on saying that they want to change but they still cling to misery, hence their talk remains impotent. They are simply deceiving themselves by their own words.

This is the first thing a sannyasin has to understand, that we are born in freedom and we create ourselves by our acts and choices. There is no fate; we make it. Hence except for ourselves nobody is responsible.

Once it is understood things become very easy. Then it is up to you; nobody can prevent you from being blissful.

Darkness represents unconsciousness, light represents consciousness. In darkness there is misery; in light there is bliss -- and meditation is the key to change darkness into light.

(And wisdom is the experiencing of that light.)

Wisdom is not the accumulation of facts, figures, information -- it is a transformation.

We are living outside ourselves, hence our inner world remains dark. If we turn in, if our attention starts focussing inside, then light is created. We have everything that is needed to create light, just a 1/08/07

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rearrangement is needed.

It is as if your room is messed up by somebody -- the furniture is upside-down, the chandelier is on the floor. Everything is there but not in its place. It will be difficult to live in such a room. You will have to put things back exactly where they belong.

This is how man is: he has everything that is needed, god has provided everything. We come absolutely ready to live our lives to the optimum, but we live at the minimum for the simple reason that we never arrange things. For example, our attention is extrovert, hence we can see everybody except ourselves -- and that is the most important thing to see. It is perfectly good to see others but first you have to see yourself, first you have to be yourself. From that vantage point, from that centred state, you can look at others and that will give you a totally different quality.

So the attention has to be turned inwards. That's what sannyas is all about a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn of our attentiveness, of our awareness. And wherever we focus our awareness that space becomes lit up. I am not against the outside world but the inside world is the first to be taken care of, then the outside world has a secondary place. And the person who can take care of his inner world is easily capable of taking care of the outside world. Wisdom means knowing oneself, and to know oneself is the beginning of all other knowing. Then the circle of your light can go on spreading; it can become more and more comprehensive. A moment comes when your wisdom comprehends everything, it becomes all-inclusive. That is the moment of enlightenment -- when one feels nothing is missing, nothing is lacking. One has come home, there is great relaxation, rest, fulfilment, deep contentment; there is a silence, yet it is full of songs.

(Wisdom is knowing yourself, Osho reiterates to Satyam Gyanam, and reminds him that that knowing doesn't happen through books.)

Books contain every kind of information. The Bible, the Koran, the Gita -- they have beautiful statements. Those statements are made by people who know the truth. But the problem with truth is that the moment you say it it becomes untrue. It remains truth only when it is unexpressed; express it and you have falsified it. But there is no other way to convey it. Hence all the enlightened people have passed through a very strange experience: they cannot remain silent because now they know something which they would like to share, but when they try to share they find that it is not the same when you say it; it is something else.

The real thing is left behind, only the word reaches the other person.

So there have been three kinds of enlightened people in the world. One kind decided to remain silent, so the world knows nothing about them because they never spoke. The second kind decided to convey it, knowing perfectly well that whatsoever you say misses the point. But they thought something was better than nothing -- even if it only triggers a process of enquiry in the listeners that's more than one can hope for.

But they have not mentioned that truth is inexpressible, for the simple reason that if they say it is inexpressible then immediately the question will be asked 'Then what are you saying? Then what are you expressing? If it is not true then why do you go on saying it? Either it is true or it is not true. If it is not true don't say it; if it is true only then is it worth saying.' So they have not mentioned that they are doing something which is not possible. That is the second category of enlightened people.

And the third category is the most paradoxical -- it consists of people like Lao Tzu, Buddha. They speak and simultaneously they also say that it is not sayable. Hence Lao Tzu has not been able to find many followers, because he looks a little crazy: he goes on saying things and at the same time he goes on saying that nothing can be said. He defines truth and says it is indefinable. He starts his Tao Te Ching... that is the Bible of the Taoists. The first sentence is 'To say the truth is to falsify it, the truth cannot be said.' This is the beginning of the book. And then he goes on saying everything about truth. Now who will listen to such a crazy man?

Mohammed does not mention that truth is inexpressible at all, Jesus does not mention it at all. they belong to the second category. But because they don't mention that truth cannot be said their ideas have been reduced to dogma, and doctrines and churches.

Lao Tzu's ideas cannot be made into a dogma, his philosophy cannot be reduced to a creed. He has put enough dynamite in it; that dynamite will destroy all structures that are created around it. It is self-sabotage; he has made every effort to sabotage himself. But the third category of the enlightened people is the most honest and sincere. Of course they have to be very paradoxical and contradictory, almost illogical and crazy.

Lao Tzu has been thought to be a madman.

His disciple Chuang Tzu went even further. Nobody has surpassed Chuang Tzu in craziness; he is the craziest Buddha that has ever walked on the earth. That's why I call this place (Osho indicates the 1/08/07

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auditorium with a circular movement of his fore finger) Chuang Tzu Auditorium, I love this man!

My own approach is the same: every day I go on saying what truth is, and every day I have to deny whatsoever I have said. So those who are going to be with me have to become accustomed to my self-contradictions, my paradoxicalness, my craziness.

To be my sannyasin means to be in the hands of a crazy man. But what can I do if you choose this way?

-- it is your freedom!

It's not so important whether one is just a rather ordinary sort of flower or something more exotic, the essential thing is that one has blossomed, Osho points out to Anand Nurit.

Hence the most ordinary grass flower enjoys the same sun, the same wind, the same rain, the same stars as the most loved flower, the lotus. There is no difference in nature. So there is no question of being small or big, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, black or white, beautiful or not beautiful, man or woman --

nothing matters. All that matters is flowering. The moment a flower opens its petals it enjoys the same bliss as the most beautiful lotus or the rose.

Gautam Buddha may be the son of a great king and you may be very poor, but it makes no difference.

He may have lived in great palaces, you may be living in a hut -- it makes no difference. As far as inner growth is concerned god is available to everybody equally; god is a communist. And in fact only people who know god can be true communists, because they understand the essential equality; then even the smallest is equal to the biggest.

One of the most precious sayings of Gurdjieff is that there is an experience where the part is equal to the whole. Logically it is absurd; as far as logic or arithmetic is concerned the part cannot be equal to the whole.

How can the part be equal to the whole? The part is small, it is bound to be small, it cannot be equal to the whole. The whole consists of many parts and this is only one part. But Gurdjieff is right: there is an experience of absolute silence, of tremendous understanding, of awareness, where the part is equal to the whole; there is no difference at all.

Remember it: nobody is born privileged, everybody is born equal. And as far as ultimate truth and the ecstasy that follows its realization is concerned, all are equal. In talents people are different. Somebody is a poet, somebody is a painter, somebody is a mathematician, somebody is a scientist. The mathematician cannot be a poet, the poet cannot be a scientist, the scientist cannot be a painter; they have different talents.

In talents people are different, there is variety, but as far as their innermost being is concerned there is no difference at all. All are equal, with the same possibility, the same potential for opening up.

So even a small grass flower has the same value as the greatest lotus. Remember it: the universe is absolutely impartial. It does not give more to some and less to some; it showers on all equally. Then it is up to you whether you allow it to penetrate your being or not.

(The meaning of Prem Denis's name, love and god of wine, just about sums up sannyas, Osho tells the newest addition to the party.)

In Greek mythology there is a god, Dionysius, the god of wine. In that sense Greek mythology is the only mythology which has a special god for wine.

Christianity destroyed that whole idea. There were temples of Dionysius and there were festivals, particularly in Springtime when flowers bloom and nature suddenly becomes joyous, and bursts forth into celebration where Dionysius was worshipped. And his worship consisted of only two things, singing and dancing. People gathered, they danced, they sang. They abandoned their egos completely, they got utterly lost in their singing and dancing. In fact it had nothing to do with the outer wine, it was essentially to create an inner drunkenness.

If you dance totally, forgetting yourself, dropping your self-consciousness, a certain subtle drunkenness arises in you. And it is very paradoxical: on the one hand you are drunk, on the other hand you are fully aware.

My effort here is to revive Dionysius, so my whole method consists of singing, dancing, rejoicing. My sannyasins have to be rejoicers and love has to be the wine, because if you love you can dance, if you love you can Ying, if you love you can create. Love releases all kinds of creativities in you. Love helps you to grow grapes in your inner world.

So you have come to the right place, Denis!

(As Susana sits in front of Osho listening to the explanation of her new name, Anand Archano, her eyes 1/08/07

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close and her head slowly falls back. Moments later a tear plops off her cheek onto her lap.) I know only one prayer and that is being blissful. Nothing has to be said to god, one has simply to be blissful and all is said through one's bliss. People can pray but if they are sad, miserable, their prayer is only words, empty words with no content. If one is blissful then words are not needed at all; one can simply dance and sing or just sit silently, joyously -- and that's enough. That gratitude reaches to the ultimate source of light.

So that is going to be your prayers no words but a silent joy pervading your whole being. -- How long will you be here? -- Forever. -- That's right -- that's what I was afraid of! (laughter) Good!

(Real knowing, or truth, is beyond all books -- even Bibles, Osho repeats.) Hence the seeker of truth has to leave behind all that he knows, all knowledge as such, because it consists only of theories, assumptions, beliefs, inferences, hypotheses, philosophies. It consists of all that is borrowed from others, and you cannot know truth unless you are totally free from all that has been taken from others. That is a hindrance. It does not allow you innocence, it does not allow you clarity, perceptiveness, transparency.

So put aside all that is borrowed, be utterly nude, naked like a small child, knowing nothing. From that point the real journey begins. Wisdom is not far away from a state of not-knowing; in fact half the journey is already complete. The negative part you have already done, you have removed all the rocks. Now you can wait, and spring will start flowing. It was hindered, now there is no hindrance it will start flowing.

Man can do only the negative part, the positive happens of its own accord. You put aside knowledge and wisdom wells up.

(In his address to Zeno, Osho puts right a popular misconception about the nature of meditation.) Ordinarily whenever people think of meditation they think of making a great effort, they think it is arduous, they think it is an uphill task. Real meditation is just the opposite of that. It is a let-go; it is not an uphill task, it is a total let-go. It is surrender, not fight; it is not effort but effortlessness.

Real meditation means learning to sit silently doing nothing, relaxing in doing nothing, resting in one's own being doing nothing -- because doing means we have moved from the centre, doing means mind has come in, body has come in. Either you have started thinking and desiring or you have started acting.

These are the three concentric circles around our being. The first circle closest to our being is that of feeling. Even when you feel something you have moved away from being. The second, which is even farther from being, is of thinking; when you think, you have moved even farther, farther than feeling. And the third circle is of activities; when you start doing something you have gone very far away, the farthest possible.

The meditator slowly moves inwards. First he leaves activities. That's why sitting silently in a certain restful posture became important. The statues of Buddha depict him sitting in a certain posture -- that posture is called the lotus posture. It is the most restful position for the body, scientifically too. When the spine is exactly erect, making a ninety-degree angle with the earth, the body is in the most relaxed position because gravitation affects your body the least in that posture. If you are leaning forwards, backwards or sideways, then more of your body is pulled by gravitation. When you are just erect the least effect of gravitation is on the body, hence it is the least tiring.

In walking you get tired because you are going against gravitation, you are fighting; when you are walking you are fighting against gravitation. It is a fight. The earth is pulling you downwards and you are raising your legs up -- that means you are fighting. In running you get even more tired and more quickly for the simple reason that running is a greater fight. Sitting became the posture Or meditators, particularly the lotus posture when the spine is absolutely erect and. the legs are crossed. For Westerners it is a little difficult because for centuries they have never used the lotus posture; they have completely forgotten it. In the East it is a very common phenomenon: people sit on the earth without knowing they are sitting in a lotus posture -- or something very close to it.

When your legs are crossed and your hands are also resting on your legs and touching each other, it is now a well-known scientific fact that your body electricity starts moving in a circle. In this posture the circle is not broken anywhere. The electricity is released from your fingertips or from your toes. When both legs are resting on each other and both hands are resting on each other the electricity starts moving in a circle. It is not released from the body, it becomes an inner circuit, hence it preserves energy. And as your electricity starts moving in a circle you become the centre of the circle.

1/08/07

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Your consciousness simply rests in the middle of it.

So the body has to be in a non-active posture, then it is easy to stop the thought process. And the way is just to watch the thoughts without any evaluation or judgement. That's the whole strategy of getting out of thoughts: don't condemn, don't judge, just remain an indifferent watcher.

The word Buddha uses for it is 'upeksha': absolute indifference, unconcern. Let the thoughts pass, they have nothing to do with you and remain unaffected. The more unaffected you are, the less they will come.

When your unaffectedness is absolute the mind disappears. And with the disappearance of the mind now there is only one more circle left, that of feeling.

Feelings are more subtle, hence they can be only tackled last. The body is the most gross; the mind is just between feeling and body -- a little subtle but a little gross also. Feelings are the most subtle.. They come like a whisper, like a little breeze: if you are not very alert you will not be able to feel them. There are just subtle changes of mood. You were feeling very good and a slight change and you are not feeling so good; a little anger has arisen or a little sadness has come in. And they are continuously changing.

After watching your mind you become capable of watching those very subtle nuances of feeling. The strategy remains the same, the method is the same, it just becomes a little more subtle. Just go on watching, unaffected, and one day feelings also disappear. The body is sitting there like a Buddha statue and you are just resting in your being.

This state is Zeno, meditation. And to be in it is the greatest experience of life. Once you have known it you can again start moving into the world using the body, the mind, the feelings, but now you are the master. Now you can use all those three circles very easily but you are not identified with them.

So this process is only till one has experienced absolute silence, cent ring, grounding. Once it has been experienced then there is no need to have a separate time for meditation; then whatsoever you are doing is meditation. Then for twenty-four hours a day there is a kind of meditativeness, because one remains centred and yet one goes on doing all kinds of things.

Thoughts come and the watchfulness is there, the body functions and the watchfulness is there, and any moment you can go in, any moment you can slip out. This is mastery. And a man who is capable of it is the real conqueror -- others are just slaves.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #28

Chapter title: None

28 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010285

ShortTitle: THUNK28

Audio:

No

Video:

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Prem Claus means love and a victorious heart. Osho describes what he refers to as the map of sannyas

-- the journey from sex to prayer.

Man has many centers in his being. The most important centers are seven. The lowest is the sex center 1/08/07

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and the highest is called sahasrar, the one-thousand-petalled lotus. Between the two, exactly in the middle, is the heart. So these three out of the seven are the most significant. The energy has to move from the sex center towards the heart center. Unless it happens one remains a slave to one's instincts.

Sexuality is the greatest slavery because it dominates you through biology. You are not the master of it; you are under the deep slavery of chemistry, biology, nature. The energy has to move from the sex center towards the heart. The moment it becomes love the heart opens. That is the first victory, the beginning of a victorious life.

To live confined to the world of sex is to live an animal existence, it is to live just as physiology, nothing more. To live through the heart is to live like man, a human being, transcending animal, transcending the lower, transcending that which binds you, keeps you imprisoned. And once the energy has moved to the heart then the remaining half journey is not difficult. The first part is the most difficult part because you have to do the first part -- the second part is done by God's grace.

One becomes entitled to the second part if one has fulfilled the first part. The moment your energy reaches to the heart center then nothing is needed on your part. Then miracles start happening and the energy goes on rising higher and higher and one day it touches the ultimate center, the seventh, where prayer happens. Sex is the lowest, prayer is the highest; exactly in the middle is the center of love.

This is the whole map for a sannyasin: from sex to love, from love to prayer -- and the pilgrimage is complete, one has arrived home.

(To Dick Osho speaks of the difference between the soldier and the sannyasin.) For the whole past of humanity we have praised the quality of being hard because the soldier, the warrior, has dominated the scene. War has been going on continuously: in three thousand years we have fought five thousand wars. Naturally, the soldier was the most important person. The past belongs to the soldier, but the future does not belong to the soldier at all. The soldier is finished, he is already living a post-mortem existence because science has developed the technology of destruction to its ultimate: within ten minutes the whole earth can be destroyed. And we have piled up atomic weapons so much that we can destroy seven hundred planets like this earth or -- to put it another way -- we can kill every person seven hundred times.

Now war is impossible. Small battles can go on -- like Iraq fighting Iran... very small battles -- just because of old habit, just because it is an old routine, otherwise war is no more possible. The third world war is not going to happen unless man decides to commit suicide, a global suicide. The soldier is finished.

He will linger on the scene a little while, creating small wars here and there just to keep himself engaged...

and the stupid generals with all their gold medals to brag about. But it has all become stupid, it is utterly stupid. In fact the generals with all those gold medals look foolish -- clowns. They should be preserved in museums or presented in circuses, otherwise there is no use for them.

The future belongs to the sannyasin, but the sannyasin has to live a totally different life from the soldier.

The most important quality in the soldier was hardness, and the most important quality in a sannyasin is tenderness. The soldier was destructive, the sannyasin has to be creative. The soldier hankered for war, the sannyasin has only one longing: to fill the whole earth with the perfume of love.

(A challenge lies within the taking of sannyas. Osho tells Anand Bernd what it is.) Bliss is the beginning of a new life. Ordinarily man lives in misery -- that is an old gestalt, an old pattern. Your parents lived in misery, and their parents and their parents' parents too; you can go back to the very beginning, to Adam and Eve. They also must have lived in misery. If they were really living in bliss the serpent would not have been able to seduce them. A blissful person is untemptable. What can you offer to tempt him? -- he has got it already.

Then of course the problem arises, a theological problem: why did Adam believe that he lived in paradise if he was miserable? The only reason that I can find is that he had no mother-in-law. (laughter) That may be the only reason why he believed that he lived in paradise, otherwise there seems to be no reason. He lived naked and only one woman was there. What kind of paradise was that? And even that woman.... every night when he came back home and fell asleep, she would count his ribs! (laughter) She was created out of a rib -- if another rib were missing that meant some other was around somewhere! (much laughter) It was not much of a paradise.

He must have been miserable, utterly miserable, hence the serpent was able to tempt him with something better. The salesman can only tempt you with something better if you are fed up with your car or 1/08/07

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with your house... otherwise nobody can tempt you.

So from Adam and Eve downwards every generation has lived in misery and every generation has given its misery to the new generation. That is our way of life on earth -- at least up to now that has been our way of life. It is time that some new gestalt should emerge, some new way of life.

To me the sannyasin has to prove that there is a possibility of living in a new way -- blissfully, musically, lovingly, in a sheer dance. That is the challenge of sannyas.

(And living life in a new way is knowing its intrinsic sacredness, Osho goes on to say.) Life in all its multi-dimensionality, in all its totality, is sacred. And there is nothing else other than life, no god separate from life. The very idea of god as separate from life has created trouble because then god is sacred and life becomes unsacred. Then to choose life means to deny god. Or to choose god means to go against life.

I want to destroy that separation between god and life. I want to declare to everybody that life is god, there is no other god, only then can we create a new man who will not be schizophrenic.

The old man was schizophrenic, because naturally he wanted to live life joyously but there was guilt, in every joy there was guilt All joys were poisoned by the priests because they were continuously saying,

'Remember, god has to be found and you have to sacrifice this life totally, only then can you find god.' To rejoice in life was a sin; it was to be materialist, to be worldly. In every possible way the so-called saints have been condemning life.

Naturally, if you lived life you felt a deep guilt; if you followed the saints it was unnatural and artificial so you became sad. Either way you were a loser. This is creating a split in man, this is the root cause of all schizophrenia. And to me, schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to only a few people. Who whole of humility is more or less schizophrenic.

It cannot be one because it has two goals and both are attractive.

You must have heard the famous ancient fable, a donkey died because he starved himself. It was not that food was not available. There were two piles of green grass by his side at the same distance from him -- one was on the left, one was on the right. He died because he could not choose. When he wanted to go to the left he felt the right side to be greener. That's how it always is: the grass is green on your neighbour's lawn, not on your own lawn -- and your neighbour thinks the same.

When the donkey moved towards the left the right was very attractive, so he would start moving towards the right, and then suddenly he would see that the left grass was greener. And the poor donkey simply died.

He could not decide -- he must have been a philosopher! He died out of indecision. And that's how humanity has been behaving.

If you become religious life seems to be very attractive, more attractive to you than to the people who are living it. The farther you go away, the more attractive it becomes. If you live life then the saints look very attractive -- their silence, their purity, their holiness. And ultimately they are going to enjoy the heavenly pleasures and you will be down in hell burning and burning forever, for eternity, so naturally it feels attractive. But if you become a saint then suddenly there is all sadness, all juice disappears, you become just a desert and everybody else seems to be enjoying life.

This has been the problem up to now. I want to destroy it from the very roots. My sannyasins have to know one basic truth, that life is god. I worship life! So there is no question of choice. One can enjoy life with total abandon because that is how one is going to find god.

The only way to find god is through life. God is the innermost core of life. Life is the outside of god and god is the inside of life.

(We're all messengers of truth dispatched to earth by god -- but we get distracted, Osho tells Satyo Angelika.)

We forget from where we are coming, why we are here and where we are going. We forget everything!

This is in a way natural, because our coming down from the beyond is like somebody descending from the sunlit peaks of Everest into a dark, dark valley. The journey is long and as he comes down lower he starts becoming accustomed to the darkness. He has to become accustomed to it because he has to live with it. By the time he reaches the valley he has forgotten all about the sunlit peaks; or maybe if he remembers them then they look like dreams, not like realities -- fantasies. It is as if one has heard about them or dreamt about them or read about them in a novel or seen them in a movie. But the journey is long, and it is very natural to forget.

1/08/07

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Coming from the ultimate source of light is really an arduous journey. Entering into the womb of the mother is the greatest fall. One cannot go below that; it is the darkest place possible. And then in living nine months in that darkness one forgets all about light; and then one is born.

In the East we have a legend that even after birth the child remembers something of god till he starts speaking. By the time he becomes capable of speaking he has forgotten everything. He has started learning the ways of the world -- the language of the world, the behavior. And we condition the child in every possible way. Slowly slowly he forgets everything; he becomes unaware of himself. And that's how millions of people live and die. Their whole life is a sheer exercise in futility. They gain nothing, they discover nothing, they rejoice in nothing, they don't come to feel any truth. And if you cannot feel your own truth how can you share it with others? And that is the basic purpose of our coming into the world -- to bring something of god from the beyond and share it.

It has to be rediscovered. We have to destroy all the barriers that have grown around it. And that's the whole process of sannyas: sannyas means a total process of deconditioning. Whosoever someone is --

Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, German, Japanese -- it does not matter; we have to decondition him. The Christian will have to be deconditioned as well as the Hindu, as well as the Mohammedan. We will have to destroy all that has grown around your natural self. And once all the barriers are removed a great joy arises.

Suddenly one recollects who one is and what one's purpose is here.

In that very moment life becomes significant because you have come to your own truth -- and that is god's message. Then you can share it with others, then you can also help others.

My effort here is to create as many sannyasins as possible so they can be spread all over the world and they can start triggering many many people into self-discovery. I am not creating a church or a creed, I am simply emphasizing a process. If one passes through that process one will come to one's own natural self.

That is our truth, and that's also god's truth, because truths cannot be separate; our truth and god's truth are the same.

Truth is one, but first it has to be discovered within oneself, only then can we see it in others too. And if you can discover it within yourself you can help others because the process is the same.

(Meditation is pure mirroring, Osho tells Dhyan Lole. And Lole is a form of Violet.) The colour violet symbolically represents two things: one is humbleness and second is love for truth.

Both these things become possible in meditation and only in meditation, there is no other way.

The moment there are no thoughts the ego disappears -- because ego is only a thought. And then there is humbleness. When the mind is not there truth is revealed, because mind is the only barrier. When thinking disappears truth arrives.

(Prem Prakash means love for light.)

Light represents consciousness, and we are living in a state of unconsciousness. We are really sleep walkers full of dreams. And if you listen quietly, you can hear people snoring even when they are walking.

They look awake, but they are not. Certainly their souls are snoring; the body goes on doing its work mechanically.

Love for light means love for consciousness. And that's the goal of sannyas: transforming darkness into light, transforming unconsciousness into consciousness. The moment your whole unconscious continent, the dark continent inside you, the Africa within, becomes full of light -- when the sun rises inside -- life takes on a totally new meaning, a new joy, a new fragrance. It is a rebirth. And it is possible because the person who can be unconscious can be conscious too.

Only the dead person cannot be conscious, because he is dead. And he cannot be unconscious either.

The possibilities of unconsciousness and consciousness exist together; hence there is great hope. Because we are unconscious, the hope is that we can be conscious. And the whole religious effort depends on this hope. Up to now only very few people have been able to transform their darkness into light. But those few people are enough proof that every man has the same potential. Just a little work upon oneself is needed, just a little respect for oneself.

Give the world twenty-three hours of your day, and give to yourself only one hour of your day, and that will do. Finally, you will be surprised that those twenty-three hours have gone in vain and only that one hour that you gave to yourself for the work upon yourself has been saved.

(Dhyan Navya. Dhyan means meditation. Navya means new.) 1/08/07

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Query:-

Meditation is an end and a beginning -- the end of the old and the birth of the new. You cannot even comprehend it because the old cannot comprehend the new, the old can only comprehend something which is old. It has limitations, it can move only within the boundary of the known, and the new is not within its boundary, the new is unknown. Hence only very courageous people can take the jump.

Courage is needed because you have to die to the old, and the old is familiar. You are dropping that which is familiar for something which is absolutely unfamiliar. This is what courage is: dropping the known for the unknown.

There are two steps to courage: the first is dropping the known for the unknown, and the second is dropping the knowable for the unknowable. By dropping the known for the unknown, meditation happens.

And by dropping the knowable for the unknowable -- samadhi, the ultimate form of meditation, beyond which nothing exists.

Meditation is the beginning of samadhi. There is no word in English for samadhi. Samadhi means all problems have disappeared, all thoughts have died, the ego is no longer there. One has become immersed with the whole, just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake. In a way it disappears; in another way it becomes the very lake.

(Love is prayer -- that is the meaning of her new name, Osho tells the American counsellor.) Love is prayer, hence no temple is needed, no church is needed. Wherever, on whomsoever, you shower your love it is prayer. You can give the prayer to the tree, to people, to the river, to the rock, to the sun, to the moon -- the whole universe becomes your temple. And wherever you sit prayerfully, lovingly, feelingly, sensitively, it is prayer.

Prayer has nothing to do with words; it is a silent gratitude towards existence, utterly silent. To say something will be a disturbance in prayer. Not to say anything is far better, because words are very inadequate and all lovers know it.

When you say to somebody 'I love you' immediately you recognise that what you wanted to say has not been said. 'I love you' does not contain that which you wanted to convey. It becomes very ordinary --

expressed, everything becomes very ordinary. Hence lovers really don't say to each other, 'I love you.'

My own observation is that when love dies then they start saying to each other 'I love you,' because now the real thing has evaporated. Somehow they can go on making the old lies with which they have become accustomed to live -- the security, the safety, the convenience of it and all the promises that they have given to each other. My feeling is that only husbands and wives say to each other 'I love you.' And whenever anybody says 'I love you,' that means it is the end, so it is better to say goodbye rather than to go on unnecessarily torturing each other. That is a kind of nagging -- 'I love you.'

When there is really love there is silence. When two lovers sit together there is silence -- it is enough.

There is communion, heart-to-heart, the mind does not interfere at all. The mind means words, language, expression; the heart simply means a silent feel.

And it is true even on a wider scale, true as far as prayer is concerned, because you are starting a dialogue with the beyond. Now words are absolutely meaningless. The beyond can understand only the language of silence.

So be love-full, overflowing, but remain silent. Let the heart say it in its own way. There is no need for the head to come in. And only then does prayer reach the very core of existence. Silence is the bridge.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #29

Chapter title: None

29 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010295

1/08/07

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Query:-

ShortTitle: THUNK29

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(Mechthild's way, and that of all his sannyasins, lies beyond battle, beyond conflict, Osho begins.) Life is not a battle although we have been told for centuries that it is. Not only have religious people been poisoning us but even the scientists have co-operated. Religious people have always been saying that life is a struggle, a battle, a constant fight And then Charles Darwin started the idea of the survival of the fittest only those who are capable of fighting are going to survive and the fittest -- and by fittest he means the most cunning, the most clever, the most deceptive.

But the truth is that life is not a battle at all. To take it as a battle is to miss it The true religion will say life is a love affair. And only when we take life as a love affair is there a possibility of knowing its mysteries. We have not to conquer it, we are part of it -- how can the part conquer the whole? There is no need at all, the whole idea is stupid. We have to enjoy it, we have to dance with it, sing with it.

Hence my whole philosophy of sannyas can be put in two simple words, 'let-go'. And that is the meaning of your name: go beyond the idea of fighting, learn to love and relax and surrender and trust and you will come to know all that is worth knowing, all that makes life a tremendously beautiful phenomenon.

(Bliss isn't a pot of gold at the end of the road, it's the flowers alone the wayside, Osho reminds us.) Truth is not a goal but a pilgrimage from nowhere to nowhere. It is an eternal enquiry because the mysteries are infinite; you cannot come to an end. In existence there is no full stop. Existence is not like a movie film which begins at a point and then 'The End' comes. It is an ongoing celebration, it has been going on since eternity and it is going to continue. There is no beginning and no end.

So the real seeker of truth enjoys every moment of the journey. He is not goal-oriented. The goal-oriented person is always miserable because his joy is not here but there at the end of the journey, and the journey is such that it never ends, so he is always miserable. Wherever he is, he is miserable because his joy, his bliss, is somewhere there on the horizon where the earth meets the sky. But they only appear to meet, they never meet anywhere. You can go round and round the earth and the horizon, where the earth meets the sky, is always ahead of you. But it is an illusion; they are not meeting anywhere.

Truth is never achieved; you cannot possess it, it is not a thing to possess. Truth is the realisation that each moment belongs to it, that wherever you are you are in it or to be more precise, you are it. The seeker and the sought are not two, the journey and the goal are not two, the first step is also the last step.

The moment one drops all goals life becomes a sheer ecstasy. Then there is no need to be anxious, worried, about whether you are going to make it or not. There is no tension because there is no future. The present is enough unto itself.

Jesus says to his disciples 'Look at the lilies in the field. And the poor lilies,' he says 'are far more beautiful than even the great emperor Solomon attired in his precious garments.'

Why are they more beautiful than the emperor Solomon? Jesus answer is tremendously beautiful. He himself has raised the question and answered it.

He says 'Because they think not of the morrow.' They are not worried about the future -- that is their beauty. They are just herenow.

My sannyasins have to be just like lilies in the field.

(The sought is hidden in the seeker, Osho says again, this time to Sateesha.) We are already gods but unaware of it, because we have never searched for our own being. If we could find ourselves we would find god too. But there are thousands of fools who are searching for god and they don't know at all who they are. Now, searching for god not knowing who the searcher is, is absolutely 1/08/07

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stupid. First we have to know the seeker, the searcher. And the miracle is that the moment you have found the seeker, you have also found the sought. Then there is no need to seek god, because he resides in the innermost core of your being. He is your very being, he is your very consciousness.

So I don't teach worship, I only teach meditation because meditation is the technique to discover your being. In discovering it, all is discovered; in knowing it, all is known.

(Bliss is the flowers along the very spring itself, Osho says to Anand Vasanto.) The moment spring comes all the trees rejoice, they welcome the spring with their flowers, with their perfume. In the East orange is the colour of spring. Its Hindi name is Vasanti; it is from Vasant -- spring. It is the colour of the flowers.

There are wild flowers which explode in the springtime and the whole forest seems to be afire. It suddenly becomes covered with roses and roses; you cannot even see the leaves.

Bliss also functions in the same way for your inner flowering, for the flowers of your consciousness. So my sannyasins are not to be serious. Seriousness is a disease which has to be avoided. They are not to be sad; they have to be cheerful, enjoying small things of life, not bothering about whether these things are worth enjoying or not. The real thing is to enjoy; what you are enjoying is immaterial.

If you can enjoy even ordinary things of life, of course you will become capable of enjoying the extraordinary. And the person who cannot enjoy the ordinary loves the capacity to enjoy anything.

Omar Khayyam was a Sufi master who has been very much misunderstood because Fitzgerald, who translated him for the first time into English, could not understand the Sufi message. His translation is the best possible and as a poet he has done something superb -- many translations have been done of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam but nothing has gone beyond the translation of Fitzgerald -- but he was not a mystic, just a poet. So he understood the language, the beauty of the language, he translated it very sincerely, but still he missed the point created a misunderstanding around the world about Omar Khayyam.

People started thinking that Omar Khayyam was just a drunkard -- talking about wine, song and dance --

that he was just a materialist, that 'Eat, drink and be merry' was his message. This is a great misunderstanding and very unjust to Omar Khayyam.

Wine, song and dance are symbols. What he means by using them is that one should enjoy even small things -- eating, drinking -- just the small things of life, things of no spiritual quality. But the spiritual quality comes from your enjoyment, not from the things. One can eat just ordinary food with such joy, with such gratitude, with such prayer, that it becomes a meditation. It starts having the quality of the sacred.

In one of his poems Omar Khayyam says, 'I want to warn the so-called saints that if they don't enjoy this life they will become incapable of enjoying the other.' And he is perfectly right, because enjoying something is an art and this life is an opportunity to learn the art.

If you cannot enjoy flowers here how will you be able to enjoy flowers in paradise? Those flowers may be of gold, studded with diamonds -- everlasting, eternal -- but if you cannot enjoy the momentary, not even the momentary, how will you enjoy the eternal? The momentary gives you an opportunity to learn the art --

that's the whole function of life.

So my sannyasins have to enjoy everything possible. Go on finding way to enjoy even things which seem on the surface unenjoyable. If you search you will find some way to enjoy even the unenjoyable things. And that's the whole process of inner transformation. A moment comes when you c an enjoy everything. That is the moment when light descends, when god penetrates you -- you are ready, your heart is ready.

Unless that happens god never enters. The host is not ready -- how can the guest come?

(Love is the first rung of the ladder to god.)

Love is the seed of prayer. The problem is that everybody in this world wants to be loved but is not ready to love, is greedy for love but not ready to share; hence everybody wants love and nobody gets it.

How can you get it? -- because nobody is willing to give it.

Love has to be given, only then do your inner sources start flowing. The more you give, the more you will be surprised that you are getting energy from some unknown sources and you are more full than ever.

Once this secret is known then all miserliness disappears; then one simply gives for the joy of giving. And the moment you can give love without any desire for any return it becomes prayer. And that is its blessedness, that's the moment when a person turns towards the sacred. The vast dimension, the infinite door of the eternal, opens up.

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Love that has a desire to get something in return remains human but love that has no motive becomes divine. Ordinarily people are not even human as far as love is concerned; they are very animal. And by animal I mean they want but they don't want to give.

One has to move from the animal to the human and from the human to the divine. This is the whole process of sannyas, the alchemy of transformation.

(Osho gives Uta the beautiful name Prem Purva -- love for the East.) Prem Purva.

The East represents the spiritual search, just as the West represents objective enquiry. The West represents science and the East represents religion.

Love for the East is only a metaphor; it is love for the inner search, for trying to know what the ground of your being is, who in fact we are, what this consciousness in us is.

As you start moving inwards a few identities are broken. The first identity that is broken is with the body. You suddenly see that you are not the body; you are in the body but not the body. Then the second identity is broken; you come to know you are not the mind; you are in the mind but not the mind. And the final and the last identity is broken when you come to know: you are in the heart but not the heart, in the feelings but not the feelings.

These three barriers crossed, suddenly you have entered the ultimate truth of your being. It is pure consciousness, it is just witnessing, seeing, knowing.

I am not against the body -- I am not against anything. The body is beautiful, a beautiful temple to be looked after, but one should not get identified. I am not against the mind either, it is one of the most beautiful mechanisms to be used, but one should not become one with it. And I am certainly not against the heart, not against feelings. Enjoy them, use them, dance with them, sing them, but remember that you are a witness, that you are beyond all this. You are a watcher on the hills and everything else is in the valley. The deepest in the valley is the body, then the mind, then the heart. The heart comes closest to your being but still it is not exactly your being. This is the discovery that has to be made and this is really the whole meaning of life.

The people who have not discovered their consciousness in its purity have missed an opportunity: They were given a great chance, a great challenge, and they wasted it. This is the only sin as far as I know.

Forgetting yourself is the only sin, remembering yourself is the only virtue.

(Osho points out the futility of fretting.)

Man is always in anxiety -- sometimes more, sometimes less but the anxiety is always there. Either it is concerning the past which is no more, hence it is futile. Nothing can be done about it, but people go on brooding, thinking that they should have done this, they should not have done that. And it is so absurd because now nothing is possible, the past is no more there, it is finished. And thinking about it, becoming concerned about it, is waiting the present -- which is and can still be used -- too. Or people are anxious about the future, about what they are going to do tomorrow, how they are going to manage and how they are going to make their future beautiful, rich, successful -- and the future has not come yet.

And ninety-nine per cent of what you are thinking about it is never going to happen, so that ninety-nine per cent of your thinking is absolutely futile. And the one per cent that is going to happen... because your energy is wasted in thinking about the past and the future you will not be able to respond to that one per cent. When the right time comes you will suddenly find you don't have enough energy to cope with it.

One should become aware that the past is no more and the future not yet; both are non-existential. And anxiety is concern. for the non-existential. In fact you cannot be anxious about the present moment even if you try. What is there to be anxious about in the present moment? If you sit silently and try to be very anxious about the present you will not be able to. Nobody has ever been able to, it is not in the nature of things, it is impossible. Yes, you can be anxious about something which is past or something which is in the future, but not about the present.

A sannyasin has to live in the prevent. And life always comes as now, as the present, so one who lives in the present without any anxiety has enough energy, in fact more than is needed, to accept the challenge that life gives. And then it is a joy, the challenge is a joy because it sharpens your intelligence, gives you integrity and gives you a chance to adventure into the unknown.

Go beyond the past and the future and you will go beyond anxiety. And to live without anxiety is the only way to live. The people who are living full of anxiety are simply dying, not living. They are on their 1/08/07

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deathbed already; missing that which is and wasting time on that which is not. There cannot be anything more foolish than this.

I call that man intelligent who can see this and can drop the past an d the future. My definition of intelligence is the understanding to drop that which is not and to live in that which is. And immediately life becomes a light, a festivity, a great joy.

(Man unconscious lives like a mole -- moving through a dark night of the soul, Osho calls it.) He cannot answer as to why he is doing something. In fact he himself feels puzzled as to why he is doing it. Sometimes in spite of himself he goes on doing things he does not want to do. Who wants to be angry? Who wants to be jealous? Everybody knows that being angry, being jealous, being possessive, is destroying your whole life. It is not some mystery -- everybody understands it, everybody has experienced it

-- but still one goes on in the same rut, going on moving in the same circles, mechanically. One decides many times that now it is enough, one is not going to do it any more. But again just after a few hours you will see the person behaving in the same way. This is what I call unconsciousness, this mechanical life. To me, this is the night.

Without the dawn, without the daybreak, one will never know what truth is, one will never know what bliss is, one will never know what god is. Then life is just a dragging from the cradle to the grave -- a long, long unnecessary journey. But there is a possibility of going beyond it. That possibility exists in everybody.

Just a little effort is needed to bring those seeds to sprout. That's what meditation is all about: helping your consciousness become clearer, dispelling your unconsciousness, claiming your being from unconsciousness.

Slowly slowly, as land can be reclaimed from the ocean, man can reclaim his being from the darkness.

But it can be done only very slowly; it cannot be done in a hurried way, it cannot be done in a hasty way.

One has to be very patient and trusting that it takes time. It is not like seasonal flowers which are there within weeks; but within weeks they are gone too. This consciousness is not seasonal, it is eternal. It is like the cedars of Lebanon, it grows slowly. But once it has started growing you are constantly moving higher and higher into joy, higher and higher into a new kind of vision, clarity, perceptiveness.

Everything remains the same and yet nothing is the same any more because you are changing and you have started moving upwards. You have a bigger vision, a bird's eye view; you can see more than you have over seen. The higher you go, the more you can see. And small things start disappearing from your life.

When the first man walked on the moon looked towards the earth he didn't say my America -- there was no America left -- he said 'MY EARTH.' He himself was surprised that he said earth; he had never said it before. When you are on the earth you are an Indian, an American, an Italian -- this and that -- a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, but looking from that height all boundaries disappear. For the first time he could feel that the whole earth was his. Now there was no question of excluding even Russia. He didn't say 'Earth

-- excluding Russia.' It was simply 'my Earth.' And for that moment he could see the point, that as you go higher small things are left behind. Standing there on the moon he was not a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, Catholic or Protestant~ belonging to this church or that. He had no nationality,, no religion, no ideology.

The height did it, ordinary physical height, BO what to say about when one grows spiritually and reaches to spiritual moons? From there one can laugh at small problems that one was so much concerned about and one can feel pity and laughter simultaneously for people who are unnecessarily still dragging themselves along with thousands of small problems. They all become irrelevant.

I don't help you to solve your problems -- that is not my work. That is the difference between psychoanalysis and all its branches and religion: psychoanalysis tries to solve your problems, religion tries to give you a new height; from that height these problems become irrelevant. That's the difference between Freud and Buddha. Freud is trying to solve small problems -- and you cannot solve them. You solve one problem, another arises because the person remains on the same plane; he will create another problem. So psychoanalysis is never complete. There is not a single person in the whole world whose psychoanalysis is absolutely complete, who is completely psychoanalysed.

Even psychoanalysts who have undergone the process for ten years or twelve years are still living with the same problems, To others they may be of some help but for themselves, you will be surprised: they are the same type of people. To others they are very wise, they will suggest to you not to be possessive....

Wilhelm Reich, one of the greatest psychoanalysts, for his whole life taught 'Never be jealous.' And he was so jealous. His wife, who has written her memoirs, wrote that she had never come across such a jealous person. He was fooling around with so many women, but with his wife he was very possessive. He was 1/08/07

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working like a detective, continuously watching, searching, looking for clues -- and of course he knew many ways to look for clues because his whole work was that, making people free of possessiveness.

So he had two faces one face, his public face, when he was helping people to become non-possessive, free, and the other face, his reality, when he was very possessive, so possessive that the wife got fed up with him and had to divorce him. She was also a psychoanalyst and she was helping others, but they did not manage to help with each other's problem at all.

Basically the problem is not that you have small problems; they are bound to be there. The real problem is that your height has to be changed. You have to come to a higher vision and from that point you have to look; all those problems simply lose meaning.

So psychoanalysis cannot help, ultimately only religion can help. Psychoanalysis is a patchwork: one hole appears and psychoanalysis covers it, another hole appears And again it patches it up; then a third hole appears. Those holes go on appearing because the real cause is never changed.

My function here is to help you to see that unless you change your altitude the problems will remain.

Once you go higher in your consciousness the problems that belong to a particular altitude become irrelevant. You will face new problems, higher problems, better problems. And it is good to face higher problems. At the ultimate height there are no problems. One simply faces one problem: what to do now?

(laughter)

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #30

Chapter title: None

30 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010305

ShortTitle: THUNK30

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

('Adrian' means creative heart -- and Dhyan, meditation, brings that out in you, Osho tells us to begin this evening.)

We are born with great potential but we are not born aware of it. The treasure is there but hidden in our being and unless we become aware of it, it is almost as if it does not exist. We can be emperors but we remain beggars for the simple reason that we don't know what seeds we have brought from the beyond.

Meditation is just a method of discovering one's potential. Once it is known you cannot remain indifferent to it; the whole world pales down compared to it. Then all the flowers of the outside are nothing and all the beauty and all the sunrises and sunsets are nothing. The inner beauty is immeasurable, because what we see outside is only the painting and inside what we see is the painter himself. Outside we see the dance, inside we see the dancer himself. Outside is the world, inside is god himself.

(You can only worship god when you've experienced something that makes you grateful to god, Osho points out.)

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If there is no bliss in your being your whole life will be a complaint; you will be really irritated and annoyed. You will be asking again and again 'Why have I been created? Why was I not asked before I was created?'

One of the characters of Dostoevsky's very famous novel, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, says 'If I ever meet god I will be unable to contain my anger. I could even kill him! Why did he create me? And without asking me, what right has he got?' And one cannot say that what this character is saying is absolutely wrong.

Ordinary life is such a tragedy that it is very natural to feel enraged.

Friedrich Nietzsche has written a small parable. A madman comes to the city and declares 'God is dead

-- have you heard it or not?' The crowd starts laughing and they start asking stupid questions. It is absolutely certain to them that the m an is mad. What nonsense is he talking about?

They have heard of two types of people, one who believes in god, one who doesn't. This fool seems to be a new type; he says god is dead. Before Friedrich Nietzsche's madman, nobody had said that god is dead.

They are giggling and laughing and making fun and finally he says 'I think you have not yet heard the news, I have come ahead of my time. And moreover I have to say to you that he did not die naturally, it is you who have killed him.'

Now it is absolutely certain that he has gone completely crazy....

But he is right: man has killed god, for the simple reason that his life is so joyless -- how can he tolerate somebody who gave him this life? You cannot forgive god; worshipping is far away, even forgiving is not possible.

Hence my whole approach is not that of teaching you a certain belief but creating a right climate inside you. Bliss is the right climate.

Love, sing, dance, enjoy as much as you can, everything that is possible to enjoy has to be enjoyed, and only then when you are rising higher and higher in your cheerfulness does a sense of gratitude arise. At a certain point you start feeling the grace of god, the blessing of being here. Then there is gratitude -- and that gratitude becomes worship.

It may not become a ritualistic worship like the Hindus and the Christians and the Mohammedans have

-- there is no need for it to become a ritual. The real worshipper is in a certain state of gratitude towards the whole because it has given you so much and you don't deserve it at all and there is no way to repay it. So all that we c an do is bow down to existence. That is worship.

(Henry is given one of the Indian names for god -- Narayana.) In India we have one thousand names for god, for the simple reason that god is multi-dimensional and that multi-dimensionality cannot be expressed through one name; the name will not cover his wholeness.

Even one thousand names are not enough to cover all his aspects but they cover a few important aspects.

Narayana is a very beautiful name. 'Nar' means man and Narayana means one who lives in man, one who has made man his abode. It is one of the aspects of god, that he is the interiormost core of everything that exists; he abides in everything. At the very centre of the rose flower you will find him, he is there at the very centre of a rock. He is the centre of everything -- that is the meaning of Narayana. And particularly in reference to man it means that there is no qualitative difference between man and god. That is one of the greatest contributions of eastern mystics to the world.

All the religions that evolved outside India missed this dimension. Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- these are the three religions born outside of India. All these throe religions make a qualitative difference between man and god. They all insist that man cannot be god; god is god and man is man. At the most man can be religious, holy, but never god.

There are also three religions that were born in India -- Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. These are the six great religions of the world. All three religions that have come out of the Indian mystic experience are agreed on one point: that there is no qualitative difference between man and god; man is only god asleep and god is only man awake. That's the only difference. So if one becomes awake one is god.

And my effort here is just that: to help you to be awake, to be aware, to dispel the darkness and to bring light into you. And suddenly, the truth, that 'I am that -- Aham Brahasmi -- I am god' is revealed. It is not an ego assertion, it is the realisation of the ultimate truth.

(Mahesh, Norbert's new name, is also a name of god.)

Just as there is the idea of the Christian trinity -- god the father, god the son and god the holy ghost -- in 1/08/07

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India we also have the idea of a trinity. We call it the trimurti, the three faces of god -- and they are far more significant than the Christian idea.

Compared to the eastern idea the Christian idea looks very childish, immature. These are the three faces of god -- not three people, remember. The Christian idea is of three people. The eastern idea is only of three faces; the person is one but he has three faces, three basic aspects.

These are the three names of the eastern trinity. The first is Brahma; Brahma means the creative force, god's creativity. The second is Vishnu; Vishnu means god's power to maintain existence. Brahma creates; Vishnu maintains, keeps it in tune, keeps it in harmony, in accord, And the third is Mahesh; Mahesh means the destructive power of god... because everything that is born has to die, everything that begins has to end.

No other religion has that idea; they are afraid of accepting that god can destroy. But you cannot create if you cannot destroy. Creativity and destruction are two aspects of the same coin. In fact whenever you create you are already destroying something, and when you are destroying you are creating something.

For example, when a painter paints on the canvas he is creating a painting but destroying the canvas.

When the physician operates on you he is destroying the disease and creating health. Destruction and creation go hand in hand, they are two wings.

Mahesh means the destructive part of god. Brahma begins, Mahesh ends, and between the two Vishnu maintains. Each existence begins with Brahma and ends with Mahesh. And to me destruction is a prerequisite for creation. If you don't abolish the old you will not be able to create the new. So it is a circle; you cannot really say who comes first. You cannot say Brahma comes first, because before Brahma Mahesh has to destroy, and before Mahesh Vishnu has to maintain and before Vishnu Brahma has to create and before Brahma Mahesh has to destroy -- it is a circle. And it is tremendously significant to understand that life is a circular process.

Everything in existence moves in circles: the earth, the sun, the stars, all move in circles. You cannot pinpoint where it begins and where it ends; all is one process. That's why they say there is one god with three faces. You can look from one side and you can see one face but the other two faces are still there, whether you look at them or not.

And my work begins with destruction. Every creation has to begin with destruction. I have to destroy all the conventions in your mind, all the traditions in your mind, all the ideas in your mind; I have to destroy all that has been imposed upon you. Only through that destruction will you be created, will you come out in your reality, in your purity. That will be the beginning. But before the beginning there is a death. Every birth has to be preceded by death.

The word 'mahesh' itself means the great god. Brahma does not mean the great god, he is only one of the gods; Vishnu is another. But Mahesh means the great god because destruction is the greatest work; without it nothing is possible. Destruction means revolution. And each moment we have to die to the past. we have to destroy the past, we have to get rid of it so each moment becomes a new moment, a fresh beginning.

Hence it is significant that the god of destruction, not the god of creation, is called the great god.

Ordinarily one would think, logically one would think that the god who creates would be called the great god but he is not called the great god. And you will be surprised that in the whole of India only one temple exists for Brahma, only one -- and there are millions of temples in India, in fact each city has hundreds of temples. Even a small village has at least half a dozen temples. People may not have places to live in but there are temples.

Brahma has only one temple devoted to him, Vishnu has many temples devoted to him but Mahesh has millions of temples devoted to him. In fact so many temples were devoted to Mahesh that they had to drop the idea of making a temple. So any place where you put a shivalinga... the shivalinga is the symbol of Mahesh. Find just any round stone you can and put it under a tree. You can just sit by the side and within a few minutes you will see that somebody has brought flowers and somebody has started chanting mantras --

and the temple has started!

In fact when for the first time the Britishers made roads and they made milestones they were in trouble because wherever they put a milestone people would start worshipping it! It made great trouble prevent them doing it, telling them that this was just a milestone. It took years to prevent them. The police had to see that nobody worshipped the milestone... because it becomes a temple immediately. You put the stone there... And the milestones were painted red -- that made them even more important. They were the colour of sannyas, so they must be devoted to some god. And India has the idea that all included there are three hundred and thirty million gods, so who knows which god he is? -- but at least, whosoever he is, it is better not to annoy him: put a few flowers there, chant a few son's and worship him.

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Query:-

Mahesh has the greatest number of temples. It shows one thing, that the East understood very correctly the beauty of destruction. To worship the god of destruction is to accept the fundamental of revolution .

(The light your eyes perceive is not real illumination, Osho tells us.) It only reveals objects. It only reveals the superficial, it does not reveal the innermost core of things; the subjectivity remains unrevealed by it. The definition of true light is that which reveals your interiority -- and it is possible only through meditation. There is no other way to reveal your inner world, to make it full of light, to see what it is. And once you have seen your inner world you have seen everybody else's inner world too, because it is the same reality.

If you have seen one rose flower you have seen all rose flowers. Then the difference will be only of detail. Some flower's be a little smaller, and some will be a little bigger, some will be yellow and some will be red, but the flowering is the same. And to understand one flower is enough; to understand all flowering.

So the person who knows himself knows everything and the person who goes on accumulating knowledge about everything without bothering about himself becomes loaded with knowledge and remains just a donkey loaded with scriptures. He knows nothing, he has not yet found the true light.

So here you have to work deeply on meditative techniques. My whole emphasis is on meditation. It is the key, it opens the door to the divine.

(Nirav means silence.)

Become as silent as possible, drop all noise of the mind.

Mind is very noisy, it is a marketplace, so withdraw from it. Take shelter in your heart. And when you take shelter in the heart and the mind is left far away you will start feeling silence descending on you. This is half the journey, from mind to the heart -- the first stoppage in the journey. When this is complete and you can see the mind moving farther and farther away and can see the silence descending upon you, then take shelter in being. It is even deeper than the heart. The heart is very silent compared to the mind but it has its own very subtle noise. It is beautiful, like bees humming, it is very musical. So when you come from the mind to the heart you feel great silence, comparatively -- because it is a relative experience.

But when you move from the heart to the being then you realise that even the heart had its own noise.

Taking shelter in the heart you feel silence descending, but taking shelter in the being the whole experience changes. Suddenly you see you are silence, not that silence is descending, it is no more a separate thing.

And that is the meaning of your name, silence.

The head is absolutely noisy, the heart is very musical -- the noise has a certain melody about it and it is very subtle -- and the being is just silence. And in these two steps the journey is complete.

The whole journey from man to god consists only of two steps. The first is from the head to the heart and the second is from the heart to the being.

(A basic ingredient for growth -- and a rare one these days -- is the quality of patience, Osho says.) The world has become too time-conscious. Everybody is in a hurry, nobody can rest, nobody can sit silently. Everybody is fidgeting, they are restless, hankering to do something, because we have been brought up with the idea that time is money, don't waste it -- do something! But sannyas is initiation into non-doing.

Find as much time as you can for non-doing, for just sitting, just relaxing, resting, waiting, not exactly knowing for what -- because whatsoever the mind can expect will not be god, will not be truth, will not be enlightenment; it will be just a thought. And the mind knows nothing about these transcendental things.

So one has to learn a deep waiting without any expectation about what is going to happen. Just waiting in silence, in stillness, miracles start happening. One has just to be patient with god and he comes, he surely comes. You need not go anywhere to find him; he comes looking for you, searching for you.

So this is going to be your work: be patient, awaiting, and find as much time as possible when you can drop the hurry and the worry and time-consciousness. Doing nothing is always far better than doing something because the essential will be found by non-doing. By doing you will find money, power, prestige which are non-essentials. By doing you will find the world, you will become worldly-rich; by non-doing you will find the eternal, the infinite. You will become rich in a totally different sense. It is a richness which cannot be destroyed, a richness which even death cannot take away -- and that is the only true richness.

(Marco's new name, Abhinavo, is to remind him that sannyas is the art of renewing oneself every moment. It is a constant rebirthing.)

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Die each moment to the past, don't let it hang around you, so each moment you are fresh and young.

The past clings like dust and the past goes on growing bigger every day, so layers and layers of dust accumulate on the mirror of consciousness -- and that's the only problem. Because the mirror becomes so covered it cannot reflect anything. It loses its mirrorlike quality totally, it becomes blind.

One has to go on removing the dust. When the mirror is absolutely fresh every moment you are continuously in contact with god. God simply means that which is, so if you are capable of reflecting that which is you are living in god.

(Niraj means a cloud, and the cloud is representative of freedom, Osho explains.) It is untethered to anything, the whole sky is available to it, it can move in any direction. It is so free that in fact it has no destination at all, it is not going towards some address; it is simply enjoying floating in the sun, on the winds. It is so totally free that it is always ready to go with the wind wherever it is going.

Out of that freedom comes a second quality -- that of let-go. So it is always in a state of let-go. The wind goes to the south, it goes to the south. If the wind starts moving towards the north it does not say 'What is the matter? -- we were going to the south. How can you change just in the middle of the journey?' No, it simply starts moving towards the north. There is no problem, no resistance.

Freedom brings let-go, and because there is absolute let-go there is no possibility of the ego. Ego needs resistance, fight, struggle, the ego wants things according to its conditions. The cloud has no conditions, it is unconditionally one with existence.

And that's what a sannyasin has to be -- a cloud, living in deep let-go, freedom, egolessness, living in such immense trust with existence that everything is good. Life is good and death too.

When both are equally good one has come home. When there is nothing to choose all anxiety disappears. When there is nothing to choose there is nothing to lose either; whatsoever happens now is totally accepted as a gift. And the gifts are always coming to the person who is ready to receive. To live like a cloud is the true way of living.

Anand Samadhan.

It is not the solution to any particular problem, it is a solution for all problems. Those who try to solve single problems are never going to succeed because there are millions of problems. You can go on solving; there will be no end to it. New problems are arising every day: you can solve a few but meanwhile many more will have arisen.

One can go crazy in trying to solve problems individually. It is like cutting the leaves of a tree. The tree is huge and you go on cutting the leaves and new leaves go on coming up. Instead of one, three leaves will pop up; you cut one and the tree will respond with three leaves. It will become thicker, the foliage will be thicker because the tree takes on the challenge; you cannot defeat it so easily. But cut the roots and the whole tree is gone, all the leaves will fall on their own. But roots are invisible and leaves are visible; hence many people go on pruning the leaves for the whole of their life.

The case is exactly the same with man: the root of all problems is the mind, but the mind is invisible.

The body is visible so people go on doing things with the body. They will stand on their heads and they will think they are doing something -- yoga -- that they are becoming spiritual by standing on their head. They are only looking silly, that's all. You can go on distorting your body this way and that -- that is not going to help.

A young man came to a Zen master. The Zen master asked, "Have you ever been to another master before?" and the young man said, "Yes, I have been to a certain master."

The Zen master asked, "What have you learned there?"

The young man said, "I will show you." He sat in the Buddha posture and closed his eyes. The master hit him hard on the head with his staff and said, "You fool! Get lost! Get out of here! We already have so many stone buddhas in our temple -- what are we going to do with you?"

Just sitting like a buddha is not going to help. It is easy to learn because the body is visible but inside the mind is going crazy -- and you are sitting like a buddha. You can fast, you can learn exercises, you can chant mantras, because these things are visible -- but the real thing is to become a witness of your mind.

Mind is not visible; it has no weight. Thoughts are not things; they are weightless. That's why you can contain millions of thoughts. If they had weight it would be impossible to contain so many thoughts in the head; the head is so small.

As many weightless thoughts as you like can be contained. In fact they say that a single man's mind is 1/08/07

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capable of containing all the libraries of the world. Thoughts are weightless, they don't occupy space; hence it is great work to be alert about and watchful of these invisible things that surround you; but that is the way to cut the root. And once you have seen the mind in all its functionings, in all its craziness, and you have become detached, aloof, you have seen that "I am not it," immediately bliss descends, showers on you. In that showering all problems disappear.

Become a witness and you will attain to bliss -- and bliss becomes the solution, the ultimate solution.

I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am

Chapter #31

Chapter title: None

31 October 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8010315

ShortTitle: THUNK31

Audio:

No

Video:

No

[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]

(All the new sannyasins tonight are German -- save for Eva, she's from Sweden. Osho adds 'Anand' to Eva and talks to her about why life hasn't been blissful up to date.) For centuries man has lived at the minimum of his potential -- that's why there is no bliss anywhere. Life has been conditioned by the priests, the politicians, the demagogues, in such a way that everybody remains at the most lukewarm. But one cannot evaporate unless one starts reaching the maximum, the one-hundred-degree point.

These people who have dominated the scene up to now have great vested interests in keeping man at the minimum. To keep man at the minimum serves two purposes. One is that man remains obedient to the establishment. He hasn't got enough energy to fight, to rebel, to go against the mob psychology. He is so tired, so bored, that at the most he can somehow only manage to live. He cannot have a dance in his life, he can only drag.

Secondly, to keep man at the minimum means to keep man a machine. At the minimum m an is a machine, at the maximum man becomes divine.

To control people who know something of god is impossible, to reduce them to slaves is not possible at all. They would rather decide to die than become enslaved. So all the vested interests have been in deep conspiracy against humanity as such. People are not living their life at the optimum, and only at the optimum is there joy, overflowing joy. Life becomes so flooded with light, love and blissfulness. But then there is danger for the establishment, because those people will become so intelligent, so sharp, that these mediocre politicians and stupid priests will not be able to dominate the scene at all.

My sannyasins have to live life totally, fully, to the maximum, to the uttermost, because only at that point does the transformation happen, never before it. And if a few people on the earth decide to risk everything to live totally we can bring a new humanity into existence. A new man is possible, in fact is absolutely needed. It is time that the old man is buried and burned and the new man arrives on the scene --

with freedom, with love, with joy, with a song in the heart, with celebration.

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My sannyasins have to prepare the ground for the new man.

(Only the toughies -- the tough of heart, that is, the courageous -- can find truth, Osho reminds Ulf.) One of the most important qualities, the most basic and fundamental quality, for the seeker is courage: courage to drop beliefs, courage to come out of all conditionings, courage to be innocent again, courage to function from a state of not-knowing, courage to live moment to moment, being dominated by neither the past nor the future, courage to be oneself -- and that's exactly what sannyas is all about. And then truth comes of its own accord, to the courageous heart truth happens.

Cowards only believe. Cowards become Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; courageous people are seekers, they don't belong to any dogma or creed. They enquire, they are inspirited by all the awakened ones

-- Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu -- but they don't belong to any church as such. And because they don't belong they can get inspiration from all sources; there is no problem for them.

The Christian feels afraid to be influenced by Buddha and the Buddhist feels afraid of Jesus; they are all living in fear because they are clinging. Their clinging gives them fear: who knows? -- something may appeal to you more, then your old clinging will have to be dropped. It is better to keep your eyes closed so there is no question of choice. You can remain clinging to your tradition, to your religion, to your country, to your race -- and all that is sheer nonsense because all that means the past.

A seeker has to learn the way of unclinging. He is not a clinger, he does not take shelter in any tradition.

Those traditions are comfortable, convenient, very consoling. Their beliefs help people because those beliefs give them an idea as if they have come to know the truth. But that 'as if' is very great and one tends to forget that it is only 'as if'.

My whole effort here is to remind you that whatsoever you have believed up to now is only 'as if'. It is as if you know -- and you know not. It is better to know that 'I don't know,' because from that point a real enquiry can start.

The sincere person cannot be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. He can only be a seeker of truth. For that, courage is very essential.

(Meditation is the art of mirrorlike stillness, Osho tells Dhyan Mike. And it's through experiencing that state that one comes to know one's godliness -- which is what Mike means.) In that moment of awareness and silence the whole world becomes overflooded with a new fragrance that has always been there but which we were not able to feel because we were in such a turmoil, we were insensitive. Otherwise it was always there. The moment we are sensitive, receptive, available, it reveals itself to us. Then there is only god and nothing else.

And to know this is the ultimate in knowing and being. There is nothing beyond it. To know it means to come to the ultimate rest. Then all desires disappear. One feels utterly fulfilled, contented. Then one comes to know this is the most perfect existence that can ever be. And then certainly one feels grateful, grateful to all that is. That gratefulness is religiousness, the essential core of religiousness.

(Gabriele means god is my strength -- and you can only experience that when your ego has evaporated in love.)

Love is a poison to the ego and nectar to the soul. The ego is the false centre in us and the soul is the real centre in us, because we don't know the real we have to invent the false. It is impossible to function without a centre, so something is better than nothing; even though the centre is false it is workable, it has a certain utility.

To discover the real centre is a long, arduous enquiry, but to create the false is simple, cheap, easy; hence society has decided to choose the easier. Our whole education is managed in such a way that from the first moment of the child's birth up to the time he returns from university, he is taught only one thing, the false ego. He is taught ambitiousness, he is taught greed, he is taught cunningness, he is taught competitiveness. He is told you have to become famous, you have to become this and that, you have to defeat others. He is told continuously that life is a struggle and if you don't fight you will be nowhere, nobody.

The parents tell him to become respectable, become honourable. The teachers tell him to be the first in the class, in the school, in the university, to win the gold medal, to top the list; and in subtle ways they are creating a false centre. Twenty-five years -- almost one-third of life and the most important one-third -- are wasted in creating it. Never again will the person be so alive, so full of intelligence, so adventurous, so 1/08/07

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ready to risk -- never again. As time passes he will become more and more conventional, he will become more and more of a coward, he will start only doing things that society expects.

The most important period of our life is wasted in creating a false centre -- and it is because of the ego that the world lacks love. Love is a natural need, but the egoist cannot love because for love the basic requirement is to put the ego aside and you don't know how to put the ego aside; in fact you have become identified with the ego. And ego will bring only frustration because all those ambitions are not going to be fulfilled. Even if they are fulfilled they will not bring you any contentment. Fulfilled or not fulfilled, frustration is certain.

The ego will never allow you to love, to rejoice, to relax, to play. It will make you always look serious, holier-than-thou, it will keep you uptight, tense -- and that is the greatest calamity that can happen to anybody.

Once you know how to drop the identity with the ego love explodes and in that explosion of love one comes to know 'I am not, god is.'I am only a small wave in the ocean of god so god is my strength. I need not worry, I need not be uptight, I need not hanker for certain goals because I am not separate from the whole so there is no need to have separate goals.' Then one is in tune with the whole.

That is the meaning of Gabriele: god is my strength. God is your strength only when the ego has been dropped. Then the block is removed, then the energy from the beyond starts descending in you like a waterfall. It cleanses you, purifies you. It makes you innocent again and it gives you for the first time a glimpse of real life.

(Then, using Deva Roswitha's name as an excuse, Osho talks on another aspect of divine power.) All power comes from the divine but we can deceive others and ourselves that it is coming from us. That is one of the most canceric phenomena happening to everybody. That gives you a false beginning, and once the first step goos wrong everything else goes wrong.

Our life is not ours, it is a gift. You have not created yourself. Even to breathe is not within our capacity.

We go on saying... we have expressions in every language like this: 'I am breathing.' That is sheer nonsense, you are not breathing. If you are breathing then death cannot come to you. Death may come and you will go on breathing. What can death do if one continues to breathe, if one insists on breathing? But we know that when death comes suddenly the breath disappears; you were not breathing in the first place.

In fact if you are breathing then in the night when you are fast asleep you may forget to breathe and in the morning people will discover that you are gone. How can you continue breathing in sleep? Even if a person is in deep unconsciousness he goes on breathing. Your conscious effort is not needed at all; even our breath is not our own.

You eat food but you don't digest it The hunger is not yours, the desire to eat is not yours, the power to digest is not yours; it is a miracle how the bread and butter becomes blood and bones. Science has yet to discover how it happens. It is the greatest miracle that is happening in everybody's belly every day, but nobody takes any notice of it, of how bread becomes your blood. Even spaghetti becomes your blood -- that is the greatest miracle! (laughter) Not only does it become your blood, it becomes your brain! I have been trying to look into Italians minds -- they are full of spaghetti, their minds really look like spaghetti. The inside of the brain looks like spaghetti.

Nothing is ours. To know it becomes a great relief. Then all is god's, so who are we to worry about it?

Success is his, failure is his. Life is his, death is his. To be in the body or not to be in the body, it is his business. That's how a sannyasin looks at existence, with a deep surrender to the whole. Then all power is divine. In fact we don't exist at all; we are just small manifestations of that power.

The moment it is experienced, understood -- not only intellectually but existentially -- your life goes through a transformation: a great tranquillity, a great equilibrium, starts happening. Then all is good, then you don't have any complaint because in the first place you were not expecting anything to happen. Then whatsoever happens is good. It is happening through the will of the whole -- it can't be wrong.

To live with this attitude is to live a religious life.

(Not many people really want to know truth even though they profess to, Osho declares.)

... because if they really loved truth they would not believe. A believer is not searching for truth, he is looking for some consolation. He wants to believe because he is afraid.

For example, in India people believe in the immortality of the soul and for twenty-two centuries they have been slaves. Now this is unexplainable: a country that believes that the soul is immortal should be 1/08/07

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absolutely fearless, nobody can enslave it, because what can you do? -- at the most you can kill the body but the soul is immortal.

But India has behaved just the contrary to its belief -- very cowardly, clinging to life, afraid of death.

But I can see a deep logic in it. It is not apparent, it is hidden, but if you just dig a little bit you can discover it. People believe in the immortality of the soul because they are afraid of death. It is not their experience, it is their consolation. They are basically cowards.

Poor people have always believed in heaven for the simple reason that here they are suffering so much --

they need some consolation somewhere after life, a divine carrot hanging there beyond the clouds. It keeps them running after it, it helps them to comfort themselves. It helps them to overlook the misery because they can always say it is momentary -- just a few days more and then there is eternal joy in heaven. It is worth suffering!

We could have made the earth a paradise but that golden carrot hanging above the clouds has been one of the greatest hindrances in transforming the earth.

People go on believing in things because they don't want to search for the truth. Not only do they not love truth, they are afraid of truth, because who knows? -- truth may be consolatory or may not be consolatory. Truth has no obligation to be according to our expectations. It may be totally different than how we were expecting it to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche has said it is better not to tell people the truth because they will be very much disturbed; let them believe. Their beliefs keep them happy. It does not matter whether their beliefs are only illusory; at least for the moment they are enjoying the dream -- why disturb them?

He has a point there. Millions of people don't want the truth and whenever there has been somebody like Socrates who insisted on telling them the truth they have killed such a man -- they could not tolerate him.

But my sannyasins have to seek the-truth whatsoever the cost. It may not be according to your expectations but there is no need to have any expectations in the first place. Truth has to be known because only through truth does one become free, one attains freedom.

Jesus says truth liberates -- and he is absolutely right. Belief creates a bondage, truth liberates. And the greatest thing that the heart of man longs for is freedom, freedom from all limitations -- and that is possible only through truth.

So I don't teach any beliefs here. I simply take away all your beliefs and leave you utterly empty so that you can start your journey afresh. If one is ready to be empty half the journey is already complete. And the magic of the journey is that the other half is done by truth itself. You remain empty and waiting, just with a welcoming heart, and truth comes. And the moment truth becomes a guest in your house your life becomes luminous, meaningful, significant.

(A loveless life is no life at all, Osho tells Prem Shivani.) The moment you enter into the dimension of love life becomes divine, then one is a god or a goddess.

The first taste of the divine happens through love, and the first taste is enough because then everything else becomes irrelevant. Then the only thing that has any significance and meaning is love. Then you go on doing a thousand and one things but now there is no other motive except love.

You do something because you love. You take care of your children because you love them -- for no other motive, not even because they are your children. You take care of your husband or lover because you love him with no expectation, with no demand, with no possessiveness, because now love in itself is the end. To love is so joyful -- who bothers whether it is returned or not? If it is returned, good; if it is not returned that too is perfectly good. The reward is not outside the act of love, the reward is intrinsic to it.

Love is not a means to something else, it is an end unto itself.

As your understanding of love deepens, your feeling of yourself as being part of god and of others also being part of god, becomes more and more clear. Then the whole mist disappears from your eyes, then life becomes synonymous with god. The moment life is synonymous with god, one is enlightened, one has become a Buddha, a Christ.

I don't want you to become Christian but I would certainly like you to become a Christ. I don't want you to become Buddhist but I would certainly like you to become a Buddha.

In the West 'Christ' represents the same ultimate state of consciousness as the word 'Buddha' represents in the East; Buddha means the awakened one, one who has come out of his sleep and can see clearly, absolutely clearly; and Christ means the crowned one. Awakening, total awakening, is the crowning ceremony, one becomes an emperor.

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Learn the art of love and follow the way of love and you will be moving towards god.

(Richman, poorman, beggarman or Buddha -- it's our choice what we become.) God creates everybody absolutely free. He neither makes you an emperor nor a beggar, he simply gives you a clean slate. You have to write your fate on it.

If you start living a life of desires you will be a beggar. Even if you accumulate the whole wealth of the earth you will still be a beggar -- a rich beggar but still a beggar, because those desires go on and on. One desire leads to another; it is a chain phenomenon, it is a vicious circle, unending.

If you start living a life of awareness, meditativeness, desirelessness, you are immediately an emperor.

Then each moment is golden because you don't sacrifice it for any future goal, you live it totally here and now. And that very living releases the imprisoned splendour in you.

My sannyasins have to be emperors -- whether you possess anything or not is irrelevant. I am not against possessions, I am not against physical comforts -- they are perfectly good as far as they go, but they don't go far enough.

Wherever you are, in whatsoever situation, live a life without any future -- that means without any desire, because desires need a future. To live in the present is to live a desireless life because in the present there is not enough space for desires to arise. The moment is so small that it cannot contain desires, you can only live it. If you are dancing you can only dance, if you are singing you can only sing, if you are eating you can only eat, if you morning walk you can only walk. There is not enough space in the present moment for many many desires, not even for a single desire.

To be in the present is to be desireless and that's the way to be an emperor. And only emperors know god -- beggars miss everything.

(A dancer -- Natraj.)

Natraj is one of the most beautiful names given to god ever in any country, in any language at any time in history. Natraj means the dance, the ultimate dancer, the king of the dancers.

Christians could not think of such a name for god. It would look too worldly, too mundane. Jews could not think of such a name for god. Their god is very jealous, a very angry god. He looks more like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Ayatollah Khomaniac -- someone like that. He could not be a dancer. You cannot think of Ayatollah Khomeini dancing. But in the East, of the many names that we have given to god this seems to be the most significant -- Natraj.

Why have we called god a dancer? -- for the simple reason that dance comes closest to the divine experience. You cannot divide the dancer and the dance, it is indivisible. In the same way existence and god are indivisible. God is not separate; he is not a creator above and beyond the creation. That's the idea of Christians, Mohammedans and other religions: god is separate from creation. In six days he created the world and on the seventh day he rested and one has never heard what he has been doing since then!

(laughter) If he is still sleeping it seems a long sleep... or maybe he had a heart failure while he was asleep or... what happened? Because Monday has to come after Sunday -- what happened? With Sunday everything ended... he went to a picnic and never returned or had a car accident? -- something!

The whole idea is stupid: he finished the whole creation in six days and then gets so tired that on the seventh day he has to have a holiday.

No, in the East we think of god not as a creator separate from creation, not like a painter who paints and then the painting and the painter are different, but like a dancer. The dance and the dancer are one. You cannot have only the dance and you cannot have only the dancer because when he is not dancing he is not a dancer either; he is a dancer only when he is not dancing he is not a dancer either; he is a dancer only when he is dancing.

So god is creativity, not a creator. He is still creating, he is still painting -- painting the clouds orange early in the morning. He is still working, painting the butterflies new colours, still trying to help the trees to be more beautiful, still bringing new children to the world -- still hoping. He is not fed up with the world and he will never be fed up with the world; he is enjoying it. And he never goes for a single holiday because if he goes on a holiday the whole world will flop. When he comes back after twenty-four hours he will find that everybody is finished because who will breathe?

It is not that he breathed only in the beginning and since then everybody is breathing on his own. He is still our breath, our very breath, he is still our heart, our very heartbeat. God and existence are not two; god is the very soul of existence -- and existence is a dance, it is celebration, it is festivity.

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And that's what my sannyasins have to learn: to know life as a festival, as a carnival -- rejoicing, dancing, singing. The more deeply you rejoice, the closer you are to god. When you disappear in your rejoicing you melt into god. And that is the moment of experiencing realisation, attainment.

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Chapter title: None

Chapter title: None