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Query:-

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Talks given from 1/9/80 to 30/9/80

Darshan Diary

29 Chapters

Year published:

1/08/07

Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Unpublished

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #1

Chapter title: None

1 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009015

ShortTitle: ICEBRG01

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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

Misery pollutes, bliss purifies. This is one of the fundamentals of life which has not been told to people; on the contrary, people have been misled, because what has been told to them is impossible. They have been told to become pure first and then bliss will be the reward. That is utterly absurd because without bliss there is no possibility of purity.

Bliss is not a reward, it is an understanding. It is looking around and seeing the beauty of existence, the benediction of existence. It is simply feeling the joy of just being alive. Then each breath becomes something ecstatic.

Life is a miracle. In fact there is no explanation for it, for why it should be. Neither the philosopher nor the theologian, nor even the scientist, has been able to explain why life should exist at all. And I don't think it is ever going to be explained; the mystery will remain. The mystery cannot be de-mystified, because it is not a question of knowing more; in fact life is something like a miracle. It should not exist but it does.

What is the need of roses and lotuses and thousands of flowers? There seems to be no intrinsic necessity. If they were not there nothing would be missed. If we were not here the earth would go round and round the sun without missing us at all. Existence would continue the same way. The stars would be there and the moon would rise and the trees would grow and everything would be as it is. But life has happened --

not only life but consciousness, love. These are all miracles upon miracles.

To see this is to be blissful. Just seeing is blissful And the moment you start feeling and living this bliss you are purified, purified of all kinds of nonsense, superstitions, all kinds of ideas -- purified of the mind itself.

As one becomes blissful mind starts disappearing. To live in the mind is to know nothing or just to know the superficial, the non-essential. The moment you enter the world of bliss (Osho's hands, held together, fluttered and separated) mind has no function there; mind becomes utterly useless. When you are miserable the mind is needed, hence the mind clings to misery because they can exist only with each other. The moment misery is not there mind is also not there.

In a blissful state one lives in the moment, there is no past and no future; hence there is no possibility of having a mind. Mind means past and the projections for the future; and bliss means to be in the present, to be as utterly herenow as if you have never existed before, as if there is going to be no other moment again --

this is all. And then one comes to know that which is.

Once it is known)you are purified of all darkness. (His fingers interlocked and covered his heart.) Once it is known your life becomes virtuous. Then virtue is not to be cultivated, it is simply the fragrance arising 1/08/07

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out of blissfulness, the fragrance of purity.

One can know it but one cannot express it, words are not adequate, words are very inadequate. Hence the need of disciplehood, the need for sannyas: it is simply a way to hear ordinary words with a new vision, with sympathy, with love. Sannyas means falling in tune with the master, becoming harmonious with the master, then that which is lacking in words can also be transmitted.

The Zen people call it transmission of truth beyond words, beyond scriptures. Even when it is transmitted between the master and the disciple, the disciple comes to know of just the tip of the iceberg.

But that is more than enough to transform one. Then one can move on one's own journey. The master has triggered the process; then it is a chain phenomenon.

Two sailors were sitting on the beach. One was an old man and the other was a very young man. The young man had come for the first time to join up as a sailor. He told the old man "This is the most water that I have ever seen in my life." The old man said "You ain't seen nothin' yet. That's just the top of it!"

The master can only show you just the top of it. But to see the top of it is enough. Then you can dive deep, then you can go into the infinite depths of existence.

My sannyas begins in bliss and ends in wisdom. Purity is just a small consequence of being blissful. So don't strive to be pure. Try to understand what has happened, what is happening every moment, and feel the bliss of it. And then you are in for a great surprise: purity, meditativeness, love, compassion, wisdom, enlightenment -- they all go on following slowly slowly. Just create one essential quality, blissfulness, then everything comes of its own accord.

One can be loyal out of fear but that is not true loyalty. That's what happens in the life of a soldier. He is loyal out of fear because if he is loyal he is rewarded; if he is not, he is punished, tortured. That's what people have known in the name of loyalty.

The sannyasin has a totally different quality of loyalty. It is nothing imposed on you, it is something that you are longing for. And it is not out of any fear and not for any reward; there is no motivation in it.

One simply enjoys trusting existence because doubting creates conflict, doubting creates darkness, doubting keeps your life split. Doubting never allows you to go with the flow of existence. You keep yourself aloof, you go on withholding yourself. You only go so far, and that too with great suspicion in your heart. Then you will miss everything because life is only for those who can be totally in it, who can live intensely and passionately.

It is possible only through trust. The untrusting one remains afraid, suspicious, on guard; the trusting one simply starts flowing with the river of life. And the river of life is going towards the ocean. There is no need to push it, it is already going there. We have to learn the art of let-go, then it will take you to the ocean, to the ultimate.

Meditation is the most precious gift of God. It is so, because it is only through being meditative that one has the capacity, the sensitivity, to appreciate all the other gifts that one is given.

Life is there, but you will never understand it as a gift without meditation. Love is there, beauty is there, joy is there, but they will all remain not understood without meditation. Hence meditation is the gift of gifts.

And I teach only one thing: how to become meditative, because it is my experience that nothing else is needed for the inner transformation. No religious ritual, no more character, no outer discipline is going to help. In fact they all hinder because when you become focused on the outside you forget all about the inside.

Meditation means a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. Ordinarily we are focused on the outside; in meditation we change the focus. We are focused on ourselves. Meditation means the experience of your own interiority; it is an inward journey.

And once you have tasted even a single drop of the nectar then the misery, the anguish, the whole problematic life dissolves. Now you know the right direction in which to go; now you know the right door at which to knock....

Jesus says, "Knock and the door shall be opened unto you." But the question is on what door, where to knock? Knocking on just any door is not going to help. Unless you start knocking on the inner door nothing is going to happen.

Jesus says, "Ask and it shall be given." But whom to ask? People have been asking the sky, the heavens, God the Father, somewhere above there in the clouds. For centuries they have been asking and nothing has been answered. One has to ask one's own inner core.

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Jesus says, "Seek and ye shall find." But where to seek? People have been seeking in every sacred place; they are going to Jerusalem or to Mecca or to Kashi or to Tibet. That is not going to help. Wherever you go, you are wasting your time. One has to go within. The kingdom of God is within you.

Meditation is the whole art of transforming the gestalt; the consciousness that goes outwards starts turning in. And then one becomes aware of millions of gifts; then small things, very small and ordinary things, have tremendous significance. Just a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the lake is enough to fill one with wonder and awe. It is poetry, pure poetry! It is music, it is dance, it is a finger pointing to the moon.

This is how you have to slip into the lake of consciousness, just like a dewdrop. It can become the moment of sudden enlightenment.

(Osho explained why he had retained Yoh Hiroshi's name.)

It is very pregnant with meaning. Yoh means yin-yang. That is the whole philosophy of tao.

Existence is made of two energies. On the surface they are polar opposites; deep down they are not opposites but complementaries. One can call them yin-yang or negative-positive or Shiva and Shakti or male and female. In fact yin and yang imply all possible opposites, with the underlying meaning that opposites are not opposites but complementaries.

The moment it happens that the opposites meet within you, that yin becomes yang, yang becomes yin, that the male and female inside you meet and merge into one -- or in modern psychological jargon the conscious and unconscious meet and merge into one -- for the first time you experience your organic wholeness. And that is the meaning of Hiroshi; Hiroshi means vastness, oceanic vastness.

Yin and yang divided, we are very small; yin and yang together and we contain the whole universe. The art of meditation is to help the man and the woman within you meet and merge and become one.

When man meets even with his outer woman, for a single moment a different quality comes to his being.

Just for a split moment when you are at the climax of your orgasmic joy, when you are not separate from the woman and the woman is not separate from you, then you are not there, she is not there; suddenly a duality has disappeared and in that disappearance of duality you have the first glimpse of what unity can be.

The ultimate secrets of meditation have been discovered through this orgasmic joy. The whole tradition of Tantra is a proof of it. But the meeting with the outer woman or outer man can only be momentary. The same can happen inside you.

One of the greatest contributions of Carl Gustav Jung to modern psychology is that he accepted this ancient taoist idea that inside man has both the male part and the female part. And the same is the case with the woman, she has both. But they are separate; a very subtle wall keeps them separate inside you. The wall is really subtle. It is just like a Japanese paper curtain, it can easily be removed. And once it is removed the whole is experienced.

To remain clinging to the part is misery, to allow the whole to happen is bliss.

True religion has nothing to do with Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. It certainly has something to do with Christ, Krishna and Buddha. True religion has been experienced only by very few people in the world; others have simply followed borrowed knowledge.

My effort here is not to make a Buddhist out of you but a Buddha. Less than that is meaningless. One should not settle for anything less. If you can be a Buddha, why be a Buddhist? If you can be a Christ, why be a Christian? Leave it for the cowards to be Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Mohammedans. The brave one, the courageous one, would like to know the truth on his own.

(Osho's eyes were wide open, his eyebrows arched for emphasis.) He would not like to know the truth through others, he would like to experience it himself -- because unless you drink the water your thirst is not going to be quenched. Buddha may have drunk the whole Ganges -- that is not going to make any difference to you. Just a glass of water will do for you but you have to drink it.

But people are so foolish that they go on worshipping Buddha and Krishna and Christ, and hoping that their thirst will be quenched they go on worshipping scriptures -- Dhammapada, Koran, Bible. It is like a thirsty man worshipping a book of chemistry which explain that water is H2O. You can go on worshipping the book; you will remain thirsty. You are simply proving yourself silly and nothing else.

Or you can go on repeating the mantra "H2O, H2O, H2O...", " buddham sharanam gachchhami, buddham sharanam gachchhami, buddham sharanam gachchami". It is not going to help, it is just H2O --

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you have to drink it yourself.

That is the whole significance of sannyas, I am not creating any religion, I am simply imparting to you a glimpse into true religion and helping you to know it on your own.

Truth liberates but it has to be your own experience, only then does it liberate, otherwise it creates a great bondage.

(Osho cautioned the Japanese woman who followed, that not all that goes under the name of meditation is really meditation; in fact some so-called meditation methods are positive hindrances.) All methods of concentration are against meditativeness. All that is known as contemplation is not meditation at all.

These three words (Osho marked them off on his fingers) have to be understood well: concentration, contemplation and meditation.

Concentration means focussing the mind on one subject, on one object, not allowing the mind to roam here and there, forcing it, excluding everything else except the object on which you want to concentrate.

Of course many distractions will arise and many times you will go on missing the thread because you are doing something unnatural.

Mind's very nature is movement and you are trying to force it to remain still, at one point. It cannot do it, and if you manage to do it after long, long practice, then it will be very tiring and exhausting. It won't make you blissful, it will make you very mad. It will give you a long saintlike face. It will make you a saint but not a meditator; it will make you dead but not alive.

Going against nature never helps. One can be victorious only with nature and through nature. There is no victory against nature; maybe there are momentary victories, but one should not rejoice in those momentary victories. They are insignificant and the price that we have to pay for them is immense. Time is wasted, energy is wasted and the ultimate result is zero.

Contemplation is a little more liquid, a little more fluid than concentration. In concentration you have to remain fixed on one word or one object -- for example, the word "love". In concentration you have to remain fixed on these four letters of love; in contemplation you can roam around, going into many meanings of love, you can go deep or high, you can bring in many other ideas concerning love. Of course there is a limit but you have a longer rope than in concentration.

So in contemplation one feels a little bit more free but one is still tethered. You cannot go out of the subject of love. Everything else is excluded. You cannot think about freedom or truth, you cannot think about anything else except love. But one can think much about love, one can ponder over it for hours or for days because love itself is an oceanic experience. It is less tiring than concentration, more fulfilling than concentration, but it is still not the real thing.

The real thing is meditation. In meditation you are neither concentrating on anything nor contemplating anything; you are simply open and available to all that is. The distant call of the cuckoo, a dog starts barking, a child starts crying -- all is included. The train passes by, the traffic noise . somebody is playing on a flute, the horn of the car . the neighbours start shouting, fighting -- everything is included. You are just a witness, watching everything without any judgement, neither condemning nor appreciating.

This non-judgemental awareness is what I mean by meditation. It is inclusive of all, it excludes nothing.

It is pure openness, vulnerability. All the windows, all the doors are open; everything is welcome, everything is just a guest and you are a host. Many guests come and many guests go but the host remains and abides.

Slowly slowly one becomes aware that everything comes and goes but one is always herenow. This experience, that you are always herenow, gives you the first feel of eternity, of the deathless, of the immortal truth.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #2

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Chapter title: None

2 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009025

ShortTitle: ICEBRG02

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.]

(Misery is simply missing the best of existence -- that's what Osho explained to us tonight.) Bliss is a bridge, misery is a wall. It is everyone's experience that whenever one feels miserable one does not want to relate with anybody; one wants to close one's doors and hide somewhere. Just the opposite happens when you are blissful. You cannot hide somewhere; you would like to run under the open sky, in the sun, on the beach, you would like to meet people, relate, share. This has always been the case.

When Buddha was miserable as a king he renounced the kingdom, went into the forest and lived a lonely life, but when he became blissful he came back to the people. The same happened with Mahavira, he was also a king. He renounced his kingdom, went into loneliness and lived for twelve years without speaking a single word -- absolutely silent.

Not to speak means to totally cut oneself off from others -- because language relates. It is because of language that there are human societies. Animals don't have any society, they all live a closed life because they cannot speak. Without language there is no society, no culture, no civilisation. To be silent means to cut oneself off from society. In a psychological way it is getting into one's loneliness absolutely, closing all the doors, all the windows.

But when Mahavira became enlightened, when his heart was full of bliss, overflowing, he went back to the people. For forty years continuously he spoke, related, shared his experience.

Bliss always helps you to be connected. And to be connected with people, with trees, with animals, with rivers, with mountains, is to be bridged with god because there is no god other than this universe. This universe is the manifest form of god, and if you relate and love the manifest form finally you will be able to enter into the unmanifest too.

Once you have seen flowers you will be able to see flowers in the seed too. In the seed they are unmanifest but they are there. So god exists with these two aspects. The visible aspect is the universe but to reach to the invisible aspect you have to go through the visible. Hence I don't teach renunciation.

If you renounce the manifest god, the visible god, the universe, you will never be able to relate with the invisible because the invisible exists as the centre and the visible as the circumference. The moment you run away from the circumference you are renouncing the centre too.

You have to penetrate into the circumference; you have to go so deeply into it that you reach the centre.

Hence my approach, my sannyas, is a way of bridging, a way of rejoicing, a way of bliss.

Be blissful and god is not far away. When you are totally blissful, when not even a trace of misery is left inside you, when only god is, within, without, everywhere, whatsoever you see is god and the seer also is god, the seen and the seen, the known and the knower, all become one -- that experience of oneness with existence is the ultimate goal of sannyas.

(Osho talked of true royalty not being something that one inherits but a fragrance that pervades the man of love.)

But down the ages we have been taught that the royal family is the noblest. And strange fictions have been created.

In England, in the Middle Ages, it was believed that the queen's legs -- because nobody had ever seen her legs and the way of dressing was such that you could not see her feet -- were joined together... they 1/08/07

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weren't separate. And that was the most significant thing about nobility!

But this kind of fiction has been spread all over the world. These are invented nobilities: king or queen, or whomsoever he is, is just born like any animal -- but with a great potential. That potential has to be actualised.

Life is an art. One has to go on learning more and more about it. And the best way to transform oneself into a noble spirit is love. Love is the very alchemy of transformation. But up to now religions have been teaching people to hate. They sermonize on love; in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, they talk about love and they create hate.

Now Christians have killed so many people down the ages and they still go on saying that god is love, that Jesus taught the way of love. All that Christians have done is nothing but murder people, burn people alive, for stupid reasons.

Hundreds of nuns were burned alive in the Middle Ages for the stupid reason that they were thought to be having intercourse with the devil. In fact the pope should have been burned because it was the priest and the whole strategy of the priests that created that state.

If a woman is continuously repressed, then naturally that repression starts bringing sexual dreams. Sex was thought to be the devil's work, so the idea of sex and the devil were associated. It was a perverted state of mind in which the poor woman started believing that because in her dreams she made love to the devil, she was corrupted. Not only that, you will be surprised to know that many nuns started believing that they had become pregnant. Their periods stopped -- mind has such power over the body -- and their stomachs started showing signs of pregnancy. It was all hot air -- nothing inside! But of course these were enough proofs.

They started walking like pregnant women and they themselves confessed before the church that yes, they had made love with the devil in the night and that's why they were pregnant. They were burned alive!

And the same has been the case with other religions; each religion has been destroying people of other religions. Christians killed Mohammedans, Mohammedans killed Christians, Mohammedans killed Hindus, Hindus have killed Mohammedans. It has been going on and on for thousands of years. It seems love is only a word. And mind is so cunning, it can even rationalize. It can say that to save our philosophy of love we have to fight, we have to destroy those who want to destroy our philosophy of love.

And the Mohammedans were doing the same. The name of their religion is Islam; Islam means peace, and Mohammedans have been the most trouble -- creating people in the world. They have nothing to do with peace, they have created more turmoil than anybody else.

Hindus talk about tolerance, but my experience of living in India is that Hindus are the most intolerant people in the world. Even when they show tolerance their tolerance is egoistic, it is an insult. They are saying we are tolerant because we know that we are right and you are wrong; we can tolerate these stupid people, these foolish people. We have the truth and nobody else has the truth. We are spiritual and everybody else is materialist, so of course a spiritual person has to tolerate all kinds of people. But in their tolerance there is deep intolerance, in their tolerance there is ego and nothing else.

The very word 'tolerance' is ugly. Who are you to tolerate anybody else? One has to accept everybody the way they are, there is no question of tolerance. Tolerance shows hatred. It is not a good word, it is not a virtue.

Up to now love has remained only a word and we have been brought up, poisoned, from the very beginning.

My effort here is to de-condition you so that all the heritage of the past which is ugly, inhuman, can be put aside and you can have a rebirth. And if one can be loving, there is no other religion needed, no other scripture, no god even is needed; love is enough, more than enough. It will open all the secrets. It is a small key but capable of opening all the doors, unlocking all the doors, all the mysteries of life.

Remember it, only a loving soul is noble. And love has to be unconditional, non-dominating, non-possessive. Love has to be the sheer joy of sharing with no desire to get anything in return. Much comes but that is another matter; the desire should not be there. One should love for love's sake, because it is such a beautiful experience, it is such an ecstasy, that what more could one desire in return? It has intrinsic value.

Stefano means the crowned one. And the word Christ means the same thing.

It means one who has entered into the kingdom of God. It means one who has become victorious over himself. It means one who has attained mastery over the mind and is no longer a slave.

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Query:-

It is possible only through meditation because meditation means a journey towards your innermost being.

The world is tremendously beautiful but nothing compared to your interiority. There are beautiful flowers and stars and rainbows -- the world is really colorful, it is a gift of God. But still, it is nothing compared to the inner universe.

The moment one experiences the inner world, the outer world fades away. Seeing the inner, hearing the inner, one comes to know the real music, the real beauty. And that experience is a crowning experience because it takes you to the ultimate peak.

A Sufi woman, Rabiya, was sitting under her roof in a small hut. It was morning and the sun was just rising and the birds were singing and it was a beautiful morning.

Another Sufi saint, Hassan, knocked on the doors of Rabiya's hut and said, "Rabiya, what are you doing inside? Come out! God has blessed us with a beautiful morning."

Rabiya laughed and said, "Hassan, it is better you come in. I know that the world is beautiful but I am enjoying the creator of the world inside. Creation is beautiful but it cannot be more beautiful than the creator."

Hassan was very much ashamed; he had never thought that his knocking on Rabiya's door would take such a turn. That is the beauty of the masters: they can turn a very ordinary thing into something extraordinary.

Hassan went in, bowed down to the woman, asked to be forgiven, and sat by her side with closed eyes.

And that day he became enlightened.

And Rabiya said, "Now you tell me: where is real beauty, where is real joy, where is real poetry?"

Hassan said, "Now I know, the outer world was just like a dream, a reflection of the moon in the lake.

Now I have seen the real moon, not the reflection. The outer was just an echo; now I have come to the source, the very source of the music. I have heard the inner melody. I am tremendously grateful to you."

Meditate, and by meditation I mean become more aware of the workings of the mind.

Watch.

Observe.

Witness without any judgment, because one can be a witness only if one is non-judgmental.

You are not to decide what is right and what is wrong, you just have to see whatsoever passes on the screen of the mind. And remember that you are only a witness; you have nothing to do with what is going on in the mind.

As this witnessing settles, less and less thoughts will pass, more and more gaps will come in. And those gaps will give you the experience which is the ultimate bliss, peace, silence. And when the gaps have become permanent you are no longer at the mercy of the thoughts, a victim of thoughts. So you can put the traffic aside at any moment, you can stop the movement of thoughts at any moment and can become thoughtless -- you have come home.

That is the meaning of 'Christ'. And one becomes crowned because one is an emperor now.

When Jesus was crucified the enemies were making fun of his name, Christ. They had put a crown of thorns on his head. They were simply poking fun at him, saying, "Look, this is the crowned one, the Christ!"

But they were utter fools; hence Christ prayed for them in the last moment of his life. He prayed to God:

"Forgive them for they know not what they are doing," because he was the crowned one. But the world has always behaved in that way with the crowned ones. The world has forced them to carry their own crosses.

The world does not forgive the crowned ones, it cannot, because in their presence it feels very much humiliated.

So every sannyasin has to be aware of the fact that there will be difficulties in the world. But don't be deterred by anything, because even if all is lost, nothing is lost. If you can know yourself you have known that which is worth knowing. If you can be yourself you have attained that which is worth attaining. All else is non-essential.

(Meditation is witnessing the mind, or to put it another way for Dhyan Caterina, it is a state of no-mind, Osho explained.)

Mind is unawareness. Its functioning is unconscious, hence the moment you start becoming aware the mind starts melting. Awareness functions with the mind just as the sun functions with ice as the sun rises the ice starts melting. As you become aware, a certain heat is created in you and that heat dissolves the minds evaporates the mind.

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And Caterina means spotless purity. That is the ultimate outcome of awareness. Caterina also means beauty, grace, devotion. They are all by-products of awareness.

The beauty of the body is nothing much it is not even skin deep. The real beauty haq to be of the soul, it has to be of the inner. It has to be something not tethered to the physical because the body is going to die and with the body the beauty of the body will disappear.

We have to create a beauty that can transcend death -- and it is within our reach. All that is needed is the magic of awareness, the magic I call meditation. And when there is inner beauty there is grace; whatsoever you do, there is grace in it. You start having a golden touch, whatsoever you touch becomes golden. The mundane starts becoming the sacred, the ordinary starts becoming luminous, even darkness starts becoming light. And out of these experiences comes devotion.

Devotion means a deep thankfulness towards god. He has given so much and we don't even deserve it; it has been showered on us and we are not worthy of it This experience creates devotion, prayer. And to attain devotion is the most precious thing in life.

How long will you be here?' he asked the Italian sannyasin.

Only two or three days.

Come back for a longer period. I am creating a little Italia here. Soon you will find all the intelligent Italians here!

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #3

Chapter title: None

3 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009035

ShortTitle: ICEBRG03

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.]

(Prem Sabine. Sabine was the name of a now extinct Italian tribe, he told us.) Love is one of the languages which has been forgotten completely. The primitive people were more loving. As civilisation has grown love has disappeared. Sabine simply means a woman from the tribe which has disappeared, which is no more. Love also has disappeared in the same way. Now man exists like a desert; hence there is so much sadness in the world, so much seriousness, so much burden. Everybody is carrying a load of rocks on their hearts.

Death seems to be a relief to many people, hence so many people commit suicide. Life must have lost all meaning. And those who don't commit suicide are not necessarily alive; they may just be afraid of death, of the unknown. They may simply be cowards.

So people who commit suicide are utterly sad, obviously, so sad that they don't want to exist a single moment more. And those who do exist, at the most they survive, they don't live -- because without love there is no life. One can survive but survival is not enough. There is no dance in it, no poetry in it, no celebration in it.

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Love is the suprememost value. Think of love as god, as the only god, and make every effort to live according to love. Never allow anything that distracts you from love, because anything that distracts you from love distracts you from life too and from god too. They are all synonymous.

D.H. Lawrence used to say that it would be good if for one hundred years we closed all the schools, colleges, universities, so that man can again become a little primitive, a little less civilised, a little less sophisticated, a little less cultured.

There is great insight in it. Of course it cannot be done, but something else can be done, and that's what I am trying to do. Let the universities continue and let civilisation continue -- they cannot be stopped, it is not possible to stop them -- but we can persuade individuals to jump out of this garbage. And if a vast number of people in the world start living the life of love then others will automatically be attracted to it It is bound to happen, because every man whose heart becomes full of love becomes a magnet. He becomes an energy field, and whosoever comes in contact with such a person is bound to be affected by it. Love is infectious.

So live love and spread love. That's my message to the sannyasins.

If you are courageous you can be blissful, if you are not courageous you are bound to remain miserable.

Misery simply shows that the person is a coward, because the coward cannot drop anything. Even though he is miserable, even though it is misery, he clings. Whatsoever is there he clings to it. He is unable to renounce anything. He knows it hurts but he is more afraid of the unknown than the known, which is giving him fear, which is giving him misery, which is giving his all kinds of anguishes, anxieties.

At least one comfort is there, it is known. And he goes on clinging to it. He only says that he wants to be blissful but he does nothing because he cannot take the basic step. The basic step is to drop misery --

because misery is not clinging to anybody, it is we who cling to it.

So a really courageous person can drop it instantly, not even gradually, because that too shows cowardliness. That shows that, we will drop it slowly slowly so that we can become accustomed to the unknown first; as it becomes more familiar we can drop a little bit more. But then it can take lives! And even then he will not be transformed.

Transformation needs a discontinuity; not a gradual change but a jump, a quantum leap from the known into the unknown. It needs the heart of a gambler.

So be courageous and drop all that creates misery in you. And drop it immediately, don't postpone it for tomorrow The coward always postpones. The courageous does it immediately; once he sees the point he is ready to do it whatsoever the risk, whatsoever the cost.

The cowardly only goes on wavering, lingering, thinking he will do it And remember: tomorrow never comes.

(Mind -- your master or your manservant. That's what Osho talked about next.) The moment one tastes the nectar of meditation all darkness disappears, all misery disappears, all beggarliness disappears. One becomes a prince, a princess, because one enters into the kingdom of god. In fact one becomes a god. But meditation is the alchemy, the whole secret is in meditation.

These are the two possibilities: one is mind, the other is meditation. Mind keeps you attached to the world, to things, to the visible, to the ordinary, to the mundane. Meditation opens the doors for the invisible, for the sacred. Mind is tethered with the non-essential and meditation gives you the essential. The distance is vast in a sense -- it is the biggest distance possible -- but in another sense it can happen in a single moment or even in a split second because it is only a question of understanding the point.

Meditation means knowing that you are not the mind, becoming aware that mind is separate from you; you are awareness of the mind, and awareness of the mind is not mind, cannot be. Mind is an object and you are subjectivity. You can see your mind functioning -- thought coming and going. It is just like a road, and the traffic goes on and on and people are passing -- memories, faces, dreams, thoughts, desires. It is a queue, a continuous queue, non-ending; day in, day out it continues. But you can become aware of it.

Ordinarily we are not aware of it; that's what is known as metaphysical sleep. The moment you become aware of the traffic of the mind the metaphysical sleep is broken, you are awake for the first time. Knowing that mind is separate is enough to bring the revolution. The moment it becomes your own experience that you are not the mind, you have entered into the kingdom of god.

So in a sense the distance is vast, in a sense there is no distance; just a single insight is enough and like a blow of a sword one is cut away from the mind; the identity with the mind is dropped. Then mind remains; you can use it whenever you want and you can turn it off whenever you want. On or off -- it depends on 1/08/07

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you. Mind is no more your master.

Ordinarily it is the master and you are the slave. Meditation makes you the master and mind starts functioning as a slave. And as a slave mind is beautiful, as a master it is very dangerous.

(The next new sannyasin, listed as a mathematician, was named Gyan Atit -- transcendence of knowledge!)

Knowledge is a barrier, not a bridge. It prevents you from knowing because it gives you a false sense of knowing. And remember, the danger is never from ignorance, the danger is from so-called knowledge. The ignorant person is far more innocent, in a far healthier state than the knowledgeable, because the ignorant knows he is ignorant. Knowing that he is ignorant he remains humble, he remains simple, and out of that humbleness and simplicity there is a possibility of wisdom.

But the knowledgeable person covers up his ignorance and starts behaving as if he knows, but all that he knows is "as if". Slowly slowly he can become auto-hypnotised by that "as if" and he can forget the "as if"

completely and he can start believing that he knows. Now this man is in real trouble because he will stop enquiring and he will become very egoistic.

The pundits, the scholars, the professors, are very egoistic people for the simple reason that they believe they know -- and they know nothing. And everybody is knowledgeable, more or less.

One has to put aside all knowledge, one has to look beyond it. Beyond is the world of the stars.

Knowledge keeps you tethered to the earth, it never allows you to see the stars. It never allows you to see the beyond, and beyond is what god means -- the beyond. Going beyond knowledge is going into the beyond.

Going beyond knowledge is going into the beyond. Dropping knowledge is creating an opportunity to know.

Socrates says: I know only one thing, that I know nothing.

This is the beginning of wisdom, this is transcendence, this is the meaning of your name.

(His address to the next sannyasin, Vedaprem, was in a similar vein.) The only criterion of wisdom is love. The knowledgeable person is not a loving person, he cannot be.

He is so full of rubbish, he is so much in his head... that his heart functions no more.

His whole energy has moved into the head. He has become just his head, he has forgotten the way to his heart.

Even if he loves he loves through the head; he thinks he loves. Even love is not love -- not a feeling.

That too is a conclusion, a logical conclusion that one needs love, that it is nourishing, that it is a necessity of life, but all these are conclusions of the mind.

A man of love is bound to be a man of wisdom. These two things are two aspects of the same coin. One can begin from either; either you start becoming love, then wisdom will come as a shadow of your love, or you start by becoming wise and love will come as its shadow. But remember, by wise I mean intelligent, not knowledgeable.

Intellect is not intelligence and to be an intellectual is not necessarily to be intelligent. Intelligence is a totally different quality. The intellectual only repeats whatsoever he has learned. In any situation which is absolutely new, about which he knows nothing, he is an utter fool. He cannot act spontaneously, his whole activity comes from his memory. If there is something in his memory then he is very knowledgeable, he is an expert. If some situation arises for which he has a ready-made answer then he will prove that he knows much. But even a small problem which is new is impossible for him; he cannot solve it.

The intelligent person has a certain immediacy. He can respond to any situation. He does not depend on the memory, he depends on awareness. And wisdom means awareness, intelligence, meditativeness. It is not of the mind, it is of the heart. In the beginning it is of the heart and finally it is not even of the heart; then it is of the being, ultimately it is of the being. And these are the three most important centres, upper centres: the head, the heart, the being.

The first step is from the head to the heart, the second step is from the heart to the being. And the moment you reach your being you have reached to the very centre of existence. It is not your centre alone, it is the centre of everything that is. In religious words you call it god, but you can simply call it t centre -- and that will do.

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word, beauty is a word. He has not experienced anything. He goes on accumulating these words just as a few stupid people go on accumulating postal stamps.

People accumulate words... and the word is not the thing. The word "fire" is not fire; you cannot cook anything on it. The word 'love' is not love. But if you watch you will be surprised how we are living in words. People go on saying to each other "I love you" without meaning anything.

A lover was saying to his beloved, "No force of the world can prevent me from loving you. We have to become one. I can go through fire, I will cross seven oceans to reach you." When he was departing the girl asked "Are you coming tomorrow?" He said "If it doesn't rain." And he was going to cross seven oceans!

But these are words, and people live and exchange words. You say to somebody "I love you". And of course he says "The same to you". (laughter) You exchange words.

I have heard about an army man who because of his courage in the war was given a very high post. He had been just an ordinary soldier; he was made a major. When he became a major his friends -- other majors and other top officials -- were puzzled because whenever another soldier would say to him "Good morning, Sir," he would say good morning and quietly he would say "The same to you" -- so silently almost like a whisper, "The same to you." But he always said it.

Finally they asked "What is the matter? Why do you say 'The same to you'?" He said "Because I have been a soldier myself." They said "We don't understand." He said "The problem is I have been a soldier so whenever I used to say 'Good morning, Sir,' deep down I was saying 'You bastard! (laughter) Son of a Bitch! Fuck you!' I used to say all these things, and they must be saying the same things to me! So I know! I say 'The same to you!'"

These things are not said; what we say is "Good morning, Sir."

People are continuously, on the surface -- even in the deeper layers -- full of words; they are saying one thing, thinking another thing; on a third layer some dream is passing by. And these are all layers of words. If you watch the layers of words you will be surprised, it is like an onion: layers and layers. You peel one layer there is another layer, you peel that layer and there is another layer. It is like Chinese boxes, boxes within boxes -- and we are lost in them.

A sannyasin has to transcend all words, word as such has to be transcended. You have to learn the art of wordless silence, you have to enter into that silence where the word has disappeared.

The Bible begins: In the beginning there was the word. What nonsense! How can there be a word when there was no man? If I had to rewrite it I would write: there was silence, in the beginning there was silence, absolute silence.

Word must have entered later on, only when god created man. He created animals, trees, etcetera; on the sixth day he created man. And they say he created man first and woman next because he wanted the poor guy at least to say something to him. Once the woman is there she won't allow it! (laughter) So with man enters the word, with mind enters the word. And the moment you leave the word aside, mind is transcended, man is transcended. In fact the word "man" comes from the same root as mind; it comes from a Sanskrit root "man. From man both words, mind and man, are derived.

Mind is man. And what is mind? -- the word. To transcend the word is to transcend the world too, because once you are beyond words you are beyond the world. That is true renunciation. You don't escape to the mountains but you have escaped into the deepest core of your being. Then you can live in the marketplace and yet you will not be of the marketplace.

(Love is the suprememost value, Osho said as a starter tonight. And he concluded by returning to the same theme.)

Love is the foundation on which one's life can become a temple and one's being can become a host for the divine guest.

I teach love and nothing else, because everything else can follow without any effort. If you are capable of love you are capable of the impossible. If one can manage to be loving one has succeeded in finding the path, in finding the truth. The only difficulty is that love demands that you drop the barrier of the ego.

The ego is just like a great barrier between you and the reality; it allows you only glimpses of reality.

And it goes on interpreting reality, it never allows it as it is. It continuously goes on giving a commentary on it: "This is beautiful, that is ugly. Look -- this is good, that is bad." It never gives you any opportunity to see what is exactly the case. Before you can see it has already interpreted, it has already contaminated; it has already come in.

Scientists say the mind allows only two per cent of reality to enter; ninety-eight per cent is prevented.

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That is too much! The mind is a great barrier, it is standing there at the door, watching what goes in and allowing only that which fits with it, which adjusts to it.

Love means changing the very focus of your life. It is coming down from the head to the heart, and as you come to the heart, the heart allows everything, one hundred per cent. It is just an opening, a window into existence. It allows the sun, the moon, the stars, the flowers, the birds, the rain, the wind -- it goes on allowing everything. And the more existence reaches you, the more bliss happens. The more existence penetrates you, the more you become alive, the more you become divine. So logic has to be dropped and love has to be learned.

Our society continuously teaches us logic and prevents us from moving towards the world of love. That is a great strategy to keep people hung up in their heads. Heady people are efficient but they are just like machines, robots.

Sannyas means de-automatising yourself. The society has made you an automatic robot; sannyas has to uncondition you, to make you your natural self again, the way god wanted you to be, the way nature intended you to be -- not what society wanted, not what the politicians and the priests have desired, but what nature intended.

Love is a natural phenomenon, logic is man's invention. Rely more on nature, trust the natural more and your life will become full of benediction, full of grace, full of god.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #4

Chapter title: None

4 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009045

ShortTitle: ICEBRG04

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.]

Reza means pleasure. Pleasure is a multidimensional phenomenon. It exists on the physical level. That is the lowest and is known to almost everybody. It is animal, because animals are also acquainted with it, but to know pleasure only on the physical level is to miss the whole point. Pleasure also exists on the psychological level.

Listening to music has nothing to do with physiology, but sex does have something to do with physiology; it is physiology, biology, chemistry, but nothing more. Food is physiological. Almost ninety-nine point nine percent of humanity is divided between these two pleasures.

There are people who know sex as their only pleasure, and there are people who know food as their only pleasure. The person who represses sex will become interested in food, and the person who represses his desire for food will become interested in sex. And the desire goes on moving like a pendulum between food and sex.

The joy that arises out of poetry, or seeing a beautiful sunset, or listening to the birds singing, or looking at a beautiful painting is certainly of a different category. No animal can know it, only man is capable of it.

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The moment you start knowing something of psychological pleasure, man is born; otherwise one remains animal.

Unfortunately many live as animal and die as animal; they never attain to anything higher than that. But to know psychological pleasure is not much either, because every man can easily know it; it is not something of great significance. It is better than the physiological, but there is still a higher peak -- the spiritual -- and that happens only through meditation.

On the physiological level we call it pleasure -- it is the same phenom-enon. On the psychological level we call it happiness, and on the spiritual plane we call it bliss. But it is the same thing getting more and more refined, moving higher, becoming less and less gross, becoming more and more subtle.

At the body plane it is just like a seed. At the mind plane it is like a flower. At the spiritual plane it is like fragrance. And to know bliss is to know God; hence my whole emphasis is on meditation.

Going above the animal you become man. Going above man you become divine. And unless one becomes divine, unless one experiences God, life is futile, life has no depth, no height; it remains only a survival. But in knowing bliss, there is great explosion of meaning -- each cell of your being starts dancing.

For the first time you know what a benediction it is to be.

To become a sannyasin means from this moment onwards your whole energy will be focussed on meditation. Meditation is the womb out of which Godliness is born. There is no other proof for God. Only meditation gives you the feeling that God is everywhere -- not as a person but as a presence. But it is almost tangible, almost visible. Nobody can refute it.

Even if the whole world says there is no God, it does not matter to a man of meditation because he knows God is. But his God is totally different from the God of the priests, the God of the churches, temples, mosques. His God is not a person, his God is a new quality that has become available to him because now he has a new perspective. It is Godliness, it is more of an inner experience -- subjective rather than objective.

So this has to become your longing from now onwards. This has to become the fire which will consume you on the lower levels and will give birth to the real you, to the real I -- which has nothing to do with the ego, but which transcends the ego.

Meditation is the art of enjoying your aloneness just as love is the art of enjoying togetherness. These two things -- love and meditation -- are the most important in life. But meditation is far more important than love, because love is possible only if meditation becomes possible. A person who cannot enjoy his aloneness will not be able to enjoy his togetherness with anybody.

That's why lovers are always in such conflict. They meet out of a desire, out of a need, because they cannot be alone, they are unable to be alone -- it feels so empty. They have only a negative experience of aloneness; the negative experience is loneliness. When one experiences the positive side of it, It is aloneness.

People know only loneliness and of course, loneliness is like a wound; it hurts and one starts feeling as if one is drowning (his hands rolled in towards his chest like waves), and one needs some support, somebody to look to, somebody to cling to. That's how lovers meet; but are desiring that the other will be the support. Sooner or later frustration is bound to happen because both are lonely and they meet out of the motive that the other will fill their loneliness. But the other is also lonely.

Maybe in the beginning, in the honeymoon days, one can dream about it and one can remain excited but soon the excitement disappears and the reality, that both are lonely, cannot be avoided. And when two lonelinesses meet there cannot be any joy. Even one loneliness is enough to create hell. Two lonelinesses are not only two, they multiply each other. Hence Jean Paul Sartre's statement has significance; he says,

"The other is hell." That is the experience of all lovers because all love fails. So in a way he is right that the other brings hell. But in a way he is wrong.

The other does not bring hell, the other only becomes a mirror in which you can see your hell. You bring hell, the other brings hell. You become a mirror for the other, the other becomes a mirror for you; you start reflecting each other -- and both are lonely and both are wounds and both are bored with themselves. How can it blossom into a beautiful relationship? It is impossible.

But if two meditator, are in love then there is great joy because both have known a positive aloneness.

Both are capable of enjoying their aloneness; there is no need for the other. In fact now they relate because they have to share, they have so much to share. It is not out of need but out of abundance, overflowing joy.

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it possible to enjoy yourself and to enjoy the other.

But the first lesson has to be learned within oneself. In fact a person who can enjoy his aloneness can enjoy anything. You cannot throw a man like Buddha or Krishna or Jesus into hell. Even if you throw them into hell they will enjoy it, they will find ways to; they will transform hell into heaven. And your so-called saints who all look sad, empty, full, stupid -- if they reach heaven, heaven is going to become hell. It depends on the person.

The blissful person creates his own space; he creates something around himself. It is a natural phenomenon, he moves with an energy field. Hence the ancients used to say that wherever a real meditator sits the place becomes sacred, wherever he moves he moves with his energy field.

It is said about Buddha that even when he moved in a forest when it was not the season for the trees to blossom, suddenly the trees would start blossoming, there would be flowers. Even though it was fall and leaves were falling, suddenly new leaves will sprout. It is symbolic. Of course when a Buddha is sitting under a tree the tree has to respond to the energy that Buddha is.

I don't think it is factual, it cannot be factual because even men are not so responsive -- how can you expect trees and rocks and rivers to be so responsive? But it is a beautiful parable.

Those who can see, those who can feel, those who can understand, will be immediately transformed by the person who is blissful. Suddenly his bliss will start penetrating you, reaching you, transforming you.

That is his love. He gives because he has so much to give. He is like a rain cloud, so full that he has to shower. But then love is totally different, it has a beauty. It is no more needy, no more greedy. It does not want anything from the other, all that it wants is that the other should be able to receive, that the other should be open.

And that's exactly the meaning of disciplehood: to be open to the master so that you can receive his love, so that you can receive his abundance, so that he can shower all that he has upon you.

(Osho proceeded to talk about the different levels of awareness the meditator needs to experience.) Man ordinarily exists in a state of sleep. He is not alert, he is not aware of what he is doing; he is not even aware of who he is. He is not conscious of from where he has come and to where he is going. He is an utterly deep, deep slumber.

Meditation is just the opposite of this somnambulistic state. It is bringing in consciousness. It is becoming alert of three things: first, the body and its activities -- because that is the grossest thing and it is easier to become aware of it -- second, the mind -- the thoughts, the desires, the memories -- and third, feelings -- the sentiments, the emotions... which are the subtlest.

If one becomes aware of these three layers then suddenly the fourth happens of its own accord. You do these three and the fourth simply happens; you have earned it, you deserve the fourth. The fourth means awareness of awareness, it means awareness of your being. And that is the greatest experience in life.

And this is the gracious gift of god -- the fourth state of awareness. George Gurdjieff used to call his way the fourth way. His disciple, P.D. Ouspensky, has written a beautiful treatise; he gave it the name THE

FOURTH WAY. But it has been a known secret for thousands of years in the East. We call the ultimate state of meditation, turiya. Turiya means the fourth, simply the fourth. We don't give it a name but a number.

Begin with the body, go to the mind, then to the heart and suddenly you have come to your centre, to your very being. And in coming to your very being you transcend all misery, all darkness, all death. You transcend both time and space.

This is the experience of god. The fourth is nothing but pure godliness.

(Either through meditation or mentation -- those are the only alternative ways to live. Or to put it another way, one can either live blissfully or miserably, Osho told us.) Mind is a misery-creating machine, it manufactures misery. So if you are finished with one misery it manufactures another. By the time you are finished with the other, many more are coming.

The mind cannot create anything other than misery. There is a reason in it. Because mind can only exist with misery it has to depend on misery. The moment misery disappears you don't need the mind at all.

I have heard about a manager of a very big office. He had never taken a single day off, he had never gone on any holiday. Somebody asked him, "Why don't you ever go for a holiday? Go to the Himalayas or to some summer resort." He said, "I cannot do it for the simple reason that I don't want to let the directors know that I am absolutely useless. If I go for fifteen days they will all come to know that I am not needed at 1/08/07

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all -- everything will go on without me. I am simply sitting here doing nothing. I am simply useless, this post is not needed at all. So it is not possible for me to go for a holiday because that will expose the whole thing, that this post is absolutely necessary. So I have to cling to it.

The mind knows perfectly well that if there is misery it will be needed, you have to depend on it to find a way out. It goes on creating new miseries so you need its help.

Once you know through meditation that mind can be totally put aside and you can exist in a tremendously beautiful space without the mind, and there are no problems to be solved because when there is no mind there are no problems ... once you have experienced this you will never again enter the world of the mind The mind will be just worthless, it will lose all its power. Right now it is the master; then it will be only an ordinary memory mechanism. If some memory is needed you can use the mind, otherwise you can turn it off.

Nobody wants to lose their job, and that is why mind goes on creating new miseries. There are many professions like this. For example, the physician, the doctor: on the one hand he tries to help people to get rid of diseases; on the other hand he goes on discovering new diseases -- he has to. Even if a very healthy person goes to the doctor the doctor is bound to find something wrong.

One woman was telling another, "My son's practice is going so well that now he has even started telling people, 'You don't have any disease -- go home!'" Otherwise he can always find something. Hence it is always good to go to the doctor whose practice is good, who can afford to lose a patient, otherwise he will find something -- it is his business. So his business is in a way suicidal.

If one day physicians succeed in destroying all illnesses in the world they will have to commit suicide, they will not be able to exist any more; their need is finished. So they are not going to do that. That's why there are strange things....

For two thousand years medical science has been working and working and working but diseases are not finished; if one disease is finished they immediately discover two more. In fact there are many more new diseases. If some two-thousand-year-old person could be found, he would not recognise what cancer is; he would never have heard of it in his lifetime.

If you could bring out somebody alive from his grave he would not be able to recognise many diseases

-- they never existed before. In the old medical treatises there is not even a mention. The physician has to go on discovering -- that's the only way for him to exist.

And that's how mind is it is its work, its business, its investment, to go on creating misery, to invent it even if it is not there.

A sannyasin has to be aware of this fact. Once you know it, it is not very difficult to slip out of the mind.

And meditation is just slipping out of the mind, and by a very simple technique. Just by being a witness to the mind one slips out of it. Just by being a witness, just watching it doing nothing and one slips out, because the watcher automatically becomes separate from the watched.

You are already out -- the moment you watch your mind, you are watching the anger in your mind, you are no more angry. You will be surprised: the anger is there but it is only on the screen of the mind, just like a TV screen. It is something there but you are the watcher, you are not it. A certain desire is there, a certain thought is moving, but you are the watcher -- you cannot be it.

The moment this is realised bliss arises. It is only out of meditation that one feels blessed. Then life is a festival, a continuous celebration.

(Just because they can't be proved, that doesn't mean there aren't such things as inner experiences, Osho said in his last address. And he illustrated the point with a hilarious anecdote from his schooldays.) God cannot be proved by any argumentation.

Philosophers have tried but they have all failed. Theologians have been working on it, on how to find proofs for god, but all their proofs are simply stupid; they don't prove anything at all. There is always a flaw underneath and any person of a little intelligence can see it.

For example they say, their most important argument -- Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, all -- is that the world needs a creator because there cannot be anything uncreated.

On the superficial level it seems logical. If you go into a desert and suddenly you find a wristwatch, you cannot believe that this can happen just by chance. Out of millions of years, just through a coincidence, a beautiful wristwatch, a Rolex (laughter) ... and even Swiss-made.... And if even a small thing like a wrist-watch cannot happen then how can this whole universe, this vast universe and this immense harmony, happen just through coincidence?

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So the logic that there must be a creator seems to be appealing. But it is very superficial because then the question arises: who created the creator? The theologian has only one answer, that the creator is not created; he has always been here, he is uncreated. But then his whole argument falls down flat, because in the beginning he said there can be nothing which is uncreated. Now he accepts god as uncreated.

If the world cannot be uncreated how can god, which is a higher phenomenon, be uncreated? A wrist-watch cannot be uncreated, the universe cannot be uncreated, then how can god be uncreated? There must be a higher god who has created him. And then it is absolutely absurd; you go on from one god to another and you fall into an infinite regress.

All logic, all arguments, all proofs for god are like this; they can be refuted very easily. The only way to prove that godliness exists is not through logic, not through mind, but through no-mind. It is not through philosophy, not through intellectual gymnastics, but through a silent state -- utterly silent, absolutely silent where no thought moves, where the lake of your consciousness is so calm and quiet that there is not even a ripple on it, that the moon and the stars can be reflected in it as if it is a mirror.

Meditation creates a mirror of your consciousness and then you can see that which is. In fact god is an ancient code word. The original meaning of the code has been completely lost. G stands for that, O stands for which, D stands for is: that which is. That is the meaning of god; it is a code word, it has no meaning in itself. It was simply used by mystics as a code. When they said god they meant that which is.

Now, to know that which is there is only one way, and that is to become a mirror. Meditation makes a mirror out of you and then the whole -- the stars and the moon and the trees and the birds and the clouds and everything -- is reflected. You suddenly know, It is real knowing. It is not knowledge attained through scriptures, accumulated through others, it is not borrowed; it is yours. It is self-evident. One need not have any proof for it any more.

When you have a headache do you need proof?

One of my teachers in my high school days was very strict. He was a Mohammedan teacher -- a very good man but very strict. On the first day of every year when his class started, the first thing that he would say was, "Remember: two things, headache and stomach-ache, I don't believe in at all. So never say 'I have a headache and I want to go home', or anything. You will have to prove it."

He did the same when I came into his class. On the first day he said "Remember two things. I can believe in your fever because I can feel that you have fever, I can believe that you have broken your leg, so you can go home. But I don't believe in two things: headache and stomach-ache."

So I told him "Okay." He said "What do you mean?" I said "I will prove it." Every day in the early morning he used to go for a walk, and I knew where he would go so I went up a tree and just threw a stone at him. It hit him on his head and he screamed and I came down.

I said "Can you prove that something is hurting inside your head? If you can prove it then I will never ask any leave for a headache or a stomach-ache. One thing I have proved is that you cannot prove it; you cannot show it; it is not something objective."

And I asked him "Do you want me to prove some day that stomach-ache.... (laughter)" He said "How are you going to prove that?" I said "I know I know your cook! I can manage to give you a stomach-ache."

He said "Don't tell this to anybody, but if you have a headache or a stomach-ache, still tell me that you have fever and I will let you go... because this headache business is difficult. Everybody starts saying..."

A headache needs no proof. You know it and only you know it; nobody else can ever know anything about it. Exactly like the inner experiences cannot be put on a table for exhibition, they cannot be made observable for others.

God, godliness, is an inner experience, an experience of your interiority, of your innermost centre. But that is the centre of the whole universe too. The moment you become a mirror, not only is the whole reflected in you, for the first time you become aware of who you are. You are part of this whole, of this organic unity. And that is the day one is born anew, one has a rebirth.

Jesus says, "Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of god." This is the birth he is talking about and his is the birth I am talking about. This is what sannyas is: a process of rebirth, a process of being born again.

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #5

Chapter title: None

5 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009055

ShortTitle: ICEBRG05

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.]

Meditation is the alchemy of dispelling all darkness. If one enters within without knowing meditation one will find only darkness. That's why people cannot believe Socrates, Jesus, Buddha -- because people's experience goes against the experience of all the awakened ones. Whenever they look within there is darkness, and all these people who have meditated deeply say, "All is light -- just go in."

This has been one of the basic problems for all seekers: if you go in without meditation you will find darkness. It is only through meditation that darkness is transformed into light; hence, before entering in one has to learn the whole art of how to be meditative, how to be silent, without thoughts, how just to be. That's what meditation is all about -- how just to be. Once you know that point where thinking disappears and everything comes to a full stop, then turn in and look and you are in for a great surprise: there is all light, infinite light.

That is the moment one comes to know that this is our source, and that we don't belong to the world of darkness, we belong to the world of light, that we belong to the world of stars, to the world that is beyond.

That we are not bodies and not minds, that we are divine. Birth is not birth, death is not death. We have been before, we will be afterwards; we are eternal.

All these experiences immediately become actual when the light is there. In darkness you cannot see yourself; only in the light can you see who you are, what your real constituents are, and what immensity, what treasure, is hidden within you. Every man, every being, is a child of light because we all come from the same source. We are rays of the same sun and we go back to the same source.

Society starts perverting the child, society starts distracting him from his nature. society starts creating barriers for him so his blissfulness becomes blocked. Society goes on putting rocks around him because it is very much afraid of blissful people. Blissful people are the most dangerous people in the world -- they are pure fire. And society wants robots, machines.

It is not just an accident that science is continuously improving machines and substituting man with machines. Man is continuously becoming useless because machines can function more efficiently, and if man has to compete with machines he has to forget all blissfulness, all intelligence, all love, all that makes him a man. He has to forget about it, only then can he compete with machines; he has to function like a robot. And that's what our schools, colleges and universities are for, to destroy your humanity and to create an efficient mechanism.

That's why great effort is needed to be that which you already are because you have to remove all the rocks put in the way by the society. And they are heavy rocks; if one is not industrious one cannot succeed in knowing bliss. And to fail in knowing bliss is to miss the whole opportunity of life. Then one exists in 1/08/07

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vain, there is no point.

So let this become the beginning of a great journey. You will have to put all your energy into it. Once you decide to put all your energy into it, it is not difficult. Those rocks can be destroyed because they are unnatural and your nature is just hidden beneath them. If you start removing rocks, springs of joy start flowing, you will have a second childhood -- and that is the beginning of true religiousness, the second childhood.

So you have undone all that the society has done to you, you are free from all that bondage, you are a man again. You are again on the right track you are again moving naturally, spontaneously, alert, watchful.

You are no more mechanical, now you are awareness. And with awareness all the doors of all the mysteries open. You become a welcome guest into the house of god.

[As the photographer from Switzerland sat back to listen to Osho's address he removed his glasses and placed them on the floor beside him. Nothing goes unobserved... ) Man lives in lies. He believes they are the only truth. And once you believe in a certain lie you make it a truth. But it is an invented truth, and it cannot liberate you and it cannot help you to know god -- because truth is another name for god.

People are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans -- these are all borrowed ideas, and truth cannot be borrowed. The only thing in life which cannot be borrowed is truth. It is so delicate, it is so subtle, that the moment it is given from one person to another it dies in the communication. It never reaches the other, what reaches us a lie.

Truth is an experience, The man who has known can speak about it, and the man who has not known can remember those words but those words will be empty words for the man who has not known. How can they be full of meaning? -- meaning comes from experience. So for people, "good", "love", "truth",

"freedom" are all beautiful words; they use them and they believe that they know what they are saying.

They know nothing. Only very few people have known; millions only believe and believing is not knowing.

Knowing is totally different from believing.

In fact, the first step towards knowing is dropping of all beliefs. Unless you become unconditioned you cannot know what actually is, because your belief will cover your eyes, it will colour everything.

The Christian looks in a Christian way and the Hindu in a Hindu way. And the truth is neither Christian nor Hindu, the truth is simply truth, Both have coloured glasses.

Just as you have nut down your glasses, in exactly the same way all beliefs have to be put down. Then you face the truth as it is. And to know truth is to know god, there is no other god.

(The master only gives you hints about how to be blissful -- not because he wants to keep you guessing but because it's a delicate business, the job of directing disciples, Osho confided.) The master cannot give you a detailed map of the territory because no map exists. And no map can ever be made for the simple reason that every individual is so unique that if a map is prepared then the map will be applicable only to the person who made it. If Buddha makes a map it is true as far as he is concerned, if I make a map it is true as far as I am concerned. But the trouble arises when people start imitating and going according to the map.

My map will become a distraction for you from yourself -- you will start imitating. So seeing the uniqueness of every individual, the real master never gives a map. The real master always respects the uniqueness, the individuality, of every individual. Hence we can only give you a few hints. You have to understand those hints and go on the journey without any map.

That's why only very few courageous people ever try to enter the territory of bliss, of truth, of love --

because you have to go without any map. And the mind is very much afraid to go into something unknown, to go beyond the boundary to take the jump into the unknown.

And whatsoever I am saying here can only be taken as hints. They are helpful, but one is not to cling to them because you are not made for the clothes, clothes are made for you. You are not made for principles, principles are made for you. But Christianity has a detailed map; it tries to cut every person to the size and shape of Jesus.

Now, if you are a little taller than Jesus you will be in trouble; Christianity will cut you down, either from the feet or from the head. If you are a little fatter than Jesus you are in trouble; you will have to go on a diet, a fast. And nobody is exactly like Jesus. Hence nobody needs to be a Christian or a Hindu or a 1/08/07

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Mohammedan, everybody needs to be just himself.

My sannyasins are not my followers but just my lovers, my friends. I am not here to give you detailed guidance, but just a few hints here and there, a few touches here and there. And then I leave you alone to make your own map, to cut your clothes according to your size and shape and to move into that unknown territory within yourself which is never repeated. It is yours and only yours.

So remember: the greatest calamity that can happen to a person is that he starts imitating somebody.

Respect Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Lao Tzu and Zarathustra -- and there have been many other people of tremendous insight. Respect them, listen to their music, try to understand their hints, but never be an imitator, never be a follower. Just be yourself.

(Then Osho talked about another aspect of how we loss track of our real nature -- by trying to impose character on ourselves instead of allowing our consciousness to flower.) If one follows the first route, creating a character, one goes pseudo, one becomes false, and split also.

One becomes two persons because the very method of creating a character is that of repression -- there is no other method. You have to repress your nature and you have to act according to certain principles decided by others. They tell you that is right and that is wrong, what is good and what is bad. They have already given you ten commandments and you have to follow them, Now what will you do with your nature?

The only thing possible is that you repress your nature you neglect it, ignore it. But nature cannot be changed in this way; it goes on nagging you from within and It goes on forcing you to go against the character that you have cultivated; hence all the hypocrisy. It is very rare to find a religious person who is not a hypocrite. And a person is really religious only when be is not a hypocrite.

Hypocrisy means you pretend to be something which you are not. You know it, it hurts, hence it creates sadness. The whole world is full of sadness because the whole world has been directed to create character, morality.

My effort here is just the opposite. I am not interested in character at all, in morality st all. I sm not telling people to be immoral, I am telling people to be conscious, to create consciousness.

And that is what meditation is meant for. It is a method to create consciousness. It makes you more alert, more aware, and as you become more aware your life starts changing. But now you are not trying to change; it changes because of your awareness. Now you can see more clearly; your clarity makes you go towards the right. Not that you have to go towards the right according to Moses or Manu or somebody else; you simply have to be clear and your clarity determines everything. It becomes the only source of decision, Now decisions are not coming from the outside, you are living your own insight. Your life will not be divided, vou will not be a hypocrite. You will be one thing and you will do the same thing, Your doing and your being will have a deep harmony, and when doing and being are harmonious life is a joy, it is a dance.

Good has to come out of consciousness, not out of cultivation or character. Real morality is born out of ccnsciousness. So that has to be the focus, everything else is non-essential. The essential thing is awareness.

(Osho spoke next to Prem Puneet, a town-planner who hailed from Holland.) Love brings a purity, not vice versa. It has been said again and again by the priests in the past that if you are pure then your life will have the fragrance of love. That is wrong. If one waits for it, it is never going to happen, because how will you be pure?

Love is nothing but a process of purification. When you love you become aware of jealousy; if you don't love you will never even become aware of jealousy. That's why the so-called saints decide not to love --

because that keeps their jealousy fast asleep. It is there, dormant, and because it is dormant they are not aware of it and nobody else is aware of it. But one is not free of it. It is there, like a seed waiting for its time, and any moment it can sprout; any situation and it can start growing. The potential is there, Love makes you aware of jealousy, of possessiveness, of domination, of ego and a thousand other trips, One can simply drop love and all those things will disappear, but only from your consciousness. They will become part of your unconscious, they will go underground. But you are not free of them.

The saints have been very much afraid of love for the simple reason that it makes you aware of things which you don't want to be aware of,

My effort here is to help you to be more loving because love brings all kinds of things to the surface. It is a revelation. Of course there is great pain in it because to know that you are jealous is to know that you are ugly; to know that you are possessive is to know that you are not what you should be; to know that you are always trying in some way or other to dominate is not a good feeling, It hurts to see all this madness in 1/08/07

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oneself.

The saints, the so-called saints, have chosen a cheap way: just drop love and all things will disappear from your vision.

My effort is for you to go deeper into love so you can bring all these things totally to the surface, so that you can even know their very roots -- not only the leaves and the branches but the roots. And the day you come to know their roots you can throw them out.

Love is a process of purification, but a painful process. All growth is painful, hence people have decided not to grow, it is too painful. But then you miss the whole opportunity. Then one remains retarded --

psychologically, spiritually, very retarded. You can see the whole humanity living in a retarded way.

Nobody is really grown-up because people have avoided the pain that is inevitable in growth.

So one has to accept the pain very understandingly. No need to make a fuss about it, no need to magnify it; one just has to accept it, the way you accept surgery, the way you accept an operation. You know that there is going to be a little pain but that has to be accepted. You understandingly accept it.

If one can accept the pain then one can soon go beyond it. The deeper your acceptance of it, the quicker you go beyond it. A man of real intelligence can even go beyond it in a single moment. But in that single moment he will have to suffer hell because the whole of the pain will explode with such intensity that you will feel you are in hell. But if you can accept it, not in a reluctant way, not in any resistant way, if you allow it because it is natural, it has to be so; nothing can be done about it; if you can accept it in a relaxed way you will go beyond it, you will transcend it. And then you are purified, purified of all poisons. Use love as a process of purification.

Love is the beginning and love is the end, or course in the middle there is pain, but it is worth it. Once you have come to purification you will know what you have attained is millions of times more valuable than all the pain that you have gone through, That pain seems so tiny. But it is later on only. When you are passing through the pain it looks very big because you have nothing else to compare it with.

When the explosion of bliss happens then you know that the pain was nothing, it was just a nightmare.

But passing through a nightmare, although it is only a dream, is painful. When you wake up you know, you laugh at it -- but that happens only later on.

The first thing that Bodhidharma did when he became enlightened was to laugh. It is said that tor seven days he was laughing and laughing. His friends, other meditators, started enquiring, "Have you gone mad or something?" He said, "I was mad, now I am sane. And I am laughing because it looked so big. But I was making a mountain out of a molehill; it was nothing, Now that I have gained is so much that that price was almost nothing. Just for a song I have attained the ultimate."

Hence the presence of a Master is helpful, In those moments of pain and anguish and anxiety you can always look up to him, you can always see that there is a future because he represents your future. He is what you will be one day. In seeing him trust arises, in loving him one passes through the pain more comfortably, more easily.

Yes, if the trust is total one can pass through the pain almost painlessly. So it all depends on how much trust is there, how much surrender is there Sannyas is surrender, sannyas is trust, sannyas is a deep let-go!

(An apt name for a child psychologist, Anand Daya means bliss and compassion, Osho explained to the Dutch woman before him.)

Anand Daya means bliss and compassion.

Bliss happens inside, compassion is its outer expression. Bliss happens at your very center and compassion is its circumference. A man of bliss is inevitably a man of deep compassion and love.

If there is no compassion that means bliss has not happened, that that man is dreaming about it, he is hallucinating, he is in an illusion. Compassion is the proof that something real has happened.

Because of this fact, that compassion proves that bliss has happened, many people have tried to be compassionate. So they have tried the other way round because that seems easier. You can be very compassionate towards the poor and the sick and the old and the miserable. That's what all the Christian missionaries are doing. They are trying to be compassionate, but their compassion is superficial, very superficial and shallow. Bliss has not happened.

Remember, if bliss happens compassion is bound to follow. You can create a compassionate character around yourself but bliss is not bound to follow because the center transforms the circumference, not vice versa. The circumference cannot transform the center.

The roots change the leaves but the leaves cannot change the roots. If the roots are healthy the leaves are 1/08/07

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healthy, but you cannot make the leaves healthy. You can paint them, you can make them as green as you want, you can paint them, but those leaves are dying. Your paint will kill them sooner than they would have died on their own. It will quicken their death, it will speed up their death; they will become dead sooner.

And that's what has happened to your saints; they are trying to paint the leaves, they are trying to paint the flowers.

It is not only with ordinary people, not only with women; the saints are the same. Women are trying to paint their cheeks red and their lips with lipstick and everything. I don't know who they are befooling!

Lipstick looks so ugly that only a stupid woman can do it. But stupidity is very prevalent. Now they are trying to deceive people that they have such healthy lips. If your lips are healthy it is perfectly good, but by painting them you are really destroying them. You are not allowing them the sun and the air because they are covered by some ugly paint.

But the same is the case with your so-called saints -- it is the same humanity and the same logic. They are painted people, their compassion is just something painted.

My sannyasins have to remember it. I don't teach compassion because it has deceived many people. I teach bliss. Forget all about others, the first thing has to happen within you. And the moment it happens you will be able to share with others. That is going to happen naturally; there is no need to worry about it. It is an absolute inevitability, it is a by-product!

(Then Osho wound up the evening by talking about the beauty meditation creates in and around the meditator.)

Meditation does two things to you: one: it makes you aware of the beauty that exists all around, it makes you sensitive to it; and the second thing: it makes you beautiful, it gives you a certain grace. Your eyes become full of beauty because the whole existence is beautiful. We just have to drink out of it, we just have to allow the beauty to enter us. Through our eyes, through our ears, through all our senses; the beauty has to be allowed to enter us. It gives tremendous nourishment to the soul.

Ordinarily a person is not aware of the beauty that surrounds existence. He is more aware of all that is ugly because the mind always goes on finding the negative. It counts the thorns, it misses the roses. It counts the wounds, it misses the blessings. That's the way of the mind.

Mind basically is negative, its whole approach is negative. It thinks only of dark things. From the past it goes on collecting dark things and about the future it goes on projecting dark things. It lives surrounded by a dark world of its own creation. And of course then life seems to be a great hell, The moment you move into meditation, the moment you become a little more silent, a little more calm and quiet, more relaxed, more resting in your being, you suddenly become aware of the beauty of the trees, of the beauty of the clouds, the beauty of people, of everything that is there.

Everything is beautiful because it is all full of god; even rocks are overflowing with godliness. Nothing is empty Or god. And once you start experiencing all these beautiful dimensions the ultimate result is that you are so nourished by your beautiful experiences -- by music, by poetry, by dance, by celebration, by love that you become beautiful. A natural outcome is that a great grace arises in your being. It starts radiating.

Everybody can see it, unless one is determined not to; that is another matter. If one wants to see it, it is there. That's why we have surrounded all the pictures of Jesus and Buddha and Zarathustra with light: a grace surrounds them. But people who are determined to remain with closed eyes, of course, they cannot see it.

To be a disciple means now you will be seeing your Master with open eyes, you will no longer be blind towards the Master, that you will put your mind aside, that you will look without the mind, without the interference of the mind, without any interpretation, that you will look directly.

With the master one relates heart to heart, not mind to mind. And then one can see the beauty that has happened. And if it can happen to one person it can happen to everybody. It is everybody's birthright.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

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Chapter #6

Chapter title: None

6 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009065

ShortTitle: ICEBRG06

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.]

(It was to a social worker from Holland that Osho spoke about man's relationship to existence. We are loved by existence but its ways of expressing that love are not understood by us, he began.) We are not open, that's why we go on missing. And one always feels that something is missing. This is what is missing: existence goes on pouring love over us but we remain closed.

And that love that comes from the whole is our most essential nourishment, so the soul remains starved.

That's what is missing. The soul is starving, it misses significance, it misses meaning.

There is a feeling that existence is totally indifferent to us -- it is not so, This is a stupid idea that has come into the mind of man because of scientific progress, science has given many blessings to man but certain curses have also come in the wake of it.

It has made man's body more healthy, more nourished, but it has made man's soul very undernourished, almost starving, It has given much but it has also taken much; and what it has given is superficial, non-essential, and what it has taken away is the essential. So science goes on giving us a more comfortable life but at the same time a tremendous feeling of meaninglessness.

Any intelligent person starts feeling that to exist is pointless. And the reason is not that to exist is pointless, the reason is that we are not able... we have completely forgotten the language to relate with existence.

Sannyas is the learning of the forgotten language so that one can again feel the joy of being, so that one can feel that we are significant to existence, that we are needed by the whole, that we are not just accidental, that we are favoured sons. That is why Jesus goes on emphasing that "I am the son of god." But Christians misunderstood him. They thought only he was the son of god. He is simply telling you that wherever there is the feeling of "I am" the sentence is not complete unless you make it "I am the favoured son of god, I am the only begotten son of god." Unless that experience happens to you, just "I am" is not enough. The sentence has to be completed.

He is not only saying something about himself, he is saying something about every I. His I does not represent ego, his I simply represents the feeling of authentic being, in everybody, But Christians got mixed up. They thought he and nobody else was the begotten son of god.

My teaching here is to make everybody feel as if they are the only begotten son of god. Nobody is lower, nobody is higher -- everybody is immensely significant.

(The meaning of the name Antar Rainer is what the search called meditation is for: the inner voice, Osho explained.)

We unnecessarily go on seeking advice from the outside when god is really to speak to us from the innermost core of our being. He is already there but we never listen to that still, small voice. In fact, we cannot listen because we are living in such a noisy head, there is so much chattering going on. That still small voice cannot penetrate unless you make your mind absolutely silent.

In many universities in America they have made a few experiments with total silence. Of course their experiments are concerned with outer noise. It happened to a musician that he went into a chamber which 1/08/07

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was absolutely soundproof, no noise penetrated from the outside. He entered the chamber and he was surprised, because he was told there was absolute silence -- and he was a trained musician, he was not deaf, he had an ear for sound... He was very much puzzled; he started hearing two sounds. He rushed out and told the director, "What is the matter? I hear two sounds."

The director laughed; he said, "Yes, those two sounds will be there. One is of your heart functioning and the other is of the blood circulating. Those we cannot stop because they go with you." The musician said, "I have never heard them before!"

Nobody ever hears them, hut if you so into an absolutely silent chamber, one hundred percent soundproof, when you will suddenly hear your heart beating loudly -- you cannot imagine that the heart beats so loudly, it is as if the sound is almost coming from the outside -- and your blood circulating. Blood circulates with very great speed, it is s constant flow. He drew a squiggly line. It is riverlike; it has its own sound.

The same happens when your inner mind is completely silenced be meditative awareness. Then you hear the innermost advice and you will be able to hear it in every situation That is the finding of the inner guide.

The function of the master is to help you to find your inner master. The outer master is only a mirror so that you can slowly move inwards and find your own master. The real Master's work is to gradually become useless to the disciple. Slowly slowly, gradually, the master starts receding. As your inner voice starts working he starts pulling his hands back. There is no need for him, he has done his work. That is his work, to make your inner voice heard by you, then you know the source of all wisdom. Then in every situation you will be able to immediately listen to the inner heart -- and it is always right, it never goes wrong.

The whole purpose of meditation is just to find the inner guide. Once you have found the inner guide meditation also is no more needed; then nothing is needed, You have got your eyes open, now you can live your life with total spontaneity. You need not depend on the memory system at all, now your answers will be real responses. Your actions will be real responses, not reactions.

Reactions come from the mind, responses come from the innermost core -- and there is a vast differences, an immense distance between the two. A reaction is borrowed, hence you are not your own self; the response is yours, hence it fulfils, it helps you to go on growing, to go on moving higher and higher.

Finally, following the inner advice one comes to the point where one becomes absolutely harmonious with the whole, because when you go right always you become harmonious with the whole. That's exactly the meaning of right and wrong.

Wrong means going astray from the whole, becoming discordant with the whole, and right means falling into harmony with the whole. And the whole has a direct connection with your being.

That's the meaning of your name. You have to discover it, then it will become a truth to you.

(Osho talked again tonight about meditation being the means by which we discover that our nature is light. Once we know that, we know we are immortal and there is no need to keep returning to live out another life.)

One moves into the vastness of existence and becomes part of it. That is what is called meeting with god. Just as a river goes into the ocean, the meditator enters the vastness of existence and becomes one with it. The twoness disappears -- that is the experience of immortality. Then one is, but not separate from the whole; one is part of the whole, an intrinsic, organic part of the whole. Those who have attained this, they are the awakened ones.

Because of the experience of light the awakened person is called enlightened. He has come to experience the inner light -- and that is the greatest experience in life. Life is really an opportunity to experience light, to become enlightened.

(Then he talked of man's dual nature; he is composed of both light and darkness, Osho told Melania, an Italian woman.)

Man consists of both. The body consists of darkness and the soul consists of light, and where this darkness and light meet that is the territory of the mind. So mind has both a little bit of light and a little bit of darkness; hence mind always remains in tension, because it is being pulled in two opposite directions.

The body pulls it towards itself, the soul pulls it towards self, And both are almost equal magnetic forces so the mind remains hanging, in between. Sometimes it chooses the body, sometimes it chooses the soul.

But whatsoever it chooses there is always the feeling that it is wrong because the other has been left. There 1/08/07

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is a feeling that something is missing.

Mind continuously lives in choice. And every choice is going to be only half and the other half will take revenge, hence mind is anxiety, anguish. The whole effort here is to help you to no beyond mind.

The mind cannot become part either of the body or of the soul. One has to get out of the mind to be free of the tension. Unless one transcends mind, goes beyond it, one cannot feel peace, There is no such thing as peace of mind. People talk about peace of mind -- that is nonsense. Mind means no peace, no-mind means peace. So the right expression will be "peace of no-mind" -- then you are centred in your real being.

So I am giving you a name which represents both. Up to now you have been Melania, darkness; now you have to be light. It is a quantum leap, a jump. It is possible, although difficult -- but that difficulty is beautiful, it is a challenge. It makes life more exciting, it makes growth an adventure.

Love, bliss, awareness -- these are things that come from the beyond. No money can purchase them, no power can purchase them, they are not commodities.

And these are the only things worth having, so those who live only with purchasable things are simply wasting their lives. Life takes on a new colour and new flavour and new beauty the moment you start seeking the priceless. And the most important of all the priceless values is meditation, because once you enter into meditation all other values follow of their own accord.

A meditative person is bound to be blissful, is bound to be loving, is bound to be free, so he has freedom, he has love, he has bliss. In fact all the treasures of life become available to him, Meditation functions as a master key -- so put your whole energy into meditation.

(By prefixing her name, Maria, with Atit (transcending) she had the whole meaning of sannyas in a nutshell, Osho told the next sannyasin.)

Maria is a very paradoxical word, hence very significant. All paradoxes are significant because they come very close to the truth. Truth contains its opposite.

Maria has three meanings. The first meaning is bitterness -- that is where we all are. The second meaning is rebellion -- we have to rebel against bitterness, we have to drop bitterness. That is the meaning of Atit Maria: to go beyond bitterness. The very going is rebellion. And the third meaning is fragrance.

When you have gone beyond bitterness, when you have passed through the mutation, that revolution, great fragrance is released.

We are bitter because we are not what we should be. Everybody is feeling sour because everybody is feeling this is not what life should be; if this is all then this is nothing. There must be something more to it, and unless that something more is found one cannot drop one's bitterness. Out of this bitterness comes anger, jealousy, violence, hatred -- all kinds of negativities. One is continuously complaining but the real complaint is somewhere else deep down. It is a complaint against existence, that "What am I doing here?

Why am I here? -- nothing is happening. Why am I forced to be alive, because nothing is happening." Time goes on passing and life remains without any bliss. It creates bitterness.

It is not accidental that old people become very bitter. It is very difficult to live with old people, even if they are your own parents. It is very difficult for the simple reason that their whole life has gone down the drain, they are feeling bitter. They jump upon everything to throw their negativity; they start catharting and freaking out over anything. They cannot tolerate children being happy, dancing, singing, shouting out of joy

-- they cannot tolerate it. It is a nuisance for them, because they have missed their life. And in fact when they are saying, "Don't be a nuisance to us," they are simply saying, "How dare you be so joyous!" They are against young people, and whatsoever the young people are doing, the old always think they are wrong.

In fact, they are simply feeling bitter about the whole thing called life. And they go on finding excuses.... It is very rare to find an old person who is not bitter, that means he has lived really beautifully, he is really grown-up. Then old people have tremendous beauty which no young man can ever have. He has a certain ripeness, maturity, he is seasoned. He has seen so much and lived so much that he is tremendously grateful to god.

But it is very hard to find that type of old man, because it means that man is a Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna. Only an awakened person can be non-bitter in old age -- because death is coming, life is gone, what is there for one to be happy about? One is simply angry.

You have heard about angry people, angry young men, but really no young man can ever be as angry as old people. Nobody talks about angry old men, but my own experience -- I have watched young people, old 1/08/07

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people -- is that nobody can be as angry as the old.

Bitterness is a state of ignorance. You have to go beyond it, you have to learn the awareness which becomes a bridge to take you beyond. And that very going is revolution. The moment you have really gone beyond all complaints, all no's, there arises a tremendous yes -- just yes, yes, yes -- there is great fragrance.

The same energy that was bitter becomes fragrance.

This is the whole process of sannyas. Your name contains the whole process of sannyas, from bitterness to fragrance.

(Her new name, Prabhati, means a morning song, Osho said and then he described the Indian custom of singing to welcome the new day.)

Prabhat is sung in praise of the morning sun. Prabhat means the morning, the dawn, when the sun is just about to rise. The East has become red but the sun has not yet come to the horizon.

In India we have songs for every hour -- different melodies, different songs. For the evening we have one kind of song which has some attunement with the evening; for the night we have different songs, different melodies; for midnight again a different melody.

To be in attunement with existence, Indian music is divided into hours. There are different songs for each twenty-four hours, because every hour existence takes a new birth. It is different -- morning is different.

In the morning birds are singing -- that is prabhati. In the night it is all silent; birds are asleep, trees are asleep, everybody is asleep -- so we have melodies which will help you to go into deep sleep. The prabhati will wake you up.

In the ancient days there was a routine in the ashrams, and that's what I'm thinking of having for the new commune. In the morning when the sun is just about to rise, there should be singing, dancing; just as birds and trees sway in the wind and everybody is agog, waiting for the sun to come on the horizon, and then suddenly the sun comes. It is a welcoming song. The most beautiful song is prabhati because it is the beginning of the day, the beginning of a new day, a new birth.

In the East we have thought that going to sleep every night is a small death. It is, because in sleep you completely forget who you are. If you die in your sleep you will never know when you died or whether you were ever alive. So sleep is a small death, a mini-death. And every morning is a mini-birth, a new birth, and you have to praise the lord -- he has given you another day! We are not worthy, we have wasted yesterday, all the yesterdays. But he is generous, he has given us another chance to try again, to live, to rejoice, to be total!

In the East the color orange is the color of the morning, of the dawn. That's why I have chosen it for my sannyasins. It has to be the dawn of a new humanity. My sannyasin has to prove that there is a new man on earth; that is the most essential thing needed today: the beginning of the new man. The old is finished and gone, the old is tired, exhausted, spent. We are just somehow carrying the old corpse. It needs to be burned, given a last farewell. We have to say goodbye to it so that we can welcome the new. The evening songs are goodbye -- saying goodbye to the sun. Maybe we will never see the sun again; so it is the last goodbye, every day we say a last goodbye. But in the morning there has to be a welcome song -- that is prabhati.

Meditation brings you to the beginning of a new birth, an inner birth; it is the beginning of dawn inside.

So the outer orange simply represents something of the inside. It is only through meditation that one can get out of sleep and can enter the day, because it is only through meditation that one can become awake. So put your energies into meditation, focus all your energies on meditation.

And the morning is never far away; it simply needs the heart to open a song of welcome, and it is there.

It is just waiting for you to sing your heart out. The moment you start dancing the sun cannot resist the temptation to come up on the horizon.

I feel sometimes that if one day all the birds decide not to sing, the sun will not rise. For what? If all the trees decide not to open their flowers saying, "Let the sun come first," the sun won't come. There has to be an inner connection; it cannot be a one-sided affair. It is not only that the sun rises and the flowers open and the birds sing -- no. Vice versa is also true: the flowers open, the birds sing and the sun rises. It has to be two-way.

Life is always interdependent; the poets have felt it. Tennyson said, "If I could understand a single flower, root and all, then I would understand the whole universe."

And he is right -- but this has been only a feeling in the poets. Mystics have seen it, experienced it, that this is so.

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(Anahato, his new name, means the inner music, Osho told the last sannyasin.) The inner music has a strange quality. The outer music needs an instrument, it needs a duality -- the musician and the instrument. The inner music does not need duality -- the musician is the music. The musician is the instrument, the musician is all. There is no division.

The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. No, one hand cannot clap. They are simply showing that inside it happens, the sound of one hand clapping. Two hands are needed to clap. That is the outside music, two hands clapping. It is easy for two hands to clap; there is a conflict, there is a struggle, there is a clash. But the inner music, anahato, means silence, the sound of silence.

Silence has its own music. It can be heard only by those who have dropped all noise from the head. It can be heard only by the heart, not by the head. The heady person goes on missing it. Only the person who is full of heart, full of love, can hear the music.

This is the music that helps you to go into the beyond. It becomes a rainbow bridge. You cannot grasp it with the mind, you cannot comprehend it with the mind. The mind has to be put aside, completely put aside, and then suddenly it is there.

That is the whole art of meditation, putting the mind slowly aside and getting to the inner music, becoming attuned to the inner world of oneness. You can call it the experience of god, tao, truth, dhamma, it is really nothing but the experience of the ultimate music. All names for it are good, they indicate some quality of it, but it is the hidden harmony of Heraclitus; that is the same thing.

To me, Heraclitus is not a philosopher but a mystic and one of the greatest mystics. The West has completely misunderstood him. He talks about the hidden harmony, it is hidden in everybody, and once you have known it inside you, you will be able to know it everywhere else.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #7

Chapter title: None

7 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009075

ShortTitle: ICEBRG07

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.]

Bliss is the shadow of creativity. You cannot find bliss unless you are creative; it is a by-product.

whenever one creates something, bliss automatically follows. Only the creators know what it is. The painter knows when he is lost in his painting. Those are the few moments of creativity when the window opens --

the window in your own being -- because when one is lost in creativity the ego disappears. In the moment the ego is not there, you are, and to be is to be blissful.

The dancer loses himself in the dance and suddenly all is bliss. It does not matter what one creates; one may be a potter, a poet, a physician, one may be a mathematician, a musician, a mystic. It does not matter what one creates, what matters is that one creates, because except through creativity one cannot know one's 1/08/07

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true being. And that very knowing is bliss, that very knowing is divine, that very knowing is the knowing of god. Bliss is another name for god.

We call god the creator; if we are also creative in our own way then we participate in god's being. That is bliss -- that participation, that meeting, that melting, that merger.

(Sannyas is a sort of spiritual striptease. This was the message to Anand Raphela.) Man as an ego is a wound -- he is sick, he is unhealthy. It continuously hurts; there is pain and anguish, there is misery, anxiety, darkness. One feels absolutely useless. But this whole phenomenon of the ego, this wound that hurts so much, we don't allow to be healed. We don't open it to the sun, to the rain, to the wind; we keep it hidden, we are afraid to expose it. We go on covering it, we hide it from everybody, we are afraid that somebody may know our wound. In fact because we hide it, it remains unhealed; because we keep it hidden behind layers and layers of hypocrisy it remains like a cancer -- continuously growing and becoming bigger and bigger. And the bigger it is, the more you have to hide it. You hide one side and then another side starts showing you still another side, and slowly slowly the whole of your life becomes just a black hole.

That's what people are, just black holes. And they are responsible for this whole thing; this hell is their own creation. Otherwise God is always ready to heal, the whole is always ready to heal. But we have to expose ourselves.

That's what sannyas is all about; it is total exposure. One has to stand naked, utterly naked before existence, with no secrets, with no privacy, and immediately the healing happens, the miracle happens.

When it happens for the first time one cannot believe that the whole wound has evaporated so quickly. It is as if it never existed in the first place, as if it were just a dream, a nightmare. In fact that's what it is -- a dream, a nightmare.

Sannyas means exposing yourself, whatsoever you are -- without feeling guilty, without feeling condemned, without feeling that you are wrong, without thinking of what others will say, without thinking of others. Sannyas means to be unselfconscious, to open up totally without any fear. And one is in for a great surprise: all misery, all anguish, is simply not found; one is healed. But this healing happens only through exposure to the whole -- and our religions, our moralities, all make us hypocrites. They are all against being nude, being in the open.

It is not only that we are hiding our physical nudity behind clothes, that is nothing -- we are hiding our reality also behind many many clothes. We want to appear beautiful and we hide ugliness; we want to appear knowledgeable and we hide ignorance. But remember, whatsoever you hide you will remain; you will remain that which you have hidden inside. You will never be that which you are pretending to be.

It is better to drop all hypocrisy. I don't teach renouncing the world, I teach renouncing hypocrisy. That is the only thing to be renounced, and everything else happens on its own. Be sincere, authentic, true.

Whatsoever you are, accept it, because without accepting it you will not expose yourself.

The healing is always done by God but you have to allow him; you have to show him your wound, where it hurts. You don't deceive the physician, you have to tell him the whole thing, whatsoever it is, howsoever ugly it appears. You have to show him your wounds; only then can he take the pus out, only then can he help the healing process.

Buddha said that he was not a philosopher but a physician. Nanak too said the same, that he was just a physician. And I see the truth of it: every master is a physician because every master only functions as a window to God. He is the ultimate physician.

To be a disciple means you will not be at all afraid of me, you will not at all hide in any way, gross or subtle, that you will be authentic and open. And then you have nothing to do as far as healing is concerned, it happens on its own. You can rely on God, on the whole. But one has to gather courage to expose one's total nakedness.

(God has given us so many gifts but they are hidden in the most obvious place and that's just where we don't look. Man is a curious creature, Osho commended.)

Man is s strange animal, a little berserk. He goes to the Himalayas, climbs Everest and goes to the moon Now he is trying to reach Mars, and he will go to the farthest stars but he will not look within. And there is the whole kingdom of god.

Love is there ready to explode. Bliss is there just waiting for you to come in and it is yours. Truth is there, your immortal being is there. Nothing has to be achieved -- it is already given, it is already part of 1/08/07

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you. Even if you want to lose it you cannot lose it, it is an intrinsic part of you, you cannot cut it yourself.

There is no way to lose it but there is a way to forget all about it. It will remain there and you will so on searching for it in the outside world, and because you never look in the direction it is, howsoever sincere your search is, it is going to fail.

Sannyas means the beginning of an inner journey, exploring your inner universe. And those who have gone within have found everything that is worth finding. Love is one of those gifts which are waiting inside.

As you turn in, suddenly spring comes and flowers start coming, love blossoms, truth is revealed, bliss explodes. Suddenly you know what Christ means when he says the kingdom of god is within you.

God is not like a flower but like a fragrance, not like a person but like a presence. You can feel it but you cannot touch it. You can enjoy it, rejoice in it, but you cannot possess it.

You can possess a flower, but you cannot possess the fragrance, you cannot hold the fragrance in your hand. But you can enjoy it, you can rejoice in it, you can feel it, you can dance with it.

And Doris (the second part of her name) means bountiful, abundant, overflowing. This, call it a quality called godliness, is abundant, it is infinite, it is overflowing. One can drink as much as one wants, it is inexhaustible. So there is no need to be miserly about bliss. Be as blissful as you can, don't put any limit on it; you cannot exhaust it.

Be as loving as you can, give as much love as you can. You cannot exhaust it; on the contrary, the more you give, the more you will become aware of the inexhaustible source because it will be coming and coming. And the river becomes bigger and bigger the more you share. The more you sing, the more new songs arise from the depths of your own being; the more you dance, the more dance comes in.

But people are living so miserly, so calculatively, so afraid that if they love somebody so much love is gone, that they withhold. The other is doing the same, and both are in tremendous need to be loved and in tremendous need to love. They are two aspects of the same coin, to love and to be loved. But both are holding, both are trying to bargain, both are trying to be as calculative and cunning as possible, both are business-like. The whole idea is to give less and take more so you are in profit. The other is also thinking the same way,

I have heard about a Jew: he was talking to a friend about the beauty of his wife. The friend said,

"Excuse me, but do you know that your wife has four lovers?" He said, "I am aware of it." The man said,

"Then I don't understand. You always go on bragging about her beauty..., She is not faithful to you, she has four other lovers, so what kind of love is this?"

He said, "You don't understand. It is better to have twenty percent interest in a good deal than to have one hundred percent interest in a rotten deal." Now this is the Jewish mind: twenty percent is far better than having one hundred percent in a rotten deal.

But everybody is a Jew. The whole world is full of Jews, Christian Jews, Mohammedan Jews, Hindu Jews. Jewishness is not confined to the Jews only, the Jew is very comprehensive -- it includes everybody, There are many religions but the real religion seems to be Judaic, Now all other religions are just branches because dig into anybody and you will find a Jew. Wherever you find a calculator the Jew is present.

This calculation works in the world because in the world everything is in scarcity. It is perfectly logical in the world to give less and get more, then only do you have some profit. It is valid economics as far as the world is concerned but it is absolutely invalid the moment you start moving towards the beyond -- this economics does not function. You need a meta-economics.

And that's what I teach, the meta-economics. There is a world beyond this world where to give more is profitable. The more you give, the more profit you have. It is a totally different arithmetic, It defies all rules of the ordinary arithmetics; it is a higher arithmetic.

That's why Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is not that he is saying that loving your enemies is great compassion and you are being a great saint -- that is all nonsense. He is simply talking about a higher mathematics. He is saying don't miss -- even if he is an enemy, don't be bothered, give, because the more you give, the more you will get. So why miss the opportunity? It does not matter to whom you are giving; just go on overflowing and your life will become vaster and vaster. The more you give, the more you are.

And when you can give totally without holding anything, you become whole.

And that is the moment when one experiences godliness, liberation, nirvana.

(Osho named the middle-aged German doctor Anand Praphulla, and then explained why.) Bliss is like a flower; the bud is there, it only needs to open its petals. And for that opening you have to 1/08/07

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drop all the barriers between you and the sun, between you and the moon, between you and the stars, between you an the whole, otherwise the flower cannot open If you hide the flower in a room where no sun reaches it, no wind reaches it, no rain reaches it, you may think that you are protecting it but you are killing it, you are committing a murder. It is with good intentions, of course, it is for the flower's own good, because outside there is wind and there is too much rain and too much sun and you want to protect the delicate bud. So that it can become a flower you hide it in your bedroom and you close all the doors and all the windows.... It will die.

It can only open when it is connected with the sun it can only open when it can dance in the wind, it can only open when it can enjoy the shower of rain, when it can have a dialogue with the stars, It belongs to the whole; it can only open up in a deep rootedness with the whole.

Man remains a bud, his blissfulness remains a bud for the simple reason that he is too concerned about security, concerned that he does not go into any danger, afraid of danger, insecurity, risk. So he keeps himself within a certain boundary and encloses himself in a protective wall. This is how he becomes a prisoner.

Life can be lived only as insecurity, life can be lived only as danger -- there is no other way. The other possibility is only death. These are the two alternatives. To be in a grave is very secure. Nothing will happen to you -- no accident, no disease, no death. Nothing can happen to the dead person he is completely safe. In fact insurance companies should only insure the dead. It is a risk to insure an alive person --

anything can happen. Any moment anything is possible. And the more alive a person is, the greater are the possibilities.

But in the name of security, we miss the whole opportunity of opening up. We miss immortality because we are afraid of death, If we accept the danger and go into it, in fact, rejoicing it, making it into an adventure, then life is bliss. And only these adventurous souls have known what god is.

It teach adventure, courage, risk. I teach aliveness.

The older religions have been teaching a kind of death to people. They are making them more afraid than they are already. People are already afraid and then the priest makes them more afraid of hell and all the tortures of hell. The priest exists because fear can be exploited. Once you are afraid you are in his hands; you can be exploited in every possible way.

I teach fearlessness, and freedom. Freedom from fear is the greatest quality needed to know god, needed to know bliss, needed to know truth.

So come into the open, into the sky. Drop all fears because all those fears are false. And enjoy the adventure of life with all its dangers, with all its insecurities. It is a beautiful life; in fact it is beautiful only because of those dangers and insecurities.

The plastic flower is not in danger, the real flower is in danger. But the plastic flower is not a flower at all. It is far more significant to be alive for only one day -- from the morning to the evening and then the petals wither away, but to live intensely and passionately for just one day, in the sun, under the sky, is enough, rather than being a plastic flower and living for thousands of years. That is not life at all, It is not a question of length, it is a question of intensity.

One should burn one's life torch from both ends simultaneously. Let it be a single moment but let it be totally alive. That will give you the taste of god and the taste of eternity.

(To the brewer from Japan, the Master divulges the secret ingredient of true religion -- meditation.) One needs nothing more than that. Everything else that goes on in the name of religion is just non-essential. Know, once and for all, that meditation contains the most essential part of religion. And if one can fulfill that one requirement nothing else is needed. Then everything else comes following it of its own accord.

And meditation means awareness. Awareness of the three layers, the physical, psychological and spiritual.

These three awarenesses make you capable of jumping into your own being. If you can manage these three things then the fourth happens of its own accord: suddenly one is just a witness, just awareness and nothing else. One knows that one is not the body, not the mind, not the heart.

These are three concentric circles around the center. Of course the heart is closer to being, so it is better to be in the heart than to be in the mind. The mind is closer than the body; it is better to be in the mind than in the body. But the ultimate goal is to be just your being -- no action, no thought, no feeling, just pure witnessing. And then the satori happens and one becomes full of light, full of truth. Then to live is a 1/08/07

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blessing. Before it, it is just a drag; after it, it is a dance.

(Really, meditation is a journey, Osho told Bhavan, from your head to your heart to your being.) Meditation is not-knowing, it is not like knowledge, It is far closer to feeling. It is not like logic, it is far more like love. So the first shift has to happen from the head to the heart. The heart is the bridge. And if you have reached the heart then it is just a question of one step more to your being. You are standing at the door of the temple; you can enter, there is nothing to hinder you. And nobody has stayed there for even a single moment; the moment one reaches the door of the temple, one runs, rushes in. This is the place one has been seeking and searching for, for millions of lives.

Meditation only takes you up to the door. But that is the greatest journey -- from the head to the heart, from logic to love, from knowing to feeling. Hence the poet is closer than the scientist, the dancer is closer than the politician, the lover is closer than the businessman. But it is only through meditation that the poet will become aware of that one step, otherwise one can stand at he door of the temple keeping the door behind one.

That's how the poet is standing: standing at the door of the temple but looking out. The mystic is also standing at the same door, but looking in. They are standing on the same spot; the thing that makes the difference is meditation. Meditation gives you a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn; you don't look outside, you look in. The poet looks outside, he is exactly on the same spot.

It is as if you are going up a staircase and somebody else is coming down. You meet on a step, you say hello to each other. You are on exactly the same step but one is going down, the other is going up.

The directions of the poet and the mystic are different. They are located in the same space, on the same step; the post and the mystic are exactly on the same step, standing at the same door. But he poet is looking outside and the mystic is looking inside -- and that makes the difference, the greatest difference.

The moment the mystic looks in, he rushes in. Then he cannot stop, nothing can stop him. The urge to rush in is irresistible. Meditation makes you capable of that ultimate step. So focus your whole effort, your whole being, on only one thing, keep one word continuously in your remembrance -- meditation -- and put your total energy into it so that it can become a reality to you.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #8

Chapter title: Mahaparanirvana day

8 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009085

ShortTitle: ICEBRG08

Audio:

No

Video:

No

There were no darshans this evening, celebrations in Buddha Hall instead for Mahaparanirvana Day.

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #9

Chapter title: None

9 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009095

ShortTitle: ICEBRG09

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.]

Meditation is a way of disappearing into the whole. It is just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean. It loses something: its boundary, its limitation, its bondage, its smallness. It gains immensely; it becomes unbounded, it becomes oceanic, it becomes the whole. So the loss is not really a loss, it is a gain.

Meditation means the loss of the ego -- that is one side of the coin. The other side is the gain of the whole.

Marina means the sea, the ocean, the oceanic. Meditation leads you towards the oceanic, from smallness to vastness, from the bounded body-mind structure to the unbounded consciousness, from the finite to the infinite, from time to eternity, from birth and death to eternal life. The only requirement is to drop the notion of the ego. And it is not difficult for the intelligent person to do. It is difficult only for the stupid -- but then for them everything is difficult.

The more intelligent one is, the more easily he can drop the idea, because he can see that it is an absolutely wrong notion, We cannot be separate, we cannot exist even for a single moment in separation. If the breath does not go in we are gone. We are continuously exchanging... Breathing means the bridge between us and the whole. The breath is something like roots in the whole: you pull the tree out of the earth and it starts dying, it loses its roots -- they were its nourishment. Stop breathing and one dies. Breathing is a subtle way of our being rooted in the whole.

The very word "breath" means life, because without the breath there is no life. That is the only indication whether a man is alive or not. If he is breathing he is alive, if he is not breathing he is dead. But because the breath is not visible we don't take any account of it, otherwise we are continuously taking something from god each moment.

We have to eat -- that comes from the whole. We have to drink. They are not as important as breathing but still they are very important. A person can live without food for three months at the most because if the body is healthy enough it accumulates enough fat inside. That is our energy reserved for some emergency.

A woman is more capable of accumulating fat than a man, because when she is pregnant she may not be able to eat much, hence nature has provided her with more facilities to accumulate fat so that in these nine months even if she eats very little she can survive.

A healthy person can survive for three months without food but then he has to die. Without water maybe one can survive for a few days, but without breathing, not even a few minutes. And these are all our connections with the whole. Even if we go on giving him every physical nourishment, a child cannot survive without love.

They have experimented: if a child is given food, air and everything, but nobody hugs the child, nobody loves the child, no warmth is shown towards the child, he starts shrinking. He starts feeling deep down in 1/08/07

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his guts that he is not needed; he starts dying. Without the love something is missing, something which does not seem to be at all visible.

The physical sciences cannot say what is missing because love cannot be measured, experimented with, but now psychologists are perfectly aware that without love the child dies. He loses hope, he starts getting in despair. And he is very delicate; he needs somebody to hug him and hold him, somebody to give him hope that life is worth living, that he is of some worth, that somebody cares, that somebody will miss him.

Then a longing to remain here arises, otherwise children die. Every physical need may be fulfilled, but something far more important, some psychological need, is not fulfilled.

So if we look into life we can be very easily aware that ego is a false idea. and the moment you drop the ego all barriers are dropped; you rush into the ocean, you become one with the ocean. That experience is the ultimate experience of ecstasy, of freedom. That is the goal of sannyas.

Philosophy will give you many hypotheses, ideas; they are beautiful ideas, but mere ideas. You will never arrive at any conclusion. Philosophy is inconclusive; one goes on and on thinking and one can go on endlessly thinking. But thinking has nothing to do with truth.

Truth is an experience, it is not speculation. Thinking is good as far as science is concerned, it can help.

Through thinking one can find ways to know about matter because matter is an outside thing. But truth is something within your very being. It is not objective, it is your very subjectivity. You cannot see it with the physical eyes, you cannot touch it with your physical hands and you cannot know it with your physical brain.

Science remains confined to the physical -- philosophy also. Science experiments, philosophy only speculates; it goes on making castles in the air. But no philosopher has ever arrived, has found truth, has become a realised person. It is a path that goes on and on but it leads nowhere.

Tolstoy continuously, repeatedly used to have a dream and he became very much tortured by the dream because it was there almost every night. It was a nightmare, but in a way very philosophical.

In his dream he would see a desert, an unending desert and two feet -- just two feet with shoes on; there was nobody above the feet. There were just two feet with shoes on going on and on, leaving footprints in the sand. They would go on and on and they would never reach anywhere because the desert was unending.

Tolstoy would always wake up tired, exhausted, perspiring. He became haunted by the dream, but he could not figure out what it meant. It was really a message from the deepest sources of his being that whatsoever he was doing was exactly like that dream. That's what he was doing; he remained a philosopher.

He has written beautiful novels, very philosophical, of great importance as literature, but of no importance as far as experience is concerned. He lived a very tortured life, continuously in anguish, many times contemplating committing suicide. Every philosopher sometimes contemplates committing suicide because whole effort goes on disappearing and nothing comes out of it; his being remains empty.

So one can go through thinking but then one is following a mirage, one is rushing to touch the horizon --

which exists not, which is only an appearance. As you move forward the horizon also moves forward; the distance between you and horizon always remains the same. That is the world of the philosopher. It is a fool's world. Philosophy is really fool-osophy.

If one wants to know the truth then one has to get out of the mind and move into silence -- not thinking but silence. And that is available in everybody's being. We just have to shift from mind to no-mind, from thinking to awareness, and immediately the gestalt changes and you start experiencing from the very beginning.

The beginning is already the end because the beginning contains the end like the seed contains the flowers. The first step is also the last step because it contains the last step in it. Once you are out of mind, just a witness, a silent watcher, truth is not far away because this watching in itself is truth, this witnessing itself is truth, this consciousness itself is truth.

The seeker and the sought are not two different things, the sought is hidden in the seeker.

God is not anybody's real longing. People seek and search for god because they have been told that unless you find god you will not find bliss. Otherwise there is no natural desire in man to search for god, the natural desire is to search for bliss, hence bliss is really our goal. And if you can find bliss, god is found, because bliss is the most divine experience in life. It is the only proof that life is not meaningless. And to know that life is meaningful is to know god.

The moment you are delighted, just for the sheer act of being, joyous moment to moment, celebrating, 1/08/07

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your existence becomes godly, God is not some person that someday you are to have an interview with, god is only a quality of your own growth. It is your own flowering.

Because of the word "god" the world is divided between the atheists and the theists, because that word does not appeal to many people. It does not ring any bells in their hearts. In fact even the people who think themselves theists and religious are not really interested in god. Their whole life proves that they are not interested in god. Even if they pray, they pray for something else; they pray out of fear or out of greed.

Just the other day I was reading a story: a man jumped out of a plane because the plane had lost all control; the engines had gone berserk and the pilot had announced that now there was no way except take parachutes and jump. But the man's parachute did not open. He was an atheist, but when you are in the middle of the sky and it is just a question of seconds and you will be finished, who cares about theism and atheism? He thought "Maybe god can help me," He started crying for god, saying, "Please help me! Please help me! Forgive me! I will never be an atheist again! I will worship you and pray forever and forever."

He was brought up in a Christian world. Although he never believed in god, he was brought up by a Christian family, so he was calling to the Christian god, naturally. Nothing happened, nobody appeared, no hand, nothing. So he thought, "Maybe I should try Allah." So he tried Allah; he shouted, "Allah, save me!"

and suddenly a hand came out of the clouds and saved him and put him on the earth completely safe.

But he was brought up by Christians, The moment he was put on the earth he said, "Thank god." The same hand appeared again and crushed him! (much laughter) People are in fear. Out of fear they become Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus... or out of greed, but nobody is really interested in god. And I don't see that anything is wrong in it. In fact humanity will remain divided if we don't drop this idea of god.

Now almost half the world is communist, they don't believe in god, and the people who believe in god their belief is also just a belief. It is very rare to find a religious person.

If we start thinking in terms of bliss this division can disappear. Whether one is a Russian or a Chinese or American or Italian or Indian does not matter; bliss is everybody's heart's longing. The whole of humanity can become one if bliss is the goal. Nobody can say "I have not desire for bliss."

And my own experience is that the moment you have found bliss you have found god too. In the past you have been told just the opposite; find god and you will be blissful. I say to you, find bliss and you will be godly. Here he whole search is for bliss.

Of course I know the moment you arc overflowing with bliss suddenly you become aware of a new quality in your life, a new fragrance, a new light. And for that light, for that fragrance, for that new phenomenon, "god" is a beautiful word. But it (words missing...) Bliss is more fundamental, more essential; we can forget all about god. Put your whole energy into being blissful and god will come seeking you, There is no need to go after him.

The experience of bliss will give you for the first time, a beauty that is indestructible. Not only that, it will give you for the first time, an insight into the very phenomenon of beauty. Not only does it make you beautiful, it suddenly transforms the whole world. The whole world becomes beautiful because the world reflects you, it is a mirror.

If you are carrying ugly things inside you those ugly things are bound to be reflected. From the trees, from the mountains, from the rivers, you cannot get more than that which you put in. And you don't have anything beautiful to put in. That's why people live such monotonous, bored lives.

There may be a beautiful sunset and they go on not looking at it at all, the birds may be singing but they are deaf, the stars may be dancing but they are blind because they have no insight into beauty. It is only an empty word that they have heard. And whatsoever they think is beauty has nothing to do with beauty. It has much more to do with their biology, their chemistry, their physiology, their hormones.

A man finds a woman beautiful and the same man does not find any beauty in the sunset, in the stars, in the flowers. I cannot trust this man's understanding of beauty. It may be just pure instinct, a sexual urge, that makes him hallucinate . Once that urge is gone the same woman becomes ordinary, the same woman is no more beautiful.

If a person is sexually starved then even an ugly woman may look beautiful. The more starved you are, the more beautiful she will look. Once your sexual urge is gone, suddenly you will become aware of how ugly she is.

And the same is true about the man. A woman finds a man beautiful -- it is not a real sense of beauty, because when you have a real sense of beauty it is not a question of man and woman at all; then you will 1/08/07

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find it everywhere. You will find it in the rock, in the texture of the rock, in the perfume of the flower, in the freedom of a cloud, a bird on the wing. You will be enchanted. Your breath will stop, your mind will stop; you will be moved, thrilled.

Of course then your experience of the beauty in a man or a woman has a totally different significance; then It is no more just chemistry, then it is poetry, But to know what real beauty is one has to go into deep silence, one has to become more and more alert, watchful, silent.

As the mind disappears you are transformed. All that is ugly in you drops, by and by you are purified in your heart. You start feeling yourself not as a body but as consciousness, not as a mind but as consciousness. Then there is beauty. You have grace and the whole world suddenly becomes graceful.

To me this is the religious experience, the pinnacle of religious experience, and out of this experience is all creativity. Without this experience one can compose a song but one cannot create a song. One can compose music but one cannot create music. One can paint a picture if he knows how to paint -- it will be a technical thing- but one cannot create a painting It is only profound silence that gives you the experience of beauty and a deep longing to share that experience with others, which become creativity.

My sannyasins have to be creators. I don't teach renunciation of life, I teach creativity. I teach you to participate. Get passionately involved in existence because that is where the truth of life is hidden. Going away from life you cannot find it.

We have three of the most beautiful words to describe the ultimate: satyam, shivam, sunderam. Satyam means truth, shivam means good, sunderam means beautiful. This is the real trinity, this is the real face of god, three faces, three aspects, of godliness. And sunderam is the highest, the last, the ultimate peak.

True love grows out of the experience nf nothingness, of nobodiness, of egolessness, otherwise love remains superficial, pseudo, a game. At the most one can remain occupied with it but one gains nothing out of it; one simply loves life and its whole of *ortunity. One moves from one dream to another dream.

Unless you know that you are not an ego you cannot really love because the ego will disturb your love, it will pollute it, it will contaminate it, it will poison it; hence jealousy, possessiveness, domination and all kinds of trips and numbers. They are all because of the ego, they are not part of love. But love is such a delicate phenomenon and the ego goes on throwing rocks on that delicate flower.

Jealousy is like a rock -- very gross. Possessiveness is a rock -- it is pure poison. Love is destroyed, crushed, shattered. And these monsters are dominating people. Love has to be freed from these monsters.

The only way is to kill the root cause.

You must have seen children's stories, fables, parables, in which this strategy hes been applied many times: there is a monster but you cannot kill him because his life is not in him; he has put his life somewhere else. Maybe it is in a parrot, and how can you find out that it is in a parrot? Unless you kill the parrot you will not be able to kill the monster. you can go on killing the monster and it will start rising up again and again. It will go on growing new heads unless you kill the parrot or wherever the life secret is hidden. Once you kill the parrot the monster is gone, gone forever.

Those stories are beautiful; they say something about our inner monsters. Their life is not in themselves.

Many people ask me how to drop jealousy, how not to be possessive, how not to be dominating, how to drop all this nonsense. They cannot be dropped unless you kill the ego because their life is in the ego.

Shunyam (the sannyasin's name) means dropping the ego and becoming a nothingness. When there is no ego, when you are not, then there is just silence.

In that silence the flower of love starts opening. It has tremendous beauty and the flavour of the divine and the colours of the ultimate. Then it does not create any bondage for you; it brings great freedom, it brings pure ecstasy. It delivers you from all darkness, from all death, it delivers you from all misery, all anguish, all anxiety. It makes you what you are supposed to be, what nature intends you to be.

And the moment you are that which is really your potential, then it is actualised, there is great contentment, great peace, great fulfilment. One hes come home.

Meditation is a state of no-mind, no-thought, no-desire. One simply is, just is -- and that is the greatest experience. Once you have tasted that is-ness there is nothing more to be experienced, there is nothing higher, nothing greater, nothing deeper either.

Dhirjo means patience. To enter into meditation one of the most essential qualities is patience. One cannot be in a hurry. The more in a hurry one is, the longer it takes. If one is capable of waiting forever --

lovingly, trustingly -- it can happen even in a single moment. Instantly it can happen, immediately it can 1/08/07

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happen; it all depends on how patient one is.

But remember, while doing meditation never bother about the result. It will come in its own time, Trust!

Enjoy meditation for its own sake, don't be greedy about it, don't project any ambition, If one can do meditation not as a means but as an end unto itself then the miracle can happen immediately, it can change your total being.

The transformation is easy. One has to learn the art of being patient -- which humanity has completely forgotten. Everybody is in such a hurry, everybody wants things to happen quickly. Nobody is ready to wait That's why there are so many charlatans in the world of religion. You ask for instant coffee so there are pedlars who sell instant coffee and they exploit you.

My approach is of patience, infinite patience -- and then the miracle is that it can be like instant coffee.

But the requirement has to be fulfilled. It is a paradox, but anything concerned with the truth is always paradoxical, it has to be paradoxical because truth needs to be inclusive of its opposite.

How long will you be here?

Half a year, she murmured.

That's good -- that is patience

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #10

Chapter title: None

10 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009105

ShortTitle: ICEBRG10

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.]

Blissfulness is like a bud opening as a flower. In misery one closes up; in misery one starts dying, one starts withdrawing from life, one starts shrinking. In bliss one expands, one relates; one dances, sings, celebrates. And that is the only way to find truth, god, love and all the great values.

One has to drop all the stupid formality of civilization, one has to become more spontaneous, like primitive man; like a child. The child represents the primitive man, the child has yet to be civilized.

Psychologists are aware of the fact that we cannot remember anything before the age of four. One remembers things that happened only after one was four years of age; one has lived those four years without leaving a trace on the memory. The reason is that at the age of four or near about then, the child becomes part of civilization. His gestalt is changed by the parents, by education. He starts behaving as he should; he loses his spontaneity, he becomes false and plastic. And from that moment on he will remember everything because the continuum has been broken.

Only in deep hypnotic unconsciousness can we revive the memories of the years before the age of four.

Then one can even remember something of when one was a child in the womb. Not only that; one can go on digging deeper and one can remember something of the past life. And in the East we have tried to reach as deeply as possible into the unconscious realm and in doing this we became aware not of one life behind this 1/08/07

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life, but of many many lives. But consciously we only remember that which has been forced upon us by others.

To become blissful one has to drop all that has been forced upon one. One has to become primitive again, like a child, innocent, then there is spontaneity. And spontaneity is one of the most beautiful experiences in life. One does not act out of the mind, one responds as a total organism. Then life has totality, integrity. Then one is really an individual and one has intelligence. One is no more a parrot repeating others; one can hear one's own inner voice. And that is always blissful, that sound is always blissful.

And once you start hearing your own voice you are on the right track; you will go on opening. And when the flower of consciousness is totally open you know for the first time what a gift life is and what an ecstasy.

How long will you be here?

"I don't know."

Then be here forever, because this is the tribe of the ancient Italians. I am reviving it!

To be solitary is negative, to be in solitude is positive. They are not synonymous. Solitude is sacred.

Solitariness is nothing but misery; one feels that one is missing others.

The person imprisoned in jail lives in solitariness, not in solitude. Sometimes they punish prisoners with three weeks' solitary confinement. Then he is left in a dark cell with nobody to relate to, with nothing to see.

In those three weeks it seems as if three lives have passed; he loses all sense of time. And slowly, slowly he starts becoming crazy. After the second week he starts talking to himself - loudly!

If he is kept in this way for three months he will go really mad, maybe irrevocably mad. This is solitariness. He has been forced into a negative darkness.

Only a meditator can transform solitariness into solitude. Then when he is totally alone he is not lonely, not at all. He is full of his own being, overflowing; in fact more overflowing than ever, because when others are there they encroach on your space. In life it is really a continuous struggle to keep your space intact.

Everybody is treading on everybody else's space; nobody is respectful of anybody's space.

This is one of the greatest problems humanity is facing today, because the earth has become overcrowded and people are really suffering from an immense confinement. The crowd is coming closer and closer; you are in a crowd everywhere and everybody is interfering with your space. Your privacy is lost -

and when privacy is lost all is lost.

The people who have been studying animals have come to know that there is a territorial imperative. For example, if you see a monkey and you start moving slowly towards the monkey, up to a certain point he will not take any notice of you, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that he will immediately start getting angry -- maybe at ten feet, twenty feet. You will be surprised that every monkey behaves in the same way: they get angry always when you are at a certain distance. It is as if the monkey has a certain sense of territory and he wants nobody to come into his space.

In zoos animals go berserk, mad. Only in zoos do animals go mad, not in the woods -- never. Nobody has heard of any lion going mad in the jungle or any elephant going mad in the jungle. But in a circus they do, in a zoo they do because they are confined. If you go to the zoo you will see the lion continuously walking around the cage, confined, enraged, angry because his space has been taken away -- and in the jungle he has a vast space. And all animals respect each other's spaces, none of them interfere in the others'

realms. The moment you enter their space you are in danger; if you don't enter their space there is no danger to you. The snake will not bite you if you don't enter his space.

Now they have measured how much space every animal has for himself. But man has no sense of that; he has completely forgotten the language, he does not know it, he has lost the very sense. And that's why humanity is almost in a state of insanity. It needs methods to create space again.

Meditation is a method to create your own space. If it is not available on the outside then create it inside.

Perhaps it is no longer available on the outside, perhaps it will never be available on the outside again; on this earth it does not seem to be possible. Then find space within. That's the whole alchemy of meditation: finding space within. Then even in the crowd you remain in solitude because now you know how to create an inner space.

You remain centered. Nobody can interfere with your inner space. People can interfere with your outer space; the wife can interfere, the husband can interfere, the children can interfere -- everybody. And it is so crowded that they are not at fault. There is no more space left on the outside.

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Meditation becomes something of absolute value when the earth is so overcrowded. Meditation has never been of such importance before. Only a few very intelligent people -- a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra

-- had the sense to create some inner space. The other people lived outside. There was enough space outside; there was no reason to find it inside. But now, everybody has to become a buddha in some way or other; otherwise life will not have any meaning. It will not have any salt, it will not have any taste at all.

So by becoming a sannyasin you will be working in the inner world to create a space there. And infinite space can be created there because you can throw out all the junk that is inside. You can throw out the thoughts, the desires, the memories, the past, the future, the dreams, the imagination. You can go on throwing out all this junk and you can create great space. That's what meditation is all about: throwing out all the contents that we are carrying inside so that the room is empty, so that you can feel yourself surrounded by infinite vastness. And that vastness is divine. That is solitude.

The outer solitude is nothing compared to the inner solitude, because the outer can always be taken by others. It is never absolutely yours, you have to depend on others for it; anybody can interfere with it. Hence the man who has no meditativeness is a dependent person, he has to depend on others. For love he is dependent, for space he is dependent; for everything he is just dependent.

The meditator becomes independent. Only the meditator knows what freedom is... the freedom of a bird on the wing in the infinite sky.

Meditation is an effort to attain inner emptiness, inner nothingness.

Nothingness means no-thing-ness. It does not mean that nothing is there, it simply means that all the things that were there have been thrown out. You are there and for the first time, because things are no more there, you have a vastness. It is really a miracle to create meditation, but once the miracle happens one is surprised that in this small body one is carrying the whole sky, the whole of eternity, an infinity. And that is our truth, that is the meaning of Hiltrud.

Hil means battle, trud means truth -- battle for truth. Meditation is a battle for truth -- your inner truth, your authenticity, your real being. But for that many things have to be dropped. To know the real, to know the true, all that is false has to be dropped.

It is a battle because the false has lived so long inside you that it is not going to leave you easily; it will make every effort to remain there. It is like a guest who has lived for so long in your house that you have forgotten he is a guest. He has also forgotten; in fact he is behaving like the host. He may have thrown the host outside because of course when the guest comes the host respects him, gives him everything that is good in the house, the best place to lie down, and everything.

If the guest goes on remaining there it is bound to happen one day or other that he will feel that "I am the master and you are the slave, because, look, I live in the most beautiful space of the house, the best room, I eat the best food. Of course I am the master and you are just a slave." That's what has happened: the host has become a guest and the guest has become the host. Everything is upside-down.

Your consciousness is the host and your mind is just a guest. Thoughts come and go, you remain. Anger comes and goes, you remain. Greed comes and goes, you remain. The only thing that remains is your being.

All things come and go. How many things have come and gone? But when they are there they behave as if they are the master.

The meditator has to fight a real battle to make the mind understand what its place is, to put the mind in its place, to bring it to its senses and show it that it is just a guest, not a host; it is not the master. The meditator has to reclaim from the mind the territory which it has possessed for long, maybe for millions of lives. The battle is because the mind will not budge an inch unless you do all that you can doc If you are really intent, if you put all your energy into it, only then can you throw it away. Meditation has to be something very intensive, very passionate, total. The moment it is total the mind knows that it Is defeated. And once the mind knows it is defeated, it becomes a beautiful slave; otherwise it is an ugly master.

The moment you have reclaimed your territory, your space, your truth, your being, you are a king, a queen; otherwise one is a beggar.

My sannyasins have to attain the kingdom of god, they have to become kings and queens -- less than that won't do. I am not creating beggars, I am creating emperors.

My whole effort is to free you from religions and help you to become religious. I don't want you to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Buddhist -- these are religions. I want you to be a Christ, a 1/08/07

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Buddha, a Krishna, a Lao Tzu, a Mohammed -- these are religious people.

Never forget for a single moment that Buddha was not Buddhist and Jesus was not Christian. Hence those who are Christians have nothing to do with Jesus. They have not understood even the most fundamental thing, that he was not a Christian. To be a Christian is to go against Jesus.

Jesus was simply a loving human being, full of light, full of joy, full of awareness. He was religious, certainly, but his religion cannot be confined to any dogma. No church can confine his vastness; every church will become a falsification. No scripture can contain him; he is vast. No words can convey him, only silence can convey him.

The Sufis have a book -- they call it the book of the books -- which is utterly empty, nothing is written in it. I think that is the only religious scripture in the world. It is born of a great insight. You go on looking at the empty pages; there is nothing there, not a single word. They have carried that book for centuries; it has gone from master to the disciple, and they have been reading that scripture.

To read an empty book you need an empty mind. If you just go on looking at empty paper you will become empty. How long can you go on looking at it?

It is said that Bodhidharma looked at an empty wall for nine years; he sat and looked at the wall. Of course he became enlightened! What can you think? How long can you think, just looking at an empty wall?

Sooner or later the mind will become bored and the mind will say, "I'm going!" The mind is bound to say

"Good bye sir! What are you doing? Are you mad? Nine years?"

That is the meaning of your name: go beyond all dogmas, all scriptures, all ideologies, and become centered in your own nothingness. And from there arises the truth -- a truth that liberates, a truth that is liberation.

One cannot attain the truth through any activity. Activity is needed to attain things of the world. Of you want to attain the inner truth you have to learn the art of no action, of effortlessness. And meditation is nothing but effortlessness, it is inaction. It is sitting silently doing nothing. It is not a doing, remember.

If you are doing meditation you have missed the point. It is doing nothing, it is simply being, utterly restful, relaxed, as if there is nowhere to go, nothing to attain, nothing to do. If one can be in such a space for only a few minutes every day, that will do. That will help you to enter your source.

In those inactive moments you will be thrown into your own source because you will not have any other place to go. You will inevitably enter your own centre. If there is nothing to do then your consciousness is automatically withdrawn from its occupations. Meditation is a state of unoccupied consciousness. It is going beyond activity.

I am not against action; but the person who knows how to go beyond action can be active and yet remain inactive. He is doing all kinds of things but deep inside there is no doer. He will live in the world, he will carry the water from the well and chop the wood, and still there is no doer. He remains in his absolute inactivity; his inactivity is not disturbed by his activities. And that is the most significant thing about sannyas.

It is easy to be active and in the world, it is easy to be inactive and in the monastery, but my effort is that you should be inactive in the world, you should be inactive in action, only then do you have the highest peak possible, otherwise something will be missing. In the monastery you will miss everything that the world can give to you, and in the world you will miss all those values that only the monastery can give to you. And I would like you to be enriched by both, the inner and the outer.

I don't want to create any separation between the inner and the outer. I would like you to transcend both and come to a higher peak where the inner and outer are no more separate. And that is possible only through meditation.

So this has to be your work, to experience total inaction. And it can be experienced because it has been experienced. I have experienced it, I am continuously in it -- and that's what I want to share with my people.

A sannyasin is a person who lives in the world and is not of the world. He lives like a lotus leaf in the lake. The leaf is in the water but the water cannot touch it. Even when dewdrops gather on the leaf in the night they don't touch it. They are there on the leaf and in the morning sun they look like pearls, but the leaf remains completely untouched by them. Just a breeze comes and they slip into the lake and the leaf is totally dry.

Hence in the East the lotus has become the symbol of the sannyasin. We have made the lotus the highest flower not for any other reason except that the lotus is a sannyasin.

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Of course it is easier to start by being blissful because bliss is a natural longing. Enlightenment is not a natural longing. One wants to be blissful. Hence I don't want anybody to run after unnatural goals, Follow the natural because ultimately it leads you beyond nature.

So there is no need to rush for something that is beyond. First experience bliss and then enlightenment comes of its own accord. And everybody knows, deep down everybody is aware, that to be blissful or to be miserable is our choice. Next time you are miserable, try it -- choose not to be miserable, and you will be surprised, it can be done. And once you have done it you have found a key. Then it is up to you. If you want to be miserable, if you enjoy misery, then it is perfectly good; then it is bliss to you! But if you don't enjoy it you can simply drop out of it.

Each moment a person has to choose whether to be blissful or to be miserable. Misery is not some calamity that happens to you, it is your choice. But nobody has told you that it is your choice. Everybody goes on telling you why you are miserable and you also start thinking in the same way, that "There must be some causes, that's why I am miserable." I say to you that there is no cause at all, except that you have chosen misery; except that god has made you free, he has given you freedom to choose, and you are mis-using the freedom.

So make it a point from this moment, to always choose to be blissful. Whenever old habits are in the way just tell them to shut up! And you will be surprised because sooner or later, one day, you will see that they do shut up! First they will not listen but one day it happens, and that day is a great revelation. It is such in ecstatic experience to say "Shut up!" and they shut up! You did not expect it to happen but one day it does.

So just go on trying and any day the right moment can come. In a right situation, in a right moment, you slip out of the misery and you start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it.

So from this very moment, watch out!

Right?,( Osho chuckled). Start!

Without love a person is blind. One can go on thinking forever and ever and one will not be able to see.

Love, and you will be able to see what is. It is only the loving heart that can touch the heart of existence.

The mind is shallow and superficial; it knows nothing of the heights and the depths. The mind is idiotic, it is always mediocre. It cannot give you any insight into reality. For that your heart needs to function -- and love is nothing but the humming of the heart.

Allow the heart to sing its song. Even if the mind condemns it, don't bother about the mind. The mind will condemn it, the mind will say "This is irrational. For example when the situation suggests that you be miserable and you start singing a song, the mind will say "This is not right, this is not how things should be, you have to be miserable -- that is logical."

Somebody has died and you dance... That's what we do here. We just wait for the opportunity! (much laughter) People go on thinking, "Now whose number is next? Whom are we going to celebrate next?" We don't miss any opportunity.

And once you allow the irrational heart to function, slowly slowly the mind loses its grip. It will take a time, a little time, because the mind has been in power so long; it will condemn you, it will create troubles for you. But listen to the heart and let the mind go on shouting.

In India we have a saying that the elephant does not care, it goes on although the dogs are continuously barking. The elephant takes no notice at all, he does not even look at the dogs -- they go on barking, Dogs are great politicians. The elephant is a mystic! (laughter) He goes on without taking any note of the dogs and sooner or later the dogs leave him, because what is the point of staying?

They may console themselves that "This animal looks dumb or deaf; he does not understand. It is very illogical: we are barking and he is not even looking at us, so what is the point of barking?" They become tired, exhausted.

The same has to be the way of a sannyasin: let your heart sing, dance, rejoice. The dogs from the head will go on barking saying, "This is irrational, that this, it is not expected, this is immoral. This is not gentlemanly, this is not nice. What will people say, what are you doing?" It will condemn all poetry inside you, it will condemn all love inside you. It will try every way to pull you out of the heart because its whole power is at risk. But don't listen to it; just go on singing, go on dancing and celebrating. And one day you will be surprised, the dogs are no more barking, they have been left far behind.

The day it happens is the day of great benediction. Then flowers start showering on you, then the whole existence starts pouring all kinds of joys upon you. You are connected with the whole, you have become a 1/08/07

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seer. Love makes one a seer, it gives one eyes.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #11

Chapter title: None

11 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009115

ShortTitle: ICEBRG11

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.]

It is dangerous, it is insecure, it is going into the unknown. It is only for those who have tremendous courage, it is not for the cowards. For the cowards truth is not possible; they will have to live in lies. They don't deserve truth, they are not worthy of it. They live in fear and they are always afraid to move beyond the familiar. And truth is always beyond the familiar.

The familiar is where the crowd lives, in which the crowd lives. The crowd consists of cowards and the crowd is the lowest as far as intelligence is concerned. One cannot fall below that, hence there is no danger, you are walking on plain ground.

But when you start moving towards the Himalayan peaks, naturally there is danger; one step wrong and you will be gone forever. But in that very risk one is born, reborn. That very risk gives you sharpness, intelligence, because of the challenge, and without the challenge intelligence goes on gathering rust and dust. When there is challenge; you are constantly alert, aware.

The most beautiful thing about danger is it gives you alertness, awareness; hence the people who go climbing an unknown peak, unmapped, are really searching awareness. They are not aware of what they are searching for. The people who have travelled to the North and South poles, taking all kinds of risks, the people who have gone to the moon, are not aware of what their search is really for. They are searching for awareness but their search is not conscious.

A meditator goes consciously. There is no need to go to the Himalayan peaks or to the moon because there are higher peaks within you and greater distances within you and far more significant stars within you; the whole sky is there, the whole cosmos is there. But it is far more risky than going to the moon or going to Everest.

The greatest, the most dangerous, the riskiest space, is within; hence very few people dare to go there.

Falling from those peaks which are inside you you fall into a deeper abyss than one has ever known before.

When you start knowing something about bliss, at the same time you become aware that if a single step goes wrong you will fall into a darkness into which you have never been. As you move towards the positive the negative also becomes bigger. When you reach the peak the valley is the greatest that surrounds you.

When you were on plain ground there was no valley at all; there was not much risk. Even if you had fallen there was not much risk -- maybe a fracture or two, at the most. But if you fall from the peak you will be shattered, completely shattered.

But nobody ever falls from the peaks for the simple reason that as you move higher, you become more 1/08/07

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alert, more conscious, you become aware of the razor's edge. You are walking on a sword. You are like a tightrope walker who has to be aware, very aware. He has to live in the moment; he cannot think of the past, he cannot think of the future. The moment is enough unto itself; he has to be herenow. Hence there is no fall, I have never heard of anybody falling from the peaks. But the danger is there, and because of the danger very few people go into the inward world, the interiority of one's own being.

They cling to whatsoever security they have gott money, power, prestige, family, the Rotary Club, the Lion's Club -- where you will not find a single lion, all are sheep. But sheep like to call themselves lions, they like pretending. Comfortable, beautiful lies they live in.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Don't take away the lies from people, otherwise they will die." And in a way he is right that people cannot live without lies, they need comfortable lies; hence Christianity exists, Hinduism exists, Buddhism exists. All these organised religions have nothing to do with truth. Their whole existence depends on there being cowards who constantly need to be comforted, consoled. They don't want the truth because truth means you have to go on a long pilgrimage, the longest journey. But if you have courage the journey becomes smaller.

The greater the courage, the shorter is the journey. If the courage is total then in a single step, like sudden lightning, one reaches the peak. It is worth taking all the risks, it is worth it to go into the dangerous, it is worth it to go into the uncharted sea, because it is only through that gambling that one's soul is born, otherwise man lives without a soul. And to live without a soul is not worth anything. It is meaningless, it has no glory, no splendour, no fragrance, no beauty, no bliss. It is monotony, sheer monotony, boredom.

The ultimate truth needs a new kind of hearing because god is constantly speaking within you. But we don't hear, we are so full of noise. The mind continuously chatters; day in, day out, whether awake or asleep, it goes on chattering. And there is not only one mind, everybody is carrying many minds.

The idea of one mind is absolutely wrong; we don't have one mind, we have many minds. So it is not just a single mind chattering, it is many minds chattering; it is a crowd inside. They are all quarreling with each other, fighting with each other for domination. Each mind wants to be the dominant one.

And in this conflict, confusion, chaos, you cannot hear the still small voice within. It is very clear but it is a whisper: soft, delicate, like a flower, like a breeze. You need a gracious hearing, you need a silence to hear it, a deep transcendence of the mind, a distance from the mind, so that the chattering goes farther and farther away. You can hear it somewhere in the neighbourhood and it goes on receding. As you become more and more silent it fades away. Finally, when you are really silent, there is no mind at all; it has gone so far away, like the farthest star. You cannot hear anything. From the mind now there is nothing, no problem.

Then suddenly the heart is heard.

That is the meaning of Simone: when one listens to one's own heart. The heart does not speak any language; all languages belong to the mind. The heart has its own way of conveying its messages which is not intellectual but intuitive.

The word "intuition" is beautiful. The mind needs tuition, it needs teachers -- schools, colleges, universities. It needs tuition, it has to be trained by others by the society. Intuition means it is already there; the master is inside you. There is no need to follow the ideas given by others, because they cannot go deeper than the mind, and mind is just the periphery of your being. And the more ideas you gather, the more clumsy you become, because more and more minds are created.

A scholar is almost in a state of insanity. There are scriptures which he can quote.

There was a great orator of England, Ingersoll. He was a very famous orator, very few orators have been of that quality, and he was a very sincere man too. Before he started speaking he would always raise a hand with two fingers sticking up, and when he ended he would raise his other hand with two fingers sticking up.

Everybody asked "What is this gesture? What do you mean?" And he would smile and never answer.

When he was dying one of his friends said, "Now please, it is a question of only a few minutes or at the most a few hours and you will be gone. Now tell us, what was the secret of your raising two fingers of your left hand at the beginning of each speech and two fingers of your right hand at the end? What was the meaning?" He said, "They are inverted commas, because whatsoever I was saying was not my own. I could not say that so I had to hide it, but now I can say I was just repeating others; the whole thing was borrowed."

But he was a sincere man. At least he made an effort to make it clear that whatsoever he was saying was not his own.

The mind has nothing of its own, it is always within inverted commas; whether you know or not, whether you are sincere or not, it is so. Mind is false thing, never original, always borrowed.

But the heart is your own, it is your own voice, it is your very being speaking to you. But its 1/08/07

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communication is not through language. It is a silent communication. It is communion rather than communication.

Once the mind is silent nothing is said but everything is heard. Without uttering a single word, for the first time you start moving in the right way, in the right direction. The heart goes on guiding you in subtle ways; you just have to be silent, that's all. And your life is transformed through silence. I teach here only silence and nothing else, because out of silence everything else flowers. One becomes a garden and all kinds of flowers bloom. With the silence comes spring, because with silence comes joy, with silence comes love, with silence comes celebration, with silence comes god, with silence comes truth.

God can be attained through two ways: either prayer or meditation. They are different ways, diametrically opposite but, strangely leading to the same experience.

If you look at the ways they look antagonistic, and if one thinks logically one will think, how can these contrary thoughts lead to the same goal? But those who have attained have seen that, ultimately, both paths lead to the same goal. And those two paths are needed because there are two types of people in the world.

Humanity can be divided into two categories: the people who are more interested in love and the people who are more interested in bliss. The person who is interested in love has to follow the path of prayer. Then God is somewhere outside and you become a lover or a beloved. Both things have been done in the past.

The Indian mystics who followed the path of prayer have always thought of God as the lover and themselves as the beloved. They thought of themselves as feminine because God is the only male. That too has a beauty of its own -- you are just receptive like a woman.

The Sufis have done just the opposite. It is the same path but they think of themselves as lovers and God as a beloved. God is the woman -- that too has its beauty. But both are on the path of love. Prayer means the highest form of love. But you have to hypothesize God somewhere outside, then you can relate.

The people who are interested in bliss have no need to hypothesize God outside, they have to hypothesize God inside. Buddha, Mahavira -- the whole tradition of Tao mystics and Zen mystics follows the path of meditation. In meditation, you don't need any outside God -- it is self-exploration.

Now, these two things look totally opposite; one is focussed on the inside God. How can they reach to the same point? -- But they do.

The person who thinks of God as being on the outside dissolves himself into his God. He disappears, and the moment he disappears the ego is dropped and there is oneness. That oneness is realization.

In meditation you have to discard the ego, you have to become aware of the ego, you have to become watchful of the ego and all its tricks and strategies and cunning ways. As you watch the ego and its subtle ways it starts disappearing. It cannot exist in the light of awareness. Awareness is just like light: you bring light in and the darkness disappears. And the ego is nothing but darkness.

The person following the path of love surrenders his ego to God. "I am not, you are." But the same phenomenon happens, the ego is surrendered. And the person on the path of meditation does it through awareness. The same phenomenon happens, the ego disappears. And the moment the ego disappears you have come to find oneness with existence. So both reach the same oneness, both paths lead to the disappearance of duality; the duality is dissolved.

My feeling is that, as man becomes more and more mature, the path of meditation has to be more and more implemented.

A child cannot understand the path of meditation; he can understand the path of love because love is natural. Every child knows what love is. Maybe later on he forgets what it is, but every child knows what love is; it is an intrinsic feel.

Meditation is for a grown-up person. And humanity has come of age, hence meditation is going to become more significant than prayer in the future. Buddha is going to become more significant than Jesus.

Zen is going to become more predominant than Sufism, Hassidism. Of course a few people will go on following those paths, and nothing is wrong in following them if they appeal to you -- if they fit you. But the more intelligent you are, the more contemporary you are, more is the possibility that you will be easily moved by meditation; hence my emphasis on meditation.

I help people in prayer only when I see that meditation will not be possible for a certain person. But it is becoming more secondary every day.

Dhyaneshwar means God that is attained through meditation. So remember, meditation is going to be your way.

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Experience is of the mind. Mind deals only with dead things. Experience means something that has already become past. Experiencing means that which is present, which is already here and now, which is a process, not a thing. And this has to be understood about everything that is valuable. Love, bliss, awareness

-- these are all processes, not things. You are always moving from one perfection to another perfection but the end never comes. It is an endless pilgrimage. The pilgrimage itself is so beautiful that there is no need for any end, the pilgrimage itself is the end.

Never make any goal in life because life has no goal, hence all goals are false and those who are running after goals are bound to be disappointed. Live life as a process, not as a dead thing but as something alive, growing, like a tree which is constantly growing; new leaves are always coming, the old are disappearing, the old is constantly replaced by the new. Or like a river which constantly goes on flowing towards the ocean, it is a continuum. Life is a river, love is a river, awareness is a river.

Remember always, nouns are all false. Existence consists of verbs, not nouns. In fact if we want to make language really true -- true to life, true to reality -- then we have to drop all nouns, all pronouns. Language should consist only of verbs. There is no tree, there is only treeing. There is no river, there is only rivering; there is no life, there is only living; and there is no love, there is only loving.

This has to be remembered constantly because the mind tries to make everything a noun. It lives in nouns -- that's why it goes on missing life. It is very happy with dead things because dead things can be easily manipulated. Dead things become objects. You can think about them, you can go round and round them, you can dissect them, you can try to find out what their secret is. But when something is alive mind simply feels impotent.

You cannot dissect an alive child. Yes, you can do a post-mortem when somebody is dead. And mind goes on doing post-mortems. It goes on cutting up and analysing corpses. But when a child is dead it is no more the same child. The real has already left; the bird is no more in the cage, only the cage is there. And by dissecting the cage you cannot find the bird.

That's why science goes on missing the soul. It goes on missing your centre because it depends on dissection, analysis. Science lives in nouns. A person becomes religious when he becomes aware that all nouns are false, only verbs are real.

That is the meaning of Prem Anubhuti: love is an experiencing, it is a process. Never try to make it permanent. Never try to change its natural course, its flow, because a canal is not a river. There is a tremendous difference between the two. The river has freedom, the canal is imprisoned. It only has the appearance of a river.

My sannyasins have to understand it as deeply as possible. Never destroy any process by forcing your ideas upon it. Remain spontaneous, alert, receptive, but allowing life its own course, never interfering. Then all bliss is yours and all benediction is yours. Then life is always an ongoing ecstasy, it is a dance of such tremendous beauty and grace that mind is absolutely incapable of comprehending it.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #12

Chapter title: None

12 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009125

ShortTitle: ICEBRG12

Audio:

No

Video:

No

1/08/07

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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.]

(Osho talked about the meaning of the word 'shunyam'. It means nothingness, and it is a tremendously positive state.)

It simply means space is there without any content. But the space is very positive, in fact more than it was when it was too full of things -- past, desires, memories, imaginings, expectations. These are the contents of your inner world. We are full of these, and they are so many that they don't leave any space for ourselves to be. We are very much overcrowded.

This is the real problem, how to disperse this crowd. And this crowd does not believe in birth control; it is a very Indian crowd. Each thought goes on generating thousands of thoughts, each desire goes on giving birth to many more desires, each dream brings thousands of dreams in its wake. So the inner world goes on becoming more and more crowded, more and more clumsy, more and more chaotic.

The child comes with pure silence. His slate is empty. It has a grace, a beauty, the music of silence. But we start stuffing each child with religious ideology, political ideology. We start poisoning each child with an ambition. We create desires in him, we create competition in him, we create imitativeness in him. We tell him, "Look, you have to be this, you have to be the president or the prime minister of the country, you have to be the richest man."

That must have been the desire of your parents when they gave you the name, Max; Max means the greatest. Every parent wants his child to be the greatest, an Alexander the Great. Each parent is living his unfulfilled desires through his children. He has not been able to fulfil his desires. Nobody has ever been able to fulfil their desires because desire as such is unfulfillable. Nothing can be done about it; it is not in the nature of things, it is not the law of life.

To be full of desires simply means to await thousands of frustrations, failures. Desires bring only frustration. They create great expectation, and when they fall apart -- and they are bound to fall apart sooner or later -- one is disillusioned. And one has carried the illusion for so long and has become so attached to it that one feels lost. Whenever a desire gets frustrated one is wounded. And those wounds go on accumulating.

Each child comes into the world healthy and whole and we immediately start wounding him. Up to now humanity has existed in a very wrong way. Something basically, fundamentally, is wrong. Our whole education is ambitious, it is political; our religions are political. Maybe they are the politics of the beyond, but they are politics. You have to reach heaven, you have to be a great achiever there in the other world too.

Nobody says to just be empty of all content, because in that emptiness, in that nothingness, flowers the ultimate

If one is ready to become a nobody then one becomes the greatest -- that is the meaning of Max. So I am giving you a paradoxical name. Be nothing then you are all, be nobody then you attain to tremendous extraordinariness. Just be empty and you will come to know the greatest in you, the highest in you. But remember, don't be nothing to become the greatest because then you cannot be nothing. To be nothing is not to be used as a means to be the greatest. It cannot be a means, it is an end unto itself. The greatness is a by-product, not the goal, not the end.

It is like a fragrance. The flower is the end, the flowering of your consciousness is all, and then suddenly there is fragrance. If you search for fragrance you will miss the flower, and without the flower there is no fragrance. If you search for the flower the fragrance comes of its own accord.

Hence the really great are not Alexanders, the really great are Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu. They were very simple people, with no desire to be anybody in particular -- humble. Jesus says "Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god." That's exactly the meaning of your name. That statement is paradoxical: the most blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of god.

If one is meek, humble, nobody, then the doors of the kingdom open, then you are a divine guest. Then suddenly you are raised to the highest pinnacle of life. But that is a by-product. To attain the kingdom of god is not a goal. Forget all about it -- just be nothing.

This is my whole teaching here, just to be a nobody. Just go on throwing out all the rotten furniture from inside your being and become utterly spacious. And that space is very overflowing, overflowing with your 1/08/07

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being, because the being can grow, it has space to grow. The being can open its petals, it can become a thousand-petalled lotus. And then there is great dance inside and great music and great poetry and great beauty and grace. Then the whole imprisoned splendour is released because there is no barrier to hinder it.

You become expansive. Life becomes an explosion of light, of love, of bliss.

(And love is another way of learning to be a nobody, Osho went on to say.) Love is nothing but the disappearance of the dewdrop into the ocean. It is losing one's ego, it is total surrender to existence. It is meeting with the whole, it is dropping your boundaries and your identity. It is abandoning yourself. The moment you abandon yourself, immediately you become oceanic, vast.

We are clinging to our identity. We protect it, we fight for it, we are even ready to die for it. And this is just stupidity because the ego is the most false thing in existence. It is just hot air, it has no real existence. It is like darkness.

You can see darkness, every day you see it, but it has no existence as such. It is simply absence of light

-- nothing in itself, just an absence of light. Bring the light in and you don't find any darkness, and you never even see it going out of the door. Put the light off and it is suddenly there. It does not come in; you can keep the doors and windows closed. It comes from nowhere because it is non -- existential, it is just absence. It does not come and go. Light comes and goes because light is.

The same is true about our ego. Ego is absence of love. The moment you bring the light of love in, ego disappears. You need not do anything else for the ego; just become more loving, unconditionally loving.

Love is not to be addressed to somebody in particular, just be loving -- that has to be your quality. It has nothing to do with relationship. Love has to be like fragrance. Whether anybody comes to know of it or not, does not matter to the flower. Even in the farthest Himalayas, where nobody comes and goes, thousands of flowers bloom and spread their fragrance.

In the Himalayas there is a whole valley of very strange flowers. People have only seen it from the peaks, nobody has been able to reach it because it is dangerous to go down into that valley. People know about those flowers but nobody has smelled their perfume; and they have very psychedelic colours. They are far away, but they are not worried at all about that; the flowers are perfectly happy.

Love has to be just your quality. Become loving, and one day it happens that you are simply love; not even loving but love. That is the day of great revelation. In that very moment the dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean.

In religious terminology, in religious jargon, it has been called god-realisation. If one likes religious jargon one can use that word, otherwise it is far more beautiful to say that one becomes oceanic; it is far more poetic. priests have contaminated the word "god" too much and they have been quarrelling around the word "god" for so many centuries that the very word immediately raises a thousand and one questions. It simply creates more and more arguments and controversies. But the word in itself was beautiful when used for the first time; it simply represented the beyond, the vast beyond.

Now it does not represent the beyond any more. Even the beyond has been exploited by priests. Priests are the most cunning people. They have made god a Christian god, a Hindu god, a Mohammedan god. Now nothing more absurd can be done, it is the ultimate in absurdity. God cannot be Hindu or Jewish or Buddhist. God simply means vastness, and to make vastness Christian is to make it small. Any adjective will make it limited. God has to be without any adjective. It simply means the infinite existence, the unbounded. And love will give you the first taste of it.

Just a drop of the nectar is enough to transform one. Once you have tasted love you will automatically drop all that is against love -- all hatred, anger, jealousy, all violence. One cannot carry them any more because they are your enemies. One cannot go on nourishing them. One simply drops them out of the understanding that arises with love, that love brings in.

All these things -- violence, hatred, anger, jealousy, possessiveness -- are part of darkness. So bring in the light of love. That's the purpose of sannyas.

(Don't be part of the crowd -- either the internal one we call the mind, nor the outer that is society.

Having touched on the former earlier in the evening Osho turned to the subject of society versus the seer.) Meditation is the greatest rebellion in the world. It is not ordinary revolution. Revolution has a political colour to it. Revolution is of the crowds rebellion is of the individual.

Revolution is of necessity political, because a crowd means politics. The communist revolution or the socialist revolution or the fascist revolution -- Russian, French, Chinese -- it does not matter what kind of 1/08/07

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revolution and what type of ideology, one thing is essential, that the crowd is there. And being part of a crowd means that you are functioning at the lowest level of intelligence.

To control the crowd, to be appealing to the crowd, to convince the crowd, you have to come down very low. You have to come down to where the crowd is. You have to speak their language. They understand violence, they understand murder. The crowd consists of collective stupidity, hence all revolutions are murderous, violent, unintelligent. But the crowd has a power of its own because ninety-nine per cent of the people are in it.

The rebel stands alone -- that's the beauty of it. A Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Jesus -- these are rebels, not revolutionaries. Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Gandhi -- these are revolutionaries. They have to go with the crowd, only then will the crowd go with them.

A rebel does not bother about whether anybody comes with him or not. He cannot compromise on any account; he cannot come down from his heights. He gives a call, certainly, to everybody who is receptive, but he remains on the peak. He is the ultimate peak of intelligence.

Meditation means the purest intelligence, uncontaminated intelligence, pure intelligence -- not intellectuality. Intellectuality is a totally different matter. You can become an intellectual by going to university, visiting the British Museum and going to the libraries and studying scriptures. You can become an intellectual; meditation is not needed for intellect. And the intellectual goes on collecting rubbish. He becomes a great rubbish-collector; his mind is just a junkyard, and everything is borrowed.

Intelligence has nothing to do with the outside, with borrowing from the Vedas or the Bible or the Koran

-- no. It is discovering one's own inner sources. It is discovering one's own centre. That's what meditation is all about: a discovery of one's own centre. And the moment you know who you are, there is a great explosion of intelligence.

Buddha is not an intellectual, neither is Jesus nor is Lao Tzu, but they are tremendously intelligent. They have the clearest insight into things, a direct insight, an immediate insight. They don't go via anything, their eyes are unclouded. There is no smoke in their mind, their flames are without any smoke -- flames of intelligence with no smoke. Hence wherever they look, wherever their light falls, they can see exactly what is, they know what is.

Meditation is sharpening your intelligence, and this sharpening happens through silence. Thoughts make the intellectual; no-thought is the way to attain intelligence.

Thinking is of the head, of the mind, and the state of no-mind is the beginning of a totally new dimension in you when all thoughts cease and there is simple silence as if a full stop has come. Nothing moves, everything has stopped. Time has stopped; one is simply in the present. In that tremendous moment

-- because it is the most alive moment of your life -- you discover yourself. And that brings a rebellion to your being. You are another person totally. You are reborn. You are no more the same old person -- the old dies. You are not even continuous with the old. It is not that the old has become refined, the old has simply evaporated.

You are a totally new person, a discontinuous phenomenon. With this aliveness whatsoever a person does, whatsoever he says, he is bound to be rebellious. Very few people will be able to understand him. The masses cannot understand. They will be against him, they have always been against meditators. They have been afraid of people like Jesus and Socrates and Mansoor. They have killed them for the simple reason that they could not digest their vision, they could not accept that somebody could be on such a height. To accept somebody on such a height means to accept that you are living in darkness. It is humiliating.

The mobs took revenge. They felt insulted; that's how the stupid person functions, behaves. When there is a man like Jesus, only the very few people who have a little bit of intelligence, who can see what he is, who can hear and understand, who have a little love and trust, who can go with him into the beyond, who can understand his message... They are bound to be very few. Rare people will be with a person like Jesus.

The masses, whether Jews or Hindus or Mohammedans, it does not matter -- will feel humiliated, insulted. And the only way to regain their ego is to destroy such a person, to remove him from the scene, because his very presence makes them feel guilty that they have not been doing what they should be doing, that they are not what they should be. His presence reminds them that they have missed the opportunity of life -- and they cannot forgive him.

They can worship him when he is gone but when he is alive they cannot forgive him. And because they cannot forgive him when he is alive, they are bound to worship him when he is gone. They will destroy the person themselves and then they will feel guilty again, a new guilt will arise. All these religions are born out of guilt.

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The Jews killed Jesus and then started feeling guilty about what they had done. They looked at their hands and they were red with the blood of an innocent person -- and they started feeling shaken. Now the only way was to repent, worship. Worship is just a way to get rid of guilt. A very strange world this is: first you kill a person, then you worship him.

The cross even became part of their worship; the cross is worshipped. Even after two thousand years we have not forgotten the guilt; somehow everybody feels that we have been part of that conspiracy. Judas was not alone. Judas felt so guilty that the next day, within twenty-four hours, he committed suicide. But the whole of humanity has somehow felt that had a part in it -- even now, although we were not present when Jesus was killed and Socrates was poisoned and Buddha was stoned. We were not there. But we know that if a man like Buddha or a man like Jesus is here, we will do the same; hence the guilt. To cover the guilt we worship them. Worship is not religious, it is out of a guilty conscience.

The intelligent person loves such people when they are alive. The unintelligent hates such people when they are alive, it tries to destroy such people when they are alive and when they are gone, it worships them.

The intelligent, when such people are gone, do not worship, there is no need; there is no guilt. When they are gone, they are gone. He searches again to see if there is somebody else who can help him. The intelligent person never becomes a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, he always tries to find an alive master -- because a dead master is no more there. Remember this: the stupid worships the dead and the intelligent searches for the alive. Initiation is possible only through an alive master. How can the dead help?

You can worship them but no help is going to come.

With meditation your intelligence will start functioning -- it is dormant. And it will bring a rebellion, first in you and then it starts spreading and radiating to others. It is like wildfire.

That's why I have chosen the colour of fire for my sannyasins, all the shades of fire -- I want to spread this fire all over the earth. Let this fire reach to every heart that is capable of transformation. Let the whole world go through a rebellion. It needs it; in fact it should have happened by now. We are already late. The morning has gone, the afternoon has gone. It has already become evening, the sun is almost ready to set.

Any day the third world war, could end the whole thing. It is time to hurry and to transform oneself and to help others to be transformed.'

(Unless truth happens to you, it's a lie; and the only way to allow that happening is meditation. But that covers all sorts of activities, Osho explained to the last sannyasin.) Knowledge can be untrue if it is borrowed, then it is only pseudo. It appears to be knowledge but because it has not happened to you it has no meaning at all. You are simply full of words, theories, but they are all empty. Unless something is your own authentic experience it never becomes true, it remains untrue.

What Jesus says you can repeat, you can repeat it in exactly the same words. You can learn the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic, and you can speak Aramaic. You can repeat the exact words but they won't have any meaning because you don't have a Christ-consciousness behind them.

Unless one becomes a Christ one's words cannot have the same meaning as Jesus'. Unless one becomes a Buddha one cannot understand what this man is saying. Yes, words will be heard, and one can go on accumulating words in one's memory system. We have an immense memory system; in fact no computer has yet been evolved which can compete with our memory system.

It is said that a single memory system, a single man of average intelligence, can contain in his mind all the libraries of the world. That is a possibility, one can remember so much, yet that will be only in the head.

Your heart will not be moved by it, your being will not grow through it; hence I call it false, pseudo, untrue.

True knowledge happens through meditation, not through any other way; there is no alternative to meditation. Meditation means discovering your being -- that is the first thing to be done. If we don't know ourselves what else can we know? If inside there is darkness what is the meaning of light on the outside?

The scientist knows nothing about himself and he knows so much about matter. What is the point of it all? If the knower does not know himself, what kind of a knower is he? Socrates is far more right when he says: the first thing is to know thyself then only are you moving in the right direction; then whatsoever you know will be really true. But begin with yourself.

So being here with me, being a sannyasin, simply means one thing, that is, being a meditator. And meditation can happen is thousands of ways: dancing it can happen, loving it can happen, singing it can happen. If the singer is lost in the song and the ego disappears it is meditation. If the lover is lost while making love suddenly there is meditation. If the musician is lost while making music it is meditation. When the dancer is no more and only the dance remains it is meditation.

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Hence life can be used in every possible way to help meditation. Meditation does not mean just sitting for a few minutes or a few hours, repeating a certain stupid mantra. Meditation means making your life meditative. Cooking, washing, cleaning -- everything should be transformed into a meditativeness. Do it with such totality, do it so creatively, that you become absorbed in it And the moment you are absorbed in anything -- it may be just rubbing the floor or washing your clothes or taking a shower... The activity is irrelevant, the approach is the real thing.

If you are absorbed in it, totally in it here and now, it is meditation. And out of meditation arises true knowledge, wisdom -- wisdom which liberates, wisdom which transforms, wisdom which gives you a new sense of meaning, fulfilment, contentment.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #13

Chapter title: None

13 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009135

ShortTitle: ICEBRG13

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.]

(Don't follow and imitate Christ, love and flower as Christ yourself, Osho told Veet Christiane.) Following is something wrong. The follower becomes an imitator. He becomes like a parrot. He starts repeating the master's words without attaining the consciousness that the master had.

It is beautiful to be a lover of Christ because love is vast; you can be a lover of Christ and at the same time a lover of Buddha and a lover of Lao Tzu and a lover of Zarathustra and a lover of me. Love is so vast that it can contain all the masters. But following is very narrow.

The follower of Christ cannot be a follower of Buddha, the follower of Buddha cannot be a follower of Christ. Following makes you limited. Why not inherit the whole earth? Why not inherit the whole history of consciousness? Why not include all the dimensions possible? Why exclude anybody? Because if you exclude anybody that much richness is lost.

Jesus says, "My god's mansion has many doors, many doors. But people are so foolish that they cling to one door, they become confined to one room, to one church, to one ideology, to one dogma. That is sheer stupidity. So go beyond following.

Love can make you a Christ one day. And only when you have tasted something of the consciousness of Christ, will you be able to understand Jesus, not before it. And that understanding will include all the masters -- Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Jaina -- it will not exclude anybody.

And that's my effort here. My sannyasins are not to be my followers, just lovers. Love has a dignity, a tremendous splendour, a beauty, because it gives freedom. Following is a bondage -- go beyond it.

(And to another sannyasin Osho spoke along similar lines.) Let it be something of the past, your being a Christian. Cling to it no more. Die to the past so that you 1/08/07

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can open in the present and you can allow the future to enter you.

We all live in the past. Somebody is born in a Christian family or in a Hindu family -- that is just an accident. You have not chosen to be a Christian, you have been forced to be a Christian. Somebody else is forced to be a Hindu, somebody else a Buddhist, somebody else a Mohammedan -- these are conditionings.

Your parents have given you a certain conditioning, your society has given you a certain conditioning, and to live in that conditioning is to live the life of a prisoner. It is slavery, spiritual slavery.

My sannyasins have to be free of all kinds of slaveries. Freedom is my message, freedom from the whole structure that others have created for you, from all the shoulds and should-nots that others have giver to you. Unless you are free of that you will never be able to hear your own inner voice.

Your parents will go on telling you, "Do this, don't do that," even to the very last moment of your life.

Your priests will go on nagging you, creating guilt in you; they will not allow you to be yourself. Nobody in this world is really interested in anybody being given the freedom to be himself or herself. Everybody is trying to impose his ideas on others. That's why we have created such a mess of a humanity, otherwise human beings can be immensely beautiful. We have created a very ugly lot, and the simple reason is that we have not allowed children to be themselves. We have crushed them from the very beginning, imposed structures on them.

A certain wall surrounds everybody, a subtle, very invisible wall, so you are not even aware that the wall is there. It is a very transparent wall. You can see through it and it hangs around you. So you can move and you can think that you are free but you are not free. You are not imprisoned in a prison made of stones and bricks, you are imprisoned in a prison made of thoughts, concepts, theologies, philosophies. It is a very invisible thing and one has to get rid of it. When the whole sky is yours with all its stars, then the whole existence is yours.

That's exactly the teaching of all the masters -- Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra. There is no difference, there cannot be. If truth is one, how can the teachings of those who have awakened to truth be different? Maybe languages are different, their metaphors are different, their parables are different, but different fingers can point to the same moon. Maybe somebody's fingers are long and somebody's are short and somebody's are white and somebody's are black -- that is immaterial.

Look at what the fingers are pointing at, don't be bothered by the fingers. And you will be surprised: Buddha is indicating towards the same moon as Jesus, as Moses, as Lao Tzu. And the moment you realise this, who wants to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan? Then one just wants to be freedom, awareness, love, bliss, celebration. And the moment you are free you will find Christ in you, Buddha in you, Lao Tzu in you, Moses in you -- all together! In that inner freedom and silence the whole heritage of humanity becomes yours. So don't cling to the past.

This is a second birth. The first birth has been missed because people tried to manipulate you. My effort here is to uncondition you and leave you totally free. I don't give you a reconditioning, I don't give you any ideology; I simply destroy whatsoever is surrounding you so that you are free. My work is negative because I know the truth is within you -- only your chains have to be broken and the truth will reveal itself. One need not look for it anywhere else. You are born with it, it is god's gift. It is already the case, it has not to be achieved -- we are it.!

(Meditate and all else shall be added unto you -- that's been Osho's insistence. Peace and silence are among the 'all else' he told us tonight.)

One can be calm and silent in two ways. One way is very cheap but superficial too, easy to achieve but not worth achieving; that is, cultivating a certain quality of calmness around yourself just on the surface, making it an attribute of your character so even if there is turmoil within at least to the outside world you can appear calm and quiet. That's what people, as far as the majority is concerned, have been doing. They only cultivate a shallow superficial, not even skin-deep, calmness around themselves. Just scratch them a little bit and they lose their calmness. Any accident is enough and vou will see that they are childish, immature. Somebody insults them and all calmness is gone; they go bankrupt and all calmness is gone.

Then you can see the child immediately taking possession of them; they go into a tantrum. They forget all about their character. They become angry, violent, they can murder, they can commit suicide -- these so-called calm ones.

But the society only wants you to be superficially calm. It is not interested much in your real transformation because it deals only with your outside, it has nothing to do with your inner. It has no interest in your inner world.

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Real calmness, authentic calmness, arises out of meditation -- not out of cultivating a character but out of awareness. Meditation means awareness. Becoming aware of your anger dissolves it and dissolves it from your very depths; it even disappears from your unconscious. Then you are really calms calm from the centre to the circumference. Your whole being is calm. Then nothing can disturb you, neither life nor death.

Nothing can disturb you.

Only when nothing can disturb you, when it becomes impossible to be disturbed, when even if you want to be disturbed you become incapable of it, then something really valuable has happened. It can happen only through awareness. It is not a question of practising a certain character, it is not a question of pretending. It is a question of inner mutation, a radical change, a change at the very core of your being. Then it radiates to your circumference too, it transforms the circumference automatically.

Once the centre is different you cannot have this old circumference around you. But vice versa is not true. You can paint the circumference with different colours -- that will not change your being. It will be only a painted face, a mask. That's how people are living, with masks. They are pretending everything. They pretend love and they have not tasted anything of love. They pretend religiousness; just by going to church every Sunday they thing they have become religious. It's not so easy; this Sunday religion is not religiousness. They can even pray every night before going to bed and every morning, or like Mohammedans they can pray five times a day. The same Mohammedans can kill, murder.

The religion of the Mohammedans is called Islam; Islam means peace, and Mohammedans have disturbed the peace of the world more than anybody else. Strange!

Christians believe in Jesus and go on repeating his words, that "God is love," but Christians have proved a calamity to the world. Just look at history, at what they have done. Thousands of people have been burned alive by them -- and god is love! They have murdered millions of people. "Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god" -- and they have been the most arrogant people in the world. They have been trying to show to the world that the only right religion is Christianity -- and, "Blessed are the meek, and blessed are the poor in spirit."

Poor in spirit means a man without ego -- and Christians have been very egoistic. Declaring that Jesus is the only begotten son of god is not humbleness. Then what is Buddha? Then what is Zarathustra? And what is Mohammed and what is Krishna? All are wrong, only Jesus is right, and those who follow Jesus will go to heaven and those who don't follow will suffer in hell and will suffer for eternity. And these people say that to be humble, to be meek, to be poor in spirit is their religion, love is their religion.

The so-called religious are not religious. The Hindus go on talking about beautiful things -- that god is in everyone, even in the rocks, in the trees, but god is not in the Christians, not in the Mohammedans, not in the Buddhists. In the rocks they can allow god, in the trees they can allow god, in the animals they can allow god, but not in Christians, not in Mohammedans. They are so intolerant and they preach tolerance. They say all religions are basically one, and they go on arguing that their religion is higher, greater, the only true religion. This is the approach of all the so-called religious people.

Our love is false, our religiousness is false, our so-called truth is false because we use it only when it helps us in attaining something. Whenever it does not help we forget all about it and we start using lies. We preach honesty and at the same time we say honesty is the best policy; so we make honesty also just a policy, just politics. This is how humanity has lived up to now -- it has been a very pseudo kind of existence.

My sannyasins have to drop all pseudoness. About love, about bliss, about peace, about calm, they have to drop all falseness, they have to accept reality. If they are not peaceful it is better to be aware of it. If you are not loving it is better to be aware of it. If you are jealous it is better to be aware of it rather than repressing it, because the repressed will come up again and again.

You cannot get rid of anything by repression, and all morality is repressive; hence I don't teach morality, I only teach meditation. Out of meditation a morality comes like fragrance. When the rose opens there is fragrance, when the lotus opens there is fragrance. No need to care about fragrance; just take care of the flower, just open up. And in awareness one opens.

Be aware and you will be surprised that whatsoever you become aware of, if it is wrong it evaporates, if it is right it becomes deeply rooted. This is the miracle of awareness. If you become aware of love it will not disappear; it will become deeper and deeper, it will attain new dimensions. If you become aware of hatred it will simply evaporate. The false cannot stand before awareness; the real becomes more clear in awareness.

It is as when you bring light in a dark room: darkness will disappear but the painting on the wall, the beautiful furniture in the room -- they will not disappear. In fact in darkness they were not there at all 1/08/07

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because you could not see them. It made no difference whether there was a beautiful Van Gogh painting on the wall or not, it was all dark. In darkness it was almost as if absent. As you bring in light, even a small candle, the beauty of the painting suddenly explodes. Darkness disappears because darkness is false, but the painting cannot disappear; it is a reality.

The same is true about our inner world. Bring the light of awareness in and anger will disappear because it is false, hatred will disappear, jealousy will disappear, possessiveness will disappear, ego will disappear --

they are all false entities. Love will grow, bliss will grow, calmness will grow and for the first time your life will become authentic. And to be authentic is to be religious. To be true to your own self is to be religious.

That is the only real worship, the only real prayer. That is the only offering we can make to god -- our authenticity. Except for that everything is just a ritual -- empty, impotent.

(You probably never thought of it like this, but it is always the new, never the old, that brings bliss.

Osho explained his insight in detail.)

Misery is always old and never new. It is one of the most fundamental factors to be understood: because misery is old and never new we cling to it. It is familiar, we are well-acquainted with it. We have lived with it so long that it is almost part of us and we are part of it And bliss seems to be a new territory -- unfamiliar, unknown. And the unknown always gives us fear, it scares us. Who knows what it is and where it will land us?

Hence people cling to misery. They suffer and they go on groaning and crying and weeping and they go on saying "We want bliss." But whenever there is an opportunity to move into the world of bliss they close their eyes because they want bliss, but they want it in the old way, and bliss is always new and misery is always old.

If you choose the old, you choose misery; if you choose the new you choose bliss. Let this be a key: always choose the new, the unknown, the dangerous, the insecure, because it is only through risking that one grows. And growth is bliss, maturity is bliss.

Never for a single moment cling to the old. Whatsoever is old go on dropping. The moment it is old, be finished with it, put a full stop by it. Never look back, there is nothing worth looking back at. One cannot look back, one has to go ahead, always ahead. And be adventurous. Sannyas means initiation into an inner adventure.

It is like climbing a virgin peak of a mountain -- dangerous, certainly, because nobody has travelled there before. Not even footprints are there, no maps exist, no directions; you will not find milestones on the way. You will have to grope, you will have to find your way. You will have to create your way by going towards the peak. And of course there are many dangers, but danger is always beautiful because it is through danger that we become alert, aware, conscious.

When there is no danger one tends to fall asleep. When there is danger you cannot fall asleep. You cannot afford to be asleep, you have to be fully awake. When your house is on fire can you fall asleep? You may be tired, exhausted, everything, but you cannot fall asleep. When the house is on fire you will forget all about sleep.

Just a moment before you were yawning and you were feeling tired, and suddenly a great rush of energy comes to you from some deeper source within you, from some reservoir, from some reserve energy, and you are very much alive, alert, as you are not ordinarily. In your mundane activities, repetitive activities, you need not be alert, aware; you can go on snoring and you can go on doing things. People are driving and they are asleep. People are doing all kinds of things but mechanically. There is no need to be aware.

Risk and danger and insecurity make you aware. And awareness is the greatest value because through awareness everything else comes in -- love, joy, god, truth, liberation.

(Last night Osho talked about the meaninglessness of a knowledge that isn't your own. But in his inimitable fashion he approached the subject with quite a different tack tonight.) Knowledge is futile because it is borrowed. Wisdom is of immense value because it is your own discovery. Never go for knowledge; that is going astray -- go for wisdom. Knowledge is easily available. In the libraries you can find it, in the universities you can find it. Knowledge comes through studying; wisdom comes through meditation not through study. Knowledge comes through thinking and wisdom comes through non-thinking. One has to drop thinking and become utterly peaceful. When no thoughts disturb you, when the whole traffic of the mind stops, wisdom arises in you. It is your own inner source that explodes.

When the heavy burden of the head is removed, when the rock of the mind is removed, the spring comes 1/08/07

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alive. Then one lives in one's own light and to live in one's own light is to live truly. Then life has meaning and significance, otherwise life is a drag, a boredom.

It is a long long boredom, from the cradle to the grave, a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing.

Don't miss the opportunity that becomes available by becoming a sannyasin. The opportunity is that of meditation. Here the only thing to be learned is meditation. My whole emphasis, my categorical emphasis, is or meditation.

If you can learn how to be silent and aware you have learned everything worth learning. All else will follow, you need not bother about it; all else is just a by-product.

(His address to the last sannyasin was an extension of the same theme.) Meditation is the most valuable ruby, a diamond, the most precious treasure. There is nothing compared to meditation. If you can know how to be meditative, the inner scripture becomes available to you.

Everybody's life contains a scripture, a bible. The outside bible is not the real bible. The word "bible"

means the book of the books. It is not the book of books, the book of books is within you; it cannot be outside.

The outside bible may have a few reflections of the inner, but they are only reflections. The moon reflected in the waters of the lake is not the real moon -- don't be deceived by it. Although it is a reflection of the real moon, so it has a certain resemblance to reality, don't be deceived by it and don't jump into the lake to find it, otherwise you may get drowned. And you are not going to find the moon in the lake; you will get into unnecessary trouble.

People have jumped into lakes. Into the Bibles, into the Vedas, into the Gitas, into the Korans, they have jumped. These are just lakes, beautiful lakes, certainly, and capable of reflecting something of the real. But a reflection is a reflection. The face in the mirror is not your real face. Don't go on searching in the mirror for your real face. You will not find it there -- the mirror is empty. So is the lake, so are all the scriptures --

empty. They are beautiful words but empty.

Unless you find the inner scripture that is within you, you will not be able to understand the outer Bibles, Korans and Vedas. Once you have found the inner then there is a possibility; then doors open up, then suddenly there is a great opening. Whatsoever was closed and hidden becomes available, slowly the curtain is removed. You can see that which is. And once you have found it inside you will find it in the words of Jesus, in the words of Buddha, very easily.

The man who knows the real moon is bound to know the moon in the lake. He will understand and he may even rejoice because he is not deceived; he knows perfectly well it is a reflection but a beautiful reflection. Sometimes when the lake is utterly calm and quiet, when there is no disturbance on its surface, it becomes a mirror of tremendous beauty. One can enjoy the scriptures, but not before realizing the inner truth.

So I call meditation, the greatest treasure, the most precious ruby. If you have found it you have found all. So while you are here put all your energy into understanding matters of meditation. Find out the method that fits you, that you feel attuned with, that suddenly starts ringing bells in your heart. And then go on moving deeper and deeper into it. And be patient.

Mind will create all kinds of distractions, disturbances -- don't be worried, they are natural. But if you go on persisting, if you go on patiently digging inwards, sooner or later -- if your intensity is enough, if you are totally and passionately involved in meditation, it will be sooner rather than later -- the mind disappears.

And the day the mind disappears and you are left without a mind, for the first time you know what it is to be. The beatitude of it, the benediction of it, the ecstasy of it, is simply incomprehensible; it cannot be communicated. One has to experience it -- there is no other way.

My effort here is to make every possible method available so nobody misses, so everybody can find the right method for himself. All the methods that have been tried, all the methods that have helped individuals to attain are available here. It is something rare, something that has never happened in the whole of history.

Buddhists know only one method, Sufis know only one method, Christians know only one method, Hindus know only one method and here, all methods are available. This is a meeting place of all the great masters. A great merger is happening, a great synthesis is arising.

So put your whole energy into finding out which method suits you. Once you know, that one method simply goes deep in you without any effort, you have found the right track for you.

And then god is not far away; it is just around the corner.

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #14

Chapter title: None

14 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009145

ShortTitle: ICEBRG14

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 were eight people tonight and between them quite an assortment of professions. The first in the line-up was Teresa who bore the modest description of mother on the darshan list.) Meditation is a state of total relaxation; not of concentration, not of contemplation, but of relaxation.

When one is so absolutely relaxed that there is no tension either in the body or in the mind, then suddenly there is an opening of the heart. Only in total relaxation does the heart open, it becomes a flower. Without its opening one remains unfulfilled, discontented.

The opening of the heart as a flower is the ultimate ecstasy; there is nothing more than that. One has come to the highest peak, one's life has blossomed. And that is the meaning of Teresa. Teresa means a reaper, a harvester.

When one has come to the blossoming, the flowering, the ripening, then one can reap the crop. Then life is tremendously significant, a gift of god. Otherwise it is just a possibility, and nobody can be blissful with only a possibility. It has to become actual, it has to become a realisation.

Being with me means only one thing: learning how to relax. The moment you relax you are in the present. The past is a tension. Relaxation is going beyond time -- no past, no future. One simply disappears into the infinity of the now and the here. And that is springtime as far as the inner ripening, flowering, is concerned.

(The next for sannyas was Katja, an optician from Germany.) It is only through meditation that one can arrive at spotless purity because when all the content of the mind is dropped, when there is nothing inside -- no thought, no desire, no memory, no imagination -- when the whole traffic of the mind has come to a full stop, in that gap, in that interval, for the first time you know what it means to be pure, what it means to be virgin, because you have reached virgin territory within yourself. You have never been there. You penetrate to your innermost core for the first time. Then purity explodes.

Purity is not attained through morality -- never. Morality really makes a person very impure. On the surface it gives the appearance of purity, but because it is repressive all that has disappeared from the surface becomes part of your unconscious. You become more impure than the so-called immoral person.

The immoral person is not as impure as the so-called religious, moral person, the saint -- who live through repression. The immoral person goes on throwing all his impurity out, he does not accumulate it.

He is far more innocent than your so-called saints. The sinner is far more innocent because he has not 1/08/07

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accumulated, and the saint is simply accumulating.

So whenever the saint explodes it is a volcanic explosion. The sinner cannot explode that way. He has no repressed dirt in him, he has always been throwing it out in instalments; when he was angry he was angry. But the saint goes on accumulating anger. When anger becomes accumulated then one is constantly in rage. Then one does not need any reason to be angry, one is simply angry. But that anger is inside, it becomes part of your blood stream, of your very marrow. Hence the saints look so sad, so controlled, so uptight. The sinner is relaxed.

If one has to choose between the so-called saint and the sinner, it is better to be a sinner, because at least he is human and not so uptight. It is one of the important facts to be learned from history, that sinners have changed into real saints within seconds because they don't have much to throw out. Any moment, if they come in contact with a man like Jesus or Buddha, their life is transformed.

That's how Mary Magdalene the prostitute was transformed by Jesus. One great murderer, Angulimal, who killed nine hundred and ninety-nine persons, became immediately transformed as he looked into Buddha's eyes. But the so-called saint is not so easily transformed. It is very difficult for saints to enter heaven. They are so egoistic and full of bullshit. Of course it is holy bullshit. Morality, purity, is all just imposed.

Meditation gives you freedom from being a sinner and from being a so-called saint too. It really creates a pure sky within you. It is better to say that it simply discovers that which is already there, it simply uncovers it.

So learn meditation while you are here. That single word is enough. It is a key, a master key.

(He reminded the librarian who followed next that not only was Christ not a Christian, but that if you are a Christian you don't stand a chance of being a Christ.)

Buddha was not a Buddhist. If you are a Buddhist you will never be a Buddha. And the same is true about all the masters, all the awakened ones: they don't have any isms, they don't have any dogma, they are not confined to any creed. They are free spirits, absolutely free. No church, no temple, is large enough to contain them; they belong to the infinity, they are infinite. But this is a tragedy from which the whole of humanity is suffering: somebody has become a Christian, somebody has become a Jew, somebody has become a Hindu, somebody has become a Buddhist, somebody has become a Mohammedan and so on, so forth. And they are all in a very schizophrenic state. It is bound to happen. A Christian cannot be anything but schizophrenic. And the same is true about all other so-called religious people, because you are trying to impose something upon yourself which has not grown within you.

What Christ says is his own experience and what the Christian says is his belief. And the distance between experience and belief is vast. It is unbridgeable.

Never be a believer if you want to know the truth. I am not saying become a disbeliever, because that is again a belief -- a negative belief, anti-belief.

So there are Christians -- they are clinging to a belief -- and there are people like Friedrich Nietzsche who used to sign his name "Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche." Now that is going to another extreme. Why should you sign your name Anti-Christ? Somebody is Christian, somebody is anti-Christian, but both are confined, one in a positive way, another in a negative way.

My effort here is to give you freedom from both kinds of beliefs -- the positive and the negative -- so that you can explore on your own.

The truth is as available to you as to any Jesus, any Buddha, any Krishna. It is nobody's property, it is everybody's birthright. One should explore it, one should go into it. Rather than believing one should go with an open mind. Belief closes you. You are already living with a conclusion which is not yours, which is given by others, which is really accidental. If you were brought up by a Hindu you would have been a Hindu, if you were brought up by a Mohammedan you would have been a Mohammedan. So it is just a question of conditioning, of who your conditioners were, of what kind of people you were accidentally born to. They have conditioned your mind. Their minds were conditioned by their parents, and so on, so forth.

Come out of all conditioning, become free, so that you can explore, so that you can enquire. A man who already has a conclusion becomes incapable of enquiry. The first requirement of enquiry is to drop all a priori conclusions and then one day you can experience.

And the day you experience you become a Christ, you become a Buddha on your own -- and that has beauty. Christ is beautiful but a Christian is ugly.

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(To Rosemarie, a German lawyer, Osho spoke of meditation as being a state of no-mind.) Meditation is equivalent to a state of no-mind.

The state of no-mind means agnosia, that "I know nothing." What Socrates says is exactly the meaning of no-mind, agnosia. He says "I know only one thing, that I know nothing." All knowledge dropped, one immediately becomes free of all kinds of imprisonments, because knowledge is borrowed and anything borrowed creates a bondage.

Truth has to be one's own, not borrowed. It has to be born to you, you cannot adopt it. But people are doing that everywhere. If a woman cannot give birth to a child she adopts a child, hopefully believing that this will make her a mother. But unless you carry a child in your womb for nine months you cannot be a mother. You may pretend you are, you may believe you are, you may deceive others and yourself too, but you have not earned it. And deep do, you know that the child is not yours.

How can you forget that, that the child is not yours? Those nine months when the child is in the womb are significant because the mother and the child live in deep harmony -- no separation, a deep unity. The child breathes through the mother, pulsates in the same rhythm as the mother, he goes on hearing the heartbeat of the mother.

Psychologists say that it is because the child hears the heartbeat of the mother that music gives us so much enchantment. Without that... If a child is brought up in a freezer -- and sooner or later they are going to do that -- that child will not have any desire for music, he will not have any sense of rhythm. He will be cold, utterly cold. He will not have any warmth, he has not known the mother's womb. He will be almost inhuman, because the child continuously changes with the mother's moods. And it is not one-way traffic either. The mother changes with the child's mood; it is a constant exchange. Those nine months, the pain, the heaviness, the sacrifice, are a must, otherwise the mother will miss something.

The same is true about truth: you have to mother it, you cannot adopt it.

Meditation simply means dropping all that is adopted so that you can become free to know that which is within you.

And Rosemarie means dew of the sea. A drop of water contains the whole sea, so if we can understand a single drop we will be able to understand the whole vast world of oceans because we can discover the formula of H2O from a single drop of water. Each man is a dewdrop of god. He belongs to the oceanic, to the vast, to the infinite. If we could understand ourselves we would be able to understand god too. And there is no other way to understand god, categorically there is no other way. The only way is through you.

If you can decode your innermost core -- it is just a dewdrop, but if you can understand it in its totality --

you have discovered god already. By knowing this dewdrop you know the whole sea. And then it is so easy for the dewdrop to drop into the sea and disappear into the sea. All fear disappears. The moment we know that we belong to the ultimate then there is no fear, no insecurity, no danger. We can drop our identity, we can drop our ego. That's what sannyas is all about, surrendering the ego.

And once you surrender the ego all misery is gone, all nightmares are gone, all darkness is gone. One is full of light and love and bliss.

(In the post-office worker's name, Prem Dieter, was the reminder that only love can be just.) Without love one is bound to be unjust. Love cannot be unjust -- that is impossible -- because love means compassion, love means consideration of the other. Love cannot use the other as a means.

To use the other as a means is the only immoral thing in existence. The moment you respect the other as an end unto himself love has arisen in you. Love cannot exploit, cannot oppress, cannot dominate.

Justice comes almost like a shadow, it follows love, it is a by-product of meditation; it is a chain. But everything begins with meditation. Meditation triggers many processes in you, it opens many dimensions in you. One of those dimensions is love, and love is followed by justice, friendliness towards all. And prayerfulness -- not to any god in particular but there is a kind of gratitude towards existence.

A man who knows what love is, is a blessing to himself and to others too.

(While we search outside for that which is actually our intrinsic nature we are never going to find bliss, Osho told a handicraft teacher.)

The more you search for it on the outside, the more disillusioned you become, the more disappointed, the more depressed. Life goes on slipping through your fingers. And as life starts slipping slowly slowly out of your hands and you have not found anything, obviously you feel very miserable, cheated. One starts feeling angry towards existence, angry towards god.

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And our century is very angry towards god. People may say so, they may not say so, but because there is so much misery how can they forgive god and how can they feel grateful? For what? For all this insanity, for all these wars, for all these murders and violence? Life seems to be absolutely meaningless, just a long series of frustrations. And the reason is that you are looking in the wrong direction.

God is not the cause of it It is futile to be angry with god. That's what my sannyasins have to understand

-- that if you are miserable, except for yourself nobody is responsible.

And the basic thing is that you have not looked in. The intelligent person will first look in. If it is not found there then he will go everywhere else. But those who have looked in have always found it without any exception. It is just waiting for you to come in, it is your very being.

Sannyas is an inner journey, it has no outer goal. One has to come to one's source, one has to disappear into oneself. And once you have reached your very source, your very roots, you are transformed. Then you can live on the outside, you have to live on the outside. Then there is nothing wrong because you will be radiating joy, you will be constantly in touch with your inner core. Amidst all the hustle and bustle of life you will remain calm and quiet and blissful. Nothing can disturb you, nothing can distract you. That's what real mastery is.

Jesus calls it the kingdom of god and he insists again and again that it is within you.

(Osho gave the name Veet Rago to a German primal therapist. It means going beyond attachment -- and that is the soil in which love blossoms, he said.)

Attachment, clinging, possessiveness are like rocks, hindering the path of your inner spring. But these are big rocks and they go on becoming bigger with every day. As time passes, the rocks go on becoming heavier and heavier.

The child knows, without knowing, what love is. Without being aware of what love is he knows, he knows love. Of course he does not know that he knows. That's the difference between a sage and a child.

The child knows love but knows not what love is; the sage knows love and also knows that he knows. That is the only difference, otherwise the sage has become a child again.

Sannyas has to be a second birth. And all that you have accumulated around the idea of attachment, clinging, possessiveness, domination, has to be dropped. These are the poisons.

Love people but love unconditionally. Love people but don't expect anything in return. Love people for the sheer joy of loving. And don't bother about whether tomorrow the same is going to continue or not.

Don't sacrifice today for any tomorrow because tomorrow exists not. Don't try to make your love permanent in any way because love is not plastic, it cannot be permanent. It is like a rose flower: it opens in the morning and in the evening the petals disappear. Tomorrow there will be another rose and the day after tomorrow, another rose. Roses will go on coming, but there is no need to cling to this rose. That is stupidity.

If you cling to this rose you may destroy even the possibility of another rose coming on your rose bush tomorrow, because you will be constantly pouring your energy around that which is no more.

It is really sad to see people when their love dies and they go on clinging -- very sad -- because now nothing can come out of it any more, but they go on hoping against all hope. It is a sheer wastage of energy.

But we have been taught for centuries that love is permanent if it is real -- and that is nonsense.

If it is real it cannot be permanent. If it is unreal maybe it can be permanent. Reality is momentary, it changes, it is a constant flux. You cannot step in the same river twice. It is a river, constantly moving.

A lover has to be aware of this dynamic process of life, so he loves but he is not worried about the past or the future. If the next moment the flower is still flowering, the perfume is still there, good. If it has gone, then say goodbye and move, with no complaint, with no grudge, with no anger, with no sadness, because once you understand the nature of life you will not have any of these problems.

And then love goes on growing in you. Lovers may change but the river of love goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Or they may not change. I am not saying to change them, I am simply saying if it changes, accept it with joy. If it does not change, accept that too with joy. That is non-attachment, that is love without attachment. Whatsoever happens one is blissful about it, one is thankful for it, one is always grateful for it.

Then slowly slowly love is no more a relationship, it becomes a state of your being -- you are simply love. And that is how it should be. When one is love, one is god.

(Her new name, Veet Tanha, means going beyond desire, Osho told the computer programmer from England, the last for sannyas.)

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Query:-

"Tanha" is a word used by Gautam the Buddha. His whole message is contained in going beyond desire.

It does not matter what the desire is. If it is money that is desired or power or prestige or love, freedom, truth, god -- it doesn't matter. Whatsoever you desire you create trouble for yourself. Trouble arises around desiring.

The moment you desire you have brought the future in, you have lost contact with the present. Desire can never be of the present, remember, and life is of the present, hence life and desire never meet. Desire is in the mind and mind lives in the future -- in fantasy, in imagination, in dreams. And all dreams are going to be broken sooner or later. They are dreams, they are not realities. And desire is dreaming.

Live in the moment -- that means live without desire. Live now, and now does not have enough space for desire. It has space enough for you but not for your mind.

The moment you live herenow all problems disappear. We create problems through desiring. First, the moment you start desiring something there is anxiety, tension about how it has to be fulfilled. Great thinking goes around and around: how to fulfil it? Then you start trying in every possible way to fulfil it.

Now, there are only two possibilities: either you fulfil it or you don't. If you fulfil it then there is frustration because you attain the goal of desire but you miss. You miss the thing that you thought was going to happen through it. You were longing for a beautiful palace and after twenty years of working hard and earning money the palace is there.

But inside the palace you are the same person. Do you think a palace can make you blissful if you have been in misery for twenty years? It is impossible. The palace cannot change you; you will be miserable in the palace. You were miserable in your small house, you will be miserable in a bigger house, in fact more miserable because there will be more space, more room.

If you achieve the desire there is frustration. Of course if you don't achieve it there is frustration. Both alternatives bring frustration.

The man of understanding, seeing that whatsoever you do... if you succeed you fail, if you fail you fail, goes beyond desire.

You have heard the saying that nothing succeeds like success. That is sheer nonsense. I say to you that nothing fails like success. But millions of people will not agree with me because they have not succeeded in anything so they go on hoping that once they are successful all will be settled. Only very few people become successful, only those very few people know that success brings nothing to you. But by the time they succeed they have devoted their whole life to success and now they are very embarrassed to confess the truth, that they have been fools. So they go on pretending and smiling as if they have really succeeded and all their desire is fulfilled and they are happy. But that is sheer deception; they are not ready to accept that they have been foolish, that their whole life has gone down the drain. Now at the end of their life they cannot confess it.

But a few rare individuals have confessed. Alexander the Great confessed that his life had been in vain

-- and he was one of the most successful persons in the world. But he confessed at the very last moment when the doctors said that now he could not be alive for more than a few hours -- not even twenty -- four hours, just a few hours. He wanted to be alive for at least twenty-four hours because he was just twenty-four hours away from the capital. He was returning from India to Greece and he had promised his mother that he would come back. Just twenty-four hours away but he could not reach home.

He was ready to give his whole kingdom -- and that consisted in those days of the whole world, the whole known world -- but the doctors said, "We cannot do anything, even if you give us the whole kingdom for which you have wasted your whole life." He didn't live long, he only lived for thirty-three years. He died exactly at the age that Jesus died. But he died on a bigger cross because he succeeded. He died with a golden crown.

We can understand Jesus -- he dies with a crown of thorns. But he dies with a deep contentment, with a relaxed being, knowing perfectly well that he is simply disappearing into god, that he is coming home; he has found the door to his home. But Alexander dies frustrated, very frustrated.

Buddha renounced his kingdom. Seeing the misery of his father, just before he was going to succeed him, he escaped. He must have been of tremendous intelligence -- he was only twenty-seven when he left his kingdom. His father was becoming old and he was ready to give him the kingdom and he wanted to retire. The father wanted to retire, the son escaped, because he had seen his father and his misery; "If that is going to happen to me too... My father's life is wasted and mine will also be wasted." He escaped just a single day before, before the crowning ceremony. The invitations were sent -- he left his father in a very embarrassing situation. The invitations had to be cancelled immediately because the son had escaped.

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Nobody had ever heard of such a thing! But he understood that it was futile, it was not of any significance to be there in that palace with that kingdom. He had seen through and through; he must have had very clear eyes.

He went beyond all desire. First he went into the forest with a desire to find truth or god. After six years of constant effort he dropped that too, because he again understood: "I am the same person: first I desired a kingdom, money, power, prestige, then I saw the futility of that. And for all these six years I desired truth, god, liberation -- but desire is the same, desiring is the same. Only the object has changed but I am the same person." Seeing it he dropped that desire too and immediately, that very night, he became enlightened.

When all desire disappears one becomes enlightened.

So I am giving you one of the most beautiful names, It is a great responsibility for you! (laughter) It has to be realised.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #15

Chapter title: None

15 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009155

ShortTitle: ICEBRG15

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.]

Your name, Sylvia, is a mythological name, and it symbolizes the profound silence to be found amongst the trees. But that is nothing compared to the inner silence. The outer, howsoever profound it is, remains shallow, it has no depth. One can go into a forest, one can go into the mountains -- there is certainly a silence, but it is in fact a negative silence. The marketplace and its noise is not there, the traffic noise is not there. The aeroplane passing by (an aeroplane passes by), the train (a train hoots from far off), the people and the dogs barking, are not there. It is absence of noise; hence it cannot be profound.

When you go in your touch a new kind of silence -- the presence of silence itself. It is not only an absence of noise, it is something absolutely positive, almost visible, tangible -- and that is the difference.

The outer silence can be disturbed any moment, but the inner silence can never be disturbed. No noise can ever penetrate it. And once you have felt it, even in the marketplace you will remain silent. It becomes an undercurrent. On the surface you may be involved in activities, in working, but deep down it is all silent.

Nothing disturbs it, nothing distracts you from it; you remain rooted in it. That's why my insistence is that sannyasins should not leave the world.

For thousands of years the monks, the nuns, have been leaving the world in search of silence. Of course they find a certain silence in the jungles and forests, in the monasteries -- but that is absence of noise, it is not true silence.

True silence can only be found when you move inwards. It exists in your very interiority. Then it has infinite depth and infinite height. It is immeasurable. And to know it is to know all. To feel it is to feel God.

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Query:-

Love needs great courage. It is not for cowards. The coward can always ask to be loved but he cannot love. And the problem is, unless you love you cannot get love. And the world is full of cowards; everybody is asking, "Give me love." Every I is begging, "Give me love," every heart has become a begging bowl,

"Give me love." But beggars are begging from other beggars -- how can they give? Nobody is ready to give.

It needs courage to share your being. And we are brought up in such a way that we become very miserly. We know only one kind of economics, worldly economics. If you give your money you will lose it.

You have to cling to it. You have to snatch it away from others. You have to give less and get more, then you are in profit.

But the inner economics is totally different, just the polar opposite of the outer: the more you give, the more you have; the less you give, the less you have; the more you give, the more the whole existence goes on pouring into you. You have to be constantly giving, sharing for the sheer joy of sharing.

It needs guts, but once you have experienced it, once you have come to know the inner mathematics, then there is no problem. The first step needs courage then there is no problem at all. Once you know that the more you give, the more you get, then it is very easy.

The first step in love cannot be taken by a coward. It needs somebody bold in spirit who can risk, because in the beginning it is a risk. Who knows whether you will get any response or not? Who knows? --

you may give your love and nothing may come in return. There is no guarantee. But that first step has to be taken in trust, then the second step is very easy and you can move thousands of miles. Then there is no problem at all; then the whole journey is very simple and life becomes more and more rich at each step.

And the richer you are inwardly the more aware you become of the existence of God. When you have reached to the ultimate peak of richness God penetrates you through and through, permeates you. Then you are divine, you are godly. Then God is not somebody outside you, it is something at the very core of your being -- an eternal light. But one has to go through this risk.

I teach only how to live dangerously, how to go into the uncharted sea, how to move into the unknown.

And the person who moves into the unknown and into the unknowable is the only religious person. Others are only creating a deception of being religious -- deceiving others and deceiving themselves.

(To a student from Italy he gave the name victory and immortality. They can be known via meditation only...)

Meditation is a bridge between you and god, and to know god is to be victorious and to know god is to be immortal. Victory and immortality are two sides of the same coin.

We cannot be victorious on our own. If we try to be victorious on our own we are bound to be defeated, we are doomed. The failure is absolutely certain, inevitable. It is like a small wave fighting against the whole ocean: it belongs to the ocean -- how can it fight? It is like the part fighting with the whole, the leaf fighting the tree to which it belongs. The leaf can be victorious only in the victory of the tree, not separately.

The wave can be victorious only with the ocean, not against it, not without it.

Man is victorious when he lives not according to his will but according to the will of god.

Jesus prays in the last moments, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." He drops his will. Now the wave is no more separate from the ocean; now there is no possibility of any frustration, any failure. And the moment you drop your will, your ego, your private idea of achievement, life moves on a totally different plane. Then each step is of victory and each moment you come closer and closer to immortality.

The more you disappear as a separate entity, the more you are victorious, the more god starts functioning through you, flowing through you. You become just a hollow bamboo. And on the lips of god the bamboo turns into a flute and songs start pouring through you.

That's what a sannyasin has to be: just a hollow bamboo -- surrendered to god, ready to become a vehicle, a passage, allowing god to be. A sannyasin needs to disappear as an ego. The moment the miracle happens, whenever you drop the ego, suddenly god is active within you. It is only hindered by the ego. Ego functions like a curtain between you and god.

(A messenger of god can only be a bringer of truth, he told Prem Angela when outlining the meanings of her name.)

The message of god is truth. It cannot be anything else. But one can only become a bringer of truth through love, not through logic. Logic is a pretender. It pretends to find, to conclude, to theorise about truth, but that is pseudo activity.

Logic can never give you the truth. Any logical conclusion is only a hypothesis, an inference. And truth 1/08/07

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is not an inference. It is not only a hypothesis it is something absolutely certain. It is not of the mind, it is not through logic that you can arrive at it; it is only through the heart, through love.

Logic can go on and on in circles. And of course it can create the illusion of some conclusion being achieved. But nothing is ever achieved. No philosopher has ever known what truth is, although they have all been thinking and thinking about it But it is like a blind man thinking about light. He can think for his whole life, he can theorise, but without eyes you cannot see light, and light can only be known by seeing; there is no other way.

Truth can only be known through loving, there is no other way. Truth comes directly to the heart, it never comes via the head. It has a direct route, an immediate contact with the heart. And we are all living in our head, that's why we go on missing it.

Love and love more. Love without any miserlinesss love without any desire to get something out of it.

Love as an end, but not as a means -- and then suddenly, when your heart is overflowing with love, truth descends. It is only through love that we become worthy of receiving truth. Then one becomes a messenger of god. Then one's whole life is a message, a divine message. One lives truth -- only then is one a messenger.

(Irene, a doctor of medicine from Germany, had been looking a little restless in her place. So he found just the right meaning for her name:)

Anand means bliss. Irene means peace.

It is easy to be blissful if you ignore peace. It is also easy to be peaceful if you ignore bliss. But a bliss without peace is feverish; it is excitement and tiring, exhausting. And a peace without bliss is dead, it is cold, it has no warmth. It cannot dance, it cannot sing, it cannot celebrate. Up to now people have tried either bliss or peace. Up to now it has been an either or question.

My effort is for my sannyasins to bring both together. Unless both are present together your life will be lopsided. One has to be in immense peace and yet capable of dance. One has to be singing and dancing and yet remaining rooted in peace. When these two polar opposites meet and merge in you, the ultimate height is achieved. And life then has a richness which could not have been possible if you chose one out of the two.

Of course it is easier to choose one -- obviously, because to be alert, to be aware, and to bring about this synthesis within you is a more complex phenomenon; it needs intelligence, tremendous intelligence. But that intelligence can be released through meditation.

So you have to remember these three things.... Meditation is the triggering, the process which can make you so intelligent that you can make the impossible happen.

It has happened within me so I know it can happen in everybody else. Your peace need not be cold, it can be full of warmth and love. And your bliss need not be just feverish, it can be ecstatic and yet very cool.

This paradox has to be achieved, only then is one worthy of God, because God contains all the contradictions and this is the greatest of contradictions. Unless one is vast enough, one cannot allow this to happen.

That vastness comes through meditation. If you can remember these three words, meditation, bliss and peace -- this is my ABC -- then the whole alphabet is complete.

(Danish Maj-Britt became a love song -- Prem Sugita.)

Love cannot grow in a state of misery. The miserable person cannot be loving, the miserable person becomes closed. And love needs openness, otherwise the sources of your energy will remain imprisoned.

Without love a man is an imprisoned splendour. Love opens the doors, removes the rocks, allows the springs of your life, your laughter, your dance, your song, to flow.

Song simply represents a state in which one is open and ready to pour one's heart into existence. The song is symbolic -- that one is not miserable. The birds singing in the morning -- just like them, one has to be constantly in the mood for singing, as if it is always morning, as if it is always the time for the sun to rise. Any moment the sun can rise and you have to be welcoming to it, you have to be in a receptive mood.

You have to be alert -- the guest can come any moment. The singing birds are just getting ready to welcome the sun. The flowers start opening, the trees start swaying. The whole earth becomes alive, aflame, ready to receive a new day.

The singing heart, the dancing heart, the loving heart, is ready to receive God. The miserable can go on praying but out of misery the prayer goes wrong from the very beginning. It becomes heavy and falls back 1/08/07

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down on the earth. It has no wings; it cannot go to the ultimate, it cannot reach to God.

When one is blissful, loving, when one is full of laughter, joy, when one is not serious about life but playful like a small child -- innocent, wondering about each and everything, looking at everything with awe, when the heart is singing hallelujah -- then God can come any moment. There is no need for you to go anywhere, just learn how to be receptive, open, loving, singing, cheerful -- and that's enough. There is no need to become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, there is no need to go to any church, to any temple or mosque. If your heart is overflowing with cheerfulness and love there is no need to even believe in God, he is bound to come.

Jesus says "Knock and the doors shall be opened," and I say, don't bother! Just sing and he will knock on your door. He will say, "Can I come in?"

Make yourself so blissful that even God would like to come in. Tempt him rather than knock on his door!

(Then he transformed a student from Germany into a blissful meditator.) Meditation is not a serious phenomenon. Of course for centuries people have taken it very seriously.

That's why millions have tried meditation but very few have achieved it. Seriousness kills the whole thing.

Seriousness is a disease.

One should go into meditation cheerfully, joyously, blissfully, with a deep longing to enquire, a sincere longing to enquire, but no seriousness about it

The moment you start taking life seriously you become burdened; and religious people have been very much burdened. Look at the faces of your saints -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. They look so serious, so deadly serious, as if life is a torture, as if they are burdened with mountains, as if they are carrying the whole responsibility of the world. That is sheer foolishness.

Learn the art of being a child. Take life as fun, and meditation comes very easily. And when it is possible to enter into the world of the divine dancing, singing, laughing, why go with a sad face, with a long face? I don't think that your so-called saints have ever reached heaven. God won't allow them there. They are not worthy of being allowed in heaven. Their company would be absolutely boring. They don't know how to laugh, they have forgotten all laughter.

If god has been surrounded with all those so-called saints, he must have committed suicide. Just looking at those saints must be such a boring affair. He must have taken shelter in hell! Your so-called saints are not good company at all. I have lived with them, I have been with them, and I know: they are not good company at all. They are like rocks, dead people -- rotten, stinking.

One has to be full of laughter then life comes to its totality. And in laughter the ego can be put aside so easily. In fact in laughter it disappears. When you really laugh there is no ego.

So be cheerful and be meditative. And meditation simply means silence -- but a laughing silence, a dancing silence, a singing silence, a silence not cold but warm.

(Italian Claudio was renamed a song -- Pragito. But his song was of meditation not of love, and turned out to be no song to speak of!)

Meditation is a state of absolute silence -- no thought, no desire, no ambition. One is simply in the present, neither in the past nor in the future. One is herenow, and just being herenow is enough, and the song starts arising in you -- the song celestial, the song divine.

It is not your song -- you are no more there -- it comes from something deeper than you. It does not come from your mind, from your ego, it comes from the very source of life. It is god's song. And the moment you hear your own being whispering a song to you you hear god's voice.

All that is needed on our part is to become silent so that we can hear the still small voice within. It is pure poetry, it is pure music, and once it starts arising you cannot stop it.

Gautam the Buddha is reported to have said that misery has no beginning but an end and bliss has a beginning but no end. And I agree with him absolutely. Misery has no beginning. Your misery is beginningless for your whole past, for the whole eternity that has passed, you have been miserable. But it can come to an end and it can come to an end right now, this very moment. Bliss has a beginning but then there is no end to it It goes on and on, from perfection to perfection, from great heights to greater heights.

Meditation is simply a key to open the lock. The moment your inner lock is opened misery disappears, bliss arises, darkness is no more found. Suddenly you are full of light -- hence the word "enlightenment".

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #16

Chapter title: None

16 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009165

ShortTitle: ICEBRG16

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.]

Language is absolutely futile as far as god is concerned, hence any prayer that consists of words is not prayer; it will never be heard by god. Only silence can be the bridge, can be the communion. Hence prayer has not to be said. One has to be prayerful -- it is a quality. It has nothing to do with what you say, it has something to do with what you are.

A prayerful person is religious, not a person who goes on doing prayer -- that is not going to be heard.

And that is the difference between real prayer and false prayer: false prayer consists of words, real prayer is nothing but pure meditation. It consists of silence, overflowing with love; no word, no language. There is nothing to say. What can be said to god. He knows it already. Before we know about it god knows it. It is absolutely absurd to say anything. Just to be silent is enough.

Meditation is real prayer, but meditation simply means becoming absolutely silent, still, calm, quiet.

Nothing is said but everything is heard by god. The head disappears, only the heart goes on beating. It is a pulsation of the heart that reaches the divine. There is surrender, there is trust, there is love, but no word, no language, nothing to say. One is simple in a state of absolute stillness.

Hence I don't teach prayer; I teach meditation, because to me meditation is the only real prayer which has ever been heard by god. What goes on in the name of prayer in the churches and the synagogues and the temples and the mosques is just pseudo. People are shouting as if god is deaf.

God understands no language. He understands trust, surrender, love, silence. That's his language.

The idea of being noble by birth is a substitute for real nobility. Everybody is born with a potential for nobility, but that potential can only grow in the climate of love. And it is unfortunate that the society, the world, the state, the church, and all the organizations that exist on the outside, don't provide you with the right climate.

They teach you hatred in such subtle ways that you never become aware that hatred is being taught and you are being poisoned, your very sources of love are destroyed.

Nationality means hatred. To be a Christian, to be a Hindu, to be a Mohammedan or to be a Jew means hatred. To believe in the white skin or in the black skin means hatred.

Humanity is one if you are loving.

Then there are no countries, no boundaries, no divisions, no fragments. Love unites, hatred divides. And the whole society is rooted in hatred. It is really continuously preparing for war.

History can be divided into two periods: hot war and cold war. When it is cold war it is preparation time for hot war. Don't think there is peace between two wars. No, there is not, not at all; between two wars there 1/08/07

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is only preparation. You cannot be continuously fighting; you have to have little gaps to rest and to revive and to accumulate arms and bombs again, because every war is so destructive that it takes at least ten or twelve years to have another big war. Without that time gap how can you go on fighting? But somewhere or other on earth war has always continued.

In three thousand years, five thousand wars have been fought. Humanity is just insane. It is as if we are existing here only to fight. And when people are continuously preparing for fight they become like animals, worse than animals, because animals also have a certain nobility. But man falls even below that.

Man can rise towards nobility only through love. I teach my sannyasins to be loving in every possible way. And because there are no outside sources everybody has to create his own small world of love, like an island, like an oasis in a desert. Then you have nobility, and nobility is beautiful, blissful.

The real aristocracy has nothing to do with birth. It is love that makes you aristocratic because it makes you rich, it makes you a king. It gives you the taste of the kingdom of god.

Society is full of hatred. It may talk about love -- it does talk about love -- but it only talks about it; it prepares for hate. It is a very cunning world, very hypocritical. It gives you masks which look very beautiful, and behind those masks there are ugly faces. It does not transform your face, it simply hides it. It creates a division in you, it makes you schizophrenic, split. You become two. And then there is trouble, then there is continuous conflict.

Love is a rebellion, a rebellion against all these stupid structures -- the church, the state. This whole structure is stupid, but because it has existed for thousands of years we have become accustomed to it, we think this is the only possibility. It is not so.

Man can live in a totally new way -- without wars, without hatred, without killing others, without murders. There is no need for all that. How much energy is wasted in that? Almost ninety-nine point nine percent. Then nothing is left, then one feels exhausted.

Love needs overflowing energy. We are like a rosebush which is continuously fighting with other rosebushes. There is not time to grow roses, no energy left for roses. Roses come only, remember, when the rosebush is overflowing with juice. If there is no overflowing of juice there will be no roses. The rosebush will exist in a retarded way -- pale, almost on its deathbed. How can it grow roses? There will be no dance, no song, there will be no joy. It will not welcome the sunrise, it will not be receptive to the songs of the birds, it will not sway and dance in the wind. Everything will look like a drag.

That's how man has become: a rosebush without roses. So love is our flowering. But flowering, remember, always happens only when you have more energy than you need for ordinary, day-to-day, routine work; only then can you blossom, can you flower. Flowering is a luxury, it is not a necessity. Love is a luxury, it is not a necessity. One can exist without love, but only exist; one cannot live.

Mere existence is not life. And people are only existing, vegetating, somehow surviving. For survival, bread and butter and shelter are enough, but there will be no grandeur, no splendor. Your inner sky will remain utterly dark. There will be no stars, no full-moon night will come.

One has to rebel -- rebel against all the nonsense that is being taught from the outside by the universities, by the churches, by the priests, by the politicians. One has to rebel against each and everything.

It is a long, long conspiracy, very deep rooted.

Unless one rebels against it all in toto -- you cannot even say that we can choose a few good things and we can drop the others, the bad things... They are all interconnected. If you choose one thing, others will come in the wake of it. One has to drop it totally; there is no question of choosing. They are all interdependent, they exist as one organism.

Rebellion means dropping the whole past and living in the present without any tradition, without any mind, without any knowledge; living like a child, as if you are the first man, you are Adam. That is rebellion.

Adam really rebelled -- even against God he rebelled. He must have been a beautiful man. He was the first man, but still, one thing that he did of tremendous importance was that he rebelled. He rebelled against some unjust order from God; it was unfair. He did not obey. And it is good: if he had obeyed, we would not be here at all. We are here because he disobeyed. We owe that much to Adam -- and more particularly to Eve. That's why I have so much respect for women: it is really my respect for Eve. And I have even more respect for the serpent. He was the first enlightened person, the serpent that persuaded Eve and triggered a great rebellion.

Each human being has to be an Adam, an Eve, again and again. Drop the past as it it never existed, 1/08/07

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always start from ABC, fresh, from scratch. And you will have a beautiful life, you will have an adventurous life. You will have an ecstatic quality in your life.

(Ralf's new name meant bliss and wisdom. They are necessarily related, Osho explained.) Bliss and wisdom are two sides of the same coin -- become blissful and you will be wise. But the so-called religions have been teaching you just the opposite; they teach you guilt -- and how can a guilty person be blissful? He is bound to be sad, he is bound to be serious. This is a great calamity that has happened to humanity.

That's why your saints look so sad, with such long faces. They cannot laugh, they cannot rejoice, they cannot dance, they cannot sing. They are incapable of love, because without bliss there is no possibility of love. And whatsoever they think is their knowledge is just borrowed rubbish; they don't know a thing. They are simply like parrots repeating scriptures.

My effort here is to destroy that parrotlike quality in you. Unless one drops all borrowed knowledge one cannot be wise. At the beginning of wisdom is in being blissful. So drop all ideas of guilt -- there is no need to feel guilty. You are perfectly good as you are. This is the way god has made you -- the whole responsibility is his.

Rejoice in the way you are -- what can you do? The moment you understand this, the moment you accept yourself as you are, a tremendous miracle happens: you start growing immediately because guilt disappears and cheerfulness enters your being. And in the climate of cheerfulness growth becomes possible.

Hence I say laughter is one of the most religious qualities. A man incapable of laughter is irreligious.

Hence I cannot believe the Christians who say that Jesus never laughed. I say categorically they are wrong, they must be wrong, they are bound to be wrong. In fact only a man like Jesus knows how to laugh, how to love. And Jesus goes on saying again and again to his disciples, "Rejoice. I say unto you rejoice, again and again rejoice."

My sannyasins have to be pure laughter and love and bliss. Then wisdom comes on its own. It does not come from the outside, it grows within you. When you are dancing and singing with joy, with deep acceptability of yourself as you are, wisdom starts happening. You have a clarity, an unconfused clarity, you attain insight into things. Then you know on your own what is right and what is wrong, what is essential and what is non-essential. And the moment you know on your own, you cannot do the wrong.

The non-essential starts withering away and the essential becomes more and more settled in you. That's what sannyas is all about, becoming centred in the essence.

(It might be just a spark but we all have the potential to love, Osho told a Japanese woman, an antique dealer.)

Right now if you look inwards there will be only darkness. If you start becoming more and more loving you are in for a great surprise: in moments of deep love if you look in you will find light. When one is really and totally in love, one can go on searching inside and one will not find any darkness anywhere.

Hence when Buddha says "Look within -- there is light," and we try to look, but we don't find light, we start thinking that he must be crazy, because millions of people agree with you that there is no light, only darkness. Only very few people -- a Jesus, a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Rinzai -- very few people have disagreed with the majority. Of course they are so few that we can easily ignore them, but the truth is with those few people.

This is my experience too: when you are full of love there is no darkness. If there is darkness that shows only one thing, you have not yet been able to grow your love.

Love more and more, love for love's sake. Love without any demand, just enjoy loving itself, as an end unto itself, and the time is not very far away when you will see the light. The moment your love has become a fire within you, your whole being becomes a flame. Then wherever you are there is light. Then not only from within but from without also darkness disappears.

The last words of Buddha on earth were "Be a light unto yourself." And Buddhists have been trying to be light unto themselves without love, hence they have failed.

The secret of life, the secret of light, is in love. Love is the key.

(Meditation is spiritual spring-cleaning he told a cook from Japan.) Meditation simply means becoming empty of all the contents of mind: memory, imagination, thoughts, desires, expectations, projections, moods. One has to go on emptying oneself of all the content. The greatest 1/08/07

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day in life is when you cannot find anything in you to throw out -- all has been thrown out -- when there is only pure emptiness. In that emptiness you find yourself, in that emptiness you find your pure consciousness.

That emptiness is empty only as far as mind is concerned, otherwise it is overflowing, overfull; it is full of being -- empty of mind but full of consciousness. So don't be afraid of the word "empty", it is not negative. It negates only the unnecessary luggage which is of no use and which you are carrying just from old habit, which does not help but only hinders, which is just a weight, a mountainous weight.

Once it is removed you are free from all boundaries, you become as infinite as the sky. That experience is the experience of god or Buddhahood or whatsoever word one likes. Call it dhamma, call it tao, call it truth, call it nirvana -- they all mean the same thing.

(Meditate then decorate your place with bliss and you've made a space that god simply can't resist. Osho was addressing the third member of the Japanese trio.)

People who are living in misery, living a life like a desert, cannot hope that god will become a guest in their being -- it is impossible. We have to create the right situation for truth to happen to us; we have to deserve it, we have to be worthy of it. And bliss makes one worthy, makes one attuned. It creates the right situation.

Bliss is like spring: suddenly all the trees start blooming, life takes on colors, it becomes all-colorful. I have chosen orange for my sannyasins because in India orange is the color of spring, because so many flowers of different shades suddenly blossom. Out of nowhere they appear; when the climate is ready, receptive, they come. Exactly like that god comes, truth comes.

Just create the right climate. Bliss is the name of that climate.

Meditation helps you to remove all the layers of dust that have gathered on the mirror of your consciousness. It removes all the clouds, the sun starts shining forth and there is great clarity, transparency.

You can see through and through without any barrier, without any screen, with no thought interfering; you can just see. In that seeing bliss becomes very clear, so clear that the distance starts disappearing. The very clarity brings it closer and closer to you.

When you are absolutely clear bliss is not outside, it is your innermost core The pilgrim itself is the goal, the seeker is the sought, but because we are confused we go on searching for it somewhere else and of course we cannot find it anywhere else.

God is hiding within you, he is waiting there. We rush everywhere and he goes on giggling within you, laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it. He goes on asking, "Where are you going? What are you doing?"

But you are in such a hurry -- who bothers to listen to the innermost core? You are in such a noise, your head is such a marketplace, that that still, small voice gets lost. But god has infinite patience; he goes on calling you forth again and again. He goes on waiting for you: some day, in some right moment, there will be a clarity and you may be able to hear, you may not be noisy.

All that I can do here is to help you to become less noisy, more silent, less confused, more clear. I don't give you any ideology -- I have none, I don't teach any theology -- I have none.

My whole effort is to help you to get rid of all theology, ideology, philosophy, to get rid of thinking as such, because thinking is just smoke and in that smoke you cannot see. It is like mist surrounding you. You cannot see even your own hands, you cannot even see your own self. What else can you hope to see? It keeps you blind.

Meditation simply helps you to become clear, helps you to open your eyes, helps you to see things as they are -- and immediately the miracle: bliss goes on coming closer and closer and closer, and the moment you are absolutely clear, it is within you.

The day Bodhidharma became enlightened he laughed and for seven days he could not stop laughing.

His friends and colleagues who were also meditating with him started asking him, "Are you mad or something? What has gone wrong?" And he said, "For the first time something has gone right and I am laughing because of how ridiculous it appears! I was searching for something which I already have within me and which has always been within me. And for millions of lives I have searched for it everywhere."

It is within you!

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #17

Chapter title: None

17 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009175

ShortTitle: ICEBRG17

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.]

The bear is a symbol of resurrection, and meditation begins in courage and ends in resurrection. The coward cannot meditate because the first requirement of meditation is to be absolutely alone. Not that one has to go to the mountains -- that is not real aloneness. One has to go inwards; it is not an outward journey at all. But to go in means to leave everybody out. You cannot be accompanied by your friends, by your beloved; nobody can go with you. And that creates fear, hence very few people ever try to go in.

Everybody is interested in travelling, people are even interested in going to the moon where nothing is to be found. But the inner journey which can give you a new life, a resurrection, is not even attempted by millions -- not even thought about, not even dreamt about, for the simple reason that it needs guts, courage.

You will be all alone, absolutely alone. The whole world will disappear as if it exists not. The deeper you go, the more illusory the world becomes, as if you had seen it in a dream and it is no more. You are so alone that nobody else exists. But this is a basic requirement to be fulfilled.

Courage is the foundation of all religious growth, of all spiritual growth. And if one is courageous enough, then of course one can have infinite bliss, one can have absolute freedom, one can have divine life.

That is resurrection: dying to the old pattern, the old gestalt, the old you, and beginning anew. It is a rebirth.

Sannyas is the whole process of rebirthing.

(The pointer in Prem Wolfgang's name was that love takes guts!)

... because you can love only if you are ready to drop the ego -- and that is the hardest thing in life to do, the most difficult thing;. One can renounce money, family, power, prestige, everything, but when it comes to renouncing; the ego it becomes almost impossible -- -not impossible, but almost impossible. One can renounce money because the ego can en joy it: "Look how much I have renounced!" You can renounce the family, the society; you can go to the mountains or to a monastery, and the ego will be going with you, rejoicing that "I am not an ordinary person -- am a holy man!"

But when it comes to renouncing the ego, the ego resists. It gives you a tough fight, a tough time. You push it out from one side, it comes back in from another side. You throw it out from the front door, it comes in from the' back door. You try to be humble, it enters your humility; it starts bragging about humility. It says, "Look! There is nobody more humble than me!" Its names are very subtle.

One needs courage because it is almost like dying. It is a death in a way, because we have lived with the ego, we have become so identified with it -- there is not even an inch's difference. It is not like taking your clothes off, it is like peeling your skin -- it hurts. Hence courage is needed, clarity is needed, understanding is needed, awareness is needed, and tremendous love is needed, trust is needed. Unless you know what love is you will not be able to drop the ego.

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So many so-called saints have failed for the simple reason that they tried to drop the ego but they never tried simultaneously to grow towards love. Then where will your energy go? If you drop the ego, great energy is released, and if you are against love then that energy will go on again creating a new ego.

So these are two parts of the same process: drop the ego and put your total energy into love so that nothing is left for the ego to survive on, so there is no nourishment left and it dies of starvation. As the ego dies your love explodes. And to know love is to know god. To love is the only religion. One need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, one only needs to be loving and one is religious.

(Mind is doubt -- and doubt is a drag was the gist of Osho's next address.) Doubts exploit you; they are parasites. They leave you utterly exhausted, tired, bored. They suck all juice out of you, they leave you just like a dry bone.

That's why so many people in the world look so serious, so sad. The world is not serious, the world is rejoicing. Look at the trees and the birds and the animals and the stars and the rivers. The whole existence is in a continuous celebration except for man, because only man can live in the heart and only man can live in the head. The choice is open. It is not open for anybody else; only man has the freedom to choose. And we have chosen the mind because mind helps in the world to have more money, to have more power, more prestige; it helps in fulfilling your so-called desires and ambitions. But it destroys you. It destroys all that is worth having: it destroys your very soul.

The heart has to be chosen. Once you choose the heart, loyalty, trust, love, start flowering. One wonders where all the doubts have suddenly gone. Just as you bring light into a room and the darkness disappears, the same happens with the heart. Once you start choosing the heart instead of the head, all doubts and all darkness disappears. Suddenly your life is full of light, full of love. And love is a rejoicing. Love is festive, it is playful. And I call this quality of love, of trust, godly, divine.

There is no way to prove god as far as mind is concerned. No argument can quench the infinitely doubting quality of the mind; there is no way. But the heart never doubts; the heart simply knows, it knows intuitively -- no proofs are required. God is self-evident for the heart, just as light is self-evident for the person who has eyes. Only the blind person thinks about light and only the blind person think's about god.

The heart has its own eyes, its own approach towards reality -- a direct, immediate connection with reality.

Be in the heart, live through the heart. Enhance the qualities of the heart, nourish them. Even if you have much to lose in the world don't be worried, because if you gain in the inner world you are gaining something eternal. In the outside world everything is momentary. You may have money today you may not have money tomorrow. You may be powerful today, tomorrow you may not be powerful. You may be a president today, tomorrow you may be nobody.

Before the communist revolution in Russia the prime minister of Russia was a man called Kerensky.

After the revolution everybody forgot about him; he escaped from Russia, and then nobody ever thought about what happened to him. Just a few years ago he died in New York -- he was a grocer! For all those fifty years he was living there, just running a small shop, and nobody was even aware that he was once one of the most powerful men in the world.

Everything is momentary on the outside. And one thing is certain, that death will take everything away, and death is inevitable. But in the inner world whatsoever you gain is going to be with you; even death cannot destroy it. You will go on carrying it with you. The body will be consumed by death, the head will be consumed by death, but your love, your joy, your truth, will go with you. That is the real treasure.

(My religion is bliss, Osho told Anand Dharma, and if it has any commandment it is to celebrate as many moments of your life as you possibly can.)

Don't think that a few things are mundane and a few other things are sacred. For the man who knows how to rejoice everything is sacred. There is no division between the world and god -- it is all divine.

Perhaps the world is manifest god and god is the unmanifest world. And when one rejoices, why make any difference between the manifest and the unmanifest? The flower is the manifest seed and the seed is the unmanifest flower -- they are one. So is this world and that, this shore and that. There is no need to divide materialism and spiritualism -- they are all together.

So rejoice in the smallest things: taking a shower or drinking tea. Don't make any difference. To the man who knows how to be blissful drinking tea is as sacred as any prayer can be, his sleep is as sacred as any religious activity.

Cheerfulness brings a new vision, a new perspective. It transforms the whole world. Then chopping 1/08/07

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wood and carrying water from the well is as beautiful as the greatest creativity. And this is the magic of sannyas, to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. The secret lies in this small word, "bliss".

So you have to enquire deeply into the world of bliss, and not only enquire but start living it, so that for twenty -- four hours round the clock whatsoever you are doing becomes religious. If you are sad you miss the point. So don't be sad and serious. Laughing, dancing singing live your life in a very simple and humble way, without any desire to improve, to attain something to be ambitious, because life is so beautiful in its ordinariness that any improvement is going to destroy that beauty.

(The birds and the bees can teach us a few things, he went on to tell the next sannyasin.) Learn from the birds their song, learn from the trees their dance, learn from the rivers their music. And once you open up you will be surprised, the whole existence is such a poetic phenomenon!

One need not enquire into the meaning of it all; then it becomes a philosophical enquiry. The moment you ask, "What is the meaning of this?" you have lost track of poetry. The moment you start dancing with a tree without asking what is the meaning of this swaying tree in the wind?" you are being poetic. And the miracle, the miracle of miracles, is that the person who starts thinking "What is the meaning of it all?" will never find the meaning, and the person who does not care about the meaning immediately finds it. Dance with the trees, sing with the birds, swim in the ocean, and you will find the meaning -- without seeking it.

Just become part of this beautiful existence.

Sing your song, because everybody has come with a song in the heart and unless you sing it vou will remain unfulfilled. You have to do your thing -- that's what I mean by singing your song. Be creative, in whatsoever way it is. Whatsoever you feel like doing, do it! Don't be bothered about what others say; that is irrelevant. Insist that this is what you want to do and this is what you are going to do, irrespective of all the consequences. Don't compromise.

The poet is really a rebel, he never compromises. If he compromises he is not a poet, he is a businessman. And if you don't compromise your love will grow in leaps and bounds. Sing your song and you will find love coming, arriving from some hidden sources within you. It will fill you; overfill you! It will start overflowing you; it will start reaching others.

That's how I have reached millions of people. I never go anywhere. I simply go on sitting in my chair!

Buddha at least travelled from one village to another for forty-two years. Mahavir travelled, Jesus travelled.

I may be the first man who simply sits in his chair in his room, never even going outside! But my song is reaching people, without any effort it is reaching millions. You just have to be loving, and then you have such infinite energy that it is bound to affect the whole quality of existence.

But insist on one thing and that is, "I have to be myself." I teach my sannyasins: be yourself. Never compromise, don't imitate -- sing your song. And you will find love and you will find bliss, and ultimately you will find truth and god.

(The natural spring of wisdom can only flow when it is unimpeded by the rocks of knowledge, Osho explained.)

Everybody brings wisdom with him, but we become overburdened with knowledge that others are very eager to impose upon us. Parents, teachers, the priests, the politicians... everybody is eager to impose his knowledge upon the child, and they destroy the wisdom of the child. The wisdom becomes so burdened with stupid knowledge -- with geography and with history which are sheer nonsense -- and with scriptures.

The Bible and the Koran and the Gita... if they are not your own experience they only burden you. They can burden you so much that you stop moving -- the burden can be mountainous. And as you grow in age, more and more knowledge goes on accumulating.

My effort here is to help you get rid of knowledge, because wisdom is your very nature. If you can get rid of knowledge you will be surprised: underneath all this rubbish there is a diamond which you have brought with you, which has not to be given to you. It is already there, it has to be brought out.

That's exactly the meaning of the word 'education': to draw out. But what the educationalists have been doing for centuries is just the opposite; it is miseducation, it is not education. They are not drawing out your nature, they are stuffing something in you from the outside, they are forcing you to swallow it. And of course they are very clever in forcing you. They punish you, they reward you, they manipulate you in every possible way. And the child is really innocent. He starts doing what he is told to do, and by the time he is capable of doing something on his own, he is so overburdened that he completely forgets that he had an insight of his own.

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Wisdom means your own insight. It has not to be taught to you, it needs no tuition. That's why we call it intuition. It is inner, it is already a given fact; it is a gift from God.

So drop all knowledge and search within yourself for your intrinsic nature. And that's what wisdom is. It is very innocent. It gives you clarity, transparency; it makes you more and more aware about yourself, about others. It awakens you. It creates an inner light. And once you have that light clear, unburdened, unclouded, your life starts moving in the right direction. You need not force it to move in any direction, it starts moving of its own accord. You have found the key -- it is hidden in you.

The function of the master is not to teach you anything, not to help you to learn something, but just the opposite: to help you unlearn so that you can find your own source.

(You can get to know god through prayer -- but that's a somewhat unsophisticated way to get acquainted, Osho told the last initiate, a man from Denmark.) Prayer is for immature persons, for childish persons, for retarded people, because prayer means hypothesising a god outside and talking to that god and shouting and telling him, "I am miserable and you are great" and praising him. The whole thing is childish because you have first projected a god -- that god is your creation. Hence the Hindu has his own projection, the Mohammedan has his own, the Christian has his own.

There are three hundred religions in the world and at least three thousand sects of those religions, so there are at least three thousand concepts about god. God is one -- how can there be three thousand concepts? They are our projections. First we create a god, an idea, a dream, and then we start talking to that dream. It is almost like auto-hypnosis: you are hypnotising yourself by your own words, and nobody answers. But one can befool oneself totally.

It is a very childish approach. That's why we call god the father because the child needs a father; or we call god the mother because the child needs a mother.

Gautam the Buddha says there is no god forget all about it. In fact he is saying prayer is not for the grown-up people it is not for mature people. For mature people meditation is the way. Meditation means no hypothesising about god on the outside. Meditation simply means becoming silent a centering becoming rooted in your very being.

And in that rootedness for the first time you start finding a new quality. That new quality can be called godliness -- not god but godliness. Because it is something which vou have never known some new name has to be given to it -- call it truth, liberation, freedom. It is such a transcendental quality, that "godliness" is a perfectly beautiful word for it. But you won't find any god, not some ancient, old man sitting somewhere above the clouds. That is very childish.

Carl Gustav Jung has written in his memoirs, "Whenever I think of God sitting above the clouds I am reminded of my own childhood ideas" -- because his father was a priest so he had been continuously sermonising about god in heaven. And the child was worried that if that god suddenly starts pissing then?...

A child is a child! Or he defecates? So Carl Gustav Jung says "I used to dream that he was pissing and the whole world was drowned in his piss! I would come out of my dreams so afraid and scared. "What kind of god is this sitting there? Sooner or later he will piss! How long can he control it? Unless he is dead... then that is another thing.

But the whole idea is childish, stupid. There is no god sitting somewhere, but there is certainly godliness within you. That is found through meditation, not through prayer. And if you find your godliness through meditation, then a new understanding about prayer arises too. Then prayer is not praise of god, praise of the lord. Then prayer is just a thankfulness towards the whole existence for how much it has given to us. It is gratitude. Then prayer also has a different quality. You don't say anything you simply bow down to the earth, to existence, to the sun, to the moon, to the mountains not towards somebody in particular, not towards some person but just towards the whole. It is pure gratitude! Then prayer is also beautiful -- but that prayer is known only by those who have found godliness through meditation.

Otherwise the people who have gathered in the churches and the temples and the mosques are all retarded people... retarded people go there. If you want to count how many retarded people are in the world you can simply go into the temples and churches and the mosques and just count and you will find the right people there!

Psychologists say that the average mental age of humanity is twelve years. Certainly it is a retarded thing, this humanity is very retarded. A person may be eighty years old and his mental age is twelve. Of course his religions attitude cannot be more than that of a twelve-year old. His approach towards life will be 1/08/07

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childish.

I teach meditation, and then one day prayer is possible, but that is a totally different phenomenon. It has nothing to do with prayer as you have known it I insist on meditation. Once the flower of meditation opens in you and you feel godliness, you experience godliness, then there is a natural gratitude. It is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Buddhist, it is simply gratitude towards the whole. That is prayer. It is the fragrance of meditation.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #18

Chapter title: None

18 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009185

ShortTitle: ICEBRG18

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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.]

(Osho began the evening by talking about bliss as a flowering of aloneness.) Bliss means courage, nothing else. It is already there inside, but to go inside is not for the cowards because the coward always wants company, a crowd. He feels at ease with the crowd; surrounded by people he feels secure. The coward is like a sheep. The sheep is perfectly happy with the crowd; alone, great fear arises.

An inside journey is a journey towards absolute aloneness; you cannot take anybody there with you.

You cannot share your centre with anybody, not even with your beloved. It is not in the nature of things; nothing can be done about it. It is easier to go to the moon because you can have company. Even if you don't have company you can have a connection with the earth; you can phone the people here. You can get directions from the outside, from the far away earth, but still you are connected. The moment you go in, all connections with the outside world are broken; all bridges are broken. In fact, the whole world disappears.

That's why the mystics have called the world illusory, maya, not that it does not exist but for the meditator, one who goes in, it is almost as if it does not exist. The silence is so profound; no noise penetrates it. The aloneness is so deep that one needs guts. But out of that aloneness explodes bliss. Out of that aloneness, the experience of god. There is no other way; there has never been any and there is never going to be.

(Because John was the name of the most loved disciple of Jesus, the name has that connotation, Osho explained to a Dutch analyst. And then he described the three different kinds of people who seek truth.) One is the student. His enquiry is mental, of the head, intellectual. He wants to gather a little knowledge of what truth is all about; his enquiry is superficial. The second category consists of disciples. Their enquiry is of the heart, not of the head. They really want to know truth, not just knowledge about truth; they want to experience it. They are not satisfied with mere knowledge, they want an authentic experience. Hence the disciple moves on a different plane from the student, the scholar. The student collects information, the 1/08/07

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disciple asks for transformation.

And the third category consists of the devotees. They are those to whom the transformation has happened , who have come to experience, to taste, who have found a glimpse of truth. The disciple is still seeking, the devotee has arrived. That is the third category.

Only a disciple can become a devotee. The student cannot become a devotee; first he will have to become a disciple. If the student remains a student for his whole life he will be missing the whole point. He will talk about truth, about love, about god, about meditation. But all knowledge is borrowed, it is not his own experience. The disciple has a little bit of experience because he moves from logic to love, from head to heart. The heart is closer to being. The student is in the head, the disciple in the heart, and the devotee reaches his very being. But nobody can bypass disciplehood -- it is a must.

And the only thing that can make you really a disciple and ultimately a devotee is meditation. One has to learn how to be silent, still, calm and quiet. The moment you know the art of being silent, the miracle starts happening. You start becoming a beloved disciple, you are no more an ordinary disciple. And when meditation is complete, entire, you are transformed into a devotee. Then the whole world is divine. For a devotee all is god; except for god, nothing exists.

That is the goal of sannyas. One may come here as a student, but one should not go from here as a student. If one goes as a disciple one has taken a great jump. And if you are a disciple then it is not very difficult to be a devotee. The first gap is bigger -- from the student to the disciple. The first change is very radical; the second change is very gradual. It comes on its own, of its own accord; you need not strive for it.

The disciple one day naturally becomes a devotee, but it is not so with the student. The student may remain a student for his whole life. The pundits, the scholars, the theologians, the professors, the philosophers --

they remain only students.

Sannyas means disciplehood, and sannyas is fulfilled when you have become a devotee. When the trees and the mountains and the sun and the moon and the stars, all represent one reality, one god, you have come home.

Pankaj means a lotus, and the lotus has always represented something of tremendous value. Two things particularly have to be remembered. One: the lotus grows out of mud -- the most beautiful flower grows out of dirty mud. It means that the dirty mud contains something beautiful. So don't reject the dirty mud, because it contains lotuses.

One has to know the art of how to grow lotuses. And it is a miracle, one cannot believe it! If one has not seen a lotus growing out of mud one cannot believe it; one cannot conceive that this beautiful flower, this delicate flower, with such fragrance, with such colour, has come out of ordinary mud.

Man is born as ordinary mud, but man contains a lotus -- just in the seed. Man has not to be rejected, man has to be accepted and transformed. The world has not to be denied, because it contains something infinitely beautiful. It is not on the surface, it has to be brought to the surface.

Hence I am not against anything: not against body, not against the world, not against the outside. I am not against anything, but I am for transforming everything. Whatsoever god has given is something valuable; if we cannot understand its value it is our fault, our limited vision.

The second thing to be remembered about the lotus is: it lives in the water, but the water touches it not.

It has such velvety petals that even if dewdrops gather on those petals they remain separate. That's why on a lotus petal the dewdrop looks so beautiful, it looks like a pearl because the lotus remains untouched.

That's why I say it precisely defines my vision of sannyas. A sannyasin has to live in the world but has to remain untouched like a lotus. I am not for renunciation, I don't teach escapism. I teach live in the world but don't let the world enter you. Be in the world but don't be of the world. Remain aloof, remain cool, remain untouched. And then the world has much to teach you. The world is a device of god; it is a situation in which to grow and mature. Those who escape remain retarded.

I have come across many people in the Himalayas who have lived the life of an escapist for their whole life, for thirty years, forty years, fifty years. But they look retarded, they don't look intelligent; they don't have the sharpness. Their sword has gathered rust because they escaped from the challenges of life.

Live in life -- all those challenges are good. It is only through those challenges that one grows. Growth comes through the hard way. Never choose the easy way, otherwise you will remain immature. Never choose the short-cut, otherwise you will miss many scenes and scenery on the way. Live life in its totality, intensely but with awareness. Awareness becomes like a velvety coating on you and keeps you separate from the world. And that very art is sannyas.

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(The real Christian is Christ, Osho told a German psychologist.) Friedrich Nietzsche has said that the first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years before -- the first and the last! And he is right. He was a madman, but about many things his insight is far deeper than that of your so-called pope!. Sometimes it happens that mad people have greater insight than the so-called sane people because the so-called sane are not really sane.

Christians are not really interested in Christ, neither are Buddhists interested in Buddha, nor are the Hindus really interested in Krishna -- because it is not a question of worship. Christ is not Jesus' name, his name is Jesus. He attained to a certain peak of consciousness. That peak is known in the West as Christ-consciousness, in the East we call it Buddha-consciousness. It is the same, it is the same peak. There are different languages describing the same peak.

One can be a Christian only if one attains Christ-consciousness, and that is possible through meditation.

Not by reading the Bible, not by going to the church, not by following the Christian ritual, not by believing in a certain dogma and creed, but by purifying your consciousness, dropping all that is unnecessary, non-essential, so that only the essential remains in you. The moment only the essential remains in you there is a great explosion of light. And that experience makes one a Christ or a Buddha or a Jina or a Krishna; it matters not what word is used.

Never be bothered with words. Remember the meaning and forget the words.

A man without love is like a flower without fragrance. A flower without fragrance is not of much value.

A man without love is also not of any value at all. A man without love is an empty temple -- god is missing.

Jesus says god is love. I say love is god, I make love far more important than god, because when love comes god automatically happens. So one can ignore god but one cannot ignore love. Love is the very bridge. And by love I don't mean the love that is known ordinarily -- that is lust, it is not love. It is desire, it is not love. It is exploitation of the other as a means, it is not love.

Love knows no lust; it is not a desire. Love is never a beggar. Love gives and never asks for any return.

Love gives for the sheer joy of giving. Love shares one's bliss, because one comes to know slowly slowly that the more you share it, the more it happens. The more you give, the more you have.

So it is not a question of whom to love, it is a question of being in a state of love, unaddressed, to whomsoever it may concern. No need even to put the name on it. Love addressed to a particular person becomes limited, narrow. And a narrow love is not real love; it becomes crippled. Love is so vast, you cannot narrow it down.

It is as stupid as somebody deciding "Because I love you, I will breathe only in your presence. So when you are not there I will not breathe."

Then the next time will never happen, the next meeting is impossible, because that man will be dead!

Even when the lover is not there or the beloved is not there, one has to breathe.

Love should be like breathing. It should not be a relationship but like breathing -- natural. So whosoever comes to you, your love is there just is as your breathing is there. If you pass by the side of a tree, your love showers on the tree. You say hello to the tree -- you can even shake hands! And when you sit on a rock, of course you enquire "How are you?"

A lover is continuously in a state of love -- that's what I mean by love. Then it takes you by and by towards god. The ultimate peak of love is god. God is not a person, it is the ultimate fragrance of love, a living fragrance.

I like to use the word "godliness" rather than "god", because god gives you a sense of a person.

Godliness is far better because it gives you only a sense of fragrance -- a presence not a person.

Love, and love unconditionally. Love, and love without asking for any return. Love as an end unto itself, and that is true prayer. And love the whole existence without any discrimination, without any choice. Love choicelessly, and then the day is not far away when you will become aware of godliness surrounding you, reaching you from every nook and corner of existence. You will become fire with it, aflame!

(And then to Prem Peter Osho said: )

Love is the rock on which the temple of life can be built. Without love all houses are made on sands, shifting sands. One is bound to be disillusioned sooner or later, one is bound to be disappointed because the whole effort can collapse any moment. You don't have a real foundation to your house. It is more or less a house made of playing cards. It looks beautiful but just a little breeze and it collapses.

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Make your life rooted in love and then it never collapses. Love is the only experience that defies death, that knows no death. A man of love is unafraid of death because in knowing love he has known something of immortal existence. Tasting love he has tasted something of eternity and he knows that in him there is something which is going to persist. No death can destroy it, no fire can burn it. There is no possibility of its being erased from existence. The certainty is so deep, so self-evident, that it needs no other proof. You simply know it is so.

But the people who make their houses without the foundation of love are simply fools. Life will go on slipping out of their hands, and sooner or later death knocks on the door and they will not have any shelter against death. They will not know what to do. They will not know that something in them is going to survive so there is no need to fear.

Love makes one fearless, and fearlessness is a great achievement. It means you have known something of deathlessness.

(Love is virtue' was the meaning of her new name, Prem Sunito, Osho told a German student.) Lovelessness is the only vice, the only sin; all other sins arise out of it. They are simply branches, offshoots, leaves, foliage; the root is lovelessness. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung -- all these criminals are rooted in a state of lovelessness. They cannot love, they have become incapable of love.

The person who loves cannot harm; it is impossible to harm. How can you harm when you love? You cannot even imagine harming anybody. Love transforms your whole life; it gives you a new character. And the character is not imposed, it comes from your very innermost core. It is not like morality; morality is just superficial. Religiousness comes from within -- that is authentic virtue. First the centre becomes full of love, then the love starts spreading towards the circumference. That is your character. And when love glows in your acts they are virtuous.

So I teach you only love, not morality, because my observation is that if love is there one is moral automatically, inevitably. And if one is not loving then all morality is pseudo, bogus. It only creates hypocrites, it does not create real sages.

Love cleanses you of all impurities -- anger, jealousy, hatred, possessiveness, domination. All trips and all numbers of the ego simply disappear just like dust disappears when you take a shower. Love is a shower of the spirit: it cleanses you. It makes you pure like a small child, innocent. And out of that innocence is beauty, out of that innocence is grace, and out of that innocence ultimately is the experience of god.

We have to be worthy to experience god. We have to create a right situation, only then can we invite him to come in. Even if an ordinary guest comes to your house you clean the house, you decorate the house, you arrange the furniture; you make everything give a sense of welcome so the guest feels at home, welcomed, loved. And when we invite god we have to prepare our own inner being because that is the place into which we can invite him.

And love cleanses the inner world. Love is alchemical, it transforms your very chemistry. It makes you a new person, it gives you a new birth. One becomes twice-born through love.

My message contains only one single word: love. So if by becoming a sannyasin you become more loving, that's enough. Then everything will be taken care of.

Jesus says, "Seek ye the kingdom of god and all else shall be added unto you." What he means by god is love. Read, "Seek ye the kingdom of love and all else shall be added unto you."

(To an artist from Canada Osho gave the name, Prem Gatha -- a story of love.) Shakespeare says about life: A tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing. And he is right as far as ninety-nine point nine percent of people are concerned: their life is a tale told by an idiot; it makes no sense at all. The ordinary life of the majority makes no sense at all, it is utterly stupid. Somehow they go on and on dragging themselves, but it is not life because there is no dance. They are only dragging, they are vegetating -- it is not real life.

Real life must have the quality of godliness, the fragrance of lore. Love has to become your inner story, then it is no more a tale told by an idiot. Then it is a tale told by a Buddha, full of dance and music! Then it releases the imprisoned splendour in you. And you have such a vast sky within, far more beautiful than the outer sky with all its stars and moon and sun. You have a far bigger sky within you, far more beautiful.

Rabiya, one of the Sufi mystics, was sitting in her small cottage, and a guest mystic, Hasan, was also staying with her. It was early morning and Hasan went out. It was a beautiful dawn and the sky was red and 1/08/07

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the birds were singing and the flowers opening and the trees swaying in the cool morning breeze. He was so thrilled that he called Rabiya, "Rabiya, what are you doing inside? Come out! God has given us such a beautiful morning -- don't miss it!"

And Rabiya laughed. She was a very strange woman, of the same calibre as Christ and Buddha. Her laughter was so loud that Hasan felt a little shocked -- why was she laughing? He asked, "Why are you laughing?"

She said, "Hasan, you come in -- because you are seeing a painting of god and I am seeing god himself!

Yes, the painting is beautiful, but who cares when you have found the painter himself? You come in, rather than calling me out!"

She transformed a small, ordinary statement into a tremendously significant message. Hasan went in; he saw Rabiya -- she was sitting with closed eyes -- surrounded by such a beautiful aura. He fell at her feet and said, "Forgive me! It was wrong on my part to call you out. I was not aware. I am not really a meditator," he said. "I have learned much from the scriptures and people think that I am a great mystic, but I am only a scholar. Teach me the art of going in.

And that's what sannyas is about, the art of coming in. And then the whole story changes. It is no more full of noise and fury. The same energy starts becoming a song, a tremendously beautiful music. The same energy that was sheer nonsense starts becoming a profound meaningfulness. And the same idiot is no more an idiot. All his idiocy is gone and his Buddhahood explodes. Each idiot is carrying a Buddha within his womb, and the Buddha has to be released.

The head is always a failure; it cannot be victorious. The heart is always victorious; it can never fail.

Love never fails; logic always fails because logic is rooted in doubt. How can it succeed? Its very foundation is doubt. And love is rooted in trust. How can it fail? There is no possibility.

In fact, love has such a magical quality that you may fail in the eyes of the world but you are never a failure as far as you are concerned -- and that is the only thing to be considered. Logic may succeed in the eyes of the world -- it is cunning. It succeeds politically; it succeeds as far as prestige, power, money is concerned. But inside you know that you have failed. Your life is empty, there is no meaning in it.

And doubt goes on creating darkness. Doubt is another name for darkness, and trust another name for light. And these are the two alternatives available for every person: the head and the heart. The whole humanity can be divided in two categories, the heads and the hearts. But we don't divine humanity that way, we divide humanity into hand& and heads. The labourer is called a hand and the boss is called the head. The person who works is a hand and the person who is cunning enough not to work is the head. But there is no category for the heart at all. This is a strange categorisation. The real division is between the heads and the hearts.

But I can understand why the heart has been ignored -- there are so few people who live in the heart.

They are negligible, they are exceptional, they can be ignored. They only prove the rule; they need not be counted. A Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna -- they need not be counted. We can ignore them; they don't consist of the vast humanity, they are not part of us. We have managed to cut them off from humanity. We call them avataras, teerthankaras, descendants of god, sons of gods, messengers of god, but not human beings.

And they are really human beings -- nobody else is! But to save our ego, we say, "We are human beings; they are far above us, transcendental. We can worship them, that's okay, but we cannot live according to them. That is impossible."

I say to you, worship is stupid. Live like a Buddha -- that is the only true worship. Live like a Christ.

And you have every potential to be a Christ or a Buddha; you are not less endowed. You have a heart, but it is not functioning. It is as if you have an air-conditioner in the room and it is not functioning, and you are perspiring and you are getting hot and you are freaking out! And it is just that you don't know how to put the conditioner on, and all these troubles will disappear.

The heart is there, a given fact, but it is absolutely non-functioning. We have forgotten how to put it on.

We have forgotten two things: we don't know how to put the head off and we don't know how to put the heart on. So the head goes on continuously, day in, day out, year in, year out. Even in the night when you are asleep it goes on chattering. It does not take any note of whether you are awake or asleep, whether you are alive or dead -- it does not bother!

Even people in their graves must be thinking, still thinking, planning what they have to do tomorrow. I cannot imagine that they have stopped -- such a long habit! Habits don't die so easily. You can die, that's another matter, but the habits persist and many things continue. So I think the head must be continuing.

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Nails go on growing in the grave and hair goes on growing -- old habits! So I think the head must continue dreaming, planning, imagining, having memories.

We have completely forgotten how to put it off. And the miracle is that the same switch which puts the head off, puts the heart on. The moment you put the head off, the heart goes on. There are not two switches!

And this is the whole of meditation: to help you find the switch, so you can put the head off. And then immediately you will start having a different humming sound, a different functioning. A different dimension opens up.

The heart can make you victorious. The heart can make you a master of your own being. It can make you blissful, peaceful, divine.

(Bliss is inside us, Osho reiterated in his last address, which was to an Indian ex-police inspector. Turn in, he told him, and you will discover a whole new perspective to life.) Then it is no more confined by birth and death. Then we know it has been before birth and it will be there after death too. Then birth and death are not the beginning and the end of life but only ordinary episodes in an eternal journey.

People are sad and miserable for the simple reason that they have been searching outside. They cannot find it there because it is not there in the first place. You have to look in the right place. Our consciousness contains all, the whole kingdom of god is there. Man comes with all that he needs, with all that he desires.

But the problem is that he starts rushing here and there, hither and thither, all over the world, thinking that by gaining more money or becoming more powerful he will be blissful. He goes on and on wasting energy.

The moment when one starts looking in is the most important one in life; nothing is more important than that. And sannyas has to be that turning-point.

My whole effort here is to help you to look within. The moment it happens... and it can happen any moment; all that is needed is your cooperation with me. It cannot happen in a state of conflict. That's what sannyas is a cooperation with the master. The disciple simply becomes so attuned with the master that he starts taking hints. He is no more in an argumentative mood, he argues no more. With the master there is no argument possible; one simply listens and follows. And things are so simple that if one can listen and follow it can happen immediately, instantly.

So be here for a few days and learn at least one meditation, Vipassana, and that will suit you.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #19

Chapter title: None

19 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009195

ShortTitle: ICEBRG19

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.]

Bliss exists, but it is part not only of the unknown but of the unknowable. These are the three realms: the 1/08/07

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known and the unknowable, and between the two is the territory of the unknown, The first step is from the know into the unknown, and the second step is from the unknown into the unknowable. These are the only two steps and the whole journey is complete. The first step is more difficult. Once you have taken the first step by dropping your misery, by dropping the clinging to the known, you will feel such freedom, such weightlessness, that you will become tempted to go into the unknowable -- naturally, inevitably. If this much beauty can happen and this much bliss can happen just by moving from the known into the unknown, you will become intrigued with the mystery of the unknowable. And then the second step is very easy; it comes of its own accord.

Sannyas means risking -- risking misery for bliss. It looks like risking in the beginning. When you have entered into it then you know that that was not the question at all, because what you have lost was not worth keeping at all and what you have gained is immense, is infinite, is immeasurable.

I teach how to live dangerously, how to live the life of a gambler and a drunkard -- drunk, of course, with the divine, and gambling continuously, staking the known for the unknown and then finally the unknown for the unknowable. The moment you enter into the unknowable you have entered into god. And that is the ultimate peak of bliss; there is nothing higher than that. You have come home.

("Discipline" is something of a dirty word in the best. But the discipline he teaches is that which arises out of the consciousness of a meditator, Osho told us.)

I teach only awareness, but out of awareness your life starts settling into a new gestalt; a new pattern arises naturally, spontaneously.

When one lives unconsciously there is a different kind of life -- it is bound to be so. It comes out of unconsciousness; it is all haphazard, accidental, as if one is moving in deep sleep, walking not knowing where, not knowing from where, not knowing why, just going because the whole crowd is going somewhere. Everybody believes that when so many people are going they must be going to something significant -- -everybody thinks in the same way -- and the whole crowd is moving in sleep. This whole humanity is nothing but a crowd of somnambulists, sleepwalkers.

The moment you become aware, meditative, your lifestyle changes. You are no more part of the crowd, you become for the first time an individual. And then out of awareness many things disappear. All that is wrong withers away and all that is right starts attracting you. It is no more a question of choice: you need not choose between the wrong and the right, you spontaneously start moving towards the right. The wrong becomes impossible, you cannot stumble towards the wrong; you are so alert that it is no more possible.

Even if you want to do the wrong you cannot do it, you can only do the right.

Out of this awareness comes a beautiful discipline not imposed from the outside. Anything imposed from the outside is slavery; anything that springs from your very being, that grows from your inwardness, has a beauty because it is freedom.

To be a disciple means to be meditative, nothing else, because the word "disciple" comes from the same root as discipline. It means living in the light of awareness. And the person who lives in the light of awareness is not only a beloved of the master, he becomes the beloved of the whole existence. The whole existence cooperates with him. All the blessings from all the dimensions start showering on him. He is for the first time blessed, really blessed.

(To Mario from Italy Osho talked about the difference between revolution and rebellion.) Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual; revolution needs a crowd, rebellion is individual. And all revolutions without any exception, have failed because the crowd is so unconscious that whatsoever it does is going to fail. The crowd consists of the lowest intelligence. And how can anything beautiful come out of the lowest intelligence? Of course it takes revenge: it kills the czars and it kills the kings; it destroys property, it changes the government. But the people who are absolutely unconscious, whatsoever they do is going to be ultimately a failure. The French Revolution failed, the Russian Revolution failed, the Chinese Revolution failed. All revolutions have failed.

And rebellion has always succeeded, but it is individual. A Jesus is a rebel, a Buddha is a rebel, a Lao Tzu is a rebel.

We need more rebels in the world and less revolutionaries. And that's my effort through sannyas, to create rebels. Each sannyasin has to be a rebel, but that rebellion is individual. You are not fighting with any structure outside, your fight is inner. You are fighting with the structure of unconsciousness; you are destroying unconsciousness, darkness, and you are bringing light to yourself. And once the light is there you 1/08/07

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live according to that light. And more and more people living according to their light can bring a new dawn to humanity; they can bring a new man on to the earth.

That is the only hope. Revolutions have failed, now rebellion has to be tried on a vast scale. Millions of sannyasins, millions of meditators, are needed, and they will all be working within themselves. It is not a question of fighting with anything outside, it is something inside man that goes on defying all efforts to change, and again and again we are in the same rut.

In Russia they destroyed the capitalists and the division between the poor and the rich. A new division has arisen, the division between the powerful and the powerless, the people who are ruling and the people who are ruled. Another class has started happening -- the same division but a different label. And this is going to happen again and again because inner consciousness is not there, so people are bound to create something similar again; they know only that.

I teach rebellion. Rebellion is beautiful, revolution is ugly. Revolution is violent, rebellion is non-violent. Rebellion has nothing to do with the outside world at all, yet it transforms the outside world because once the inner is changed it consequently starts triggering many things in the outside world. But that is not our purpose; it happens as a by-product. Even if a single man changes, thousands are bound to change. Whosoever comes in contact with him is bound to be transformed in some way or other. A seed will fall into his being too.

So in a way I am preparing for a great revolution, but not through revolution -- through rebellion, individual transformation.

(In fact love is a bridge between man and god, Osho explained.) There is no other proof of god. We have the capacity to love -- that's the only proof, because the very capacity shows that there is something in life which is not a commodity, which is not material, which is not business. There is something in life which is not a means to something else but an end unto itself; one loves for love's sake. Now that is beyond economics, beyond politics, beyond mathematics, beyond logic.

Hence lovers have already looked to the so-called business-minded to be a little bit cuckoo, crazy, nuts!

And in a way they are out of their minds, but they are out of their minds in a very beautiful way. It is not derogatory to be out of the mind. In fact, a buddha happens only when somebody is out of the mind.

One can fall out of the mind in two ways. One can fall below the mind, then one goes to an insane asylum; one can go above the mind, then one becomes enlightened. But both are out of the mind, so they have a similarity. They are utterly different, yet one thing is similar: both are out of the mind. One has fallen below, one has transcended. Yes, there is a great difference, but there is one thing common too. A lover knows something which is out of the mind -- and it is not below the mind, it is above the mind.

Love is the only proof for god. Love more, so that god becomes more a reality to you. You will not find god in the Bible or in the Koran or in the Gita; you will find god only in love. That is the real Bible, the real Koran, the real Gita, the real song of life, the only scripture worth studying.

(Meditation is the art of self-awakening, Osho told a karate teacher from Germany.) Meditation needs a totality, an absolute devotion, perseverance and continuous effort to awaken yourself. And one never knows when it will bring the fruits, the flowering, hence one has to go on and on waiting with patience -- but working, working for it.

People have become so lethargic that they don't want to work for anything. They would like some short-cut. They would like something like instant coffee, so that they need not do anything! But meditation needs a great industrious spirit. It needs intense inner work because it is a question of awakening and your sleep has been for millions of years; for thousands of lives you have slept. It has become a habit, it has almost become your nature

To awaken yourself great effort is needed. You have to shake yourself and you have to pull yourself out of your dreams. And nobody else can do it for you, on your behalf, because it is a very tricky phenomenon.

If somebody else tries to wake you up you will resist and you will go even deeper in your sleep, because you will not like being interfered with. Nobody wants to be interfered with.

The master is in a very strange situation. He wants to wake you up, but he cannot do it directly. If he tries to do it directly, just out of resistance you will fall deeper into sleep; your ego will be hurt. The master can work only in a very indirect way. He has to give you not only hints, but he has to persuade you to do it on your own. His work is of persuasion, hence it takes a long time. It can be done very easily -- the awakened person can awaken the sleepy person instantly, but the problem is, the sleepy person will not 1/08/07

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understand the compassion. In fact he will feel offended, that "Who are you? Why are you disturbing my beautiful dreams? And if I want to sleep, who are you to wake me up?" He will not say it so clearly because he cannot say anything clearly -- he is asleep! But he will slip deeper into sleep just to avoid awakening, because whatsoever he sees he thinks is reality, and somebody is pulling him out of his reality. Maybe he is dreaming that he is an emperor with golden palaces, and you start waking him up. Of course he will be angry!

That's one of the things that Jesus never understood. He tried directly. And I can understand why it happened. Buddha never tried it directly. We have a long tradition of awakened people and we know how to persuade the person to do it on his own. We have to throw cold water on him, but we persuade him by saying "Throw the water yourself. This is the bucket -- take a jump into it or pour the bucket over your head!n We persuade him in such a way, saying "This is nectar, not water! And it is not cold, it is very lukewarm and you will enjoy it!n Once he pours it, he is finished, he will wake up -- because it is really ice-cold!

In the East we have a long tradition, a ten-thousand-years long tradition at least, of thousands of awakened people working. That's why nobody was crucified like Jesus. In India he learned the art of awakening people. For eighteen years he was travelling in the East, that's why for eighteen years the Bible has no account of him. The Bible remembers him when he is twelve, and then suddenly the Bible remembers him when he is thirty. Eighteen years' gap is there, and they don't have any way to explain what happened in these eighteen years. Eighteen years is a long time in the life of a man who lived only thirty-three years; eighteen years is his whole life! He was travelling in the East from Egypt to India, continuously being with many awakened masters, so he learned one thing, that people have to be awakened.

He was a young man and he rushed back to his country to help his people , but he was in such a hurry that he tried direct methods. Of course people crucified him -- they did not want to be awakened in such a way. He simply told them, "This is ice-cold water and I am going to throw it in your eyes, and I am going to wake you up!" This is not the right way.

Buddha says, his last message is, "Be a light unto yourself." At the very end also he is persuading "Be a light unto yourself." He is saying "You can be a light unto yourself, I am just helping you. If you want to be awakened I can give you a few hints, but the longing is yours."

It is a delicate affair, a very delicate affair. If you jump immediately jump... and that's what Jesus did.

He says to his disciples, "Go and shout from the housetops." That is not the way to persuade people -- to shout from the housetops. They will pull you down They will kill you immediately if you shout from the housetops.

The master has to work very slowly and the disciple has to be industrious. It is going to take time, although the master will go on saying it can happen right now. That is part of his persuasion -- otherwise you will escape! The moment you start escaping he will say "Just now it is going to happen! Where are you going? Wait!" And he knows perfectly well it is not going to happen now! It will take time because you have slept so long, you have forgotten how to wake up. You have forgotten how to open your eyes, how to get rid of your dreams.

Hence patience is needed on the part of the disciple, work is needed; one has to wait and one has not to be in a hurry. The paradox is that the more you are in a hurry, the more time it takes; the less you are in a hurry, the less time it takes. If you are not in a hurry at all it can even happen right now. Watch out!

(Osho talks about his vision of sannyas.)

It is not the old idea of sannyas at all, it is a totally new vision. The old sannyas was escapist, and I am against all escapism. The escapist is a coward, and god is not for cowards.

My sannyas is to live in the world, totally in the world, and yet fully aware, watchful -- living in the world without any clinging. No need to renounce anything. Rejoice in everything, enjoy everything, but remember to be aloof too. A part of your being should always be alert, watchful, so that you don't get involved. Act, but don't become a doer. Life has to be lived as if you are an actor on a great stage, and the whole existence is nothing but a drama. But don't become identified with the roles you are playing in the drama. That's where the problem arises, when you become identified.

So my sannyas can be reduced to a simple definition: non-identification with any role you are playing, whatsoever it is. One can be a doctor or a businessman, one can be an engineer or a painter -- whatsoever role you are playing, remember it is a play. Don't get serious about it. Success and failure are the same when it is a play. Whether you succeed or fail does not matter; what matters is that you remained alert all the time.

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Success comes, you watch it; failure comes, you watch it. Life is there, you watch it; death comes, you watch it. Your whole work is to remain a witness to all that happens around you, within and without. This is the foundation for my sannyas.

And the second thing to remember is: this witnessing is possible only if you slowly move into meditation. Choose one meditation, whichever fits with you, and then go on working on it without any desire for any immediate result; forget all about result. Just go on doing it, enjoying it, and one day the result comes. But it comes only when meditation has come to a certain intensity. It is like water evaporating: when it comes to a one-hundred-degree heat it evaporates. At ninety-nine degrees it still does not evaporate, it is still water; just one degree more and it disappears.

The same happens with meditation: you go on working, a certain intensity comes, a certain degree of heat is created, and the ego evaporates. And when the ego is no more, god is.

(The next initiate was a German actress.)

Man is born with the light, every child has that flame, but slowly slowly dust gathers around it. Clouds are created by the society, by the parents, by the whole establishment -- religion, politics, culture, civilisation. They are all in a great conspiracy against the small child. And the child is helpless; they go on forcing things into him. They destroy his innocence, they destroy his beauty, his grace. They cover everything in his being. They make him a beggar, and he had come as an emperor.

Sannyas moans rediscovering yourself. It is a journey of rediscovery. In short, whatsoever the society has done to you has to be undone so that you can have a new birth, a second birth, a second childhood. Once you have a second childhood you will not allow anybody to interfere with you again, because now you are not a small child, you can protect your freedom, you can fight for your innocence. You cannot be forced by any power. You can be killed -- that's perfectly okay -- but you cannot be enslaved.

And my effort here is to help you to become free from all that others have imposed on you. And once you are unconditioned, once you have tasted something of freedom and joy that comes with it, you will never again allow anybody to interfere with your freedom. And not only that, you will never interfere with anybody else's freedom either.

That's what I call a real religious person: one who never interferes in anybody's freedom and one who never allows anybody to interfere with his freedom either.

(Deva Dhyan.)

Meditation is a state of absolute silence. It is not concentration. Concentration is a tense state, and in tension you cannot be silent. Silence needs relaxation, total relaxation. Meditation is not contemplation either, because contemplation means you are still thinking, maybe beautiful thoughts -- of god, love, truth --

but a thought is a thought; it does not matter about what. Every thought is a cloud and destroys your clarity; your vision is blocked.

Meditation simply means no-thought, no-mind. It happens through watching your thought process, not by chanting a mantra -- because a mantra is a thought, a seed-thought; not through prayer, because prayer is again thinking, talking, words, language. One has to go beyond language, beyond words. One has to relax so totally that there is no tension -- physical or psychological.

In that silence, in that restfulness, one comes to one's very source, to one's very roots. And from there is the mutation, the transformation. From there arises a new quality to your life which is divine. God is not somebody outside, it is a quality, a fragrance. It is around the meditator. The meditator is like a flower which has opened, and godliness is a fragrance that surrounds the meditator.

God exists only once in a while when there is a Buddha, when there is a Christ or a Lao Tzu. Then god disappears and becomes invisible again. He becomes visible only when there is somebody like a Buddha.

Buddha becomes the opening, and from Buddha's window god can start looking into the world. But otherwise there is no god. No atheist can be convinced that there is a god for the simple reason that he does not know anything about meditation.

Only a meditator knows god, but he does not know him as an object, as a person; he knows him only as his own fragrance, his own music, his own poetry, his own juice.

(He named the last sannyasin, Devaprem -- divine love.)

Love can be either animal or human or divine. Millions of people, the majority, know only about the first, the animal love. Animal love means using the other as a means, exploiting the other as a means. It is 1/08/07

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lust, pure lust, exploitation. And of course there is bound to be conflict because you are exploiting the other and the other is trying to exploit you. Both are trying to exploit each other -- there is bound to be a conflict.

Hence the so-called lovers are continuously fighting. Psychologists have even started calling them intimate enemies -- not even friends but enemies! Of course they are intimate because they are very close to each other, living in the same room, overlapping each other's space, trying to strangle the other...(Right on cue, sounds of love-making from what seemed to be the house of the next-door neighbours' rent the air )...

both are doing the same!

This is the so-called love.

Only very few know the second, human love. Human love has no conflict. When conflict ceases and harmony arises, when you are not using the other, when you respect the other and the other's freedom and the other's individuality, the other's uniqueness.... Human love never interferes with the other's space. It is not an effort to dominate, to possess. When jealousy falls away animal love disappears and human love arises.

But very few people know anything about human love, and unless you know about human love you are not a human being. You only look human, deep inside all kinds of animals are there, the whole jungle, wild animals. Just watch others or watch yourself with your woman or with your man and you will see all kinds of animals barking and fighting and doing all kinds of things to each other, playing all kinds of tricks, laying their trips on each other, and at the same time trying to show that they love. Love is only a facade, a mask.

Human love is totally different. There is no fight, no question of fight. There is respect and you are grateful that the other has agreed at least to be with you. The other has agreed for a few moments to meet and mingle, to meet and merge with you. One is constantly grateful for those moments. And there is no desire to possess, there is no desire to make it permanent either. If tomorrow it disappears, it disappears --

such is the nature of things. In the morning the flower is so alive; by the evening it is gone. Nothing can be done about it. But one is still thankful that the flower blossomed; one is still grateful for whatsoever has happened through it. There is no complaint, no grudge. Human love knows no complaint, no grudge.

And beyond the human is divine love. Only once in a while has a person reached that high peak. In divine love you are not in a relationship at all. It is not a question of loving this person or that, you are simply love, your very being is loving. It has become your aura, it is your very breathing, so wherever you are your love showers.

That is the meaning of Devaprem: divine love, not addressed to anybody in particular, but wherever you are it is always there, anybody can share it. And you will feel obliged and grateful to the person who shared your love because the moment you reach to that height you become aware of a strange paradox: the more you give, the more you have. The more you share, the more goes on coming to you from some unknown source. That unknown source is god. Slowly slowly you become aware of that unknown source. The source of love, life, light, the source of all, is god.

At that height there is no ego. You are no more an entity, you are just a hollow bamboo on the lips of god. The song is god's, you are just a passage. And you are grateful that god has chosen you to be a passage, that he has chosen you to be a medium, a vehicle, a messenger.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #20

Chapter title: None

20 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009205

ShortTitle: ICEBRG20

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.]

The coward is bound to live in lies. Lies are comfortable, cozy, because they don't ask you for any transformation. You need not change yourself. Lies fit with you; you need not fit with them.

Truth needs courage because truth never compromises. You have to fit with it. You will have to drop many things. You will have to become more open, more silent, more loving, only then can truth be yours.

You will have to go through a thorough cleaning. A total transformation is a basic requirement for truth, and that needs courage.

Hence millions have chosen to live the life of a coward. It is comfortable; you remain the way you are.

And the lies are very compromising; they are ready to be according to you. They fulfill your desires, your requirements, but because they are lies your whole life is wasted. Ultimately you will find you have deceived yourself. But that comes only at the end; that comes only when death knocks on the door. Then you become aware of what you have done, but then it is too late.

Entering into sannyas means you are ready to drop the lies, howsoever comfortable, and you are ready to risk everything for truth, because the final victory is with truth. Small battles you can win through lies, but the ultimate victory is only with truth. And for that sannyas prepares you. But much has to be changed.

Many prejudices have to be dropped. Your whole mind has to go through an upheaval, a revolution, a radical change.

Be ready for it, because once you start having a glimpse of truth, even a glimpse of truth, your life becomes so blissful, such a benediction, so meaningful, that one starts feeling grateful to existence. Out of that gratefulness arises prayer. Only that gratefulness makes a person religious.

(The two meanings of her name are very significant and also happen to be related to each other, Osho told Jonda, because humbleness is needed by the lover of truth.) The ego is a barrier: it does not allow you to know that which is. It keeps you ignorant because it can exist only in darkness; when there is light it dies. It is like darkness: the moment light comes in, darkness disappears. Hence the investment of the ego is in keeping you in the dark.

Humbleness means only one thing: drop the ego. Don't think in terms of separation. No man is an island; we are all together, we are part of one organic whole. We are not separate, hence the very idea of ego is stupid. Only the whole can use the word "In; the parts cannot use the word. The parts exist only through the whole; there is no life in separation. Hence to live with an ego is to live a very superficial life, pseudo, without roots. And that brings misery.

The moment one drops the ego all blocks disappear and light starts penetrating you. The doors are open, the windows are open. The sun is yours, the moon is yours, the stars are yours. Suddenly you become vast.

And that's what truth is: the experience of one's vastness, one's infinity, one's eternity. And the moment one knows "I am eternal," there is bliss because there is no more any death, no more any misery, no more any fear. One has attained to immortality. Bliss is just a shadow of immortality.

(Love is holy because it makes you whole. It is a bridge, Osho reiterated tonight.) A man without love lives disconnected from the whole. And one needs many bridges because life is multi-dimensional, and the more bridges you have, the more rich you are. When all the dimensions and all the planes of life are connected with you, naturally you have immense richness -- immeasurable, inestimable.

That richness Jesus calls the kingdom of god. His expression is beautiful. It is a kingdom, and not an ordinary kingdom, not the kingdom of this world, not the kingdom that exists in time and one day disappears but a kingdom that once attained is forever yours.

Hence my definition of religion is love. Love in as many ways as possible. Don't be a miser in love.

Love animals, love trees, rocks, rivers, people. Find out as many doors for love as you can find. And the more you love, the more you are. Love makes you integrated; it gives you a cent ring, a rootedness, a 1/08/07

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groundedness. It creates a temple out of you. And only when the temple is ready can god be invited.

Many people search for god but in vain, because they never make the place ready to receive him. You need a certain inner space for god to come in, for truth to come in. That space is created by love.

His name meant an image of meditation, the Master told the next initiate -- and you have to look at a statue of Buddha to see that.

It is not historically true; it does not represent Buddha in an ordinary sense; it does not resemble his physical appearance at all. But still it is true, far more true than any photograph can be. It is not pictorial; it has nothing to do with the body. It represents something of the inner: the stillness, the silence, the unwavering quietness, the state of no-mind.

It is not an accident that Buddha's statues were the first to appear on the scene, on the earth. And they were made of white marble. Only white marble can represent Buddha; the coolness of the marble, the whiteness of the marble, the stillness of marble, the stillness of a marble statue. They represent something that happened to Buddha's interiority. They are not physiological but symbolic, metaphoric -- poetry written in marble -- a depiction, a scripture, a sermon.

Create a silent space within you where no thought exists; no desire, no mind. One is simply a pure being, a witness, a silent watcher. There is no past, no future. Time has stopped because mind has stopped; without mind there is no time. Mind is time, and the moment you get beyond mind you get beyond time; you are simply in the present. The present is not part of time. Now is not part of time. Time consists of past and future, and the reality is between the two. Neither the past is real nor is the future.

The meditator drops both, past and future both, memory and imagination; he simply exists now and here. In that state one penetrates into the ultimate core of existence, one comes to know what truth is, and truth liberates. There is no other way of liberation. Truth makes you free of all bondage; the bondage of the body, the bondage of the mind. All kinds of prisons simply evaporate. You are as vast as the sky -- no limitation. Not even the sky is the limit.

Unless that unlimited vastness is experienced one remains miserable, because that is our nature and that has to be fulfilled.

Only then is there contentment.

Only then is there joy, rejoicing.

(Accumulate knowledge and you have a head that's overloaded; experience knowing and you have a heart that's overflowing. The only proof of truth is blissfulness, Osho reminded us.) The knowledgeable person is not blissful. He knows about truth but not truth itself. He knows about God, but to know about God is not to know God. To know about God is information; to know God is transformation, it is a totally different phenomenon.

And the moment you know on your own -- not because Jesus says so or Buddha says so or I say so --

when you know on you own, great bliss explodes. Thousands of flowers open up within your being. For the first time your inner world is no more a desert, it becomes an oasis. For the first time you experience what life is all about and the splendor of it and the glory of it and the tremendous beauty of it. It is ecstatic. And the moment you know, you are bound to radiate bliss; it is just natural.

Truth is experienced at the innermost core, but bliss starts overflowing you. That's the only proof that truth has been experienced. If the saint is sad he is not a saint. There must be rejoicing, there must be laughter, there must be singing and dancing and celebration. His whole life is a celebration; moment to moment it is a continuum of celebration. These so-called saints with long faces are just stupid people deceiving others, and not only others -- they are so stupid that they manage to deceive themselves too. They start believing that they have arrived, but nothing has happened to them. Their desert is so clear, there seems to be no oasis in their being.

My whole effort here is to make you a garden, to make you cheerful in every possible way. But that can happen only when you have experienced something of truth on your own. It is not going to help if one goes on reading the Bible and the Koran and the Gita. Unless you read your own being you will not know what truth is. Truth is hiding there -- of course it is in a seed form. Once you go there your very going transforms the seed into a flower. Your very presence is enough to bring a revolution.

So my sannyasins have to do only one thing, I ask only for one thing: put your energy together for an inner journey. Move inwards, because unless you know who you are, all knowledge is useless. The only knowledge worth having is your experience of yourself. That opens the door towards more mysterious 1/08/07

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experiences. That is the beginning of an eternal pilgrimage.

(Sannyas is the search for truth, Osho stressed again in his address to Satyaprem.) Man has lived for centuries in lies -- beautiful lies, but all lies. We go on believing in heaven and hell, we go on believing in god, in immortality, in the soul, but these are all beliefs -- beliefs are lies. You don't know anything on your own, whether there is a soul within you or not. And it is not a question of argumentation; even if it is proved logically that you have a soul it will not make any difference to the quality of your life. Or if it is proved there is no soul, that will also not make any difference.

There are theists, there are atheists, and they are all living almost the same life -- the same stupid life, with no qualitative change. There are people who believe that god exists and there are people who believe that god does not exist, but if you look into their lives there is no difference. So what is the point of all these argumentations? It is futile. The only thing that matters is experience, not argument.

And if you don't even know whether the soul exists within you or not, what else can you know? How can you know god and heaven and hell and all that nonsense? The closest thing to you is your soul, and you have not even explored that! And you are talking about some heaven somewhere above, in the sky and some hell somewhere deep down. You have no idea what you are talking about! In churches and temples and mosques people are continuously arguing, discourses are being given about great things, and nobody bothers about the most simple thing -- knowing who you are.

So I don't teach any philosophy here and I don't teach any dogma, creed. My whole teaching consists of experimenting, of experiencing, of going within yourself with an open mind, with no belief -- because every belief will be an obstruction to knowing the truth. Every belief is inimical to the enquiry for truth. So don't be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; don't be theist or an atheist. There is no need, because you don't know anything. Just know "I don't know" and go inside with that state of mind, just like an innocent child who knows nothing. If one can enter into one's being like a child, innocent, and if one can function from a state of not-knowing, then it is not far away; it is very close by.

And the moment you know your being you have found the key, the master key which can unlock many many doors. In fact that one key is enough to unlock all the doors. I call that key the truth, your truth, your experienced truth.

So drop all beliefs, drop all lies which others have taught you, and go innocently, empty, knowing nothing. And soon you will find a great treasure, a great wisdom, within yourself. It is already there just waiting for you to come empty-handed.

Meditation means going inside empty-handed, empty of all belief, of all knowledge.

(He was replaced by Satoshi, whom Osho renamed Dharmananda. It means the bliss that arises out of knowing the nature of existence, Osho explained.)

Without knowing it, whatsoever we do is bound to create misery. The most fundamental thing is to know the nature of existence so that we can be in tune with it. Otherwise everybody is out of step, and that being out of step is what misery is. To be in harmony with existence is bliss, to be in deep accord is bliss.

To be in discord with existence is misery.

So the only thing which can bring a total transformation in your life is to become aware of the truth, the nature, the tao, of existence. And the way does not go on the outside, the way goes through you; it is an inner journey. First you have to find your own centre. The moment you have found your centre you have found the centre of existence because they are not two. We differ only as circumference, at the centre we are all meeting and merging. At the centre we are all one: the trees, the mountains, the people, the animals, the stars.

The moment you penetrate your own centre you come to know the tao of all that is. And once you have known the tao, nature, the dharma, you cannot go against it That will be simply suicidal. But without knowing it of course one is bound to stumble, bound to go astray. Meditation is a way to find your centre.

And I have reduced sannyas to the very bare essentials I have dropped all the rituals, all the non-essentials, because modern man has no time for all that nonsense. And the essential is meditation. If you can learn meditation you have learned all.

(We have the intrinsic capacity to love, but society heads us away from realising it, Osho told Prem Amrito, who sat, or rather knelt on one knee, in front of him as if she were taking her mark and getting set to run.)

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Society has no interest in your love energy. Its whole interest is in your head, in your logical capacity, because that can be used as a commodity in the market. The society only wants you to be efficient -- not meaningful, simply efficient, as efficient as a machine. Now, the machine has no idea of love and will never be able to have any idea of love.

As far as the head is concerned, sooner or later computers are going to replace it. What the head does, computers can do in a far better way. But I don't think that any computer is ever going to fall in love.

Logic is a mechanical capacity -- machines can do it. Love is really the human element in you, but the society is not interested in it, it has no use for it; hence it teaches everybody to be logical. And the more hung up in the head you become, the more you forget your heart.

My work here is to bring you back down to the heart. And your cooperation is needed, that's why sannyas is a requirement. Sannyas means from your side you say, "I am ready, I am willing to come down.

Just show me the way, just show me the ladder." Sannyas is simply a surrender, a let-go, a gesture that "I am ready," that "I will not hesitate," that "I will not resist," that "I will not fight you." That's all. Because unnecessary time is wasted in resistance.

It is as if you go to a surgeon and you start fighting with him, and he is doing surgery on you! You start doing karate chops and things like that -- then how can the surgery be done? That's why the surgeon has to give you chloroform!

I don't give chloroform, but it is surgery, and your total acceptance is required. That's what sannyas is. It is not a ritual, it is a deep, meaningful gesture. Once I see that somebody is saying yes, then I can start the surgery. And it is the greatest surgery to bring your energy from the head to the heart because it goes against all your conditioning, education, culture, religion. But unless your heart becomes alive again, humming again with the music of love, you will never be able to know anything of significance. God is known through the heart, truth is known through the heart. The heart is the center from where we can take a plunge into existence. It becomes the jumping board to go into the oceanic.

Man is immortal. There is no death, in fact. But how to know it from the head? Hence I say love is the only experience in life which makes you aware of your immorality. And once you know there is no death, your life of course will have a totally different quality to it -- of poetry, of dance, of song, of celebration.

Because there is no death once can shout, "Alleluia!"

(An in-quest is needed to discover the cause of the death of man's happiness; no outer search will help, Osho told Gyandevi.)

Your silence is the only scripture. Your inner journey is the only sacred pilgrimage. And the truth has to be known not with open eyes but with closed eyes, because it is inside. And the moment we withdraw ourselves from all outside activities, bodily activities, mental activities, when we are completely withdrawn as if the world has disappeared, as if there is nobody else left, we are all alone ... in that aloneness wisdom explodes. You become full of light.

Then you can live in the outside world, but now nothing can disturb you, nothing can distract you. That light remains with you and goes on showing you the path. It goes on again and again indicating to you the right way, it goes on choosing for you what is right and dropping what is wrong.

The inner wisdom is an insight, an insight into everything that is going to happen to you. And once you have the insight, naturally all the pitfalls disappear, all the mistakes and errors disappear. Your life starts following a very straight way. It becomes simple, natural, spontaneous.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #21

Chapter title: None

21 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

Archive code: 8009215

ShortTitle: ICEBRG21

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.]

(The sense of 'me' is misery, Osho told Claude, a doctor from Switzerland.) The ego is misery, the root cause of all nightmares. One cannot drop misery without dropping the ego.

You can drop one misery but another will replace it. You can go on cutting the leaves of a tree -- other leaves will go on coming. One has to cut the very root; and the root is hidden, it is underground. You see the branches and the whole tree above the ground.

And the same is true about the ego. What you see in the conscious mind are only branches and leaves and foliage. The ego is hidden in the unconscious, it is underground. One has to dig up those roots.

That's what sannyas is all about: finding the root cause. And the miracle is, the moment you have found the root cause you are already beyond it. Then it starts disappearing of its own accord because you no more support it, you no more cooperate with it, and without you it cannot exist even for a single moment.

When the ego disappears one is humble, and in humbleness grows the flower of bliss.

(Then to Patsy from Australia, Osho said:)

Meditation brings real aristocracy. It creates "aristos" -- but real, authentic aristos. By birth nobody is an aristocrat; by birth everybody is born as a beggar, full of desires, demands, expectations. And those expectations are impossible to fulfil, hence frustration sets in. Those demands are basically impossible hence life becomes a constant misery a continuous misery, a chain of miseries, of tragedies.

Those desires that every child brings into the world are intrinsically unfulfillable. The more you have, the more the desire jumps ahead of you for still more. Desire simply means desire for more -- how can you fulfil it? If you have so much money the desire says, "Have ten times more." When you have ten times more the desire has jumped ahead, again it wants ten times more, and so on, and so forth. The distance between you and your desired goal remains constantly the same. Whether you are poor or rich, it makes no difference; the beggars are beggars and the Alexanders are also beggars.

But a real aristocracy is created by meditation because meditation gives you the whole kingdom of the inner world. Jesus calls it the kingdom of god. It opens up treasures which are inexhaustible. It brings tremendous contentment because all those desires which were creating discontent disappear. When you are silent those desires wither away and what is left is uncontaminated contentment, absolutely virgin contentment.

Meditation is like poison for expectations, demands, desires. It kills all those stupidities. It cleanses you totally from all begging. Suddenly one is an emperor. One may not have anything as far as the outside world is concerned but one has something of the inner which nobody can steal, which nobody can take away, which even death cannot destroy.

When you have something that is indestructible then you are really an aristocrat. Then you have gone beyond ordinary sleeping humanity. Then you are a new man, a totally new man, so new that there is no continuity with the old at all. It is discontinuous with the old, it is a rebirth.

(There are two kinds of loyalty, Osho told Prem Martin -- that of the soldier and that of the sannyasin.

But the latter is more of a disvalue than anything, because it destroys the soul of the person.) The soldier is born when the soul is destroyed. The soldier becomes just a mechanical yea-sayer because he has been forced, manipulated, conditioned. He has forgotten his own freedom. He is reduced to a non-human entity; he has fallen below the human.

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societies have been at each other's throats, all the countries have been energies of each other, and everybody is trying to conquer the world. This stupidity -- of conquering the world -- has been the root cause... because of it humanity has not become mature; it has remained retarded. The soldier is a retarded person. The whole training in the army is to retard, to prevent, your spiritual growth so that you become incapable of saying no.

That is a wrong kind of loyalty -- I am against it.

And just at the opposite polarity is the world of sannyas. The sannyasin is exactly the polar opposite of the soldier. Sannyas means a loyalty born out of love, not out of fear, out of growth, not out of retardation, out of your freedom, not out of your slavery.

I give you total freedom because my trust is that a totally free person is capable of a loyal heart; only a totally free person is capable of having a loyal heart. Then that loyalty comes from his own innermost core, it is not imposed. It enhances his being, it makes him graceful, beautiful. He is capable of saying no, but because of love he says yes. His capacity to say no is not destroyed, it is there; if needed he can say no. But he says yes out of his own inner choice, out of his own decision.

Sannyas is your decision. Yes, it is a surrender, but the decision is yours. And when surrender comes out of your decision it has a beauty because it doesn't stink of slavery, it is fragrant with freedom.

Hence I teach love. Be more loving. And out of love slowly slowly your yes becomes bigger and bigger.

First you start saying yes to the master, to your friends, to the world of the sannyasins, and slowly slowly you learn the treasures of saying yes, the blessings of saying yes. And then one day you can say yes to the whole existence, to life itself.

That is saying yes to god and that is the ultimate peak of surrender, of love, of trust. It brings you to the highest peak of consciousness, the Everest of consciousness.

The soldier falls below humanity, the sannyasin goes above humanity.

(To Ned, a therapist from America, Osho explained the seemingly paradoxical situation that probably all of us who live here have observed -- that while the poor of India are perhaps the most impoverished people of the world, it doesn't seem to trouble them too much.)

Meditation opens doors to inner richness. And the outer richness is only a false substitute: it keeps you in a kind of illusion that you are rich. Deep down you remain poor, because the outer richness cannot change your inner world. If you are poor in a hut, miserable in a hut, you will be poor and miserable in a palace too. The palace cannot change your misery, it has nothing to do with your misery. Your misery can only be changed by some inner transformation.

So there are two kinds of poor people in the world; the poor poor and the rich poor -- but both are poor.

And in fact the rich poor person is far more poor, poorer than the poor poor, for the simple reason that he has contrast. He can see that the outside has become rich and in contrast his inner poverty shows more clearly. The poor man cannot feel that. Both sides are poor, in and out, so there is no contrast. It is like writing with white chalk on a white wall -- there is no contrast. You carl write something, but you cannot read it. The rich man is like a blackboard on which you write with white chalk; it comes clear and loud.

Hence all rich societies have felt a tremendous urge to find inner richness. That's how religion is born --

religion can be born only in a rich society. The poor society can only have a pseudo kind of religion; it cannot have real religion because it cannot feel its inner poverty, there is no contrast.

That's why when people from the West come to India they are surprised and puzzled: people are so poor and yet they don't seem to be so miserable. They should be very miserable, but they don't seem to be as miserable as people in the West are -- and they are rich. They have all the technology and all the industry and all the scientific gadgets, but they are very very miserable. They feel that life is a meaningless project, they feel life is absurd. So when they come to the East and see poor people in a way contented they start thinking it must be because of religion. It is not so. And the Indian gurus go on saying it is because of religion -- that is sheer nonsense! It is not because of religion, it is because there is no contrast.

The poor man can still hope, the rich man cannot hope, he becomes hopeless. The poor man can hope that one day he will become rich and then everything will be all right; so he can go on dreaming, he has something to dream about. The rich man has come to the very end of the road. He has all that he had ever dreamt of, or even more than he ever dreamt of. Now, what to do? Nothing is happening. All that he wanted he has, and the emptiness still continues; in fact, it looks very clear now. One thing is certain: that this road leads nowhere; he has come to a full stop. Something else is needed. His inner search begins. When the outer search has failed completely because it has succeeded -- nothing fails like success -- he has to turn in.

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have not found it on the outside so maybe it is not on the outside -- let us look in. It is simple logic -- turn in. And those who have gone in have always found it, without exception.

Meditation means turning in, and then you immediately see explosions of joy, richness. Suddenly your life has meaning, splendour. Suddenly a quality of dance, of rejoicing, of celebration, arises in you. All meaninglessness disappears and now you know you have something which is intrinsically yours and there is no need to hanker for anything because nothing can be found to... any improvement is not possible.

Once you have known the inner there is nothing more to know, there cannot be anything higher. You start overflowing with your richness; in fact you start sharing it with others.

Meditation brings you tremendous richness, inexhaustible richness, and a deep longing to share it, to give it to everybody for no reason at all, for the sheer joy of giving it.

(To Irene Osho spoke on a favourite theme of his -- the synthesis of love and peace -- and then turned to address Parambodhi, whose name meant ultimate enlightenment.) Man has the capacity to become a god -- and less than that won't do. Less than that will always keep you unsatisfied. And man becomes a god when the inner world is full of light. Mind is darkness. If one can put the mind aside, light explodes. It is like an atomic explosion. One becomes a fire, aflame! The whole being suddenly becomes full of light. It is our nature, but the mind is covering our light like a cloud covering the moon; because of that cloud you cannot see the moon.

All that we do here is to help you to put the mind aside. All the meditations are nothing but devices to put the mind aside. And once you have got even just a glimpse of your inner light, then things become very easy. Then you know that the light is inside. And then to put the mind aside is not difficult because now you know there is no risk -- it is worth putting it aside. Only in the beginning is it difficult because you only know the mind. You have been identified with it, you think you are the mind so to put it aside feels very dangerous. It feels like committing suicide, because it is you! But you are not it. It is just a deep-rooted misconception, a wrong calculation. You are simply making a mathematical mistake. Two plus two are four, and you are putting five. The moment you understand it then nothing has to be done, you simply put four and things start changing.

And my approach is not that of implanting a belief in you. I don't want believers. Believers have always existed and nothing has happened to them.

I want you to experience. Believe only when you have experienced. Hence meditation, because meditation means an effort to experience on your own.

So while you are here try to learn the methods to put the mind aside as deeply as possible. And all the methods are available here, all the methods that have ever been tried and a few more methods which have never been tried before. So this is a great opportunity. If you put your energy totally into it something is bound to happen.

(And while we were on the subject, Osho pointed out that it is possible for someone to think they are enlightened when actually they haven't really attained.)

There are many pseudo enlightened people in the world and they sincerely believe that they are enlightened. So one has to be very aware not to fall into that mistake. And the distinction is not difficult, the criterion is very simple.

The criterion is: if the idea of enlightenment gives you any ego then it is false. If it makes you proud then it is false. If you start claiming some superiority -- holier than thou -- then it is false. That is the simple criterion to be remembered.

When it has no claim of superiority, when it is not a question of being proud, when it is not an achievement at all, when it does not fulfil your ego in any way, when on the contrary you suddenly find the ego has disappeared, you look within and you cannot find the ego at all, then it is true enlightenment. When you are not then the enlightenment is true; when you are, it is false.

(And the only way to enlightenment is meditation, Osho told Dhyanbodhi.) One should not waste one's energies in any other direction. One can accumulate much knowledge but enlightenment will not happen. One can go on doing physical exercises, yoga and postures, enlightenment will not happen through it. It may give you a better physical health but that is not enlightenment. One can go on chanting mantras and enlightenment will not happen through it. It can give you a better quality of sleep but sleep is not enlightenment, Of course you will feel healthier, you will have a certain well-being, but that 1/08/07

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is not enlightenment.

Enlightenment is possible only when you go beyond thinking, when you drop the mind. Then there is nobody who can chant and nobody who can do yoga postures and nobody who can accumulate knowledge.

All those strategies are of the mind. When the whole mind is put aside, then nothing is left -- only a deep silence, an unfathomable silence. In that silence you come across your own light, your own innermost core starts shining forth like a great star.

So remember, meditation is the key and everything else is fooling around.

(Putting the mind aside -- that's actually what sannyas is, Osho told Veet Chintan.) Man is not the body, not the mind. Man is something higher than both, bigger than both, greater than both, vaster than both. There are people, the materialists, who think that man is just the body; then there are people, the psychologists, who think man is just the mind.

But man is consciousness, because man can watch his body-mind, both, and the watcher cannot be the watched, the observer cannot be the observed. When you can watch the mind processes, that simply says that you are separate from them, you are not them.

It is really a very strange phenomenon that even great psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Adler and others have not looked at a simple fact. The simple fact of witnessing would have been enough to give them proof that man is consciousness -- neither body nor mind.

And once you know you are consciousness you start existing on a higher plane, and of course with that higher plane your whole life changes accordingly. Your lifestyle changes, your life-gestalt changes.

And I don't insist that you should change your lifestyle. You should simply move higher than the mind and you will see the miracle happening on its own -- that your lifestyle changes, that anger disappears, greed disappears, that jealousy disappears. There is no need to drop them. You simply go beyond them and they all start looking so stupid, there is no need to be bothered with theme There is no question, they simply wither away, they simply recede farther and farther away and disappear.

Sannyas is a transcendence of the mind, and that's exactly the meaning of your name. It precisely defines sannyas. Go beyond the mind and you will have infinite treasures of bliss. By going beyond the mind one goes beyond birth and death too, one becomes part of eternal life.

Religious people have called that eternal life god; one can call it truth, one can call it enlightenment, one can call it samadhi, tao. These are different words for the same phenomenon; that one has become part of the eternal stream of consciousness. You just have to get out of the prison of the mind -- and that is the only prison.

(And continuing on the same theme, Osho named the next initiate Veetkaya to remind her that she is neither the body nor the mind -- which in fact aren't two separate things but just two faces of the one entity.) Man is living in a psychosomatic world of body-mind. The mind is the inner body and the body is the outer mind. So the moment you go beyond the body you also go beyond the mind.

And the key to going beyond it is very simple: just become an observer. Observe the body walking, sitting, going to sleep, eating. Just watch, become alert. Remain alert as much as possible. It is difficult in the beginning; but it is a knack; it comes soon. Once you make a little effort you will see that you are walking and at the same time there is an undercurrent in your watching, that you are eating, that you are drinking, that you are taking a shower. Not that you will be saying all these words inside you, there is just an awareness of what is happening.

And with that awareness a separation automatically comes in. The body becomes something there on the screen and you are the onlooker, just a spectator looking at a movie, unidentified, watching the traffic or watching a river flowing by. You are not it. And suddenly a great sense of freedom comes as if you are out of a prison. And that sense of freedom is what sannyas is.

Sannyas is to bring you great freedom, and in freedom there is love, in freedom there is truth. In freedom all that you have always wanted, starts happening without any effort on your part.

My whole approach is to change the foundation. I am not worried about the circumference. If the center becomes transformed through awareness, the whole circumference sooner or later follows it -- it has to follow, inevitably. Hence my insistence is not on character but on consciousness, not on morality but on meditation.

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Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #22

Chapter title: None

22 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009225

ShortTitle: ICEBRG22

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 addressed Luca, a stage designer from Switzerland.) Mind is a dark hole. If one looks inside one will find only darkness because the first layer of our inner world consists of the mind. The second layer consists of the heart, and the third is our real being. When you look in -- and that's what meditation is all about looking in -- first you will find darkness. If you go on digging then you will find a twilight, neither darkness nor light; that is the realm of the heart. It is just as when the night is no more and the sun has not risen yet -- something in between. It has its own beauty, but very few people even enter into that twilight land of the heart.

If one goes on digging still deeper then one enters into the world of being. Then light explodes, and that light dispels all darkness, all doubts. That darkness, that doubt, which has been with you for thousands of lives disappears in a single moment, and with it death also. They are all part of one organic whole --

darkness, doubt and death; those three D's have to be remembered. Light takes you beyond all the three.

Luca also means the enlightened one. That's exactly the whole purpose of sannyas: to help you to discover your enlightened state, your Buddhahood, It is your nature; nothing has to be added to you.

Something certainly has to be thrown out, but nothing has to be taken in.

Meditation helps you to reach to your innermost core. Once you stand there you are beyond the reach of mind, thought, memory, imagination, suddenly there is absolute silence. In that silence truth is known. That silence is truth, or you can call it god -- it is the same.

Ma Prem Susanne means a white lily, it is representative of all that is most beautiful: grace, totality, flowering, fragrance.

Man is also a seed, just as there are seeds of trees. But the misery is that many people die as seeds. They never change their potential into an actuality, they never come to a flowering. And unless one flowers one remains unfulfilled. Unless the fragrance is released one remains imprisoned.

Love can give you the very secret of transforming the seed into a flowering bush. It can help you to grow graceful flowers of consciousness, of bliss, of godliness, of grace.

The white lily is one of the very graceful flowers, and the whiteness, particularly, represents totality. No other color represents totality: white means all the colors together. White in itself is not a color, it is a synthesis of all the colors. Black is absence of all colors and white is presence of all colors. The light is white; when it passes through a prism it is divided into seven colors. That's how the rainbow is created.

A rainbow happens only in a particular situation: in the rainy season when the rainwater is hanging in the air, small droplets of water in the air, in the atmosphere, and the sun suddenly comes out of the clouds.

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the rays into seven colors. Hence the rainbow is created.

White represents totality, unity, oneness. Love gives you oneness with the whole. If you can love existence, that is the only true religion. You become one with it; then all distinctions, divisions, disappear.

The rainbow becomes a white ray again; it again becomes organically one, integrated.

Love can do miracles. It can unite you with the whole and it can help you to transform your potential into the real. Love is the path of self-realization.

(Build your life with bliss bricks, Osho told an engineer from Holland.) People make misery their foundation, and misery is like shifting sands. Making a house on shifting sands is creating hell for yourself. You will be crushed under it because it is going to fall at any moment; it has no rock as a foundation.

Why do people choose misery to be their foundation? It is really amazing. But there is a reason; misery is helpful for one thing, it helps your ego. And bliss is dangerous for the ego, it kills the ego. And we are all brought up in such a way that we become ego-oriented. Our whole education is to enhance the ego, to make us ambitious -- and ambition is insanity. Ego is nothing but sheer madness, and the egoist is bound to live in misery because he will be afraid of bliss.

People talk about bliss; they say "We want bliss," but they are really afraid of bliss. Whenever bliss comes they close their doors, they shrink back, they withdraw into themselves. They close themselves like turtles, they go into their shells -- they hide in their shells -- because the moment bliss happens your ego simply evaporates. And that creates panic, one is scared, because we think that we are egos and if the ego is gone then we are gone. That is not true.

You are not the ego. In fact, when the ego is gone you will really know who you are. Unless the ego goes you will never be able to know yourself.

Hence I teach bliss, because I know bliss is sure to destroy your ego. I don't tell you to drop the ego; I persuade you to be blissful, to be cheerful, because for that you are easily ready. At least there is a desire for bliss in everybody; one may have repressed it but it is there. It is never destroyed; it can be brought up again. And my work consists in bringing your desire for bliss to the surface. Once it is there ego dies of its own accord.

And that is the most significant moment in one's life, to see ego dying and being arising. It is like clouds disappearing and the sun shining forth. And only then can you make a temple out of your life, a temple into which God can be invited, can be welcomed, can be received, can become a guest.

Blissfulness will make you a host. If you are totally blissful, god instantly enters you. Only total blissfulness makes one worthy to receive the ultimate guest.

(Most of us leave home, never to find it again. But there have been a few prodigal sons and daughters --

Osho pointed out.)

Those few are the awakened ones, the enlightened ones, the Buddhas, the Christs. We can take hints from them, we can learn much because they are constantly pointing towards the right track. But we are so stupid that we start worshipping them rather than taking the hint. Rather than looking at the moon to which their finger is pointing we start worshipping the finger.

In Japan there is a temple a very ancient temple, a very strange temple, because ordinarily in a Buddhist temple there is a Buddha statue, not only one but many. There are temples of Buddha where there are thousands of statues. In China there is one temple which has ten thousand statues of Buddha. For centuries Buddhist monks have carved Buddha statues out of the whole of the mountain. Even to go around all those statues takes days -- ten thousand statues!

In this strange temple there is not a single statue inside, but only a finger and nothing else. And just underneath it there is a quote from Buddha: I only point the way, you have to follow it Buddhas only show the way; you have to follow it.

Bliss is already our nature, our intrinsic nature, but we have become so artificial, so unnatural, hence there has come a division between our reality and our personality. Our personality is bogus, false, pseudo.

And the process of sannyas is of dropping the personality so that you can discover the individuality. And that is a gift of god. In that individuality bliss is the first encounter; the first meeting is that of bliss. And then there are many facets and dimensions to your inner being: love, grace, silence, truth, freedom. There is no end, it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. But the first thing that happens is a tremendous ecstasy.

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humble.

(The real Christian is he or she who has the consciousness of a celebrant, Osho told Kerstin.) Being a Christian has nothing to do with Christianity. It has nothing to do with the church, a creed, a dogma; it has something to do with your own consciousness. If your consciousness becomes blissful you attain to the same state as Christ -- and that is the only way to be a Christian. Being a Christ is the only way to be a Christian.

Believing in Christ won't help. Millions of people believe in Christ, millions of others believe in Buddha, and so on, and so forth; neither the Buddhists are Buddhas nor the Christians are Christs -- they are just believers. Belief is cheap; it does not transform you.

Transformation needs guts. That's why Jesus says everybody has to carry their cross on their own shoulders. It is a symbolic message. It is not that you have to carry a wooden cross continuously on your shoulders, but it means that one has to crucify something within oneself, the ego; it is the barrier in bliss.

One has to crucify all that is false so that the real can reveal itself as it is.

(Then he made Jurgen a farmer of love.)

One of the greatest tragedies that has happened to humanity is that we are brought up with a wrong notion that we already know what love is. We don't. And because of this false notion we live without love.

Of course all that is needed to know is provided, all that is needed to create that music called love is within you. But it is like a guitar: you are there, the guitar is there, but you don't know how to play upon it. Music will not be born.

The potential of love is there, the seed of love is there, but you have to know how to cultivate it, how to be a farmer, how to be a gardener; what climate is needed, what season is right to sow the seeds and how much water and how much manure and how much sun and how much shade. One has to be very intelligent, only then the most delicate flower....

There is nothing more delicate than love; even roses are not as delicate. Unless one is very intelligent one will not be able to grow into love.

Life is an opportunity to grow the qualities of love, to bring love to a state of ultimate flowering. But one should not think from the very beginning that one knows what it is. That very idea prevents you from moving into the world of transformation.

It is like an ill person who thinks he is healthy. Now, he is going to die because he will not take any notice of illness. In fact he will repress it, he will avoid it, he will not look at it. Even if it comes and insists on being taken notice of, he will deny it. He will fight with it and he will say, "You are not there. I don't believe in you. I am perfectly healthy." Now, this man is in a really dangerous state and the danger is not coming from illness, the danger is coming from his stubbornness in rejecting it. If he accepts it, then something can be done; then cure is possible. And the sooner one becomes aware, the better. Then it can be prevented from the very beginning.

In a better human society we will tell every child, "You have the seeds of love, of bliss, of truth, but they are seeds. Your whole life has to be a tremendous effort to sow the seeds, to learn the art of growing, to be patient to wait for the seeds to sprout, then to take care of the plants and still to prayerfully wait for the right season when the flowering happens."

And that's what we are doing here. It is an experiment in inner farming, in inner gardening, in inner agriculture. But the first thing has to be the shock that up to now you have lived in vain and whatsoever you have done has been done from wrong ideas. And we have to make the slate clean, so the whole past is simply put aside.

A sannyasin has to begin from scratch. Sannyas is a new birth. It is as if you are born today and now you have to start living.

Forget the past, don't go on carrying it. It has not given you anything. It has been tragic -- no need to remain burdened with it. Become free of it so that you can experiment afresh. Then sannyas is a great adventure.

(Meditation is not-minding. This was the message to Dhyan Sandesh. Mind is our prison, said Osho.) We are imprisoned in our thoughts, ideologies, philosophies. We have to go beyond words and scriptures and theories, only then does one start experiencing the truth. Theories are about truth, but to know about truth is not to know truth itself. Meditation makes you capable of knowing the truth directly.

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I don't give you any ideas about truth, not even definitions about truth. I only give you certain strategies, devices, which can help you to go beyond the mind. I provide ladders so the prisoners can jump out of their prisons. I help you to know how to bribe the guards so that when you escape from the prison they pretend to be fast asleep. I provide you with keys to unlock the doors.

I am not interested in philosophy at all. My approach is existential. Meditation is something existential, not theoretical, not intellectual.

So being a sannyasin means being a meditator, nothing else. Put all your energies into meditation because when one is imprisoned the first thing is to get out of the prison; everything else is a sheer wastage of time. You can go on reading the Bible in the prison -- Bibles are provided for the prisoners! You can go on reciting the Gita or the Koran, and they can help you to forget the walls you are surrounded by. But that is living in a fool's world -- those walls are there.

Ladders are needed, Bibles are not needed. Or if you have got Bibles, use them as stepping stones. Put Bibles upon each other, make a ladder so that you can reach the top of the wall and jump! That's the only use scriptures can be put to, otherwise they are useless.

The only priority, the first priority, is to get free of the mind, then everything else follows of its own accord.

(Osho returned to a favourite theme of his -- the meaninglessness of outer achievements and victories unless one is master of oneself.)

Alexander the Great died crying because he became aware that his whole life had been a sheer wastage because death was going to destroy everything and he had used his whole life chasing after things which death was taking away. So what was the point? He had never allowed himself to live. He loved a woman but he could not live with the woman because his whole interest was in conquering the world. He loved his mother but he could not be with her because he constantly had to go on conquering new lands.

He promised his mother that he would come back, once he had conquered the world he would come back home. But he could not reach home either. That was a great wound. He died on the way back from India. His mother was not very far away, only twenty-four hours away -- just a journey of twenty-four hours. He told his physicians, "I can give you my whole kingdom -- help me to fulfil my promise!" But the physicians said, "Even if you give your whole kingdom we cannot do anything -- death has come. You cannot survive more than two or three hours, and it is better to rest, relax. There is no point -- you cannot reach your mother."

Now this man died when he was only thirty-three. A small life, but even that was wasted in something unessential.

Meditation means going inwards, reaching your innermost core, entering your interiority. And it is a vast phenomenon. It has its own infinity, eternity. It knows nothing of birth and nothing of death. It knows nothing of time; it is beyond time and space both. To know it is to know god -- and that is the real treasure, the real kingdom.

(To wind up the evening Osho described the different levels of bliss, starting with what we know as pleasure -- that is related to the body.)

If it comes through the mind it is happiness, we know it as happiness. If it comes through meditation --

that is through being -- then it is bliss, then it is pure. Pleasure depends on the body and the body is not trustworthy. It is there today, tomorrow it is gone.

Today it is young, tomorrow it is old. Today it is healthy, tomorrow it is sick. It is not dependable; one should not trust it very much. It is a very temporary abode -- just a bamboo hut. A small earthquake is enough to finish it! Or just a small fire, or just a strong wind, and it is gone, gone with the wind! One should not invest too much in the physical world.

And happiness also is not of any more value -- a little higher than pleasure, a little better, but just a little.

There is not much difference. There is a difference but that difference is only of quantity not of quality. You can be happy with poetry, with painting, with music, but the same song repeated again and again will create boredom. You have heard the music and it was beautiful, but if you hear it again and again soon you will be fed up with it. It is momentary, it is constantly changing. You cannot be at ease with it, at rest with it. It creates tensions in you because the old pleasure becomes pain, the old happiness becomes unhappiness. The moment that you were happy with becomes a headache.

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woman, the same man, can go on giving pleasure for their whole life. It is simply stupidity, nothing else!

Otherwise once you have known the whole geography of the woman or the man it is finished. You have explored the whole territory, now there is nothing more in it.

Bliss is qualitatively different. It does not depend on the outside world, neither on woman nor on wine, neither on love nor on music. It depends on nothing. It is just the joy of sheer existence. You are simply happy for no reason at all. It is uncaused, unmotivated. It is authentically yours.

Hence, except for meditation, there is no door to real bliss; all others are temporary substitutes. And the miracle is, if you have known bliss then you can transform even physical pleasure into bliss, then you can transform psychological happiness into bliss. But that is possible only if you have known the ultimate bliss.

Then you can bring that ultimate bliss to the dark valleys of the mind and the still darker valleys of the body.

A meditator loving a woman or a man has a different quality to his love. It is that of sharing, it is not of demand. He does not want anything from the other, in fact, he wants to give. It is not a question of "Give me more, this is not enough." He wants to give himself because he has too much. He is like a raincloud, so full it wants to shower. A meditator can transform the quality of music, painting, poetry, because he can bring something of the beyond into them.

And that's the difference between real creativity and pseudo creativity. pseudo creativity remains of the mind and real creativity comes out of being.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #23

Chapter title: None

23 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009235

ShortTitle: ICEBRG23

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.]

(The way to truth is not through logic but luminosity. This was the message for Prabodh Thomas.) One cannot seek truth through thinking because thinking is an unconscious activity. It is groping in the dark.

Only when one is conscious, alert, aware, does seeing begin. Thinking is not seeing; it is a substitute for seeing. The blind man thinks about light but the man who can see, sees light. He does not think about it, there is no need to think about it.

The man who has not known love thinks about it, the man who has tasted love knows it knowing and thinking are two diametrically opposite processes. Thinking is not knowing -- and we go on thinking about truth. That is not the way for the seeker.

The seeker has to drop thinking and become aware. And awareness is possible only when you drop thinking, when there is no thought in your consciousness, your consciousness is pure, uncontaminated, unpolluted. In that clarity everything is revealed. All the mysteries of life, all the secrets of existence, are 1/08/07

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yours.

(It's the greatest love, that of truth, Osho went on to say.) People live in comfortable lies. They don't want truth, they want consolations, cosy consolations; hence they remain clinging to superstitions, to traditions, to conventions, because all that is old has a certain prestige, a certain credit in the marketplace. All that is old, they say, is gold. It is not so.

The old looks gold only to the fools, to the cowards.

Life is new every moment, it is never old. Existence is always now and here. It has nothing to do with the past and nothing to do with the future either. The moment you are also now and here there is a meeting

-- and that meeting becomes the truth. Of course it will shatter many illusions, it will shatter many ideologies, it will shatter all conceptions, a priori beliefs, because truth cannot fit with you, truth cannot compromise with you and your ideas about it. You have to be ready to fit with truth itself. That's what I call love for truth, a readiness to go with truth wherever it leads, and whatsoever needs to be dropped one is ready to drop. That is possible only if there is love for truth.

Love can do everything, love can sacrifice everything -- and truth requires total sacrifice, total commitment.

Sannyas is the journey of love towards truth. So I am here to shatter all your beliefs, ideas, conceptions, projections. In a way my work looks very hard, harsh, because I have to cut out many chunks which you have believed to be your very being.

The work of a master is exactly like that of a sculptor: he has to cut the rock and he has to be very hard.

Only by his hardness, by cutting out all that is non-essential, is he capable of transforming the rock into a beautiful statue.

When you come to me you come as a raw diamond. It needs much cutting, much polishing, only then will you shine in your splendour. When you come to me you come full of superstitions -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Communist. I have to destroy all those, mercilessly, because only then can I help you to discover your real being.

From your side sannyas means a green signal to go ahead.

(We're here to die -- and born tomorrow. Sujate, Patricia's new name, gave Osho the opportunity to talk about the second birth a sannyasin passes through.)

The first birth is only a so-called birth. It only gives you an opportunity, a potential. Unless the second birth happens you are not well-born, you are only half-born. Many people think that they are fully born with the first birth. They are deceiving themselves. They will die without knowing anything about life, without knowing what it really was to be. They will only vegetate. They will exist but their existence will not have anything of value. It will be a very superficial existence -- routine, mundane.

A second birth is needed and that birth happens through love because love means only one thing, the dropping of the ego.

With the first birth you cannot drop the ego. In fact, each child has to learn the language of the ego just to survive. It is only for a grown-up person to decide, to choose, whether to live in the ego or to drop it and live in total humbleness.

Jesus is right when he says, "Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of god." By meek he means those who are without any ego. And the only magic that can help you to drop the ego is love.

Jesus also says, "Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of god." That's exactly the meaning of Sujate: unless you are born again. And love is going to be the very process of your second birth.

Sannyas, to really be a transformation, a revolution, has to be nothing but a jump, a quantum leap into the mysterious dimension of love.

Drop the ego. Don't think you are separate from existence. Ego creates walls, love creates bridges.

Destroy all walls and use the same material, the same bricks, to create bridges.

It is the same material that creates the ego. Dismantle it and use the same material in making bridges.

And make as many bridges as possible. The more bridges you have with existence, the more rich you are.

When you are related totally you are liberated: liberated from all sleep, somnambulism, unconsciousness.

Your life becomes full of light.

Love, and you will know what light is. Love, and you will know what life is. Love, and you will know what god is.

1/08/07

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(Osho warned us that although meditation is a must, it must be dropped at some point. He was addressing Dhyanbodhi, a truck driver from Holland.)

Meditation is a method, a means. Awareness is the end, the goal. Meditation is only a key. It opens the door and then you enter into the world of awareness.

Meditation is not an end unto itself, so when you have attained to awareness meditation disappears.

Meditation is complete only when it can be dropped, when you need not meditate any more, then meditation has come to its ultimate peak, it has released your awareness. Its work is done.

It is a ladder or a boat: you reach the other shore and the boat is no more needed. You simply say thank you to the boat. Of course it has done much for you, you feel grateful, but there is no need to become attached to it, there is no need to carry the boat on your head wherever you go. When you have crossed the bridge, the bridge is no more needed. When you have climbed the ladder and reached a higher plane you forget all about the ladder.

There are two types of people in the world who are interested in meditation. They can be divided into two categories.

One type is people like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; their idea is that meditation is the goal. Then the other category is like J. Krishnamurti who says meditation is not needed at all. Both are right in a way and both are also wrong in a way. They are both telling half the truth.

Mahesh Yogi is telling the first part of the truth: meditation is needed, and he is right. But it is not needed forever, it is just a means. And the meditator has to be aware of it from the very beginning otherwise he will become attached, obsessed with meditation itself. Then it becomes a ritual. Then it is no more of help, it becomes a hindrance.

If you cling to the ladder, even if you have reached the top rung of the ladder and you cling to that, you have not reached the higher plane. Unless you leave the ladder behind you will not be able to move on the higher plane.

Krishnamurti is too cautious about this fear, because many meditators become attached to their meditation, so he says there is no need for meditation. But if there is no need for meditation you will remain on the lower level. Without the ladder you cannot reach the higher level.

My approach is total. I say meditation is needed and I also say a moment comes when meditation has to be dropped. And that is the meaning of your name, Dhyanbodhi.

Dhyan means meditation -- that is the beginning part, half, and Bodhi means awareness -- that is the last part, the other half, the other side of the coin. That's why Zen people say effortless effort: effort is needed but they remind you again and again not to become attached to it, hence the paradox of effortless effort. And I agree with the Zen approach towards life. It is a whole approach, more wholesome than any approach that has ever existed on earth.

(Then he enlarged on the nature of awareness.)

Awareness is what the alchemists have been searching for -- the elixir, the nectar, the magical formula that can help you to become an immortal.

In fact everybody is immortal but we are living in a mortal body and we are so close to the body that the identity arises. There is no distance to see the body as separate. We are so immersed in the body, rooted in the body, that we start feeling we are the body -- and then the problem arises: we start becoming afraid of death. Then all the fears, all the nightmares, come in its wake.

Awareness creates the distance between you and your body. It makes you watchful of both your own body and mind, because body and mind are not separate. Body-mind is one entity, the mind is the inside of the body. And when you become aware of body-mind you immediately know you are separate from both and the distance starts happening. Then you know you are immortal, you are not part of time, you are part of the eternal, that there is no birth for you and no death either, that you have always been here and you will always be here. You have been in many bodies because you desired so much.

Each desire brings you back into a body because without a body no desire car. be fulfilled. If one is very much attached to food one will need a body; without a body you cannot enjoy food -- souls are not known to eat food. So a person who is too greedy for food is bound to come back in a body. Or the person who is too attached to sexual pleasures is bound to come back in a body, because nobody has ever heard... Except for one thing, that the holy ghost created Jesus Christ.... Otherwise no ghost has ever been able to do anything like that. And it is just a myth: ghosts cannot do it. Even if they want to do it they will have to possess 1/08/07

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somebody's body. Without a body there is no possibility of any pleasure, any fulfilment of any desire.

So when all desires disappear you will not come back into the body but you will remain in the universal consciousness as part of the infinity. That's what we in the East call nirvana, the ultimate state of consciousness, when there is no need for any body, no need to be imprisoned again. We call it the ultimate freedom, because to be in a body is a bondage. Of course it is a very limited thing and you are unlimited; it is forcing the unlimited into such a limited, small world of the body. That's why there is constant tension, uneasiness, and one goes on feeling crippled, one goes on feeling crushed, crowded, imprisoned, chained.

One may not be exactly aware of it but vaguely everybody feels something is wrong. This is what is wrong: we are infinite and are trying to exist through the very small world of the body.

Awareness frees you from the body. And the moment you know you are not the body, in that very moment all desires that can be fulfilled through the body also disappear. It is like bringing light into a dark room -- darkness disappears. Awareness functions like light and all desires are nothing but darkness. And it is nectar.

Sannyas is an alchemical phenomenon. Our search is for that ultimate transmutation in which the mortal experiences immortality.

(Osho continued on the subject of awareness when explaining the meaning of her name to Gyanbodhi.) There is a possibility of becoming knowledgeable without awareness. But knowledgeability is not wisdom, it is mere information -- borrowed, and anything borrowed is ugly, anything borrowed is a burden.

It does not enhance your growth, it hinders it, it blocks it.

True knowledge, wisdom, happens through awareness -- not by accumulating information but by going through a transformation. Awareness is a radical transformation; you are born anew.

Ordinarily one exists in a very sleepy state. One is aware very minimally, just one percent or not even that. It is enough for your day-to-day work, it is enough to earn your bread and to make a shelter and to have children and a family. It is enough for that, but more than that is not possible. Ninety-nine per cent is just darkness in you. And all that darkness can be changed, one can be full of light. And then one knows the intensity of living, the tremendous ecstasy of living.

Sannyas means putting your total energy into awakening. Just a total effort is needed -- passionate, intense. From this moment think of awareness as a question of life and death. In fact it is a question of life and death. Without awareness you are simply dying every day; with awareness you start living for the first time and then life goes on growing bigger and bigger, vaster and vaster.

One day it is so abundant that not only are you alive, whosoever comes close to you, he becomes alive.

You start imparting some magic to others too, you start overflowing with life, love, light. And that is a state of a Buddha, of a Christ, of a wise man or a wise woman.

In English there is no good word for wise woman. Somehow the word has become very much associated with wrong things -- witch. A witch really means a wise woman. And you will find many witches around here. (laughter) But they are wise women, remember, not witches in the western sense of the word.

So become a witch!

(Then he ended on a rather more juicy note -- that of love.) Love is the most blessed state because it is a state beyond the mind. Mind is logic. Logic is a very low phenomenon -- worldly, materialistic. Logic is mathematics; and life is not logic, it is far more than logic.

Life is love, life is a mystery. No logic is able to measure it. No logic can fathom its depth or its height.

Life remains a mystery for logic, because the very beginning of logic is to take life as a problem -- and it is not a problem.

A problem can be solved; a mystery cannot be solved, it is unsolvable. Love knows how to live the mystery; it is not bothered about solving it, it is not even bothered about understanding it. Its whole approach is how to live it in its totality, how to go into it deeply, fully, not holding anything back. Love is a quantum leap. It is great courage. One needs a gambler's heart and one also needs the quality of a drunkard.

The calculative person cannot love, he is cunning; and love needs simplicity. The calculative person is always a Jew, whether he knows it or not -- that is not the point, whether he is born a Jew or not -- that is not the point. He is a businessman, he always thinks in terms of profit. And love is not a profitable business, it is not a business at all. It is living life without the attitude of a businessman.

It is living life as a poet, as a musician, as an artist; as a lover -- and then life reveals all its mysteries and one becomes more rich as one becomes more capable of love.

1/08/07

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Query:-

Love unconditionally, love all, without any discrimination. Love for love's sake, not bothering about any reason -- and then you will know what god is. It is only to the lover's heart that god becomes available. For the logician god is non-existential, for the lover only god exists. That's why Jesus says god is love. He is absolutely right.

And I don't thing anybody before him has made such a pregnant statement. That one statement is enough to prove that this man knew that he was talking of something that he had known himself. It was not borrowed, it was not in any scripture of the world. No other enlightened person has ever said that before.

And because of such statements he was crucified; he was going against the whole tradition and convention.

A real master always goes against the conventional, the traditional. He is bound to because with him the whole existence moves a step forward, closer to god. own observation is that love is the most blessed phenomenon.

Blessed are those who know what love is, for theirs is the kingdom of god.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #24

Chapter title: None

24 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009245

ShortTitle: ICEBRG24

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.]

(Siggi, a therapist from Germany, received the name Dhyan Anutoshen -- then Osho took off from there.)

Meditation means a state of no-mind -- where all the functioning of the mind has ceased. The moment the functioning of the mind ceases you have a profound silence such that you have never known before, such clarity, such transparency -- because all the clouds are gone, all the smoke is gone, there is nothing to hinder your insight. All is absolutely clear.

Meditation gives you innocence, clarity, insight into your own being and into the very being of the existence that surrounds you. Suddenly all misery disappears, all desires disappear. Desires are by-products of misery; because you are miserable you are always hankering for a better state of things -- more money, more power, more prestige and that more is non-ending. When you attain it, again the mind is there asking for more.

Mind simply means the desire for more and more, ad infinitum. Mind means discontent, unquenchable thirst. The moment mind ceases there is suddenly contentment, absolute contentment, because there is no desire. One is so utterly happy in the now and the here that one cannot even conceive that things could be better than this. Then one moves in a world which is absolutely perfect. It is the same world, only you are not the same person.

And when there is deep contentment inside you, of course it changes everything in your life. Your very aura becomes that of peace, you carry an energy field around you. You become infectious. Even people who 1/08/07

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sit by your side will start feeling that something very strange and mysterious is there.

Those who are sensitive will be immediately moved, their hearts will start beating with a new joy. They will be surprised at what is happening. You are not doing anything, it is simply happening; you become a triggering point, a catalytic agent. Just your presence triggers some process in them.

It is a synchronicity. You don't cause it, it simply happens. You are not a doer in it. It is like the sun rising and the birds starting to sing; suddenly from nowhere the trees are awake and the flowers start opening. The sun is not telling them to do it, the sun is not doing anything, the sun is simply present, but the presence is enough. It stirs the life on earth immediately, sleep starts disappearing, a deep awakening happens in nature. When one is contented one carries the climate of contentment around oneself.

First become contented, then your very life will become a source of joy for others. That's the only true service -- not the service that Christian missionaries go on doing. That is mischief and nothing else. It is exploiting people in the name of service, it is converting people, it is a political game. And the people who are converting them are not themselves converted.

Conversion does not mean a change of religion; it means a change of consciousness. That's exactly the meaning of conversion: when you are no more asleep but awake, when you are no more full of the rubbish of thoughts and memories and desires, when you are utterly silent -- that is conversion. When the head has disappeared -- you are no more a head person -- when the heart has taken its place then you are headless and just a pure heart -- that is conversion. It is not a Hindu becoming a Christian or a Christian becoming a Hindu -- that is sheer stupidity; just changing prisons from one prison to another prison, that is not conversion.

Conversion is something inner. The only conversion I know of is from mind to meditation, because is changes your whole being; from discontent it brings tremendous contentment to you.

The lifestyle of a sannyasin has to be that of contentment. He lives in the now and lives fulfilled. If he dies the next moment, he happily dies, dancingly dies -- because there is nothing more! All is already complete! He does not need any more time to do anything, nothing is incomplete. At every moment all is complete, all is accomplished. He is ready to go at any time. He will not even want to linger a single moment more.

(Life's ways are mysterious: that which we can work for is ultimately worthless, while that which is really precious is given to us as a present, Osho told Jean, a rolfer from the States.) There ar things which are not achievements: bliss, truth, love, life, consciousness. These are things which man has to be ready to receive. That's all that is needed on man's part: a welcoming heart, an open heart, a receptivity, a sensitivity. You cannot achieve them by effort, you can receive them -- only by rest, relaxation. And these belong to a world of a totally different dimension.

The outside world is the world of achievement and this is the opening of the interiority of your own being. These are gifts of god. Hence the more man tries to be blissful, the more miserable he becomes, because he is doing something wrong, something absolutely absurd. You cannot try to love. If you try then it is not love; it may be acting. If you are ordered to love somebody you can make an effort but deep do, you will know there is no love.

Love is a happening, you cannot force it. You can only be available. It is like the sun rising in the morning, you can open the door and the rays will come in. You cannot force the sun to rise but you can prevent the rays from reaching you. Even if the door is open you can keep your eyes closed. Everywhere there will be light but you will be like a dark island in the ocean of light, you will remain in darkness. By keeping your eyes closed you are not welcoming, you are not receptive, you are not available.

The truly religious person is simply available to god. And by god I mean the total -- not a certain person somewhere but the whole, this whole universe, this infinity, this eternity.

If you are receptive to it you will be showered with bliss, with love, with truth. Thousands of flowers will go on falling on you. But these are not achievements, hence ego cannot claim them; in fact ego is a barrier. Hence the achiever cannot meditate. For meditation you have to learn the art of non-achieving the art of effortlessness, the art of relaxing, the art of not doing anything. That's what meditation is -- just a total rest.

Neither is the body doing something nor is the mind doing something, all activity as such has ceased. In that profound silence god starts penetrating your deepest core.

(The mind is prosaic, the heart is a poet, Osho told us.) 1/08/07

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The heart is not mathematics, it is something far more. It is not logic, it is something beyond logic, it is supralogical. But it has tremendous beauty and it contains the ultimate truth.

So poetry to me is just a metaphor to tell you to come down from the head, from the world of prose, grammar and calculation, to the world of the heart, of love, of dance, of music. That is the transformation that is the most fundamental thing in sannyas.

A sannyasin functions through the heart, not through the head. He uses the head but in the service of the heart; the heart is the master, the head becomes the servant. And then life has a fragrance. Otherwise life becomes a drag, a mundane affair, business. It loses all grandeur, all sacredness. The head is very destructive as a master -- and the head becomes the master. It has completely destroyed the heart. That is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity, all over the world, in all societies, in all cultures, in all the religions too. People are all living in the head. Religion becomes theology, in the head.

Jesus is not a theologian... but the popes and the bishops and the priests -- they are all theologians.

What Jesus says is his love affair, his love affair with god. and what these people go on saying has nothing to do with love. They are arguing, trying to prove something which can only be proved by experience, which cannot be proved by any argument.

In fact the atheists go on succeeding because of these fools, because all their arguments can be destroyed very easily. In fact no argument has an ultimate value, no argument is self-evident, a better arguer can destroy it immediately. It simply depends on how much acumen you have for logic. And logic is a prostitute, it is always ready to go with anybody, whosoever is powerful.

Atheists go on succeeding because of these priests, bishops, popes. These people are the cause of atheism in the world because they argue for god. And arguments can be destroyed, I have never come across a single argument which cannot be destroyed. So it all depends on who is arguing. If the arguer is efficient he can destroy all arguments. It has nothing to do with truth.

Jesus is not arguing about god, he is living god. His very presence is a proof of god. The same is the case with Buddha, even more so because Jesus at least uses the word "god". Buddha never uses the word

"god". Buddha is the only person in the whole history of man who cannot be refuted by logic because he never gives you any argument. How can you refute him? -- he does not even use the word "god"

He used to keep silent about eleven things, one of them was god... and heaven and hell, etcetera, eleven things. He used to say to everybody "Don't ask about these eleven things -- I am not going to answer because every answer will be wrong. These are things to be experienced."

And he never answered questions about them; he never said yes, never said no. He never took any part in the whole argumentative process. But his very existence was proof enough.

H.G. Wells has said about Gautum the Buddha that he was the most godly and yet the most godless man.

And it is true, because he never talks about god; certainly he is godless. But you cannot say that he is not godly -- his very existence is divine.

Make religion a love affair, that's my message for my sannyasins. It is not a question of logic or the head, it is something of the heart. You need not prove it, you have to live it -- that is the only proof -- and then it is irrefutable.

(Meditation, like bliss, is ours for the uncovering.)

Meditation is like peeling an onion: you go on removing layer after layer and finally nothing is left. That nothing is silence, that nothing is meditation. That nothing is the greatest experience in life. There is nothing higher than it or deeper than it or more valuable than it, because out of that nothingness thousands of ecstasies are born. That nothingness is the womb of the whole existence.

So all that I teach here is how to peel the onion. Hence the meditators and the people who are working in the canteen are doing the same thing; there is no difference-both are peeling onions. And in both processes tears come to the eyes (laughter). It hurts!

So get ready for it. First try with the meditations and if you don't succeed (much laughter)... then you will be sent to the canteen! In any way, one has to peel the onion.

How long will you be here?

Half a year or longer.

That's perfectly good! You will be able to peel the onion, don't be worried.

(He renamed Ursula a love worshipper.)

Love is the only religion there is -- not Christianity, nor Hinduism nor Mohammedanism, but love.

1/08/07

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Enough of all these isms -- they have tortured man enough, more than enough. It is time to get rid of all these isms and ideologies, all these dogmas and creeds. It is time to reject all that is non-essential and to save just the essential. The danger is that because the non-essential has grown so much and man has become so tired of it, he may throw out the whole thing -- even the essential with the non-essential, the baby with the bathwater. That danger is there.

For the first time in the history of man we have come to a very critical moment. If we want to save the essential then the non-essential has to be rejected, and the sooner the better, because almost half of humanity has rejected religion. Russia and China and the other communist countries constitute half of humanity. They have already rejected religion, in toto, for the simple reason that the non-essential really has been an opium for the people -- Karl Marx is right but he is right only about the non-essential. But the non-essential is almost ninety-nine per cent or even ninety-nine point nine per cent.

Scientists say that in prehistoric times there were very huge animals on earth, bigger than elephants, bigger than whales -- their skeletons have been found. They were very powerful, immensely powerful. Why did they suddenly die? What happened to them, that calamity happened to them? The only thing that scientists have concluded is that they became so huge that they could not survive. Their very weight became a hindrance, they could not move, their movement became impossible. And when climates changed they were not able to move to another place where the climate was right. They died because of their own size.

Smaller animals survived because they were able to move.

Now the same is the situation with the religions, they have become huge animals. Now Christianity is a huge animal, so is Hinduism and Mohammedanism. They are dying under their own weight. Nobody is destroying them, they are committing suicide in a subtle way.

The non-essential has become so much that the essential is almost lost in it. And it is time for us to sort it out before the essential is rejected. Let the non-essential be dropped and same the essential. And to me, love is the essential.

Jesus says god is love. That's enough, that's the whole Bible. Even if the whole Bible is destroyed nothing will be destroyed if this single statement is preserved: God is love. And out of this single statement the whole of life can be transformed.

Live a life of love. This is true worship and true prayer. Then you need not go to the church or the temple, then the whole existence is your temple. And then you can worship anywhere because everywhere god is. Under a tree, by the side of a rock, listening to the roaring waves of the ocean -- everywhere god is manifesting in millions of forms. This whole existence is a temple. There is no need to create idols because the trees are enough; the flowers are there, the sun, the moon, the stars are there, the people, the animals, the birds. What is the need to create statues, temples, mosques, churches? There is no need.

The whole existence is sacred for the man who knows what love is. So go on growing in love. Love unconditionally, rejoice in loving and you will be surprised to find that without doing any ritualistic prayer, without repeating a certain tradition, without quoting any scriptures, you have found god. And once god penetrates your being once there is an experience which you can call divine, you have come home. Then there is no desire any more; you are fulfilled, you have blossomed!

(Then Osho told us why man likes to live in lies.)

Man lives in lies because to seek truth is troublesome; it is risky, it is dangerous. It is adventuring into the unknown, into the unchartered sea. And man is a coward, he clings to the familiar, to the known. He is not really interested in knowing the truth, he only wants consolations; comfortable lies will do.

In fact truth is never comfortable in the beginning, it is very uncomfortable.

Buddha is reported to have said that lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end, and truth is bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end. And he is right, absolutely right. Truth is bitter, not because truth is bitter, truth is bitter because we have lived in lies for so long that when truth comes our lies are shattered, and that hurts.

And truth never compromises. When it comes all lies are bound to be shattered and demolished. In the beginning it creates a chaos, but out of that chaos stars are born, out of that chaos is creativity. So only very few daring souls have known the truth. Others have lived coddled with their lies, holding their toys, their teddy bears, clinging to comfortable ideas.

For example, man is afraid of death. Because he is afraid of death, knowing nothing of immortality he clings to the idea of immortality. He does not even know what life is, although he is alive. He does not know what death is although he has died many times. But he clings to the idea of immortality.

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People come to me and ask "What happens after death?" And I tell them, "First try to know what happens before death. You are alive -- right now your concern should be with what life is. Do you know what life is?" They say they don't know. And they are interested in knowing about something which has not happened yet: after death, what happens?

If you know what life is, if you know that which is right now, you will be able to use this same awareness when death comes. It is the same awareness; the same mirror that reflects life will reflect death.

And if you are aware, there is no death, there is no birth, there is only eternity. But that has to be an experience, not just an idea.

Truth means experience. Truth is never a belief. Beliefs are always lies. They can make your life a little bit more convenient but that's all; they are like tranquillisers. Truth is awakening. And man needs awakening, not tranquillisers to fall into deep sleep. But for centuries man has remained attracted to alcohol, to other kinds of intoxicants, to psychedelic drugs; from the time of the Rig Veda up to now he has remained addicted. In the times of the Veda he was addicted to soma and now he is addicted to LSD -- there is no difference. And all these intoxicants, psychedelic, alcoholic or whatsoever they are, are just efforts to avoid the truth. And to avoid the truth is to remain in misery.

Yes, we can make a life which is surrounded by misery a little comfortable, but it is stupid. We can have an absolutely blissful life but that is possible only if we drop the lies and enquire into truth, And the first requirement of the enquiry is to not carry any a priori ideas. Go in absolute ignorance, knowing nothing.

Whenever a person moves in a state of not-knowing he is bound to know truth. And truth brings bliss.

My sannyasins have not to be believers but adventurers, explorers of the unknown. So I am not giving you any dogma, any creed to cling to. My whole effort is to push you into enquiry, because it is enquiry, authentic enquiry, that brings a man to truth, to the realisation of truth. And then bliss is yours, benediction is yours.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #25

Chapter title: None

25 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009255

ShortTitle: ICEBRG25

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 idea of prayer is silence and availability, Osho told Dhyan Anna.) To me silence is the only prayer because god understands no other language. Hence all the so-called prayers are disturbances. When you start saying something to god you miss the whole point.

To me prayer means to be in a prayerful mood, a loving mood. But nothing has to be said. One has to be simply open, open to existence, to the trees, to the sun, to the wind, to the rain, to the stars. When one is open and silent it is prayer.

Hence prayer cannot be Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan; prayer is simply prayer, because it is silence.

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If you say something then it can be Christian or Hindu or Jewish. But if you don't say anything, if you are simply full of gratitude towards existence, no word crosses your mind, that is prayer, authentic prayer.

Without meditation there is no prayer. Prayer is the fragrance of meditation, the song of silence. Nothing is said but everything is heard. If you say something, god cannot hear it; if you don't say it, it is heard. One has to understand this paradox, only then can one understand prayer.

(Love is an overflow of bliss.)

A miserable person cannot be but unloving. It is not a question of your intentions. Even the miserable person wants to be loving, but it is impossible; just wanting it is not going to help. It is impossible in a state of misery because one is closed, one is shrinking and dying within, and love needs flowing, opening. And love is possible only when you have something to give.

The miserable person has nothing to give. In fact, he continuously demands "Give me this, give me that." He pretends to show love, but the reality is that he wants to be loved. And the other party may be in the same situation, hence two beggars are asking from each other "Give me something" -- and both have empty bowls! Naturally there is going to be conflict, misery, fight. Lovers are continuously fighting for the simple reason that everybody wants the other to love and nobody is ready to love.

I teach bliss, and then love comes inevitably. When you are overflowing with bliss you have to share it.

It has an intrinsic need to share, just as a cloud full of rainwater has to shower or when a flower opens it has to release its fragrance.

Love is the release of your grace, of your beauty, of your splendour. Every man is an imprisoned splendour -- and misery is the prison. It is only a question of understanding and misery disappears. It is our choice whether to be miserable or to be blissful. In a single moment of understanding one can drop all misery. It is not a question of gradual growth, it can be dropped suddenly. And whenever it is dropped it is dropped suddenly. My whole effort here is to make you aware and understanding so that you can see it is you who are creating your misery by choosing it. Once you have accepted the total responsibility for being miserable then it is just a question of not creating it anymore, and the same energy becomes bliss. And the moment you are blissful, life is love. When life is love it is religious, it is divine.

(Real freedom is a state of mind, or rather, mindlessness, was the gist of the message for Dhyan Svatantro.)

Meditation is a means; freedom is the goal, the ultimate goal. But without meditation nobody can attain to freedom. I am not talking about political freedom, I am talking about spiritual freedom.

Man has tried in thousands of ways to change the outer structure of the society, to change the state, the economy. We have tried all kinds of economies, Capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist -- we have tried all kinds of political ideologies. And all have failed, without any exception, for the simple reason that if man remains inwardly a slave you cannot make him free from the outside that is impossible. We will again create a new kind of bondage, he will move from one prison to another prison. But he cannot live without chains; he has become accustomed to chains. And the root cause is within him.

Meditation simply destroys the root cause of all slavery. Meditation simply means a state of no-mind.

Mind means all that society has given to you. It is not yours, mind is something borrowed. It is basically planted in you by the society, by the politicians, by the priests, by the pedagogues. The whole educational system exists just to condition the child in a particular pattern, to give him a certain gestalt, to imprison him, to make him a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a communist -- but to make SOMEthing out of him, not to allow him to be himself but to impose a certain structure.

Nobody wants anybody to be himself. Parents have their ideas about how their children should be; they impose their ambitions, their ideologies. Society is very much afraid of free people. It wants to cripple everybody's consciousness, because slaves are obedient. Slaves are not dangerous because they cannot be rebels.

So your mind is basically against you. Never thing of it as yours. It serves the society, it serves the state, it serves the church; it is not in your service. It is a very cunning device.

Meditation means to put the mind aside so that the whole imposed world of conditionings is put aside.

When you are not a Christian, nor a Hindu, you are neither an American nor a German nor a Chinese nor an Indian. All nations are put aside, all races are put aside. For the first time you are simply a human being with no label. And the beauty of that is immense and the ecstasy of it is immeasurable. Suddenly you find yourself expanding. Even the sky is not the limit! You become vast. Meditation opens doors for you, doors 1/08/07

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of infinity, of eternity. You go above time and space.

The moment you drop the mind you become part of god -- and by "god" I don't mean any person. God is not a person at all -- god is a presence, not a person. God simply means a quality, a certain godliness that surrounds the whole existence, a certain sacredness, a purity, a fragrance.

The moment you put the mind aside, the barrier between you and the whole is no more there, the wall between you and the whole is no more there. Suddenly a meeting, a merger, a communion, happens. And that communion brings freedom -- freedom from the body, freedom from the mind. You are simply pure consciousness. It brings freedom from birth and freedom from death too. Suddenly you become aware that you were before birth happened and you will be there even after death. The house, the body, is just a temporary abode. You have lived in many bodies and you have lived in many minds. Those minds, those bodies are all gone, but you remain. You are the only abiding factor in existence.

This consciousness is timeless, beginningless, endless. And it brings many kinds of freedom, a multi-dimensional freedom. It brings freedom from death, and naturally, the moment you are free from death, the moment you know you are immortal, as immortal as the whole existence, all fears disappear.

Freedom from death means freedom from fear. And when there is no fear there is love -- there is love only when there is no fear.

The person who is full of fear, how can he love? And the person who is full of fear, he cannot enquire into truth. All that he wants is to be consoled so that he can repress his fears.

The people who are in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, are all afraid -- cowards. They are simply there out of fear. They are afraid of hell, they are afraid they may lose heaven; they are afraid of a thousand and one things. They are constantly trembling inside. This is a very ill state of affairs.

My sannyasins have to go beyond all this. They have to drop the mind, and with it all the beliefs and all the knowledge that others have given to you, because it is not true. Truth is always yours, your experience, authentically your experience. It cannot be given by somebody to you. I cannot give it to you. My truth -- I cannot give it to you -- will remain mine. I can only help you to find your truth. I can simply give you a few hints, a few guidelines. Then you have to follow those guidelines in the inner world. It is inward exploration. I don't give you any belief, any dogma, any creed. I simply give you a few methods which can help you to go inwards.

The moment you have reached your own centre you know what is, you know that which is. In that very moment you are free, and freedom brings love, bliss, truth, god. Freedom brings all the ecstasies that one has been longing for for thousands of lives. All frustrations disappear. Life becomes a blessing. And not only are you blissful, you also become a blessing to the whole existence.

A blessed person is always a blessing to all. His very presence is enough to enhance other people's joy.

He triggers in other people's hearts blocked sources of energy. Just being in contact with a man who is blissful is enough, and your heart will start singing a song; some bell suddenly starts ringing inside you.

There is a synchronicity, and immediately a transmutation starts happening.

That's what the meaning of sannyas is: being with a master in deep attunement, being with a master with deep love and trust so that you can gather courage to put the mind aside. It is the greatest courage in life, but if once, even for a single moment, you can put the mind aside, you will have a glimpse of the ultimate. And then there is no trouble: you can put the mind aside whenever you want. The first experience is very definitive, very decisive, but the first experience needs courage; it needs courage to risk.

Sannyas is a risk. It is moving in danger, moving in insecurity -- but life grows only in insecurity. Only gamblers know the depth of life, only drunkards know the heights of life. The cowards just go on clinging to their miseries -- they cannot know anything of value.

(Love is an alchemy that only works with the catalyst of egolessness, Osho told Prem Parivartan.) Ego is like a rock and love is like a roseflower, and if you put a rock on the roseflower obviously the roseflower will be crushed and will die. You have to put the rock aside.

People have chosen egos because we have been brought up in such a stupid way that the whole effort is to create an ego in the child. It is created through ambition. Ambition is fuel, food for ego, and we try to force every child to become ambitious. And once the child becomes ambitious he loses track of his heart; then he is hung up in the head o.. because the heart is absolutely non-ambitious. The head is ambitious; it is always on an ego trip. It always wants to be first, to be foremost. It wants to be the president, the prime minister, this and that. It is always desiring more and more, and it never leaves any energy for you to live, to love, to rejoice. It destroys your heart. Your heart is a delicate phenomenon, like a roseflower.

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My approach is: see clearly and choose the rose, and forget all about ambition. By becoming a sannyasin this change has to happen -- only then are you truly a sannyasin -- that you move your whole energy from ambition, from the head, and allow your heart to grow. And then thousands of flowers grow.

Suddenly the spring comes to your being. Then one knows what contentment is &nd one knows what sharing is, and one feels grateful to god for giving us such a beautiful life and such a tremendously ecstatic existence.

But without love one simply drags. Love brings dance to your being, it brings celebration.

My sannyasins are not to be like the old stupid so-called saints -- sad and serious and ugly, with long faces. And you can see on their noses, their egos. They are holier-than-thou, always condemning others.

I want sannyasins to be lovers, dancers, singers, poets, sculptors, painters -- creative, enjoying creativity, living moment to moment with total abandonment, with deep surrender to existence. Then all the beauties of life are yours, the very kingdom of god is yours.

There is no need to live in misery. One can go on from one peak to higher peaks, from one perfection to another perfection of bliss. There is no end to it -- it is an unending pilgrimage.

(Life's a laugh, Osho told a Japanese sannyasin.)

Life has to be taken non-seriously. It has to be taken joyfully, it has to be taken playfully, and only then will you be able to know what it is. The serious person is dull, dead. The serious person can think about what life is but he will never know.

One has to become like a small child again, full of wonder and awe and rejoicing in small things. Watch a child collecting seashells on the beach, coloured stones, with such joy, as if he has found diamonds. Look at the glee, the fun, the laughter, of the child! Running after butterflies or collecting wild flowers he is so totally in it that there is no past, no future for him.

Jesus says again and again: Unless you are like a small child you shall not enter into my kingdom of god. What he really means is to take life playfully e a child. Rejoice in small things. It is a gift of god to be rejoiced! It is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived. The serious person makes a problem out of it and then he gets into trouble because it is not a problem in the first place. Hence no solution is going to be a solution; each solution will bring more problems.

The whole history of philosophy is proof for it. Each philosopher has given more problems to the world and he has not been able to solve a single problem because the fundamental approach is wrong. Life is not a riddle or a problem, it is a mystery. It cannot be de-mystified, hence there can e no solution ever.

The poets are closer to life than the philosophers, the musicians are closer to life than the mathematicians. The dancers are even closer because in a real dance the dancer disappears. He himself becomes part of the mystery. He loses his ego, and with the ego all seriousness is lost.

I teach dance, I teach music, I teach poetry, because these are the pillars of the temple of celebration.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #26

Chapter title: None

26 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009265

ShortTitle: ICEBRG26

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.]

(Osho reiterated in his address to a professor from Germany, a theme on which he touched on the evening of the twenty-first -- the synthesis of love and peace; tonight he exchanged "bliss" for love but it was essentially the same message. The two -- bliss and love -- can be experienced together, he said.) When I say this is possible I am not only philosophising about it, I have experienced it and I have observed thousands of sannyasins experiencing it. Now it is no more just an experiment, it is a proved hynothesis.

(Meditation is not inimical but actually medicinal for the mind, observed Osho in his address to Dhyan Rosalie.)

Mind is a mechanism -- a beautiful mechanism, of tremendous importance, but there is no need to keep it on for twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out. It is tiring, it becomes too hot. It starts burning its own tissues.

That's why children seem to be more intelligent than older people, for the simple reason that their delicate tissues are still alive. Their engines are brand-new, their computers are not yet over-burdened. And mind is a biological computer.

And remember... Fifty years ago one of the great Indian scientists discovered something; now many other scientists have come to the same discovery. His name was Jagdish Chandra Bashu. He was laughed at.

He said, "Just as there is mental fatigue there is metal fatigue. Even metal gets tired, even metal needs rest."

He was laughed at. Of course he was a Nobel prize-winner, one of the greatest scientists India has ever given to the world, but it took fifty years for the scientific world to recognize what a tremendous insight he had given it.

Now it is a well-established fact, that everything tires, and the more delicate a thing is, the more easily it tires. And your mind is a very delicate phenomenon. In such a small space, the head, you are carrying a computer bigger than any which has yet been invented. Scientists say if we were to create a computer like the human brain we would need almost the same space as a huge city takes to install it, because a single human brain can contain all the information that is contained in all the books of the world; that its capacity.

It consists of seven hundred million cells and each cell can contain infinite information, almost infinite information.

So I am not against the mind, in fact I am all for it. 4nd that's why I want that it be given a little rest. The poor mind is continuously working. You are sleeping; the body rests but the mind continues dreaming, chattering.

I sometimes suspect that when people die, even in their graves their minds must be continuing ... old habits! The mind must be chattering, still planning for tomorrow, not knowing that you are in the grave, dreaming. If it can continue in your sleep it can continue in your death too. It has something like an autonomous authority, and we have completely forgotten how to put it off.

That's the whole secret of meditation: it is a method of putting it off. It can be put off very easily, you just have to be a witness. Just watching your mind ... and you easily become aware that just by watching, doing nothing else, no chanting of a mantra .o. because that is again the working of the mind. No need to chant a mantra. That is stupid; you are again a victim of the same mind. No need to repeat and recite a prayer, because that is mind-work.

Witnessing the mind, listening to its noise, aware of it all -- thoughts passing, the whole traffic of memories, desires, imagination, dreams -- just standing by the side of the road and seeing the whole traffic...

And it is always rush hour as far as the mind is concerned! Just watching it, a miracle happens, because watching is the only thing in you which is not of the mind, which belongs to your being, to your soul.

The moment you watch you are just a consciousness, and immediately something starts settling in your consciousness, and the mind and you are separate. The moment you know that you are not the mind, you are out of the mind, your cooperation with the mind stops. And that is the whole method of putting the ignition off. It is your energy that keeps it on. When you are separate your cooperation disappears and the mind comes to a halt, immediately to a halt. That is the state of meditation, absolute silence. In that silence you 1/08/07

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start opening up your petals, your consciousness becomes a roseflower. And that is the meaning of Rosalie: a roseflower.

Only in deep silence does the spring come to your soul, flowers bloom, fragrance is released. And when your consciousness blossoms there is tremendous fulfilment, contentment, bliss, peace, truth, freedom. All the great values come as a by-product of meditation.

I don't think any communist has gone through all his books -- they are tiring, very tiring. I don't think that even he himself read them all! Going through his books was a kind of self-torture, but I did it. And after searching through his great, voluminous works I agreed with only one statement, and that is the statement at the end of his Communist Manifesto where he says: Proletariat of the world unite, because you have nothing to lose but your chains. With that statement I agree. Of course I have my own meaning -- Karl Marx may not agree with it.

I call a proletariat a person who is miserable. he may be rich or poor, that is not important. A proletariat is one who has not known his inner kingdom. He may be a Rockefeller or a Morgan or a Ford. Jesus is not a proletariat although he comes from a very poor family. He is the richest man the world has ever known --

the uneducated son of a carpenter.

The proletariat is one who has nothing. His whole being is empty -- no joy, no peace, no understanding.

He is a beggar, and beggars have nothing to lose except their chains. But a problem arises: we become so accustomed even to chains that we cling to them.

It is a well-known fact that once a person is imprisoned he returns again and again to gaol. That fact has not been yet considered by our so-called lawyers, judges. They still go on punishing people, they still go on carrying the idea that punishment is going to prevent them from committing a crime. In fact, our gaols are universities to teach crime! because once a person is imprisoned for five years he becomes accustomed to gaol; in fact he starts liking it. Life is very easy: you don't have to bother about employment, about the rising prices of things. You will get tea every day at the right time, and your lunch and your breakfast and everything; you need not bother about shelter and clothes. And just by paying the price of chains life becomes so easy, comfortable, that who wants to come out?

So once a prisoner is released he immediately finds another excuse to go in. This fact has not yet been taken into account. He becomes habituated to the life of a prisoner. The outside world scares him; he feels afraid. The moment you throw him out of gaol you throw him out of his home! Now he has to search for a place to live, some work to do. He has to earn money and the whole struggle to survive.... Suddenly he sees that it is better to be back in gaol. These prisoners are called gaolbirds -- they always come back. And it is true about almost ninety-eight percent of criminals, they always come back.

People start clinging even to their chains -- they give them a certain comfort. People cling to misery. It needs courage to drop the known, great courage to risk the known for the unknown. It is a gamble.

Sannyas is a gamble. It is risking your known life for something unknown, That's why a master is needed to persuade you, to push you, to seduce you towards the unknown. A master is needed whom you can trust, whose love you can trust, whose presence gives you the confidence to take the step into the unknown, to take your small boat into the uncharted sea. Once you have entered into the unknown then there is no problem: you know that is bliss, that is truth, that is god. Then one never looks back. But to drop the safety of the shore, to drop the safety of the known and the familiar, one needs courage.

I don't say to my sannyasins to renounce the world, I say renounce misery, renounce the known, and always be ready to go into the unknown, into the new, because that is the way to god.

These are the three words to be contemplated: the known, which is misery; the unknown, which is the way towards god; and the unknowable, which is another name for god. Move from the known into the unknown, and the unknown will take you to the unknowable, to the ultimate mystery of existence.

(Tomaso was described on the darshan list as being a teacher from Italy.) Meditation makes you innocent, and it will not be difficult for you because you are an innocent person.

You are just like a child. It is very rare to come across a child of your age! You could not even keep your eyes closed!

That is beautiful -- I loved it -- you were looking in between, many times. But that's good!

And I have heard many stories about you... that every day you go to the meditation and you read my books there. That's good! That's what meditation is all about!

Just be like a child -- and you are. Don't be worried about the world. The world is cunning and the world condemns simple people. You are a simple person, hence meditation will come very naturally to you and is 1/08/07

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bound to happen. Meditation creates the right space within you, it prepares the ground.

And for you, this is a good meditation; you can just sit silently with closed eyes. That will be a little hard so you can open them a few times -- nothing to worry about! Once in a while looking around is perfectly okay!

And truth is not far away; if one is simple it is bound to happen. It is a gift of god to all simple people.

You have come to the right place. Italy is not the right place for simple people! It is good for the Mafia, but for....

So now enjoy being here. Dance, sing, and for the first time in your life relax, because there is no need to be clever here. Right?

So be here!

(His way lay beyond the ego, Osho told Veet Atto, an agriculture student from Italy.) The only problem is the ego, but it creates thousands of other problems; it is the root cause. And I am not interested in pruning the leaves and the branches -- cut the root -- because that is a futile effort, cutting leaves and branches; they will grow again. And all the religions have become too much concerned with the leavres and the branches, and by cutting them nothing is going to happen.

The problem with the roots is that they are always underground; you cannot see them. And that's how ego is, it is always underground. You see greed, you see anger, you see sex, you see ambition; these are all above the ground. Jealousy, possessiveness, domination, they are all above the ground. But they are only symptoms. And never treat the symptoms -- cut the root, go to the very root, and then in a single blow life can be transformed.

The ego is a false entity. It is an invented centre which exists not. It is a cheap way to create some identity. To discover the real centre needs courage, needs deep meditation, needs inner searching, a soul-searching. So people have found a short-cut: rather than finding the real centre they create a plastic centre. It is cheap, easy. That's what ego is. Ego simply means you don't know who you are, still you think you know.

This false knowing has to be dropped. It is better to accept that you don't know; that is a first step towards truth. Dionysius calls it "agnosia", a state of not-knowing.

So these are the three states: ignorance.... In ignorance a person does not know but thinks he knows. The second is agnosia: a state of not-knowing. A person still does not know, but he knows that he does not know

-- and that is a tremendous growth. And the third is realisation, enlightenment, awakening Buddhahood, when a person knows that he knows.

Millions are living in the first state. Sannyas means moving to the second. And then the third comes or its own, you need not do anything. You just remain in the second, watching so that the first does not come in from some back door. Remain in a state of not-knowing, remain innocent, childlike, wondering about it all but not creating false knowledge to hide your ignorance, and the ego disappears.

The moment the ego disappears your real being reveals itself. And then there is light and then there is abundant life and then there is an infinity of love overflowing. By going beyond the ego one goes beyond both time and space and enters into the ultimate. Less than that cannot satisfy, less that that is not worthwhile.

This is the goal for a sannyasin -- the ultimate realisation of god or truth or nirvana.

(Life can be travelled via the highway of the head or of the heart, Osho told us.) The method of the head is analysis and the method of the heart is synthesis.

When you analyse something you destroy its life. For example, if you give a rose flower to a chemist and you tell him "Look, what a beautiful flower it is!n he will say "I will have to dissect it. I will have to find where the beauty is." And he will analyse the flower. He will find how much earth is there and how much water and other chemicals, but he will not find beauty because beauty is not a chemical, beauty is not matter. He will simply deny it, he will say there is no beauty.

But the poet or the painter, they approach life through a totally different way. For them chemicals do not matter, matter does not matter. For them beauty is the most significant phenomenon. They will dance and rejoice. Their way of seeing is through love. Love reveals beauty, logic destroys it.

All that medical science knows about man is about dead bodies, because they go on doing post-mortems on dead bodies. Even if you cut up a living body, the moment you cut it, it will be dead. So whatsoever medical science knows about man is about a dead man, not about an alive man. That's why they will deny 1/08/07

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that there is a soul, because they have not found it. They cannot put it in a test tube; it is not observable either. It is a totally different world: it is found through the heart.

Analysis is not the way to find the ultimate truth, the living truth. Analysis is right as far as matter is concerned. Synthesis is the right approach towards life. And that's what I teach here.

Bring your energy from the head to the heart, move from logic to love. And love will give you new insight; it will open your third eye. It is just a metaphor -- there is not a third eye really. Otherwise there are fools who start thinking of a third eye as if something like these two eyes is there inside. Then again you are thinking in terms of matter, and the medical science will deny it because they know there is no third eye.

The third eye is only a metaphor, it is poetry. It is just a way of saying that love has its own way of knowing and seeing.

It is said about Majnu... the story of Majnu is a Sufi story, a great love story. This young man Majnu fell in love with a woman, Laila. These are metaphors for Sufis. It is not just a love story, it has a deeper meaning too. The mundane can enjoy it as a love story and the meditators can enjoy it as a tremendous story of the love between man and god.

Laila was not beautiful; she was very homely or maybe she was even ugly. She was not even fair-skinned, she was dark. And Majnu was so mad after her that the whole town became compassionate towards Majnu. The parents were absolutely against this love affair -- parents are always against love affairs. And they were rich people and Majnu was poor .

Even the king became interested in the whole phenomenon, because many times he heard Majnu passing by the side of the palace shouting "Laila! Laila! Laila!" He was continuously repeating the name of Laila as if it were a name of god, and he was continuously weeping and crying.

One day the king called him and said, "Because of you, I myself became interested in Laila. Thinking that she must be a very beautiful woman I called her to the court and I was surprised -- you must be mad --

she is a very ordinary woman, in fact ugly, and I feel much for you. So look, I have called twelve beautiful girls from my own palace and you can choose any. These are the most beautiful girls in the whole country."

Majnu looked very closely at each girl and shook his head.

The king said, "You must be insane! These are the most beautiful girls and you are saying no to them for that ugly woman. I don't see the point!"

Majnu said, "You don't understand, sir. To know the beauty of Laila, you need the eyes of a Majnu!

Unless you have my eyes you cannot see her beauty. I love her!"

This is a tremendous insight. People think that they love somebody because the person is beautiful; that is wrong. The person looks beautiful because you love them. Love comes first, then the person becomes beautiful. It is love that beautifies the person, not vice versa, not that the person is beautiful, that's why you have fallen in love. Just the opposite is the case: you have fallen in love and the person looks beautiful.

Love creates beauty, reveals beauty. For love there is nothing ugly. As your love grows, the whole existence starts becoming beautiful. When your love is perfect this is the most perfect existence that can be.

When your love is absolute then everything is divine, then everywhere is god, because the eyes of love can only see god and nothing else.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #27

Chapter title: None

27 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009275

ShortTitle: ICEBRG27

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.]

(Misery makes misers of men -- this was the message to Heidi, a therapist from Norway.) The miserable person is bound to be mean, he cannot be noble. One should not expect nobleness out of misery. That is impossible; that is asking for something which is against nature. But this is what we have been doing for centuries. People are miserable, and society in every way creates their misery. It is a created phenomenon, it is not natural. Except for man nobody is miserable. All the animals, birds, trees, rivers, mountains, stars, they are all in tremendous bliss. Of course they are unconscious of it.

Man has one thing which is tremendously valuable: he can be conscious1y blissful. But there is a danger also. The danger is that he may get trapped in a pattern of misery. No animal can get trapped in it, no tree can get trapped in it. When one is capable of consciousness one is also capable of choosing. That is part of consciousness, one can choose. Both alternatives are open: one can be blissful, one can be miserable.

Society is for miserable people. It needs miserable people because they are good slaves. Their whole energy is destroyed by their misery, hence they cannot be rebels. Rebellion needs overflowing energy, vigour, courage. The miserable person is so tired, so exhausted, he is willing to do anything, to follow any commandment, any order, howsoever stupid it is. He has no energy to fight against it; he cannot say no. Out of the sheer necessity to survive he goes on saying yes to all the vested interests. And the society consists of vested interests: priests, politicians. All kinds of powerful people need everybody to remain in misery.

Every child is brought up in such a way that he gets caught in misery. And then we expect nobleness, then we expect grace, then we expect love, beauty, joy. We make the person even more burdened. First we destroy all possibility of nobleness, joy, love, grace, truth, intelligence... we destroy everything and then we say now be intelligent, be joyous, be courageous. That makes the people even more burdened, more miserable, because they try to impose a certain kind of nobleness, a morality. That creates hypocrisy in them. If they follow the moral rules they go against their innermost core; if they don't follow them they feel guilty. Either way it makes the misery multiplied.

My effort here is to help you to get out of the pattern of misery; that is the first thing -- because it is a choice. You can get out of it, just a decision is needed. It is simply a question of deciding to get out of the prison. Nobody can prevent you -- there is nobody to prevent you. It is out of your own choice that you are in it, it is out of your own clinging that you are in it. My first teaching is get out of this trap.

And the moment you are out of misery, suddenly you are noble. There is grace, beauty, joy. Life starts having a new dimension, a new richness. It becomes more festive, it starts taking on the colours of celebration. And that celebration is sacredness, that celebration is godliness.

And the way to come out of your misery is meditation, because the mind has been created by the society, and if you remain inside the mind you remain inside the prison. Mind is the prison, the root cause of all your slavery, of all your despair, anguish, anxiety. It is continuously destroying you -- it is poison.

And it is very easy to get out of the mind just by becoming aware of the whole mechanism of mind --

thinking, desiring, expecting. All these things have to be watched as if you are just a mirror reflecting whatsoever passes by, with no judgement, with no desire even to judge, just a pure witness -- and immediately you are out of the mind. First it will come in glimpses. For a few seconds you will be out of mind, but those few seconds will give you a taste of freedom, of tremendous ecstasy. And then slowly those small moments will become bigger; the intervals when the traffic of the mind completely stops will become bigger.

And then slowly slowly the knack is learned. If you want to put the mind into a non-functioning state for hours or even for days you can. Whenever it is needed you use it, whenever it is not needed you put it off.

Both ways it is healthy: it will give you freedom and it will also give rest to your mind. And when the mind has rest it becomes, of course, a better mechanism, it functions better. Its memory is clear, its functioning is in tune, its thinking is logical, it functions at the peak.

So it is not against mind to be a meditator. Meditation means going beyond mind, but it is not against mind. In fact, it is a tremendous boon to the mind, a blessing, because the mind also gets tired: it does 1/08/07

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continuous work, twenty-four hours a day unnecessary work, unneeded. But the mind goes on and on because you have completely forgotten how to stop it. By just being a witness you learn the art of stopping it. The moment you are a witness it stops on its own. That's the whole point.

Then nobleness is yours, and then to live is certainly a great gift. One feels grateful to god. Out of that gratefulness arises prayer.

(Meditation is as easy as pie, as Osho tells a new sannyasin, who has been riding a unicycle around the ashram.)

It is slipping out of your mind like a snake slips out of its old skin. It is not a science, it is an art or, to be even more precise, it is just a knack.

It is easy to teach science, very easy, because it consists of something observable; it relates to the objective world. The student can see what is happening with his own eyes. He can see water evaporating at one hundred degrees. There is not much of a trouble in teaching science; just a very average intelligence is needed.

To teach art is a little more difficult because tremendous intelligence is needed. If a person wants to be a painter he will have to learn two things, not one. In science he has to learn only one thing: he has to become informed. If he wants to be a painter he has to learn the technique of painting and the art of painting --

which are two totally different things. For a technician painting is only a question of arranging colours in a certain pattern, with a certain geometry, certain proportions; it is almost science. But then it cannot be a great piece of art. It may be perfect technically, but something will be missing in it. It will not be original, it will be a repeat, because for originality not only technique is needed, for originality immense intelligence is needed.

Zen monks have been painting for thousands of years and they say that to learn real painting one has to learn the technique for twelve years and then for twelve years one has to stop painting completely and forget all about it. And then after those twenty-four years one has to start painting again, so the technique is forgotten, so the technique does not come in between you and the painting. Now you can start painting as if you don't know painting, you don't know the technique of painting, so you can be original.

The second stage of twelve years is far more important than the first. The technique has to be learned, certainly -- without knowing about colours and canvases you cannot paint -- but that is only a preliminary process. Then you have to forget all about it so you don't become addicted to the technique. The technique goes deep into your blood and bones, but you are not at all self-conscious about it. It functions, but you are now free from technique; it does not hinder you.

Art -- music, poetry, painting -- is far more difficult to teach, a longer process. And a knack is the most difficult thing to teach because it needs three things; it needs a certain technique, it needs tremendous intelligence and also it needs some intuitiveness. Intuitiveness is the highest peak of intelligence. The very word 'intuition' is significant. Education is tuition -- somebody teaches you. Intuition is something that happens to you; it cannot be brought in from the outside.

The master can create a certain atmosphere, a certain energy field; it is a very indirect process. It is just as a gardener prepares the ground and then sows the seed and then waits; there is nothing else he can do about it. Now everything depends on the seeds. They will find their way in their own time. It will be something like intuition. You cannot persuade the seeds to grow faster, you cannot tell them "This is the time -- go ahead." You cannot order them; you have simply to wait. Prepare the ground, remove all the barriers, rocks, weeds, etcetera, give them a beautiful bed, watering, sun, and then wait, then wait for their own intuition to unfold. You cannot do more than that.

That's the function of the master; to create a certain energy field in which your intuition one day suddenly becomes aflame. It cannot be caused, it cannot be forced. It can only be helped, and that too in a very soft way.

That's the whole purpose of sannyas: to create an energy field, to create a communion of people, to create a loving, invisible force, a have of love, so that the wave can take you, can possess you.

Meditation is only a method: it helps to remove the barriers. It is spade-work. Weeds are removed, thoughts are removed, mind is removed. It is just a removing -- it is a negative process: rejecting, rejecting everything that is inside so one day there is nothing to reject. All that can be thrown out has been thrown out and you have a pure space, just space. And that space is the right preparation. In that space your intuition, the seed of intuition which you have been carrying all along, suddenly bursts forth unpredictably. One cannot say when it will happen, but one thing is certain -- it does happen. That much can be said; the time 1/08/07

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cannot be predicted, but it happens. If the space is ready it happens sooner or later -- and it is always sooner rather than later.

And your name Jack is very beautiful; it means god's gracious gift. The gift is already with you, but you have not opened the treasure, the doors of the treasure. The parcel has remained with you unopened, and it has remained for so long with you unopened that you may have completely forgotten about it.

My work is to help you to find where you have put it and to find how to open it. And then life becomes a splendour, a grandeur of inconceivable dimensions. Then for the first time you know what depth means, what height means; then you are no more flat. Ordinarily people are just flat: they don't have any depth, they don't have any height -- just flat ground. They don't know the depths of the Pacific, they don't know the heights of the Himalayas. They are missing something.

The real adventure begins only when you start moving deeper into your being and also higher into your consciousness, and the processes are two sides of the same coin. If you go deeper you go higher, if you go higher you go deeper. It is one dimension, the vertical dimension. People who are living a flat life are living horizontally, and of course, their life is just like a flat tyre, utterly punctured! And you must know about tyres -- you are a unicyclist!

Become something vertical. Sannyas is a change from being horizontal to vertical. And then life is really bliss, a gift of god. One cannot repay god, there is no way. One can only be thankful, tremendously thankful. That's what prayer is, that's what religion is: a deep gratitude to existence for what it has done for us.

(Love is the first lesson in learning of god, Osho told Prem Sanatana.) Love is the only quality, a natural quality, that has something of eternity in it. Hence love is the first experience of god, the beginning of the experience of god. God is much more than that, but love opens the door. God is inconceivable, but love is not inconceivable. Love is natural, so love functions as a bridge between man and god. If the bridge is not there you cannot reach god; god remains simply an empty word.

But with love immediately you start understanding god in a new way. It is no more an empty word; it starts having great content in it, great meaning in it, great significance in it.

Knowing love is the first lesson in knowing god. That is the beginning of the alphabet, the ABC. Of course god is far more, because the alphabet will have to go to XYZ, but if you have begun rightly with ABC, XYZ is not far away. A good beginning is almost half the journey, a right beginning is half the journey.

Begin with love so one day you can know god. And never begin with god because you cannot begin there. That's where all the religions have failed: they begin with god, which is not possible. You are stuck on this bank and you start your journey on the other bank, where you are not. So your journey remains just a fantasy, a journey of dreams -- beautiful dreams, but dreams are dream, beautiful or ugly. When you wake up you will see that all that time has been wasted. Even if they were nice dreams they have not given you anything.

So there are worldly people who dream of worldly things, and there are so-called religious people who dream of religious things, but both are dreamers -- both are stuck on this bank. And god is the farther shore.

A bridge is needed or a boat is needed if a bridge is not possible. Love can function both ways. Either it can become a bridge or it can become a boat, but it can take you to the other shore.

The so-called religions teach you to begin with god, and of course then you have only to believe in god.

You don't know, you have to believe. This is the beginning of superstitution, and all kinds of stupidities will be born out of it -- Christian stupidities and Hindu stupidities and Mohammedan and Jewish, and there are thousands of forms. Stupidity comes in every size and shape, in all colours; whatever you choose it is available. The market is full of stupidity and you have infinite variety; you can choose. You can go on changing from one stupidity to another.

But unless you know, you don't know. Belief is not knowing. Belief is a deception, deceiving others and deceiving yourself. And I am not worried about others -- if you deceive others it is okay -- but don't deceive yourself because that will destroy your whole life. And my understanding is that the person who deceives himself is the person who will deceive others. The person who cannot deceive himself cannot deceive others either; it becomes impossible for him to deceive. And belief is the greatest deception.

The only way to begin is with love, because that is a natural phenomenon. Everybody is born with a loving quality. You have to purify it, you have to make it more and more refined, cultured, so it loses all animality and lust, and slowly slowly starts rising higher than lust. Drop jealousies because those are 1/08/07

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poisons, heavy weights that keep your love low; it cannot rise high. Possessiveness, ego trips, domination --

go on dropping all these, and slowly slowly your love will become weightless. A moment comes when there is no jealousy, no possessiveness, no lust, and love is pure. You have wings, you can fly. Now you have something in you which can take you to the ultimate source of life, to god.

Hence I say love is the first glimpse of eternity, and the last glimpse is god. Love is the beginning of god and god is the end of love. Love is the first step towards god and god is the ultimate goal of love.

(Contrary to popular opinion, yoga isn't a set of strenuous exercises, just the converse: it's total let-go.

Osho was addressing Anand Yogendra.)

Yoga means the art of communion, becoming one with the whole, dissolving yourself into the whole like a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the lake. The moment it falls into the lake it becomes the lake. It loses one thing -- its small identity, its ego, its boundary -- but it gains infinitely; it becomes the whole lake. The dewdrop was always in danger, the sun will rise and it will evaporate. Dewdrops are always on the verge of death, any moment death can happen. But once the dewdrop becomes part of the lake, death becomes impossible.

Man is just a dewdrop, and that's why he is miserable, afraid; afraid of death, afraid of a thousand and one things, constantly trembling inside. And it is natural, understandable. The only way to get rid of all this fear, trembling, is to become one with the whole.

That's what yoga is: the art of dissolving yourself into the whole, losing your boundaries, losing your ego, your identity. In the beginning it seems to be very difficult because that's all we know about ourselves.

The function of the master is to help you, to encourage you, to seduce you, to push you to take the jump.

And if one loves the master, trusts the master, things become simple, very simple. That's what sannyas is all about; it is just a trust. And in trust it is easy to take the jump; without trust it is impossible to take the jump.

In doubt you cannot take the jump because you will always be doubting whether to take it or not and it will always remain an either/or, either/or, either/or.

And there is no way to decide through the mind because the mind has no way to know the unknown, it remains confined in the known. And you have never experienced the melting with the whole, so it is a gamble. The doubting person cannot risk. It really needs guts, great courage, to trust, to put all the doubts aside.

In spite of all the doubts one falls in love with someone who has known, who has taken the jump, who has found. And in trust one takes the quantum leap. It is a single step. Once you have jumped, then nothing can prevent you. Even if you doubt on the way you can doubt -- nothing to worry about. Now you will reach the lake; you cannot hang somewhere in the air.

So once somebody has jumped I don't bother about it at all. I don't even look -- it is finished, I start working with somebody else, because there is nowhere in the air you can stop, you have to go to the very bottom. So my work is finished once somebody has taken the jump.

And the moment you become one with the whole there is bliss. Life for the first time has meaning because for the first time there is no more death. For the first time you know you have always been here and will always be here, that you are indestructible. In knowing it there is rejoicing, in knowing it there is freedom from fear, in knowing it one starts dancing.

Then there is nothing else to do -- dance, sing, rejoice!

Then this whole universe belongs to you because you are part to it.

(The momentary ultimately proves misery-making; only the eternal can bring ecstasy -- this to Amrit Satyam, a psychiatric nurse from Holland.)

We live with momentary things. That's why there is so much misery, because whatsoever is momentary is not going to satisfy. By the time you become aware that it is there it is already gone. This life is almost a flux: it is continuously moving, slipping out of your hands. Nothing is certain, nothing is stable. Everything is in a constant movement.

You cannot make your abode in this momentary world, on these shifting sands. If you make your abode on these shifting sands it is bound to collapse; it is absolutely inevitable. The collapse is going to happen any moment, and you cannot live at peace.

You fall in love, then there is fear about whether the love is going to remain tomorrow or not. Your lover may leave you or you may start thinking to leave your lover. So we start making arrangements to stabilise it, to make it something permanent, and in that very effort all joy is lost.

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Lovers start trying to possess the other so that tomorrow it is still there, but in trying to possess love you are already destroying it. You are not even waiting for tomorrow to destroy it, you have destroyed it today...

because nobody wants to be possessed, nobody wants to be thought of as a commodity. Nobody is a thing.

To behave with a person as if he or she is a thing is to humiliate; it is utterly disrespectful. And everybody resists it, hence the fight starts.

The desire is for something eternal, but that cannot be fulfilled in the outside world. Somebody is poor and he thinks that if he becomes rich he will be happy. The moment he becomes rich he is not happy, he is simply more worried. Now he is worried about whether he is going to remain rich or not, because things go on changing. The market goes down, the prices change, the banks go bankrupt, governments become communist, so nothing can be certain. So there is a constant worry. When he was poor at least he used to sleep well; now he cannot even sleep, his sleep becomes a restlessness. He is constantly worried, nightmares surround him.

Through great effort a person reaches the highest post of the country, becomes the prime minister or the president... and then the fear. Almost the whole of his life is wasted in reaching the highest post, now he clings to the chair, afraid that others are pulling his legs. There is a long queue of people who all want to be the president or the prime minister . There is immense competition, cut-throat competition, and everybody is against everybody else's necks. He cannot rest at peace. He has reached after such a long effort and now all that he can do is to cling to the chair, to somehow survive there.

This is what goes on happening unless we start looking inwards. The outside world is not going to satisfy because it is a changing world, momentary, and our innermost longing is for the eternal. And that cannot be fulfilled on the outside.

I am not against the outside world. All that I want my sannyasins to be aware of is that your desire is for the eternal and that cannot be fulfilled on the outside. So on the outside remain joyful with the momentary, don't ask that it should be eternal. Nothing can be eternal on the outside. Enjoy the momentary as momentary, knowing perfectly well that it is momentary.

The flower that has opened up in the morning is bound to die by the evening. It has come with the sunrise, it will go with the sunset. So rejoice! I am not against the flower -- rejoice! But remember, don't cling, don't hope, otherwise you will be disillusioned. Rejoice in the momentary on the outside, and search for the eternal in the inside.

That's my message to my sannyasins. And inside you will find amrit, nectar, the immortal, the eternal, the divine. And once you have found that then there is nothing more to be found. Then all is bliss, then all is joy. Life is fulfilled. One has come home.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #28

Chapter title: None

28 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009285

ShortTitle: ICEBRG28

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.]

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The truth is beyond the mind. All that is significant is beyond the mind. Mind is made of the stuff called dreams. Daydreams are known as thoughts, but they are not different; it is the same process -- it is non-substantial. Thoughts are like darkness, they appear just as darkness appears. It looks so real, but just bring the light in and it is no more there. It is an appearance, something very illusory.

That's why you cannot do anything directly with darkness: you cannot throw it out, you cannot bring it in. Absolutely nothing can be done directly to darkness because it does not exist in the first place. It has no weight -- it is just an absence of light. So when you bring the light in, because of its presence the absence disappears.

The same is true about mind: mind is an absence of meditation. The moment you enter into meditation, mind disappears just like darkness. And only then does one know that one has lived in a very illusory world.

The mind is the world in which we live. The real world is far away from us. The mind is between us and the real and it goes on distorting the real, interpreting the real, projecting itself on the real. It never allows you to see the reality, it never allows you to see even your own self. It becomes so important that you become focused on it, and the two realities, the outside and the inside, both disappear. The non-substantial becomes your whole life; it dominates you. You live through the mind, you live as the mind.

And that's the only problem. To live in something illusory is to live in vain. There will be no growth, no maturity, no richness, no understanding, no bliss, no truth, no beauty.

One has to go beyond mind -- and that cannot be done by fighting. If you fight you have already accepted mind as real. The moment you accept the mind as real you are entrapped by it. If you fight with darkness, how can you win? Even Mohammed Ali will not be of any use if he starts wrestling with darkness! Darkness will destroy -- although it does not exist.

When you fight with something illusory you are going to be the loser. You are fighting a losing battle.

You are simply wasting your time and energy, because there is nobody other than you -- you are fighting against yourself. It is as if you put both your hands against each other: you can make them clash, but that is unnecessarily wasting your energy. Both hands are yours. It is better to put your hands together in cooperation rather than in conflict. The energy is saved; one becomes a reservoir of energy.

So there is no need to fight the mind -- that is stupid. One only has to watch it, and watchfulness functions just like light. Watchfulness is light, awareness is light. It makes you more and more full of light.

It becomes a flame, and a flame without any smoke because it is without any fuel.

Hence all the mystics of the world have said the moment you enter your center you know what real light is. They have all defined God as light, the ultimate experience as enlightenment. It simply means realization of the light, not as as object but as your very being, your very nature.

So the moment you become conscious, alert, aware, watchful of the mind, the mind starts disappearing.

In a perfect moment of watchfulness there is no mind to be found. And that is the beginning of a transcendental experience.

That is the meaning of your name, Veetmano: transcend the mind. Once mind is transcended the kingdom of God is yours. And with the mind all the problems disappear, all the doubts disappear, all hatred, all violence, all misery. Whatsoever you have known as your life up to now, the whole thing will simply disappear with the mind and you are born anew. It is a resurrection.

Sannyas means resurrection, the birth of a new being.

(Religions in the past succeeded only in making man unwholey, Osho told us.) The old idea of all the religions of the world was to renounce, to reject, to condemn this world in order to praise the other world. They were creating an unnecessary opposition between this and that, between this shore and the further shore. And they are not in opposition at all. This shore and the further shore are in deep cooperation with each other. They help the same river to flow between them. They belong to the same river, they are not separate. Underneath the river they both are joined together; they are holding he river. If one shore disappears the river will die -- it needs both shores, both are absolutely needed. But they are not two, just two extremes of one energy, two polarities like positive and negative electricity. Both are needed for the electricity to exist, but they make one whole -- it is one phenomenon.

My approach towards life is that this world and the other world, the material world and the spiritual world are not opposites but complementaries. Without this, that cannot exist; without that, this cannot exist.

Religions have created an unnecessary split, and the split has created a split in man himself. Man has 1/08/07

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become schizophrenic, he is divided. If you go into the old scriptures of the world religions, they all talk of man in a way which divides him into the lower and the higher. Even the body is divided: below your navel is something lower, above the navel is something higher. This is sheer stupidity! It is the same body -- the same blood circulates. It is nowhere demarcated as higher and lower; there is no hierarchy in tile body. Even the head is not higher than the feet -- they are both together. It is one unity, one organic unity.

And so is the case with the body and soul. They are not two separate phenomena. The body is the manifested part of the soul and the soul is the unmanifest part of the body The soul is the inner side of the same reality of which the body is the outer side, and they both function in deep harmony, in deep togetherness. It is tremendously beautiful how the soul and the body go together hand in hand, in a dance. It is one rhythm.

But religions created the idea that this world has to be renounced. The result was that religious people became escapists. They went to the monasteries and the mountains. In the first place they became afraid of love because love means the other, love means so e kind of relatedness; for that you need the world. So they were against love although they all talked about love. But their love was absolutely non-substantial, abstract. It meant nothing -- it was ghost-like. You can call it the Holy Ghost! But even if you call it holy it is a ghost, and a ghost is a ghost is a ghost! It does not exist -- holy or unholy does not make any difference.

They talked about love but they talked about love in such an abstract way that it really makes no sense.

Love has to be earthly. Just as trees cannot grow without earth -- they need roots in the earth -- love needs roots in the earth; the body represents the earth. But the tree goes high into the sky; it whispers with the clouds. Every tree has an ambition to touch the stars!

But remember one secret: the higher the tree goes, the deeper go its roots; it is proportionate. The roots have to be as deep as the tree is high. The height and depth have to be absolutely balanced. With small roots the tree cannot go very nigh; it will fall down.

The old idea of love was abstract -- a tree without roots in the earth, just going higher and higher and touching the stars. It is nonsense! Yes, love has to rise above the earth but it cannot rise without the help of the earth. It needs the earth's support. Love has to become something higher than passion, but passion has to be its support. It is not against passion -- higher does not mean against. The higher contains the lower; it is bigger than the lower, not against. The lower is contained in it. The higher transforms even the quality of the lower; it beautifies it. It makes even passion transformed.

That is the meaning of the word "compassion": it is passion transformed, it is passion become luminous; then it is compassion. But it is not against passion. The flowers that come on the top of the trees are gifts from the earth although they look so different. Their colour, their fragrance, their beauty -- you cannot find them anywhere. If you dig in the earth you will not find the colours, the beauty, the fragrance, but the earth contains them. The tree simply helps the earth to reveal its secrets. Those flowers were contained in the earth, those colours are part of the earth, of the earth's chemistry. It is the earth's gift to the tree -- the earth is not against the tree.

So a real Buddha, a really awakened person, is a bridge between the two -- this world and that world --

between the material and the spiritual.

Religions created fear about love. Hence monks lived separate from nuns, nuns lived separate from monks. There was tremendous fear. One Catholic monastery still exists -- one thousand years old -- on Mount Athos. For one thousand years not even a single woman has entered the monastery. What to say about a woman? They don't allow even a six-month-old girl! What kind of people are living inside -- monks or monsters? They are even afraid of a six-month-old girl. They must be boiling! They must be sitting on volcanoes of sexuality. And they are not allowed to come out. Once a monk enters the monastery he has entered forever. It has an entrance but no exit.

So first those religions created these stupid people, devoid of love, devoid of the earth, devoid of roots; they are dead. And the second outcome was that they became uncreative, because without love there is no creativity, without the world there is no creativity. And what can you create? -- you will be afraid of beauty.

Even the beauty of a rose will remind you of the beauty of a woman or a man. Even the beauty of a sunrise will remind you, the beauty of the moon will remind you, and some faces will start arising in your memory.

You cannot paint, you cannot sing, you cannot play on musical instruments, you cannot create poetry --

because without love, what poetry will you create?

Love is the source of all creativity, and all the religions of the world creates people who were uncreative. That is a calamity. Millions of people who could have contributed immensely to the world, who would have made it a beautiful place, a paradise, were taken out, taken away.

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My effort is to bring this whole nonsense to a stop, to a complete stop. It is time -- enough is enough!

We should create a new kind of religious person who knows how to love, who knows how to be creative.

My sannyasins have to do both. They have to be lovers, great lovers, and great creators -- whatsoever their inner feel, their inner intuition, is. But they have to be creators. They have to listen to their own possibilities, their own potential. And it speaks. hen you are silent your potential speaks to you, whispers to you. And those whisperings are absolutely categorical -- there are no ifs and butts. The heart knows nothing of ifs and buts, it simply says that this is your destiny: become painter or a poet or a sculptor or a dancer or a musician. It simply says to you that this is how you will be fulfilled. It starts directing you.

The function of the master is to help you to be silent so that you can hear your own inner whisperings, and then your life starts moving through an inner discipline. So I don't give you any outer discipline. I help you to discover your insight; then you are free, then you move in freedom.

So sannyas is not a bondage, it is not a cult, it is not a creed. It is a declaration of freedom. It is a declaration of individuality. It is a declaration of love and creativity.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #29

Chapter title: None

29 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009295

ShortTitle: ICEBRG29

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 began tonight on a note similar to the one on which he ended last night -- learning to listen to the inner whispering.)

Man unnecessarily seeks for knowledge on the outside because the source of all wisdom is at the very core of your being. All that is needed is a deep silence to hear it, because the heart cannot shout, it only whispers. It cannot shout for the simple reason that it is not aggressive. Shouting is aggression, violence.

The mind is very aggressive, hence it is constantly shouting, making much fuss about everything, creating great noise. And because of this noise one cannot hear the still, small voice within. Once this noise ceases, when we have put the mind aside, suddenly the whisper comes so clearly that one cannot miss it.

And because there is no mind one cannot misinterpret it either. It comes with such certainty, with such absolute.... Self-evident it is; it needs no proof, no argument. It is absolutely categorical. Once you have heard it you are bound to follow it. One will never go against it, one cannot. It is one of the fundamental laws of life.

People go astray because they don't know where to look for real advice. In the past they used to go to the priests, now they have started going to the psychoanalist. The psychoanalyst is the new priest. Neither the priest nor the psychoanalyst know anything. The priest himself was in confusion, so is the psychoanalyst. In fact psychoanalysts go to each other to be psychoanalysed. They have their problems, they have not solved their problems either. They have their difficulties, their own mess. In fact they are in more of a mess than 1/08/07

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anybody else, than any profession. No other profession commits so many suicides and no other profession goes insane as much as the psychoanalysts -- and they are trying to help people! They themselves are not healed.

The old proverb is absolutely pertinent about them, Physician first heal thyself. But their profession is very profitable, it always has been. The priest or the witchdoctor or the psychoanalyst -- they belong to the same chain, they exploit one thing in different names, that is, that people have forgotten to listen to their own hearts.

My effort here is to help you to find your own voice so that you don't need any other advice. I don't give you any advice, I don't try to solve your particular problems. My effort is totally radical; I simply help you to put the noise inside off so that you can hear your own voice. And then you cannot go wrong. Then you live in your own light. That is the way of a sannyasin.

The sannyasin is not a follower, the sannyasin is not an imitator. The sannyasin is one who has found his own soul, and now he lives accordingly.

(He only wants drunkards and gamblers for company, Osho said, That's what you have to be if you want to love.)

Love is when the rock of the ego is removed. Then your life's juices start flowing. That's what love is all about your life juices. And they come with such a flood that you start overflowing with them. You have to share. And when you share your love energy with anybody, it is not that you are obliging the other person, in fact, just the contrary is the case: you feel obliged to the other because he accepted your love. You don't ask for anything in return because love in itself is such a joy, who cares for any reward?

Rewards are meant for purposes where the process itself is that of misery -- then a reward is needed. So the reward is like a carrot hanging in front of you and to get the carrot you can pass through all kinds of miseries. The Nobel Prize, the gold medals in universities, the presidencies, the prize minister-ships of the world -- these are just prizes. They are very childish because to hanker for a prize is childish, to ask for a reward is childish.

The really mature person lives in such a way that each moment in itself is a reward. It is not that the reward will be coming later on. The mature person has such an insight into things that the journey and the goal are no more separate, so each step of the journey is a goal in itself -- tremendously blissful, beautiful.

who cares about the goal? Every moment is such a benediction that one enjoys it as an end unto itself; it is not a means to anything.

When a man has come to this state, when everything is an end unto itself, only then has he lived his life truly, he has become really grown-up. Growing old is not becoming grown-up. Growing old has nothing to do with you, it is not to your credit. Every donkey becomes old; it does not need any intelligence. But to be grown-up needs great intelligence, great courage, and a heart which is ready to risk, gamble.

One can be my sannyasin only if one is ready to gamble, if one is ready to risk without holding anything back. When one is ready to be totally committed, then only is some transformation possible. But it brings infinite grace, it brings celebration to your life. Flowers start showering on you, the whole existence rejoices in your joy.

(Osho talked again tonight about how we can live either as lovers or logicians, and about how society has no use for the former so does all it can to harness the heart's energy in the service of the head.) The man of the heart has no market value. He has immense value in himself but that value is not of the market; he cannot become a commodity. When people are poor what till you do with poetry and music, what will you do with painting and sculpture? When people are ill what are you going to do with poet? It cannot feed, it cannot give shelter, it cannot help as medicine.

Society is not interested in the values of the heart, its whole interest is in tile head, so society forces every child to move towards the head. Of course every child basically wants to move towards the heart because that is a natural and spontaneous phenomenon. But we have to divert him. We have to punish him, reward him, we have to create fear and the idea of profit in him, we have to persuade him towards that which is practical and utilitarian: Become a doctor, forget all about dancing; become an engineer, forget all about poetry; become a mathematician, forget all about music -- those things are for mad people.

And when you force the child and condition the child... and society has great powers to condition. The schools, the colleges, the universities -- they exist not for you, they exist for society, they serve society; they are agents of a particular establishment. And the whole process is a long process -- it is twenty-five years at 1/08/07

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least by the time you become a Ph.D.; that means one third of your life. But once you are conditioned you completely forget about the heart. You by-pass the heart. The heart remains at the side, you go directly to the head, your energy starts shooting directly to the head. This is the misery.

I am not against science, not against mathematics. My observation is that there are people whose heart is in mathematics, then it is perfectly good. For example, Albert Einstein: his heart was in mathematics so it was not a head question for Albert Einstein, it was his love affair. But to force every child is ugly. It is a calamity, it is coercion, it is violence.

Just think of a society where every child is forced to become a poet. It would be good for a Shakespeare, good for a Shelley or a Byron, but what about everybody else? If everybody has to be forced and trained to be a poet they will not be poets; their heart will not be in it. They will be just third-rate or even fourth-rate people, their whole life will be of misery.

Just think of Albert Einstein being forced to become a poet, then you will understand what is happening.

He will never be a first-class poet -- that much is certain. He can be a first-class mathematician, he will be a fourth-rate poet, or even that may be difficult. He will remain miserable for his whole life. That is what is happening.

If your heart is in something then for you it is perfectly beautiful, but it has to be a natural phenomenon, a spontaneous urge. Then whatsoever it is you will rejoice, your heart will feel victorious, your life will have a splendour and glory and you will feel that your life has been of tremendous fulfilment.

But society exists in a kind of regimentation; everybody has to be forced into a certain thing. So for a few people it is good but for the majority it is destructive. To ninety-nine per-cent of people society is destructive, all societies are the same in that way. And we have not yet been able to create a society where everybody is given the opportunity to be himself or herself -- respected, valued and not forced to be somebody else.

A sannyasin has to just be his or her own self, whatsoever the consequences, then even to live a poor life is very rich because your heart is in it. If your heart is not in it you may become the richest person in the world but you will be very poor because you will not rejoice in it. Just think of Albert Einstein becoming a Rockefeller; his heart will not be in it. Or Bernard Shaw becoming a Ford; his heart will not be in it. Or Picasso becoming Adolf Hitler; his heart will not be in it, he will be utterly miserable. A thousand and one times he will thing to commit suicide, and if he does not commit suicide he will go mad.

Everybody has brought a certain duality with his birth and that quality has to grow. Meditation helps you to find your natural urge, your intuitive feel. Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, so there is no disturbance, so your inner world is completely empty and you can see and search for where your heart is.

The moment you have felt the heartbeat, the moment you have found your inner pulse, then you are on the right track. Then whatsoever you do will bring joy to you and ultimately god is yours. But it is only through the heart, never otherwise.

(Osho said, If one enquires into love ultimately one finds god.) One should go on deeper and deeper into the phenomenon of love and at the ultimate core god will be found. But that is not to be made much of a concern, because once god becomes your concern you start going astray because you start forgetting about love; you start thinking about god, believing in god, worshipping god. And that is all false because you don't know god at all.

The same is not true about love. You know something, everybody knows something about love. Love is a natural phenomenon. Of course it needs great refinement, it is very crude; it is like a raw diamond. But the diamond is there, you just have to become a little bit of a jeweller. You have to learn how to polish it, how to cut it, how to make it shine -- and that is not very difficult.

Once you have discovered the inner beauty of the diamond and you have cut away all that was unessential, you have found god. Love is like a raw diamond and god is a fully polished, cut, shining diamond. But your concern should be with love because the journey begins in love and ends in god, and you cannot begin at the end. That's where all the religions have gone wrong: they begin at the end -- how can you begin at the end? You have to begin from the very beginning.

So all religions have become theologies. Theology means logic about god. That is sheer stupidity, there is no logic about god. God is the most illogical phenomenon. It is as illogical as love. Is there any logic in love? You fall in love with somebody -- what logic is there? If somebody insists "Why?", you can only shrug your shoulders, that's all. You can only say it has happened; it is a happening, not a doing.

It is something bigger than you, hence it is incomprehensible. And it is not of the mind, it is of the heart, 1/08/07

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so the mind knows nothing about it. The mind condemns it, the mind calls it falling in love. Mind the word

"falling", it is a condemnatory word. The mind says you have fallen, you are no more in your senses, you have gone a little bit cuckoo. It is a condemnation. And all the languages of the world have such words, about this they all agree.

I don't agree. I say rising in love, not falling in love, because the heart is a higher centre than the mind.

Of course physiologically the mind seems to be at the top and the heart seems to be in the middle, a little below. It is only physiologically so. But the heart is at the innermost core because the most precious thing is always kept at the core, at the inner centre, and the head is on the periphery. Just think that way then the total evaluation changes; then the heart becomes the centre and the mind is just something on the periphery, on the circumference. And when you have great treasure you don't keep it outside, on the circumference of your house; you keep it hidden deep in the innermost chamber of your house.

The heart is your inner chamber where all that is beautiful and great is hidden. Jesus calls it the kingdom of god. It is within you. It has to be discovered -- not by logic.

Logic is good for discovering things. It is good for scientific enquiry, it is absolutely impotent in subjective enquiry. For subjective enquiry you need a totally different method -- that is love. It is only through love that you will become aware of beauty, not through logic. It is only through love that you will become aware of bliss, not through logic. It is only through love that you will become aware of god, not through logic. All that is significant is discovered through love and all that is insignificant, mundane, is discovered by logic.

Logic is good as far as it goes but it does not go far enough, it has a limitation. Love has no limitations.

It is as vast as the sky, or even vaster.

I teach only one thing and that is love. Love unconditionally, love for the sheer joy of loving, for no other motive. Love people, love animals, love birds, love trees, rocks, stars. Don't miss any opportunity to love. Whatsoever is available shower your love on it, because the more you shower your love, the more love grows in you. The more you share, the more you have, the more you give, the more you have -- that's why I say it is a very illogical phenomenon.

Logic will not agree with it. How can logic agree with the statement that the more you give, the more you have? It will say)of course you will have less. If you give)that much has to be deduced, you will have less. If you have ten rupees and you give away five you have only five left.

Love is illogical. It says if you have ten rupees, give ten and you have twenty. And all the great masters are absolutely in agreement with it. It is meta-economics. It is something like a higher mathematics, not comprehensible by lower mathematics of the mind.

To enquire into love is the only purpose of life. Life is an opportunity to enquire into love. People go on accumulating money, power, prestige -- these are the fools. Death will knock at their door any moment and all their money and all their power and prestige will collapse. They came empty-handed and they will go empty-handed. Only a lover goes so full. He comes empty-handed but goes very full, overflowingly full.

His death is a celebration; his life is a celebration -- his death is the crescendo of his life.

At the moment of death when a man like Buddha or Jesus or Socrates dies, his death is the ultimate in sharing because this is his last moment on earth, his goodbye to existence. He gives totally and in that total giving he receives god as a guest.

Buddha has used two words. When a person starts moving into the world of love, becomes loving, he calls it nirvana. The word "nirvana" means cessation of the ego -- and of course, when the ego ceases one becomes loving. And when such a person dies Buddha calls it mahaparinirvana, the great nirvana, because then he gives totally. We gives his body, his mind, his heart, his life -- he gives everything back to existence. He simply disappears into nothingness. His giving is absolute, nothing is retained. He simply evaporates, he is no more. He has not kept anything, not even himself; hence Buddha calls it the great cessation.

These are the two Moments which are the most valuable: the first is nirvana when you become loving and you start sharing and the ego disappears, and the second is the great nirvana -- that is when death comes; you give totally, nothing is left behind, not even a trace. And that is the moment when one becomes part of god or part of the whole. And to be part of the whole is the only way to be holy.

To be whole is to be holy. Except for love there is no way to attain to this infinity, to this eternity.

(Bliss can't be boxes Osho told Anand Nirupama.)

Bliss has no form. It is not an object, it is an experience; hence science cannot verify it, science cannot 1/08/07

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collect information about it.

Every scientist knows that there is something like bliss, something like love, something like beauty, but as long as he is a scientist he will deny them; he will say these are all fallacies, illusions, hallucinations. For him matter is the only reality, the object is the only reality; he denies subjectivity.

It is a very strange situation: the scientist denies himself, accepts the objects and never becomes aware that without a subject how can there be an object? Without a scientist how can there be science? But he cannot put himself into a test tube so he cannot verify it, he cannot examine it, he cannot dissect it.

The most unverifiable phenomenon is bliss. It is absolutely formless. You cannot catch hold of it. It i5

like fragrance. A flower you can catch hold of, so science studies the flower. But religion studies the fragrance, and the fragrance is the very purpose of the flower, the fragrance is its essential core, its truth, its celebration, its gift to existence. The flower exists for the fragrance, not vice versa.

Bliss is a fragrance but it can happen only if you become a flower, if you open up like a bud opening.

The bud contains fragrance but it remains hidden inside; unless the petals open the fragrance cannot be released.

Meditation is just an effort to trigger the process of opening in you, so you are no more closed, so you start coming out, you start opening your doors and windows, you become available to the sun, to the moon, to the stars, to the wind, to the rain. You start becoming open to people, to all that surrounds you. When you are totally open life is bliss... But it is an experience and very formless. You cannot prove it, you cannot convince anybody of it, but you can experience it. And who bothers whether anybody is convinced or not?

If you have tasted of it there is no need to bother.

Once a very great logician came to see Ramakrishna and he argued very much against god, against truth, against bliss, and all that is inner. Ramakrishna laughed and enjoyed it. The logician started feeling a little bit embarrassed, obviously, because he thought that Ramakrishna would become sad because he could not argue and he could not answer him -- but he was rejoicing! He ashed "What is the matter with you? Are you mad or something? -- because I am arguing against all your beliefs and you go on laughing!"

Ramakrishna said "You can argue but how can I deny my experience? You are simply showing that you have not experiences, that's all. And I am enjoying it, your arguments are beautiful, but they cannot convince me because I know and you don't know. Your arguments are clever and I am enjoying them, they are very intellectual and I appreciate them. But I cannot answer because what I have experienced is unarguable. And who cares about convincing you? In the first place it is not possible; even if it was possible, who bothers?"

The man was immensely impressed. This was the first time he had found a man who could not be dislodged from his cent mind, from his grounding; no argument affected him. Ramakrishna said "You make very convincing arguments and they can convince anybody who has not known. But what can I do? I am helpless: I have known it! You are like a blindman who is arguing against light. I can understand your arguments, why you are arguing -- because you don't have any eyes. And I am like a man who has eyes and who has seen the light and I know. I cannot argue about it, because you don't have any eyes.

"Only eyes can give you an experience of light, so if you want to learn," Ramakrishna said, "what bliss is, you will have to be with me and drop these arguments. Just once taste something of it then you can argue."

And this man, Keshavchandra Sen was his name -- one of the greatest logicians of the past century --

became a disciple of Ramakrishna. The whole of Calcutta was shocked, they could not believe it, because Ramakrishna was absolutely uneducated, a villager, a very simple person, almost a simpleton. And Keshavchandra Sen's becoming a disciple was very shocking news to the intelligentsia. They asked again and again "Keshavchandra, what happened?" And he said " Something has happened. I could see that that man is blissful. I tried in every way to somehow make him waver, but nothing can make him waver. He knows something which I have not known and for the first time I have become interested in knowing it. I thought it is only a question of argument -- it is not.

"I have seen this man and his eyes and his presence and I certainly feel that he has something which I have not got. But this is a feel."

So remember, bliss is a fragrance, a feel. But one can learn the ways to find it. Sannyas is a beautiful beginning for this journey. Now remember meditation, because I teach only one thing. Once you are a sannyasin either I teach you meditation or love -- one of the two -- because both lead to the same phenomenon. To a few people I teach love because for them it is more natural and to a few people I teach meditation; for them that is more natural. But both lead to the same goal. Meditation helps you to come out 1/08/07

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of the mind, love also helps you to come out of the mind. Meditation destroys your ego, love also destroys your ego. But for you my suggestion is meditation. Pour your energy into meditativeness and bliss is not far away.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Chapter #30

Chapter title: None

30 September 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Archive code: 8009305

ShortTitle: ICEBRG30

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.]

(Our nature, pure and simple, is to be pure and simple, Osho reminded us in his first address tonight.) We come into the world absolutely pure and innocent, absolutely clear, clean, but then the world starts writing on our consciousness, it starts conditioning us. It pollutes everybody, it contaminates, poisons. By the time a child is mature enough to think on his of the world has already destroyed him. He is already crippled, paralysed; the world has already taught him to use crutches and he has forgotten to use his own insight. He cannot stand on his own legs; it has made him dependent.

This is the greatest conspiracy against humanity, to make every human being a cripple -- not physically but spiritually. And the strategy that is used is to give you a mind so that your consciousness becomes covered with thoughts, desires, ambitions, ego, ideologies, religion, politics, and a thousand and one things are there, layer upon layer. Your mirrorlike consciousness disappears and then a man lives a life of indignity, a life which is absolutely graceless, a life of blindness, a life of utter dependency.

First the child depends on the parents and they enjoy the child being dependent on them. Then they force the child to depend on the teachers, on the priests, on the politicians and whosoever is in authority.

You always have to look up to the authority, you have to follow orders and be obedient.

Obedience has been almost like a cancer. It has been used against man to destroy his freedom, to destroy his very soul. And once they have destroyed it they start talking about purity: Be pure, be moral, be integrated, be sincere, be honest. First they destroy all possibilities and then they start talking about great values. That is another strategy to make you feel guilty, because you cannot manage it. They have destroyed all your possibilities and now they are expecting you to be pure.

You were pure in the first place but they did not allow it. Once they covered your mind with great clouds; now they want you to be pure -- and it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, and then a guilt arises in you. You start feeling unworthy, you lose all self-respect. And once a man loses his self-respect he loses all. Then he is just a slave; he will serve all the vested interests, the establishment. He will be only a functionary, a machine, he will not be a human being.

And that's what these exploiters and oppressors of all kinds need -- not human beings but machines.

They don't want you to be anything more than your functions, your duties. You should end at your functions, you should not have anything more than them, because that anything more could be dangerous; You may start thinking on your own and then you will no longer be able to support all kinds of superstitions 1/08/07

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which have been imposed upon you. You may start contemplating and then certainly you cannot always say yes; many times, in fact ninety-nine times out of one hundred, you will have to say no.

You may even start meditating if you are allowed -- and that will give you absolute freedom because it will help you to rediscover your nature. Society is very much afraid of giving you anything more than a machine needs. It brings you down to the minimum and at the minimum nobody can be blissful. Bliss happens only at the maximum, when you have reached to the optimum, to the highest peak of your potential.

And the only thing to be done is to undo whatsoever the society has done to you. That's the purpose of sannyas: it is an undoing, it is a dismantling, it is a dispelling all pollutants that society has put into you. It is a kind of returning to the source, to your natural purity.

So I don't teach purity, I don't teach morality -- that is all nonsense. I only teach meditation so you can get rid of the mind. The mind belongs to society and meditation belongs to you. With meditation you are absolutely free, and suddenly you start discovering your intrinsic treasures. And then begins a great pilgrimage of joys, beauty, beauties, songs, celebrations. And it is an unending process. It gives you the vision of eternity. It gives you the certainty that you are immortal.

And to know it is to become part of god, is to be divine.

(And continuing the theme, Osho turned to the next sannyasin -- a taxi driver from Germany.) Mind is a bondage, it is a prison, but a very subtle, invisible one; and a very strange one too, because ordinarily the prison is outside you and you are inside the prison. But with the mind it is just the opposite: you are outside the prison and the prison is inside you. It goes on deceiving you very easily because you don't see any walls around you; you can believe that you are free. But you are not free if your mind dominates you. And it does dominate you; it goes on pulling strings from behind you and you are just a puppet. The puppet can think it is free, that all these movements are his -- they are not.

Unless one gets out of the mind, unless one puts the mind aside, one never knows what freedom is.

Freedom is the very taste of god; there is nothing higher than it. Freedom means freedom from mind, freedom from body, freedom from birth, freedom from death, freedom from all kinds of limitations. When you feel you are unlimited and there are no boundaries to you, then only do you know what freedom is.

Otherwise one is confined in a very small space which is overcrowded with desires, ambitions, expectations, frustrations, dreams, memories. It is so overcrowded that you are almost crushed by the crowd that you are carrying within yourself. What freedom can one have in such a crowded space? There is no space even to move.

One needs spaciousness. Meditation brings space to you, it creates space, it throws out all junk. And whatsoever your mind has is nothing but junk. It is a junkyard, a graveyard carrying corpses of the past and carrying unnecessary, stupid dreams about the future which are never going to happen; they have never happened. Between the past and the future you are confined, and both are non-existential. The past is no more and the future is not yet, and between these two non-existentials you are crushed.

Meditation means to be here, to be now -- no more past, no more future. This very moment is all. And suddenly there is freedom, suddenly you start rising upwards from all kinds of bondage.

Meditation is a simple phenomenon of being here and now, dying to the past every moment, not carrying it at all and not bothering about tomorrow, because it never comes. It is always now, it is never then. It is always here, it is never there. There and then don't exist, here and now exist; in fact they are two sides of the same coin. Even physics have come to the insight that time and space are not separate. Here means space, now means time.

One of the greatest contributions of Albert Einstein is the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space, it is not a separate thing. Space is three-dimensional and time is the fourth dimension. But this has been the insight of the mystics. It is so old that it is difficult to say when it really happened for the first time; it is the most ancient insight of the mystics. But it is natural: science has to follow only after thousands of years because its very procedure is a very long-winded one. But now physicists are saying exactly what the mystics said five thousand years ago, that now and here are two sides of the same coin. And that's the only thing that is real; all else is either imagination or memory.

Getting out of memory and imagination is meditation, and the moment you are in meditation you are free, you are released from the prison.

(Tonight Osho compared morality that is imposed on a person to lipstick!) 1/08/07

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You can paint your lips red -- that does not mean that you are so healthy, so young, that your lips are red. But you can paint them red. And there are millions of foolish women all over the world -- one wonders whom they are deceiving -- whose whole face shows one colour and their lips show another colour. It is so clear.... And there are layers of lipstick.

I even wonder: who are the people who kiss them? (much laughter) Some mad, insane people -- they must be -- otherwise, who wants to taste lipstick? But that's how it is happening on many many planes of human life. Morality is just like lipsticks you paint yourself from the outside, you make a beautiful face, a mask, you pretend to be somebody you are not.

When you are full of tears you smile, when you are angry you don't show it, you go on repressing it.

Naturally this whole process creates a division is you. The tears were real but you did not allow them, you pushed them back. And the smile was false but you tried to smile. It cannot go very deep, it is only on the lips. It is just an exercise of the lips, a Jimmy Carter exercise. It has nothing to do with you.

You must have heard about the grin of the cheshire cat. The cat disappears but the grin remains. I always think that even if Jimmy Carter disappears the smile will remain there, because it has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter; the smile can continue on its own. Jimmy Carter is gone but the smile continues because it is something separate, totally separate. It has its own autonomy.

Morality is just like that: a false smile. You practise morality but that does not give you dignity of character.

Dignity of character comes through meditation. You are not practising anything as far as your character is concerned, but your insight grows. You start seeing things as they are, and naturally when you start seeing things as they are your whole life is transformed in this new light, in this new vision. You cannot behave in the old way. You cannot deceive anybody because now through meditation one knows that we are not separate -- who are you deceiving? You are deceiving yourself. You cannot be violent, you cannot hurt, you cannot enjoy hurting anybody because now you know that the other is part of you as you are part of the other. We are part of one organic universe, we are not separate entities at all.

Then of course you will have a dignity of character and a dignity will come through integrity. You will not be divided, you will be one. Your vision will be one, your lifestyle will simply be a consequence of it, not against it, nothing imposed. It is like healthy lips the redness comes from the blood circulating inside. It is a totally different phenomenon.

So remember, meditation has to be the source of real character. One can forget all about character -- just put your whole energy into meditation and out of it arises a character. It is not something put together by you, it comes spontaneously. And when character is spontaneous it has a beauty of its own, it is a joy. It is not a means to any end, it is an end unto itself.

(How long will you be here? Osho added.

Two months, maybe more, was the reply.)

Let it be more!'

(Bliss is the fragrance of inner unfolding, Osho told Anand Sugandha.) Ordinarily people live a closed life. They don't open their doors and windows. They live in fear, hiding, always afraid of the unknown. They don't allow the sun, the rain, the wind, to enter their being. But if you put a rose plant in your room and you close all the windows and all the doors and no wind, no rain, no sun reaches it, you cannot hope that the rose-bush will survive; it will die. That's how people are -- almost dead.

They are living a dead life, just dragging somehow.

To really live one has to be available to all that is. One has to be open and vulnerable, one has to drop all fears. There is only one thing one should be afraid of, and that is fear. Except for that never be afraid of anything, because fear cripples, kills. And the moment you start moving towards the unknown, in spite of all the fears, your life starts having many new thing, of which you were never aware, because as the adventure deepens, your thrill, your ecstasy, deepens with it.

As you start moving into the unknown there are so many challenges to be faced, encountered, that naturally you become more aware, more alert, more cautious, more conscious. You have to be. It is walking on a razor's edges how can you be sloppy? Sloppy? You have to be cautious and alert, it is risky. And whenever there is risk, your intelligence becomes sharp. And when intelligence is sharp, ecstasy is great and you are thrilled at each movement; at each step your inner being starts unfolding.

Only in this climate of adventure, ecstasy, integrity, risk, danger, intelligence, awareness, does the inner being open. The bud becomes a flower.

1/08/07

Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

In the East we have called it a one-thousand-petalled lotus, this opening of the inner flower. There is no flower like it because it is the flower of consciousness, it is unique. And the perfume of it is what is called enlightenment, Buddhahood, Christ-consciousness. That's the fragrance.

Bliss is the fragrance of a life lived totally, dangerously, exploring the unknown and the unknowable.

(We nave to remember two words and the difference between them, he told us tonight -- information and transformation.)

People go on collecting information -- they think it is knowledge. It is not. It it deception, self --

deception. Knowing happens through transformation, not through information. Information can make you a scholar, a pundit, a knowledgeable person, but it cannot make you wise. You will be as stupid as ever, or maybe more.

Scholars have only repressed their ignorance. It has not left them, it is deep inside them. Of course they have accumulated much knowledge, but because it is not their own it has no value, no validity, no truth.

One can repeat the Bible like a parrot -- that does not mean that one becomes a Moses or a Jesus, otherwise all the universities would be creating many Jesuses, Buddhas, Krishnas. Universities have utterly failed in creating wise people.

If once in a while a person who has passed through the universities becomes wise, that simply means he has become wise in spite of the university, not because of the university; he must have been very very cautious. The university could not destroy him, because the universities can only impart information.

Sannyas is the beginning of transformation. It is a change of the very base of your life, it is a change of your very outlook, it is a change at the deepest core of your being. It is a shift from mind to no-mind, from noise to silence, from continuous chattering inside to profound silence. This change of gestalt releases your wisdom. And to live in one's own light is the most glorious thing; only then can one feel grateful to god, never before it.

The animal love is unconscious.

Divine love is absolutely conscious. Human love is half way between the two, hence in human love there is always a conflict, one's being feels torn apart. That's why although love gives people great hopes, those hopes are never fulfilled. On the contrary, every hope brings great frustrations, disillusionment.

Love promises ecstasies but what it really brings is agony. It is human love, so it is bound to be so, because human love is a tense affair. A part of it is absolutely ready to go back to the animal world -- that's the sexual part in love. And the other part wants to transcend, to go beyond even the human -- that is the prayer part in it. Lovers become very much confused; they cannot figure out what actually is the case, because sometimes they feel love as just lust and sometimes they feel it as such a profound prayerfulness that they are puzzled.

Hence love has never been defined. How to define it? If you define it according to the highest peaks it is prayer, but those are rare. If you define it by its ordinary, day-to-day existence, then it is just lust and nothing else. And one cannot conceive how the lust can be prayerful or how the prayer can fall so low that it becomes just an animal desire.

So lovers are in a very great confusion, but it is not their fault. My sannyasins have to understand that human love is inevitably a tense affair because it is neither wholly animal nor wholly divine. It is in a continuous conflict. It is divided, it is split; it is in a way schizophrenic.

Either you have to fall back and behave like animals -- then there is not much conflict... but that is not possible, one cannot fall back, one cannot go back. People have tried all methods to fall back -- alcohol, psychedelic drugs... all kinds of intoxicants are momentary successes in falling back, but after a few hours you are again in the same situation.

One can only go ahead, one cannot go back. Human love has to go towards divine love, but that is an arduous task, it is going uphill. The first is impossible but it looks easy; the second is possible but it looks impossible. So many choose the first because it looks easy, but it is not possible at all. The possible is the second but it is not easy. All upward movement is arduous. It needs consciousness, it needs sincerity, it needs commitment, it needs perseverance and patience.

I am giving you this name Devapriti, just so that you can be reminded again and again. You very name will remind you, will become a reminder that one has to go to the highest peak of love, only then is there fulfillment, only then does one feel at ease, at home.

How long will you be here?

1/08/07

Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994

Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished

Query:-

I will stay until the end of October.

Till the end of October? Then come back again. And this is your home -- come back forever!

(In Indian mythology Gandharv is the name of god's musicians, Osho told the newest swami -- Prem Gandharv. And then he spoke to us of love.)

Music is pure when even instruments are not needed. And because of that I feel that Indian mythology has more insight than any other mythology. The angels in the Christian heaven go on playing on harps --

everybody is carrying a harp. They must be really tired by now. (laughter) And the whole day there is no other work, you have to go on playing hallelujah. It must be boring.

Indian mythology says that the musicians of the gods don't need any instruments, they don't even sing songs. Their silence is their song, their silence is their prayer. That seems to be far more significant, far more dignified.

Silence is music, pure music.

The Zen people say that the ultimate enlightenment is like the sound of one hand clapping. One hand clapping... If two hands clap then there is a clash, conflict. When only one hand is clapping it is of course absolutely silent, there is no sound at all, and that silence is the ultimate music.

Love is the ultimate music to me. It does not need even the other. If the other is needed then it is either animal love or at the most human love. But when the other is not needed at all, then it is divine love. Then it is not a question of relationship, it is not a question of your even being loving: you become love itself. Then you are the music, you are the song. It is no more a quality, no more an activity. It is your very being.

And when love becomes your being there is great celebration inside. There is no sound, there are no instruments, but one hears a celestial music, a music which is not a created one -- uncreated music. We are made of it so if we go deep in our beings we are bound to find it. It is already there like an undercurrent.

Once in a while in certain situations we become aware of it. Seeing a beautiful sunset suddenly you fall silent -- not that you practise being silent or that you try to be silent, no -- it simply happens. The beauty is so tremendous, it is such an awe that you forget to blink your eyes. It is as if for a moment the heartbeat stops; for a moment time stops, mind stops, everything stops; you are in a complete nothingness. And then you feel great beauty, great joy.

Of course you logically think it is coming from the beautiful sunset -- it is not so. The beautiful sunset may have functioned as a triggering point. It may have triggered a process in you but it is not the cause of it.

And once you understand that there is no cause to it , you can simply close your eyes and you can fall into deep silence any moment. That's what meditation is all about: creating a situation independent of the outside world. No sunset is needed, no beautiful full-moon is needed, no beautiful woman or man is needed, no roses , no lotuses are needed. Nothing is needed because you have found that these are only triggering points -- and it can be done by yourself.

Just by becoming attuned to the inner, you immediately hear something, you immediately become full of something which cannot be expressed in any words whatsoever. It remains unexpressed, inexpressible. But love comes closest to it.

So remember, love has to become the music of your life.

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