Bhagwato, Jesus says: Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of God. Exactly that’s what I say to you: Unless you are born again….

There are two births. One is given to you by your parents; that is a physical birth. That is only an opportunity for the second birth. If you think that the first birth is all, you have missed the whole point. The first birth is only a seed. It is of immense value if the second happens; it is of no value at all if you miss the second birth. You have to be twice-born. That’s how we have defined the buddhas in the East.

The second birth has to happen within you; it is of consciousness. It is not of your body, it is not even of your mind; it is of awareness.

Ordinarily, the first birth makes you only a machine. You start living in a very superficial way; you don’t have any depth, you don’t have any soul yet. You eat, you drink, you work, you sleep, but all like a robot. You don’t see the beauty of existence — you can’t see it. You don’t see the godliness of every moment; it is impossible for you to experience it. It needs a transformation of your whole interiority. It needs a new subjectivity, a new vision, a new perspective.

You see in a certain sense, you hear only in a certain sense. Yes, you hear the words, but the meaning is missed. You read the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, but just like a parrot. Even parrots are far more intelligent than your so-called pundits, than your so-called knowledgeable people. You go on repeating like a gramophone record. And you are so egoistic that you can’t accept, you can’t say, “I don’t know.”

Jascha Heifetz, the distinguished violinist, was in London where he was scheduled to give a concert. A few hours before curtain time, he noticed that a violin string had broken, so he hurried to a music supply shop for a replacement. He was waited on by a girl who was new to the business.

“I would like to have an ‘E’ string for my violin,” said Heifetz.

“A what?” asked the uncomprehending girl.

“An ‘E’ string.”

“Sorry, luv,” she replied apologetically, “but ye will have to pick it out yourself. I can’t tell the he’s from the she’s!”

People are very reluctant to accept the fact that they don’t know. They try in every possible way to manage a facade that they know. This is the greatest mistake in life. You are not yet born, but if you think you are already born, if you think you have already attained to life, then this whole opportunity is going to be lost. It will go down the drain.

And you can learn great words; they are available. You can learn them so much so that if you meet Jesus you may repeat his words better than he can do it himself because you have been repeating them for so long. You may defeat him; in a competition he may not be able to survive at all. Some stupid priest may win the competition because he will be just repeating exactly, word for word. Jesus cannot do that; that is impossible. He has to be spontaneous. He will respond to the situation. He may say some new things — because twenty centuries have passed. How can he go on saying the same old things? Impossible.

That’s why the people who believe that they know are the most ignorant in the world. To be ignorant is not that bad, but to believe that you know, without knowing, is very dangerous.

It seems that talking parrots had become quite fashionable. Understandably, Mulla Nasruddin’s wife decided she must have one for herself. However, every store she went to had sold out of parrots. Finally she found a shop that had one left.

“But,” the owner cautioned, “this bird was previously owned by a madam in a whorehouse and its language may be quite salty. Perhaps if you keep him covered for a week, he will forget what he has seen and heard.”

Mrs. Nasruddin purchased the bird and did as the shopkeeper bid. At long last the week was over and the bird was finally uncovered. He first blinked his eyes and then after adjusting to the light looked around and said, “Hmm… pretty new house. Hmm… pretty new madam. Hmm… pretty new girls too.”

Just then Mulla Nasruddin walked in. The bird took one look at him and said, “Ah, shit! Same old customers. Hi, Mulla!”

Yes, even parrots are more spontaneous than your pundits. You go on repeating. Your parents believed that they lived and their parents believed that they lived, and they have given you the idea that you are alive. You are not alive, you are only vegetating. To be alive means to be awakened.

Bhagwato, when I say the new man, I mean the conscious man. Humanity cannot be saved if the conscious man does not arrive. In the past it was not so necessary, but now it is absolutely necessary, it is a must. If the new man does not arrive on the earth, if more and more people are not going to become conscious, alert, awake, then this earth is doomed. Its fate is in the hand of the stupid politicians, and now they have immense power of destruction, such as they never had before. That is something new.

Just five years ago they had so much power that they could have killed every single human being seven times — although you don’t need to kill any human being seven times, once is enough. We had five years ago so much atomic energy — atom bombs, hydrogen bombs — that we could have destroyed this earth seven times. And within five years we have really progressed — now it is seven hundred times! We can destroy seven hundred earths like this earth, and we go on piling up…. And any moment, any mad politician can trigger the process of self-destruction.

The coming twenty years are going to be the most dangerous in the whole history of humanity; it has never been so dangerous — we are sitting on a volcano. Only more consciousness, more alertness can save it; there is no other way. We have to de-automatize man. The society automatizes you. It creates efficient machines, not human beings.

My effort here is to de-automatize you. I am doing something absolutely antisocial. The society makes you a machine and my effort is to undo it. I would like this fire to spread and reach to all the nooks and corners of the earth, to help as many people as possible to be conscious. If in a great quantity consciousness grows on the earth, there is a possibility, a hope, we can save humanity yet. All is not lost, but time is running short. Everything is being controlled by politicians and by computers, and both are dangerous. Politicians are mad. It is impossible to be a politician if you are not mad enough. You have to be absolutely insane, because only insane people are power-obsessed.

A sane person lives life joyously; he is not power-obsessed. He may be interested in music, in singing, in dancing, but he is not interested in dominating anybody. He may be interested in becoming a master of himself, but he is not interested in becoming a master of others.

Politicians are insane people. History is enough proof. And now computers are dominating.

You know the saying: To err is human…. That is true, but if you really want to create a great mess, human beings are not enough — you need computers. Now machines and mad people are dominating the whole world. We have to change the very foundation. That’s what I mean by a new man.

A new man means more conscious, more loving, more creative. This whole process is possible through being more meditative. Become more meditative, silent, still. Experience yourself deeply. In that experience, a fragrance will be released through you. And if many, many people become meditators, the earth can be full of a new perfume.

-Osho

From Dhammapada, The Way of the Buddha, Volume 10, chapter 11

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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The present psychology is not yet comprehensive enough; it touches only the periphery of human individuality. It remains confined to the mind. It is not right to call it “psychology.” Psychology means “the science of the soul” and the present psychology is not only, not the science of the soul, it denies even the existence of the soul.

The moment you deny the soul, consciousness, something which is beyond the mind but within you… This denial is not an ordinary denial because it destroys the whole dignity of man. It takes away his very center. He becomes center-less, soul-less, just a robot.

The right name for modern psychology is “robotology” because it studies only the mechanical behavior of man and the mechanics of mind. Its studies cannot go very deep for the simple reason that if mind is all and there is nothing more to life than mind, you cannot ever become one, undivided.

To be divided is the nature of the mind; to be always balanced between opposites – love and hate, courage and fear, yes and no, atheism and theism.

Mind does not feel at ease unless it has divided a thing in two. It cannot conceive of light unless it is contrasted with darkness, it cannot conceive of life unless it is defined by death.

And because psychology remains within the boundaries of the mind it cannot help man to grow to his potential heights. Psychology will discourage you: spiritual search is nothing but a mirage, the seeking of truth is hallucinatory.

It is not a coincidence that we are the most intelligent generation, because ten thousand years of growth is within us. So on the one hand it is the most intelligent generation that has ever existed and on the other hand, because of psychology spreading these poisonous ideas – that there is no consciousness, no soul, no life beyond death, and man is just matter; that mind is also nothing but a certain combination of material elements – this has created a very strange situation. Intelligence is pulling man towards more growth and the people who deal with growth are pulling man backwards, telling him, ”There is no beyond, just be normal – that is more than you can dream of.”

”Just to be normal” is the goal of psychology.

A great goal: just to be normal.

People have lived for thousands of years without any psychology – and normally. In fact, as you go backwards you will not find so many murders, you will not find so many suicides, you will not find so many rapes, you will not find so many sexual perversions. As you go back they start becoming less. Primitive man was more innocent than you are. He was not as intelligent as you are, but he was more innocent. You inherit his innocence but you are keeping it repressed.

The combination of intelligence and innocence is meditation. The moment innocence and intelligence start growing within you… it is not that you become capable of solving all the problems of the mind, but a totally new thing happens: you start going beyond mind. The problems of the mind are left far behind, as if they never belonged to you – in fact they never belonged to you.

And once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down. The mind is getting no more energy – it cools, calms down on its own accord. That’s why I have said meditation is a medicine too – and both words come from the same root.

Once your intelligence and your innocence are available to you, just like two wings, the whole sky is yours. There are no more boundaries for you.

I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the psychology of the buddhas. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep.

It has to be understood; the people who came to Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, were all sick people – obviously, otherwise why should they come to the psychoanalyst? They were seriously sick, their minds were falling apart. Sigmund Freud came in contact only with sick people – that gave him the impression that man himself is sick. In a way he is logical because everybody he examined, everybody he analyzed, everybody he treated was sick. And these were high-class people, bourgeois – professors, scientists, very rich people – because a psychoanalyst’s time is the costliest thing in the world today. All these people were basically living an insane life, but because everybody else is also living the same insane life you don’t become aware of it.

If Sigmund Freud denied that there is any possibility of a soul in man he cannot be blamed. He never came across a Gautam Buddha; he never came across a man who had gone beyond mind.

The trouble was these people who have gone beyond mind have no reason to go to Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Freud is afraid to go to such people because they are against the very foundation upon which he has raised a whole empire – certainly there was a great vested interest. If just a simple method of meditation can help a person… not only to be normal, because to be normal can never be accepted as the goal. That means you remain a mediocre person for your whole life; you never go beyond the boundaries of the society. In everything you remain half-hearted, there is no intensity, there is no totality.

A normal person is wishy-washy, just in a limbo, neither here nor there… hanging in between.

It is unfortunate that the great psychologists of the West had no opportunity to know the mystic and to become acquainted with his world – which is absolutely extraordinary. He lives twenty-four hours among you, but not with you; his kingdom is far away. He has tasted love, of which you have been only dreaming. He has experienced truth, of which you have been only thinking and philosophizing.

He has encountered existence directly without any mediation of a priest, a prophet, a savior. He has seen existence in its freshness. He is not a Christian, he is not a Hindu – because these are so old, so full of dust and borrowed, they cannot give you a transformation.

Remember one thing: unless the truth is your own experience, whatever you believe about truth is only a belief. And all beliefs are lies, and all believers are blind.

The psychology of the buddhas means that we accept man as a three-storied building. There are a few who remain only on the ground floor, only in their bodies; all their interests are centered in the body – this is the lowest life for someone to choose, as if you are living on the porch when the whole building is yours.

The second level of life is that of a well-understood mind – but who is going to understand the mind?

You can see the difficulty of the psychologist: he studies the mind but if you ask who is studying the mind…. Mind cannot study itself.

There must be something beyond – a witness, a watcher who studies the mind. The scientist is studying only from the outside. He is studying the behavior of other people and from their behavior he is deducting principles upon which human behavior is based. But his observation is of the behavior, not of the real being inside. He can be deceived.

You can be sad but you can smile, you can hold back the tears. Or if you are a little artful, you can manage to bring crocodile tears. Your behavior is not reliable. We don’t know what is happening inside you, whether your behavior is an expression of your inside or it is a camouflage, hiding you in beautiful garage.

Buddha accepts three steps: the body, the mind, the consciousness. Even the consciousness is only a step.

These three steps lead to the temple of the divine, of the immortal, of beauty, of celestial music…. You start touching heights, Himalayan heights where you can find virgin snow which has never melted.

In your inner being also you are carrying greater peaks than Everest, with eternal beauty.

The psychology of the buddhas is comprehensive of the whole individuality of man – and it does not end there. By studying, by experiencing the body, the mind, the consciousness, and the beyond, Buddha is preparing you to dissolve into the universal.

Just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake…. On a beautiful morning the sun is rising and the whole sky is so colorful… just a cool breeze is there, but it is enough for the rose petals, for other flowers… for the lotus….

In the early morning sun the dewdrops on the lotus petals look like pearls – or it will be better to say that pearls look like the dewdrops. They are slipping slowly, slowly towards the vast ocean, in which they will be lost and yet not lost. As dewdrops they will be lost, but they will emerge as the whole ocean.

Unless psychology can bring human beings to this oceanic experience it is immature, it has just started its ABC’s. And in the West it is going around in a circle – because you do not accept higher realities; where can you go? You are stuck with the mind – analyze it, analyze its dreams, analyze its repressions. But it should be taken as a very significant question that there is not a single man in the whole world who is completely analyzed. This is a failure of the whole system of psychoanalysis – twelve years, fifteen years people have been in psychoanalysis and they have not moved anywhere. Yes, they have learned psychological jargon; it has become more difficult to talk with them! But they are the same persons with all the weaknesses, with all the frailties. Twelve or fifteen years of psychoanalysis has not been able to a make even a single dent in their personality.

It is a rich man’s game. Just as poor people have their games; rich people have their own games. Psychology is still a game, guesswork, with no foundation in reality.

The mystics in the East have never bothered too much about the mind; they have only developed methods to bypass the mind. Those methods are the techniques of meditation – they are just to bypass the mind.

Once you have bypassed the mind, once you can have a bird’s-eye view of your own mind, things start settling.

It is your energy that disturbs the mind, that gives it the power to be violent, to be sad, to be angry, to be hateful, to be jealous. Now you are no longer giving it any energy.

It won’t take a long time. The mind withers almost like a cloud – it was there and it is no more.

The moment mind disperses; your meditation has come to maturity. Now your meditation will be the medium, not the mind. The mind will be used as a mechanism by your meditative forces, but mind is put aside; it is no longer the master. And it is one of the strangest stories that for ten thousand years in the East we have worked on meditation and we have been absolutely successful, not only in becoming meditative, but also in dissolving all the problems of the mind.

There is only one way to solve the mind and its problems, and that is to get out of it.

But modern psychology has no idea of where to go, so they go on around and around but they remain just ordinary beings. Now Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler and Assagioli have devoted their whole lives… but you don’t see the eyes of Gautam Buddha, you don’t see the gestures of Mahavira, you don’t see the insight of the seers of UPANISHADS. You don’t see the transforming presence which all the mystics in all the countries have always radiated.

In my way of looking at things, mind itself is sick. Unless you get out of it, you cannot help the poor mind to become healthy. You are too much identified.

Not being identified with the mind is the shortest way to your own being. And your being is always healthy; it does not know what sickness is. It cannot know, it is not in its nature. Just as mind cannot know peace, your being cannot know tensions, anxieties, anguish. The question is not of curing the mind; the question is shifting your whole energy, your whole focus, from mind to being.

Meditation helps you to shift.

This great shift of your attention, of your awareness, is what I call the psychology of the buddhas. And any other psychology is going to be wrong, because only a man of eyes knows what light is. There may be millions of people who are blind – there are millions, but it is not a question of democracy. They cannot vote, they cannot assert a single word about light. That one man is right and those millions of people are wrong.

The question is not of numbers. The only question that is significant is the transformation of your being from mind to no-mind.

Modern psychology thinks it is the science of the mind.

The psychology of the buddhas will be the science of no-mind.

-Osho

From Sermons in Stones, Chapter 14

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Both audio and pdf files can be downloaded from Osho World.

Anand Ravi,

It is something very essential to understand, because it has always happened and it is going to happen always in the future too. There is not going to be any change. Every teaching is bound to be corrupted; it is in the very nature of things. Just as every child is to become old one day and everyone who is born is going to die one day, each teaching is out of necessity bound to be corrupted. It cannot be avoided. It is not that the great Masters have not tried; they have tried their best, but you cannot go against the laws of nature. Nobody can go against the laws of nature.

There are seven things to be taken note of.

The first is the experience of the Master himself. When he experiences the truth there is no mind at all. It is a state of no-mind, or as Dionysius will call it, a state of agnosia – absolute innocence; not even a single thought moves in the mind. Hence the memory system is not functioning; the mind is in a complete state of non-functioning. It is frozen, it is absolutely still.

This is the moment when the teaching is perfect, but nothing has been taught. The teaching has not yet become teaching. Nothing has been said, nothing has been heard. In fact, even the Master is not yet aware of what has happened. Something has happened, but he is simply so lost in it that there is no possibility of him becoming aware of it. To be aware of something means division, the observer and the observed; the experience has become split. When the experience happens it is indivisible. There is no knower and no known, no subject, no object. All is silent. This is the most perfect teaching.

The second stage is when the Master becomes aware of what has happened – corruption has begun, even inside the Master. He has not said a single word, but a vague awareness has started arising in him. The experience is no more undivided, it is divided, it has gone from one to two. It is no more the same, it is not the whole. Part of it has become subjectivity – the knower, the observer, the awareness – and the other part has become the object, the known, the experienced. This is the first corruption, and it happens inside the Master.

The third is: the Master formulates his experience; he starts making it more clear, more expressible. Now there are not only two but three things. The one is divided into three: the subject, the object and the mind, because without the mind nothing can be made articulate. The mind is the expert. Language has to be used, logic has to be used. The mind has to be awakened from its deep sleep; the mind has to be called forth. Just as one day the Master had struggled hard to put the mind into a deep-frozen state, now he struggles hard to unfreeze it, because without it there is no possibility of being absolutely clear about what has happened. It has to be conceptualized.

Now, the moment the ultimate experience becomes conceptualized a great corruption happens, because the wordless is being forced into the word. And words are small things, and the experience is as vast as the sky – even the sky is not its limit. The unlimited has to be brought within limits. Naturally much will be lost. First it was the whole sky with all the stars, with all its infinity and eternity. Now it is only a small window with a frame, a man-made frame. Now you are looking through the window: it is no more the whole sky but just a small piece of it.

And the fourth thing to be understood is the expression. Out of great compassion, out of love, the Master would like to share with others what has happened, because he can see millions of people groping in the dark in the same way as he was groping one day. He can see everybody groping in the same darkness, with the same confusion, with the same misery, and now he is in a state where he can help. At least he can indicate the way; at least he can show something of the beyond. He can make something transpire, he can trigger some process.

He has to use the art of synchronicity. He has to sing the song so your song which is in the seed starts moving, becomes alert, comes out of its dormant state, starts reaching towards the sky – so that your seed is broken, so that your song also starts having a longing. Your heart has to be touched.

The Master speaks, but the moment he speaks even more is lost, because to conceptualize within yourself is one thing; to communicate it to somebody else is totally different. Now you have to look at the other person, at what he can understand; only that can be said. You have to come to the lowest possibility because that’s where people exist. You have to use language which they can understand.

The Buddha cannot use the language which only other Buddhas can understand. He has reached the sunlit peak, but he has to come back; he has to descend back into the darkness of the valley. He has to use your language, your expressions, your ways of saying things. And naturally, almost ninety-nine percent is lost; only one percent is expressed, and that too needs a very skillful Master. Not all the Masters have been able to express even the one percent; many have remained silent seeing that they have no skill.

When I decided to become a teacher in the university, a few of my friends who were aware of what had happened to me asked me, “What are you going to do?”

I said, “It will be good if I can be a teacher for a few years, it will help me tremendously: it will give me the skill. Now I have something to express, I have something to share, but the skill is needed. The best teacher is one who can help the last person hearing him, the lowest in intelligence, to understand. Of course the best ones will understand easily, but you have to keep aware of those who are not that intelligent.”

And humanity, the greater part of humanity, is not intelligent at all. It lives in a very stupid way; it lives in mediocrity. Its consciousness is so much covered with dust and rust that its mirroring quality is completely lost. It cannot reflect anything, it cannot echo anything. Great skill is needed; only then can one percent of the experience be expressed.

And the fifth thing is the hearing of the experience. Now that the Master has spoken he is no more the master of what he has spoken. Now the person who has heard becomes the master of it; now it is his possession. Up to now the corruption was happening inside the Master, because he was bringing it to the level of the mind. Once he has spoken then it enters into a mind which has never experienced anything of the unknown, anything of the beyond. In the very entry, out of that one percent almost ninety percent is lost. It is bound to be so because everybody understands things in his own way, according to his own conditioning, his past experiences, his philosophy, his religion, his ideology.

Nobody hears in silence. If you hear in silence, then there is a possibility you may be able to get hold of the one percent, and that is enough for you to be transformed. Once a small flame enters into you, the whole forest will be afire soon. That one percent is enough. It is pure fire! It will make you afire.

But even that one percent never enters. It enters only into those who are devotees, who are totally devoted to the Master, who have no conditions, no barriers, who are almost like shadows, who have effaced themselves completely. Otherwise, ordinarily the sixth thing is bound to happen: the interpretation. The person who hears is going to interpret it. The moment your mind comes across any word it immediately interprets it; it cannot allow it to remain as it is.

Looking at a rose flower your mind immediately says, “A beautiful flower!” You cannot resist the temptation of saying it. You may not say it to anybody, but deep inside you have said it to yourself: “What a beautiful flower!” You could not remain silent with this beauty. Interpretation is bound to happen.

Now you are here – Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, Parsis, Sikhs – all kinds of ideologies, all kinds of philosophies are there in your minds. Whenever you hear something you will give it your color. Then not even point one percent is left. What to say about one percent? – Not even point one percent is left. It has become so diluted, so contaminated that it is almost something else.

And there is the seventh possibility: the moment the hearer starts telling it to others, what he has heard… All the Buddhist sutras begin with: “I have heard the Blessed One say this….” Buddha never wrote a book, neither did Christ nor Lao Tzu; they all depended on the spoken word. There is a reason for it: because while I am speaking, the word is one thing, but the pauses are far more pregnant, the silences are far more meaningful; my gestures may touch your heart more easily than my words. My words are bound to go into your memory system; they will revolve there. But my presence, my eyes can penetrate you far more deeply.

Hence all the great Masters have used the spoken word. Nobody has ever written a book, and I don’t think they are ever going to write a book. The moment you write something it becomes dead. The moment you say something it is not only a word: behind it is standing an alive being, full of joy, full of the experience, so full that he is overflowing. His words can take many, many things towards you, crossing all the barriers; there is a possibility of reaching.

But when the person who has heard it from somebody else goes on telling it to others, he is just repeating like a parrot.

That’s why, Anand Ravi, all the great teachings, all the teachings which were perfect become corrupted in time. They become corrupted even in the presence of the Master.

These are the seven steps of corruption. And if you keep alert then something can be saved – only something, but that something is enough. If you can save even a seed that will do, because out of that seed the whole earth can be made green.

-Osho

From Guida Spirituale, Chapter Six

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Both audio and pdf files can be downloaded from Osho World.

I don’t want you to become monotonous. Monotony  is death. A life of ordinary indulgence is repetitive and so is the life of ordinary religion. The life of YOGA is tremendously rich. It is affirmative. It is saying yes to existence. Blessed are those in whom GOD has become a laughter, a song and a dance.

-Osho

Jayananda, it depends. It depends on you, on your state of consciousness or unconsciousness, whether you are asleep or awake.

There is one famous maxim of Murphy. He says there are two types of people: One, who always divides humanity in two types, and the other, who doesn’t divide humanity at all.

I belong to the first type…. Humanity can be divided in two types: the sleeping ones and the awakened ones — and, of course, a small part in between.

Happiness will depend on where you are in your consciousness. If you are asleep, then pleasure is happiness. Pleasure means sensation, trying to achieve something through the body which is not possible to achieve through the body, forcing the body to achieve something it is not capable of. People are trying, in every possible way, to achieve happiness through the body. The body can give you only momentary pleasures, and each pleasure is balanced by pain in the same amount, in the same degree. Each pleasure is followed by its opposite because body exists in the world of duality, just as the day is followed by night and death is followed by life and life is followed by death. It is a vicious circle. Your pleasure will be followed by pain; your pain will be followed by pleasure.

But you will never be at ease. When you will be in a state of pleasure you will be afraid that you are going to lose it, and that fear will poison it. And when you will be lost in pain, of course, you will be in suffering, and you will try every possible effort to get out of it — just to fall again back into it.

Buddha calls this the wheel of birth and death. We go on moving in this wheel, clinging to the wheel… and the wheel moves on. Sometimes pleasure comes up and sometimes pain comes up, but we are crushed between these two rocks.

But the sleepy person knows nothing else. He knows only a few sensations of the body — food, sex. This is his world; he goes on moving between these two. These are the two ends of his body: food and sex. If he represses sex he becomes addicted to food: if he represses food he becomes addicted to sex. Energy goes on moving like a pendulum. And whatsoever you call pleasure is, at the most, just a relief of a tense state. Sexual energy gathers, accumulates; you become tense and heavy and you want to release it.

The man who is asleep, his sexuality is nothing but a relief, like a good sneeze. It gives you nothing but a certain relief. A tension was there, now it is no more there; but it will accumulate again. Food gives you only a little taste on the tongue; it is not much to live for. But many people are living only to eat; there are very few people who eat to live.

The story of Columbus is well-known. It was a long trip. For three months they saw nothing but water. Then one day Columbus looked out at the horizon and saw trees. And if you think Columbus was happy to see trees, you should have seen his dog!

That’s why the Siberian dogs are the fastest in the world: because the trees are so far apart.

But this is the world of pleasure. The dog can be forgiven, but you cannot be forgiven.

During their first date, the young man, looking for ways to have a good time, asked the young lady if she would like to go bowling. She replied that she did not care to go bowling. He then suggested a movie, but she answered that she did not care for them. While trying to think of something else he offered her a cigarette which she declined. He then asked if she would like to dance and drink at the new disco. She again declined by saying she did not care for those things.

In desperation he asked her to come to his apartment for a night of lovemaking. To his surprise she happily agreed, kissed him passionately and said, “You see, you don’t need any of those things to have a good time!”

It depends on people what can be called happiness. To the sleeping, pleasurable sensations are happiness. He lives from one pleasure to another pleasure. He is just rushing from one sensation to another sensation. He lives for small thrills. His life is very superficial; it has no depth, it has no quality. He lives in the world of quantity.

Then the people who are in between, who are neither asleep nor awake, who are just in a limbo, a little bit asleep, a little bit awake. You sometimes have that experience in the early morning: still sleepy, but you can’t say you are asleep because you can hear the noise in the house, your wife preparing tea, the noise of the samovar or the milkman at the door or children getting ready to go to school. You can hear these things, but still you are not awake. Vaguely, dimly these noises reach to you, as if there is a great distance between you and all that is happening around you. It feels as if it is still a part of the dream. It is not a part of the dream, but you are in a state of in-between.

The same happens when you start meditating. The non-meditator sleeps, dreams; the meditator starts moving away from his sleep towards awakening. He is in a transitory state. Then happiness has a totally different meaning: it becomes more of a quality, less of a quantity; it is more psychological, less physiological. He enjoys music more, he enjoys poetry more, he enjoys creating something. He enjoys nature, its beauty. He enjoys silence. He enjoys what he had never enjoyed before, and this is far more lasting. Even if the music stops, something goes on lingering in you. And it is not a relief.

The difference between pleasure and THIS happiness is: it is not a relief, it is an enrichment. You become more full, you become a little overflowing. Listening to good music, something is triggered in your being, a harmony arises in you—you become musical. Or dancing, suddenly you forget your body; your body becomes weightless. The grip of gravitation over you is lost. Suddenly you are in a different space: the ego is not so solid, the dancer melts and merges into the dance. This is far higher, far deeper than the joy that you gain from food or sex. This has a depth. But this is also not the ultimate.

The ultimate happens only when you are fully awake, when you are a buddha, when all sleep is gone and all dreaming is gone, when your whole being is full of light, when there is no darkness within you. All darkness has disappeared and with that darkness, the ego is gone. All tensions have disappeared, all anguish, all anxiety. You are in a state of total contentment. You live in the present; no past, no future anymore. You are utterly here-now.

This moment is all. Now is the only time and here is the only space. And then suddenly the whole sky drops into you. This is bliss. This is REAL happiness.

Seek bliss, Jayananda; it is your birthright. Don’t remain lost in the jungle of pleasures; rise a little higher. Reach to happiness and then to bliss.

Pleasure is animal, happiness is human, bliss is divine. Pleasure binds you, it is a bondage, it chains you. Happiness gives you a little more rope, a little bit of freedom, but only a little bit. Bliss is absolute freedom. You start moving upwards; it gives you wings. You are no more part of the gross earth; you become part of the sky. You become light, you become joy.

Pleasure is dependent on others. Happiness is not so dependent on others, but still it is separate from you. Bliss is not dependent, is not separate either; it is your very being; it is your very nature. To attain it is to attain to God, to nirvana.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.10, Chapter 10

Every seeker wants Enlightenment.
Most people perceive that to be a state of ongoing bliss and oneness and believe that after that, life is easy and simple forever after, because of the eternal expansion into the beyond.

While it is true that there is something called “the enlightenment Experience” which has all of these characteristics, the true enlightened life is something quite different. The bliss is not the emotional experience we can know through the ego. It is beyond that. This truth is revealed overtime, bit-by-bit as we grow into who we are and lose our ego identity.

Some parts of the learning are guaranteed:
We have to first recognize who we are beyond our mind and body to the point that a shift of perspective, of context occurs, but then we have to crash and come down from the enlightenment high. We need the courage to admit that every experience wears off, even after a few years, that clarity can be lost again and that identification with the mind can come back. That nothing is permanent and that to reach higher peaks we need to pass through different valleys. Failing is an essential part of the path. When we have spiritual success our ego grows side by side, when we fail, it is diminished and is ground down.

The Enlightenment experience is the end of the search but surely the beginning of the path. (Or as I often say, the search moves from the horizontal to the vertical dimension.) Often it takes the loss of that experience, for us to be truly committed to the discipline of the spiritual life. We have seen paradise. We have tasted the natural state and now it is gone. What is left is that we are constantly confronted with our failing, our fears, clinging and despair. We must open, and open deeper into the pain and fear, letting it cook us, break us and pulverize us, so we can truly disappear as a separate self. When we do not have the proper understanding, the proper context, the valleys are very difficult to move through.

What follows is my own experience of this process. May it be of help to other travelers on the path.

By the mid-nineties my life looked like I had made it. At least on the outside. I lived in India in a very beautiful area outside of town. I was a respected member of the ashram that I was a part of. I loved the work I did as a therapist; the relationship I was in was wonderful, rewarding and fun. At least that was what I was telling myself. The house we had built up was splendid; we had several servants, cats, dogs, fishponds etc. We lived the successful life of the neo sannyasin. Daily meditation was comfortable; I had come to settle in the comfort of knowing how to leave the mind behind and experience bliss. I had found a good refuge from pain. What more could I ask for?

I told myself I was fulfilled, denying the fact that I was always feeling inferior to my lover because I brought in a lot less money, denying that I felt deeply insecure about my capacities as a therapist and denying so many other little facts. In fact denial had become my way of life and I can see in retrospect that I vaguely knew it always, but it was too threatening to admit it to myself. Compensation was an art that I had mastered since early childhood.

Then one day my lover left. The hole I fell in was profound; it was as if every time I fell into that hole it became deeper. Determined to finish with it once and for all (ego always thinks in terms of permanent elimination) I dove into it for about a year and did some intense therapy, until I rediscovered the Awareness intensive group. In this group you ask yourself the koan: “Who am I” from very early morning till late at night. The “results” were amazing. For the next year I participated in each and every one of these 3 or 7-day groups. Usually it would take me 24 hours of struggling before I would pop into another dimension; the realm of oneness, clarity and peace. I got addicted to the highs, as they would lift me straight out of all my unresolved pain. I learned how to “do” it. Popping koans became my specialty. For a while I would come down as soon as the group was over but then it started to happen that the highs would not go down anymore. The clarity would not leave me anymore and peace was more or less permanently present. In other words I had accumulated a lot of energy (shakti). Now greater breakthroughs and greater revelations came. I was finally free from all my suffering!! I had found a way out!! I even remember now some thoughts that were immediately dismissed like: “Now I never have to worry about money anymore, I have what everyone wants.” “Now I never have to bother about sex and relating anymore because I am beyond them.”

The ego was always lurking just by the side and in a way I knew it but I was too ignorant about the true mechanics of the mind to fully realize what that meant. I told myself that I was staying clear of ego because I was aware of it. I looked in Osho’s words for a context to understand my precise situation but did not find much. Maybe I did not know how to formulate the question because I thought that I was already enlightened but I found nothing much that was truly helpful. I felt very alone and thought that this is what he meant when he said that in the end you are alone and I decided to trust my experience.

For a while I met with a woman who had declared herself enlightened and she helped me clear away some doubt. On top of it she gave me all the conformation I was looking for! (This is exactly what the mind wants: confirmation, and so unconsciously we look for someone who will give it to us.) However the most dominant experience was one of joy and peace. The shift was dramatic and profound. I wanted to share it immediately with whoever wanted to hear it. There was a very genuine and naive sense of wanting to help others out of their suffering. The intention was clean and innocent as far as I could see. Not knowing that as long as there is ego our intention is never 100% pure.

Someone later described people who declare their enlightenment prematurely as little girls who dress up in their mother’s clothes and wear high heels pretending they are adults. It was a bit like that, now that I look back. I felt like a kid with a bag of candy that I wanted to share. And even though friends avoided me like the plague eventually people showed up who wanted to hear what I had to say. Many seekers today (like I had been myself) want only one thing and that is to be lifted out of their pain with a shortcut, and shortcuts I had!

Of course they were in awe. I was generating a lot of cosmic energy; everyone in the room could feel it and whomever I talked to or looked at, shifted for some time into a state beyond the mind. I was blown away by it as well. I was loved and revered. I finally felt worthy of that love as well. Pride started to slip in. After all this person that had been humiliated so often (me) had made it and was someone. I saw the pride but told myself that because I was seeing it, it did not matter. Everything was anyway all happening in the ONE and therefore temporary. My fame grew fast, more and more people attended the satsangs and had great awakening experiences. They were the proof of my “rightness.” My ego swelled up again a little more.

From time to time the old insecurity knocked on my door but I would not open. I did not want to acknowledge that it was there. You have to understand the very delicate situation one is in. You feel like you have transcended suffering, which had been the motive for the search all along. And then to realize that this is not true is not an easy feat. The ego will fight it. The soul has an imprint of ego protections that is centuries old. It does not give way that easily.

For many years on the path, all we want from the search is freedom from suffering. Only much later is our intention pure and clean enough for us to only want what is, howsoever painful or uncomfortable it may be. So I felt very expanded because the awakening was strong and I could channel huge amounts of energy and did not really know that they were all passing through and were therefore colored by the ego. All the while my ego was expanding beyond its wildest fantasies, without me being very aware of it. It became more and more transparent and smart and spiritual, it told itself it is nobody and it is not there!!! And it succeeded very well at fooling even itself. This ego is very smart. Because I kept sharing every pitfall I saw with my students, I thought that I was free of it. Not seeing that sharing was not enough for the ego to lay low. That it needs absolute dedication and willingness to stay vigilant at all times. That it needs the scalpel of the surgeon all the time!! The thing is through the sharing I believed that I WAS being honest and vigilant. And to some extend of course that was also true.

The enlightenment experience is always a mixture of clear and honest intention and a power hungry ego. If we do not have an alive teacher at the time of awakening, we are in great trouble. We simply cannot travel alone at this point; precisely because we can hardly see the ego by ourselves.

My fame kept growing and tirelessly I traveled the planet, thinking I was doing something very good for humanity. Now I see that it was the old primal story all over again: I needed to help everyone who was in pain otherwise I had no right of existing. Burn out came after two years. I had to stop. The body collapsed and I was shocked to find the first thing that arose when the doctor said I needed to rest was: “Who will love me now?” In a way that was the beginning of the fall. Of course honest as I was, I shared all this with the students in satsang, showing how much ego is still accompanying this awakening experience. I shared my pain and errors and found to my amazement that not many wanted to hear the truth if it did not sound blissful.

Over the four years that I was teaching, I found that rarely someone wanted to hear the truth. Many people come to this type of satsang because they want to be told that there are shortcuts and often they want to adore someone. Not many want to hear about the painstaking work of purifying our minds and healing our pains. In fact, in the satsangs, the jokes about working on yourself are plentiful.

The beauty as well as the difficulty of our time is that spiritual knowledge and secrets are available at the click of a mouse. All the scriptures are public. In the past this was not the case, information was given only in relation to the students/disciples advancing in practice and experience. Now we do not have to practice meditation or do any hard work in order to receive the teaching and so the danger is that we only absorb the teaching in a mental way.

In the meantime I had moved into a relationship (after much initial protest from my side) and this provided another reality check. I was not as beyond as I thought I was. Learning to love and be loved provided and still provides endless lessons. I took a year off and met with a lot of old childhood pain and present loneliness. First only my old friends had despised me but I had been welcomed with open arms into the satsang community, but now also the satsang community threw me out. I was not supposed to feel pain and be honest about it. Finally though, I was being able to welcome it and feel it without further manipulation. I took some months in silence and started to feel again the need to meditate. (Of course in the years of being nobody there had been no one to meditate.) Still all the while I still enjoyed mostly the bliss and peace of being at one.

Then the real hit came. My best friend and working partner was diagnosed with cancer. For some months we kept it up, saying that it was okay. That we felt no fear or pain, that dying was as good as living and that everything that comes must also go again. But then we cracked, both of us. I spent the last weeks at her side, nursing her at home until she died in my arms. That split me right in two. There was simply so much pain. I was overwhelmed by it, consumed by it, helpless with it and bewildered by the fact that I was feeling all this again. My sharing became again more honest, I no longer pretended anything anymore or offered miracles and shortcuts. Of course people came less and less. Slowly I saw that what was left was a handful of sincere seekers whom I actually had not much more to offer than my friendship and limited wisdom and experience.

I realized that I was longing for guidance. I was looking left and right in old and new teachings until I found what I was looking for in my new teacher Aziz. His Zen hits were painful and not always welcomed but over time I understood more and received for the first time a map of reality that resonated with me. My own master had been too wide, too rich for me to see a clear and practical path. He spoke about so many practices and left it to me what to choose. This had brought me were I was. I felt and feel a deep respect and gratitude for him but I needed more. I needed personal guidance from an alive teacher. Now I found this very precise teaching that resonated in my soul as a reflection of reality. He guided me in my practice and taught me a complete new way of meditation. He also told me to stop teaching but I was afraid to stop. It was my only source of income. I believed that I needed the money, I needed the recognition and I needed somehow the position (more for myself than for others). But above all I needed to NOT let myself know THAT IT WAS OVER. That I had had an amazing opening and enlightening experience. One that lasted for years even and that bit-by-bit it had slipped away.

Slowly I have come to understand that corruption lives in all of us and that it is not entirely possible to not be corrupt. After all we do most everything we do for ourselves. By keeping the meetings going I could still tell myself that it was not over. I could continue to dream a bit more and tell myself that it would pick up again. Or worse I would blame it on the low quality motivation of the seekers that it was not happening anymore.

But life is generous when the intention is honest. I prayed daily for truth and sincere prayers are always heard. I moved to the west, to the country I was born in, and found it extremely difficult to adjust to that culture after 16 years in India. There came a time where there was no more money. Friends and family needed to keep us afloat. Now I truly crashed. The entire shadow side of the personality appeared. The ego had grown stronger (it keeps growing side by side with our realizations, the more powerful we become the more powerful the ego also becomes). The super ego came back with a vengeance. The self-torture and self-blame returned with the force of a tornado. The Shadow was here, presenting itself loud and clear. I thought that I had met my shadow a long time ago but never to this depth. Shadow exists in relation to light, the more light, the bigger the shadow I found out.

All of a sudden I was identified again with almost each and every single thought. I was emotional from morning till night, apart from the hours that I meditated. And meditate I did, and pray, and move my body to ward off the depression till it could not be warded off anymore. I was in hell and realized that the healing had to happen right here in hell. The money was finished, I started to take a cleaning job and was ready to take any job still dreaming to some extend that after this all was over a new miracle would happen and I would be magically lifted out of here again. And life would be forever good.

But truth does not live in the presence of hope. Giving up our hopes is one of the many prices we have to pay for the priceless pearl. The ego screamed and screamed. It simply did not want to part with the glorious times. My entire life with all its undigested and denied pains came for another round. Thoughts of suicide were my companions. Without the support of my partner and some dear friends, family and a good healer, it would all have been a lot more difficult. The love that I received was so supportive and healing.

Nevertheless I was really lost and only partly grasped what was going on. I needed help. One thing was clear, that there was no way out but only a way through, my only interest became to stay present in the pain and whatever emotion presented itself. I felt lower than I had ever been, and it started to glimpse that: to go down is to go up. I was grateful that Aziz came to the west for another silent retreat! However, at the end of that one-week he announced that he was going to live in seclusion and would no longer be available as a guide and teacher!

Once again on my own and not fully realizing what was happening I prayed for help. My great luck was that a book fell into my lap called “Halfway Up the Mountain” by Mariana Caplan. It brought all the missing pieces in the understanding. This book was about me. It was my story in detail. Here I read about each and every pitfall I had fallen into. It gave me a positive context and sufficient information about the process I was going through. Reading that book was like being in retreat. It reminded me again and again that there was a healing power in this crisis. My dignity was restored again when I started to understand that this is a mechanical response in the mind and not a personal failure or trip. My suffering became more dignified. I learned that disillusionment is not only necessary on the path but a true gift of the Grace of God. It is like you are being weaned off the breast of God and allowed to walk. Of course you fall left and right like any toddler does but eventually you will find balance and walk.

The fall from paradise seems in truth an integral part of the enlightenment process. In fact some teachers say that you have to earn it to deserve it. When we realize that the path we are on is not at all what we thought it would be, and that reality is something completely different than all our illusions about it, we are shocked. This is not an easy transition to make. It is extremely painful and it feels like being skinned alive. And yet this pain magically opens us deeper to what and who we are. Enlightenment comes to life when we embrace our endarkenment in the very same way. We realize deeply that our human reality will always be here, that pain will always be here, that suffering is an integral part of human life. Either we suffer unconsciously or we do it consciously. We realize that the freedom we thought we had found in the bliss and joy of the Enlightenment high is not the real freedom at all. It is much deeper. It is truly accepting what IS.

By the time I had finished reading the book the let go was complete. I closed down all teaching activities, cancelled my ticket to India and am ready for a new chapter in this adventure called life. This time it can happen right here where I am. And I truly do not know anything about where this is going.

No hope and no plan.
Om shanti.
Rani

Presently Rani is back as a spiritual guide / facilitator.
info@rani-willems.org

Here is her website.

As seen on Sannyas News

July 2, 1944 was another beautiful day for a drive to Ojai. This time I was accompanied by my wife and two Theosophical friends from Pasadena. We all had an animated discussion about Theosophy on the way up. Krishnamurti’s talk on this day included reference to the dualistic nature of thought and the mind’s play between the pairs of opposites (good & bad, right & wrong, yours & mind, etc.) After the talk, we had a picnic lunch down by a beautiful stream under the trees. I spent the rest of the afternoon awaiting my 5:00 o’clock interview. The interview was to be given at Arya Vihara at the east end of the Ojai Valley, an old redwood house which had been purchased in the early 1920’s for Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya by Annie Besant and a group calling themselves The Brothers Association.

My wife and friends waited in the car while I went into the house for my interview. I had been trying to think of what to say. I thought I had all of the answers to life’s problems. What could we talk about?

Krishanji—as I later came to call him—met me at the door and asked me to be seated in a chair in the small redwood room. Then he sat down facing me and after a brief period of silence he said, “Well, sir, what do you want to talk about?” This of course was the same question I had been asking myself all afternoon. I began by asking how I could actually live a celibate life under the conditions in which I was living. I brought up the subject of celibacy and the goals I had set for myself.

His response was, “Why do you want to live a celibate life?”

I told him of my wishes to develop my psychic powers and live a spiritual life.

Krishnamurti asked me what my wife thought about my wishes for celibacy an I explained how this proposed way of life was so important to me that I really didn’t care what she thought about it; it was something I felt compelled to do.

“But don’t you feel that she has some rights in this matter?”

Even so, I replied, I still feel that way about it.

Krishnaji apparently saw that I was determined on this course of action; he dropped the subject. He obviously was not going to give me any magical solution to my problem with sex.

The interview came to an end and we both left the room to stand on the outside porch. The afternoon sun was low in the western sky and the scene from this elevation overlooking the Ojai Valley was very beautiful. I remarked to him about this beauty and he replied, “Yes, it is beautiful, but isn’t it a shame that the war is still going on?”

That’s true but I suppose it is all according to The Plan.”

Krishnaji said, “What plan?”

I said, “You know, the Plan of Evolution?”

“All of the great teachers have talked about evolution; Christ, Buddha, and all the others.”

“That’s funny, I don’t remember the Buddha saying anything about evolution. Of course, there is such a thing as physical evolution such as from and oxcart to an airplane, but I don’t think this is what you mean by evolution.”

He was right! I didn’t mean physical evolution. I meant the idea that I had always entertained pertaining to spiritual evolution. He then asked, “Is there such a thing as evolution in the way you mean it?”

Suddenly I saw that a basic idea upon which I had based all my life and hopes was not valid in the way I had believed it to be. There was no spiritual evolution, only the freeing of the consciousness from conditioning.

I was utterly shattered by this discovery and in desperation I asked him, “Is there nothing real in this world outside of the pairs of opposites?”

“Yes, that tree is real and your little dog is real, but what you think about them is not real.”

I suppose he could see the shock and void I was facing, as he kindly said, “Please come and see me again on Thursday afternoon and we will talk more about these things.” He then said goodbye and we parted.

My mind was in utter turmoil. The very foundations of my psychological world had been torn apart. I felt that I was in a void and doubted by ability to drive home. However, Krishnaji had pointed out the obvious fact that physical things did have a reality in themselves. This meant that my car was real and the steering wheel which I could firmly hold onto could be my link with reality. I have no recollection of the trip home.

The next three days are also totally lost to personal memory. I know that I did not eat or sleep during this time. There was no “me” to do these things and I suppose the body was quiet.

When I came back to normal functioning it was with an entirely new perspective. My first conscious act was to resign from the Theosophical Society. It had been the whole basis of  my life; now for me it was dead. I now saw from a new perspective the occult studies that had held such a fascination for me before. Not that these studies represented falseness, only that I had transcended them. They were part of the dualistic thought process. Because of my sudden awareness of the state of being beyond thought, these occult studies no longer held interest for me. Ambition was gone: there was no future so how could there be ambition? Fear was gone: what is there to be afraid of when one is going nowhere and hence has nothing to gain or lose? There were no problems because there was a new discernment moment-by-moment into the true relationship between myself and the environment. There was a direct perception into all relationships and a feeling of oneness with everyone and everything. The word love took on a different meaning. With the personal element removed, there was an integral feeling of love and compassion for every living thing: a knowing what was right and the desire to help. There was the knowing that never again could I consciously escape the facts of life by being dishonest in order to protect myself or in order to gain anything for myself. From that moment on I felt completely responsible for my own actions, aware now that freedom is an intrinsic part of life, and thus I must never again consciously stand in another’s way or cast my shadow across another’s path. All life was really one, and the actuality of it was overwhelming. There was a seeing the virtues spoken of in the Bible were an intrinsic part of this unified consciousness. I no longer needed to worry about expending the effort required to live virtuously. No discipline was required, no effort need be exerted, the path and I were one, constant companions in this new state of being. There was a state of acceptance of whatever life brought and true faith born in the knowledge that in doing my best, with no thought of self, whatever happened would be all right. There was the birth of insight into many things and with it the ability to see the true in the true and the false in the false.

I felt as though I had been living in a very cluttered house surrounded by innumerable “things.” These things were ideas, and conclusions which I had created. Suddenly my house had been swept clean and I was alone—not lonely, but in a state of complete freedom—free to start from scratch to discover the true values in living. Concepts such as right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral were stripped away as absolutes. Now, these judgments were only relative terms. As Krishnaji had said, it was a pathless land. There was no one who could give advice. There was no authority! It was a new dimension: a timeless state. There was no fear.

I remember writing Krishnaji a note in which I told him that I felt as a little bird must feel when it has outgrown its nest: it must fly but doesn’t know how.

Thursday I drove up to see Krishnaji again. The trip helped to bring me down to earth and by the time I had arrived, there was a grounding in physical reality. I tried to explain to him some of the fantastic things that had happened, but he would stop me on each attempt to describe this to him. Each time he would bring me back to the present moment and refused to discuss anything which had happened in the past. This attitude of his applied to all meetings that I have ever had with him over the past 39 years. Though I didn’t appreciate it at that time, his wisdom in this matter was well grounded in fact, as subsequent events have shown.

During this interview he said, “Find the answer to the question, ‘What is the I?’” Naturally at that moment, I could not answer the question. However, the question had been posed, it did register in my mind, and was to bear its own fruit in a most interesting way.

On the way home I tried to analyze the details of all the events of the past few days. I was again in focus with my everyday life in the physical world but a new dimension had been added. All of the qualities and feelings of the experience were present in the deepest part of my consciousness. I could not forget the essence of the event; it was now an intrinsic part of my nature. With all of this, however, there was now also the reality of my actual life situation to be faced. I was married, with its relationships and responsibilities. There were my wife and son, whom I loved and who certainly needed my help and understanding. There was my home and the airport business in Monrovia. There was the Monrovia Flight School operating in Prescott, Arizona, with a contract to train Navy pilots. World War II was in full swing. I knew that I must give my complete attention to every detail of this situation which I had created through my past thoughts and actions.

Krishnaji had challenged me to answer the question, “What is the I?” This question began working inside me like a seed that had been planted. It seemed an impossible question. Where was I to start? I can see now that this is a fundamental question. Our whole life’s activity is based on the premise that we know what we are. There are certainly plenty of professional authorities who have told us about ourselves. I was well familiar with many of these descriptions: medical terminology concerned with the gross physical body; the psychological terms for the various phases of consciousness; and the esoteric terms form the domain of the occult tradition.

For the next few days I found myself busy with my home life and the airport business. The private airports within 150 miles of the coastline had been closed to flight operations shortly after Pearl Harbor. However, there were other activities which needed supervision at the Monrovia airport. My secretary had moved to the flight operations at Prescott, Arizona, so I found myself alone in the office most of the time.

One morning, having taken care of the things that had to be done, I picked up the booklet of the Krishnamurti Talks of 1936. These were the talks that had been given in various locations around the world. I had been reading this booklet in a desultory manner for the last several weeks, and had gotten up to the fourth talk given in Ommen, Holland on July 29, 1936. I had not picked up this book for the past week, as so many things had been happening in my own life. Now, however, there was time and space in which to read. There had been no intimation of any connection between this material and Krishnaji’s question, “What is the I?” Now a new element had been added to my understanding. The words were alive and had a living quality. They no longer were just furnishing “dead” information but as I read, there was a different quality. Each sentence applied directly to me at that moment. This was what I was actually experiencing at that moment. There was again that heightened awareness which had been experienced the previous Sunday, but this time it was happening at my own level and in direct relationship to what I was involved in. What I was reading was like looking at the innermost functioning of my own mind. I was in direct relationship with the words, they were like a mirror in which I saw and understood the workings of my mind.

In this particular talk Krishnaji was continuing to examine the “I” process, and as his description of its dynamics unfolded, there was a direct link between me and this description.

Suddenly it happened! In the midst of the second paragraph there was again that complete stopping of time and an insight into the situation. The “I” had caught itself in action. At this moment there was no longer any mystery. Krishnaji’s question had been answered! There was no “I” existing separate from the thought process. The “ego” as a permanent entity didn’t exist. What did exist was a process! This process had a name, a past, and a future which was the result of time.

When the thought process stopped, time did not exist. There was only experiencing, not the dual process of experience and the person to whom the experience was happening.

[…]

The result of these contacts with Krishnaji led to many changes in my life. I began to experience more and more frequently the state of consciousness which for obvious reasons I have chosen to call Now-Consciousness.

This has become an ongoing state of experiencing for me over the intervening years. It has brought a transformation in behavioral patterns that I have not consciously sought. Neurotic responses to many life experiences have dropped away. Relationships with nature have taken on a depth of meaning hitherto undreamed of. Each detail of life has become meaningful in a new way. All of the insights previously seen have remained in their essence as a sustaining background through which life is met.

To me, the valuable characteristic of Now-Consciousness is its universal availability for anyone. It can be experienced by rich or poor, in a palace or a hovel, by an intellectual or a simple person. It is the common heritage of everyone. Because of its simplicity it is easily overlooked by the erudite.

It is the only approach to the experiencing of reality that is non-dualistic. Therefore the transformative results are not ego induced. What is discovered is true and uniquely understood by each in his own way. This truth becomes an intrinsic part of one’s nature and leads to right behavioral patterns. In this behavioral change, which so subtly comes about, one finds his or her place in the over-all fabric of life. It is a true uniqueness in which there is no competition or exploitation of another.

I have found that it is all too easy to reach conclusions about anything. Any conclusion or definite answer is a blockage to the ceaseless flow of life which gathers around itself other mental debris. This effectively brings to an end further insights into that particular subject. Therefore what I happen to be now observing is only my individual point of view. My findings may be of interest to others who are also seeking the true meaning of life.

In the early years of his teaching, Krishnamurti had reiterated many times his intention to never betray the truth in order to make it more palatable to his listeners. I was deeply touched by his sense of integrity. In speaking with him one day, I remarked, “Krishnaji, I never what to betray this truth, which has become so important in my life.”

He answered, “Don’t worry, you will never betray the truth if you are careful to only speak or write from your own experience and understanding of life. Never quote or use other people’s material as your own.” This made a profound impression on me and since that time, I have been very careful to follow that course.”

-Albert Blackburn

Excerpts from Now Consciousness: Exploring the World Beyond Thought, Part One

This book is available from IdylwildBooks.com

Osho: Mm, what about you? Is there something you would like to say to me?

Terence Stamp (a film star from England): If you can help me in any way…

O: In every way!

T (thinking he had been misheard): Any way.

O: In every way I am going to help, mm? The first thing first: become a sannyasin (Terence nods slowly). That connects you with me – and before the work can start a deep connection is needed, a deep involvement with me is needed because the help is not going to be an outer help. I need a passage into the heart. And by becoming a sannyasin you become available, you become vulnerable. Then it becomes very easy, you don′t create obstacles. Otherwise ordinarily the human mind goes on creating obstacles in a thousand and one ways… unconsciously of course.
A man is his own undoing. So if you really want help, the first need is to get involved with my family -  immediately many things start happening. The first thing – you become relaxed with me. Otherwise whenever a new person comes here, he′s afraid of sannyas – desirous and afraid too. There is a part which wants to move into this new space that I am making available here, and there is a part, naturally from the past, which is suspicious of everything – everything new at least; that part holds back.
So if you are here and not a sannyasin, to become a sannyasin or not to become a sannyasin remains a constant worry on the head – a very subtle tension. Once you have become a sannyasin that tension is gone. You can relax, and only when you are in a relaxed state can I penetrate you. By becoming relaxed you become feminine; then penetration is possible. By surrendering you are no more a male energy that′s why surrender is so difficult. The male energy is aggressive… it wants to conquer. Hence the West has given birth to science – science is an aggressive attack, almost a rape on truth.
In the East we have never thought in terms of conquering, we have thought in terms of surrendering. We surrender to nature, to God, or whatsoever one calls it, and then nature starts revealing its mystery.
So this sannyas is nothing but a first step towards the ultimate surrender which will be coming by and by. I am just a door. By surrendering to me you enter into the temple.
And I can help in every way, but I can help only if you allow me to help.

There is a very famous story about a sufi mystic, Bayazid…

When he went to his master he was a young man, desirous of knowing. He went to his master and he asked the master, ′Would you teach me, sir?′
The master looked at him and said, ′Would you allow me to teach you?′
And that very saying became a transformation.

I am ready to help but will you allow me to help you?… because nothing can be done without your cooperation. I never interfere in anybody′s life unless the life has become part of my life – that′s what the meaning of sannyas is. Then you are no more Terence: you don′t belong to your past – you belong to me. You can simply come out of your past as a snake comes out of the old skin – and it is tremendously beautiful to come out of the past. For a man like you who has lived a public life, who has become famous in a way, who is well-known, it is a must to get out of it.
This is one of the greatest human dilemmas – that when a person is not known, not famous, he hankers to become famous because walking on the road as a nonentity hurts. Nobody looks at you, nobody even says ′hello′, nobody pays any attention. Whether you exist or not does not matter. If you die, there will not even be a ripple, you will simply disappear as if you had never existed – it hurts. One starts in every way to make one′s mark, to leave one′s signature, so that even when death comes one can live in people′s memories. And one wants that people should pay attention… people should know who you are! So there is a great urge to become famous. Somebody becomes a politician, somebody becomes an actor, somebody becomes an author, a painter, a poet… somebody becomes a saint.
The day you are famous – and it takes long effort; tired, exhausted you arrive, you become famous – suddenly you recognise that now it is almost impossible to walk on the road, to be, because no privacy is available. Wherever you go people know who you are. Everybody is staring at you. One becomes a public show. So when one becomes famous, one finds that one has lost one′s privacy, one′s own space. Then one wants to be anonymous, you want to go somewhere where nobody knows you. So first we create fame, when it is there… and by the time it is there much has been lost, much energy has been wasted, one has suffered much: many headaches and many ulcers, and everything has happened. And then by the time one becomes famous, it is futile. First one hankers for riches – when they are there, one simply sees the futility of it all.

T (quietly): It′s true.

O: Sannyas is just a leap of understanding, that now fame does not mean anything, richness does not mean anything; that you would like to live a natural, simple spontaneous life. I am not saying to escape from the world, I′m not saying drop out of your work, but once this ambition disappears, you can remain in whatsoever you are doing, but the quality will change.

T: Yes.

O: And that′s what I can see – you need a space to be alone, you need a space, a private space, a private sky where you are left alone and you can be silently growing, doing something or not doing something, just enjoying being. You are tired of doing. Sannyas will be a great help: it will make a discontinuity.
On the surface it is very difficult to say what sannyas is. It is an experience And there are two ways to become a sannyasin: one is you think about it, you decide about it. The other and the better is that you simply go into it in deep trust without thinking about it, without making a decision about it. When you make a decision, sannyas is not so valuable because it is the past making decision. Then the break is not so abrupt. Mm? you will think – who is this thinking? Your past will think and calculate and watch and talk to people and meet people and see whether something happens or not. This whole thing will go on and then there is a conclusion, a decision you take or you don′t take. But this decision comes out of the past, and the past remains continuous; then the quantum leap is missed.
If you simply take a jump, not knowing where you are going, not making any effort to know where you are going – if you simply go into this darkness, into this vast darkness of existence, without any map, without any plan then it has a tremendous beauty. You will have a thrill, an adventure.
So it is for you to decide! Would you like to decide or would you simply like to go into it?

Terence gazes at Osho for a moment, then wordlessly lowers his head and moves closer to Osho′s chair.

O: Close your eyes and feel me surrounding you from everywhere as if you are just in my womb, relaxed, contented and whatsoever form your body starts taking, let it take.

Terence sits quite still while Osho writes his sannyas name and then places the mala over his head. Osho places his thumb on Terence′s forehead, on his third eye, while his right hand holds the locket of the mala. After a moment or two Osho allows the locket to fall and places his hand on Terence′s head, gazing at him and then closing his eyes, for several minutes…

O: This will be your name… so consciously, deliberately make a break with the old name. For your business purposes you can continue the old, but as far as you are concerned the old name becomes fictitious, the old name becomes pseudo, and this new name becomes your reality – Swami Deva Veeten.
“Deva” means “divine” – the word comes from the same root as divine. Divine comes from a sanskrit root, deva – they both mean light. From dev comes day and divine both – it means light. And “Veeten” means “beyond”: “the light beyond” or “the God beyond”. And the reality is beyond you. The reality is beyond the body, beyond the mind. That′s what one is ordinarily identified with – either the body or the mind – but reality is beyond both. Reality is in the witnessing of both.
If you can observe the body, you are more real than you are when you are in the body. If you are eating, you are not as real as if you are watching yourself eating. When you are thinking, you are not so real; but if you can watch the thoughts passing by you become more real.
Reality happens to you only when you are not identified with the body and mind. So Veeten means trying to be beyond, trying to be constantly beyond any identity that can confine you. That′s what Gurdjieff calls ′self-remembering′, but self-remembering is not such a good word because the self in fact does not exist when there is remembering. So the word is not a very fortunate choice; self-remembering somehow makes it a self-centred thing. There is every possibility… and I have come across many Gurdjieff people who have mistaken self-remembering for self-consciousness.
They become more self-conscious – that creates more tension. Self-remembering has nothing to do with self-consciousness because it has nothing to do with self, it is simple remembering. Remembering is also not a very good choice of words, mm? Because it means that you are remembering something from the past. It has nothing to do with the past either. You have never known it. It is going to be for the first time. It is not a rediscovery it is a discovery! So it is a witnessing, it is pure consciousness, it is just seeing things as they are.
So these are the three layers upon one′s being. One is the world outside, the outermost layer: the sun, the trees, the people, the society. It is very easy to get out of it, because there is a gap between you and it; it is not very difficult. And there is no need to escape to the Himalayas or to a cave, because wherever you go the world is there – the outer world is there. It is very simple, because the distance is vast so one is never identified with the outer world. There are a few people very neurotic, who have become identified. Somebody is so much identified with his car that if a car is dented, he is dented. Or with the house – if the house is gone, he may start thinking of committing suicide. Or there are people who are very much identified with money, wife, children, but ordinarily that is not such a big problem, because you know that you are separate.
The problem starts with the body; the body is very close. The outer world is like a dream – you can drop it and you can become naked. The body is like skin it is not so easy to peel it away, but it is not impossible. So just watching helps. You are walking on the road – just become the witness, see the body walking.
And don′t make it a tense thing: strain is not needed. If it becomes strenuous, you miss the point. So be perfectly at ease and relaxed. It is fun – it is not a serious thing. That is one of the other problems which Gurdjieff people have imbibed – they become very serious, and they don′t take it as fun. That creates anxiety.
Even when Gurdjieff was there many people became ill, many people died, many people went mad, and the reason was that it was thought to be such a great work! The very word ′work′ makes it very serious. What I am doing here is play – it is not work. When I am gone, my work is to be known as play, never as work. So take it non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease and through seriousness no one has ever gone beyond. Seriousness is so heavy that it makes you rooted in the gravitation. One needs to be very playful, then one can go beyond gravitation – one can fly!
A great unburdening is needed, so just be playful about it. When I say, ′when walking, watch,′ I mean be playful. If sometimes you forget, nothing is wrong in it. Watch that too – you have forgotten, good! Then again you remember, good! Both are good. In fact there is a rhythm. You cannot constantly watch; it is just like breathing in, breathing out.

Veeten (suddenly animated as if something has clicked inside): Aahh!

O: And that has been one of the missing points in Gurdjieff′ system.

V: Yes! Yes!

O: People are trying to be continuously watching. It is foolish!

V (thoughtfully, one hand under his chin, the other across his waist): Right… right!

O: When you breathe out the air goes out, when you breathe in the air goes in, and there is a rhythm. The eyes go on blinking; there is a rhythm. And everything is a rhythm: the day and night, the summer-winter, the whole of life is rhythmic. So watchfulness cannot be a continuity. One should not strive for it. It is foolish, and it can create a neurosis! It can create cancer, tuberculosis, and it can create many things, because you strain too much.
So just let it be a natural rhythm. Sometimes you forget; that means it is exhalation. When you remember it is inhalation. And then it becomes very simple… very simple, child-like. And when you start enjoying it, forgetfulness, remembering, forgetfulness, remembering… And both are good. because the forgetfulness gives you respite and rest that is needed, it prepares you again to remember.
So walking, eating, sitting, just be watchful, but in a playful mood, with the body. And the same has to be done with the mind. Sometimes sitting silently, just watch. And that watching has not to be with a staring inside – with very relaxed eyes. One is simply sitting, a thought passes by – one looks at it.

V: Yes, because when I look at it, it stops.

O: No, you must be straining. If you strain, then it stops. Let it float, it has its own right to be. Let it float just as clouds float in the sky. Just watch. So, watchfulness without any tension in it. That′s why I am not using the word attention, because it has tension in it.

V: Yes… yes!

O: Just an unfocused watchfulness. So whatsoever it is, one is looking at it. There is no desire to stop, because if you are desiring to stop it you cannot watch it. The very desire becomes again a subtle identification – you are afraid of the thought. There is no need to be afraid. The thought is the thought, you are you. The thought is not hindering you. The clouds are moving in the sky. The thoughts are moving in the mind. The thoughts are as far away from you as clouds, and they have nothing to do with you. In fact they are not even yours – they are just passing. That′s why one thought comes, another comes, and sometimes you will become aware that if you are with a certain person a certain type of thought enters in you, mm? Because that person is constantly broadcasting. So they are not exactly yours; thoughts are collective.
The society exists in an atmosphere of thoughts just as air is social. Mm? I breathe out, you breathe in. You breathe out, I breathe in. One thought passes my head, it enters in your head, it passes into somebody else′s head and it goes on.
So nothing to be worried about. You are not to stop it. Simply watch, and in a very relaxed, calm, quiet mood. And learn to sit silently. Whenever you can find time, just relax in the chair – no need for any posture. The only thing to be remembered is that you are at ease. Any posture that makes you at ease, at home, is good. So just relax, just close your eyes, and just be.
By and by you will see you are neither the society, nor the body, nor the mind. And then a new sensation… a new feeling of being arises, and you know you are this. Not that you make that type of statement inside – no. It simply arises existentially: ′Now this is me.′
This witnessing, this consciousness, is our innermost core. And all the religions have been working to achieve this state. Many people try but miss, because they try too hard. That is the problem with Krishnamurti – trying too hard… making it such a problem. People are already burdened with problems, and you bring another problem, and an almost impossible problem too. And Krishnamurti goes on hammering on their heads, and becomes angry too… rages!

V: Yes – he′s very austere.

O: But that is not going to help anybody. Life is playful… God is playful. And one comes closer to God as one becomes more playful.
So mix with people here, change to orange, forget your past for the days you are here. Dance, meditate – but everything has to be done absolutely non-seriously. Sincerely, yes! – but seriously, no.

V: I understand.

O: And enjoyment, delight, has to be imbibed. Laughter has to be learned and enjoyment in small things: drinking a cup of tea, talking to a friend, holding hands with a stranger or just sitting looking at the sky. Life is marvellous! And if we miss, only we are responsible – nobody else.
And all that man needs to be happy is available. All that man needs to be happy is always available. You just have to relax and enjoy it and participate in it. So let celebration be the only rule!
And I would like you to do a few groups here. A few groups will be very helpful.

V: Okay. Whatever you say.

O: And have you done any groups?

V: No. I put my name down for Rolfing.

O: Rolfing is good, mm? Do that, and book for Encounter 4th to 10th. Your dates are not yet certain, when you will be leaving?

V: No. Maybe 5th, but I′m trying to stay for the eleventh (Osho′s birthday).

O: Be here! Eleventh is not to be missed (laughter).

V: Okay!

O: And now I can order you – you are my sannyasin! (laughter) Mm?

V (grinning cheerfully): Okay!

O: So book for Encounter, 4th to 10th, and these days you are here just mix with people and dance and enjoy… And forget everything.

(The Shadow of the Whip (a Darshan Diary) #8)

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

You can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Eva, it is not a question of forgetting yourself—on the contrary, it is a question of remembering yourself.

What is the ego? Ego exists because you have forgotten yourself, because you don’t remember who you are. And it is very difficult to live without SOME idea of who you are. Not knowing the reality of your being, you have to create a false substitute.

What is the ego? Ego is the false substitute that you have created for the self. It is not your self, but it is very difficult to live without a self—it will be almost impossible to live without a self, some kind of self is needed, is a must; otherwise, how will you keep yourself together?

You will start falling apart.

Even if the center is false, it helps you. Even a false center keeps you at least somehow together. You have forgotten yourself—hence you need the ego.

If you remember yourself, there will be no need for the ego.

You ask, Eva: Do I have to forget myself to lose my ego?

Ego is not anything real that you have to lose or you can lose—you don’t have it in the first place. It is just an idea, a shadow; it is non-existential. It is like your name: when you were born, you did not come with a name. Then somebody—your mother, your father, your family—started calling you ‘Eva’. Some name is needed to call you by; it is utilitarian.

Your name is the first name that was ever given. When Haavva was created because man was alone, Adam was alone, and was very much depressed because of the loneliness … the whole existence and Adam was lonely. He asked God to give him a companion, and God created a woman. God asked Adam, ”What are you going to call her? What name would you like to give her?” And he was so ecstatic that now at least there was somebody with whom he could be friendly, with whom he could be loving, with whom he could talk, communicate, with whom there was a possibility of relating. He was no more alone!—he was so ecstatic that he said he would call this creature ‘Eve’, ‘Eva’, ‘Haavva’.

“Why?” God asked.

And Adam said, “Because Eve, Eva or Haavva means life—she is my life. Without her I was almost dead.”

But when Eve was created, there was no name. A name was given to her because Adam would need it. Sometimes he would have to call her: “Where are you?” Sometimes the name would be needed–but a name is a false thing, it is just a label. We give names to people just to make it helpful to commune, to relate, to call, to address. But names are not real! You need not drop them, and even if you drop them nothing will be dropped.

You can drop this name ‘Eva’—nothing will be dropped. Simply an idea! And you are no more attached to it. In exactly the same way: the name is for others to call you by, but you need something to call yourself by too—that’s what the ego is: I.

If you want to say something about yourself, you need some word—that word is ‘I’. Names are for others to call you by; the ego is for you to call yourself by, to address yourself. It is also false, it does not exist. You need not lose it. All that is needed is to understand it—why this ‘I’ has become so important, why it has become so significant, so central, so substantial. A shadow has become so substantial—why? Because you don’t know your real self.

When Jesus says ‘I’, he does not mean the same ‘I’. When he says, “I am the gate, I am the truth, I am the way,” his ‘I’ does not connote any ego. When Krishna says to Arjuna, “Come to my feet, surrender to me,” his ‘me’ is not the same as your ‘me’.

Buddha used to say to his disciples, “Be a light unto yourself.” A great King, Prasenjit, had come to see him. And he saw many sannyasins coming and bowing to Buddha, and saying:

“Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami—I go to the feet of the Buddha. Sangham

Sharanam Gachchhami—I go to the feet of the community of the Buddhas.

Dhammam Sharanam Gachchhami—I go to the feet of the ultimate law, the ultimate law that supports existence, that runs like a thread and makes the existence a garland.”

Prasenjit was a man of logic, well-educated, sophisticated. He was a little bit puzzled. He asked Buddha, “Excuse me, Sir, but you say to people, ‘Be a light unto yourself,’ and then they surrender to you, and they touch your feet—you don’t prevent them. This is illogical, this is contradictory. If you say ‘Be a light unto yourself,’ then there is no need to surrender to anybody else. Then why should they touch your feet?”

And Buddha laughed and he said, “They are not my feet, and they are not surrendering to

ME—because there is nobody inside me as the ego who can claim. I am just an excuse—they are surrendering. It is not a surrender to me; it is simply a surrender—I am just an excuse.

Because they are not yet capable of surrendering without any excuse, I allow them to use me as an excuse. But there is nobody to whom they are surrendering.”

That’s exactly the meaning of a Buddha: one who is not; in the sense of an ego, one who is not. But as far as the supreme self is concerned, the ultimate self is concerned, he is and you are not. The ego is a false idea, and it is needed because the real self is unknown.

Eva, you need not forget yourself to lose the ego—in fact, that’s how you have gained it.

You need to remember yourself, not to forget but to remember. You have to become more aware and alert, you have to wake up. You have to see who you are, not what has been told to you—that you are a woman, that you are a man, that you are a Hindu, a Christian, a white or a black—not what has been told to you.

You will have to go inside your being to the very innermost core and see who you are. In that very seeing, in that very remembering, the ego disappears. When the light comes, the darkness disappears; when the real self is remembered, the unreal is no more needed. And it is not that you have to drop it: it is simply not found.

But we live in the ego, and in every possible way we go on finding new props for it. In every act we go on nourishing it—even in those actions of which you are not the doer you go on claiming that you are doing it. People say, “I am breathing.” Just look at the absurdity of it.

If you are breathing then you will never die; death will come and stand in front of you and you will go on breathing. You may not oblige death; you may say, “I am not going to stop breathing.”

You are not breathing; breathing is not your activity, it is not your doing—it IS happening.

You cannot breathe. If it stops, it stops. If the next breath is not going to come back, you will not be able to do anything. Breathing is a happening, but man has made it, or at least believes it to be, a doing.

You say, “I love.” Even the expression ‘love-making’ is utter nonsense. You cannot love; you cannot not love. Love is a happening, not a doing. What can you do about love? Either it happens or it doesn’t happen. If you try, then it will be something false, then it will not be love at all—then it will only be acting.

If you are ordered to love a woman or a man, what are you going to do? You will go through empty gestures: you will hug and you will kiss and you will go through all the movements, and with no love at all. The whole thing will be mechanical! And that’s what is going on, what goes on around the world. The wife has to love the husband, the husband has to love the wife—it is a kind of duty to be fulfilled. It becomes a performance, acting. It is not real, hence it is not satisfying, it brings no contentment, no fulfillment.

The ego is very cunning in that way: it goes on finding supports, props, new pastures to feed itself on. If you fail, you blame circumstances. If you succeed, it is you who have succeeded. If you fail it is fate, kismet; if you fail it is the society, the ugly society. If you fail, it is the cunning people, the cunning competitors. But if you succeed, you succeed.

A great Sufi story:

Mulla Nasruddin took his disciples to an exhibition. Many things were going on at the exhibition. At one place people were staking much money and trying to shoot arrows to reach a certain target. Mulla gathered his disciples and he said, “Come, and I will show you something.” That is the Sufi way of teaching the disciples. He took the bow and the arrow—a great crowd gathered: “A Sufi Master with his disciples—something is going on!” People were very silently watching. With great show, Mulla shot the arrow … it fell very short, it never reached the target. The crowd started laughing. Mulla said, “Stop! Don’t be foolish.” He turned to his disciples and said, “Look, this is what happens when you live with an inferiority complex. This is how the person who suffers from an inferiority complex will act—he will never reach the target; he will fall short. His whole heart is not in it.” The crowd became silent: “Yes, there is a lesson in it.”

Next arrow … and it simply went far ahead, it left the target behind. That was also a failure; the crowd started laughing again. And Mulla said, “Be silent! You don’t understand these secrets.” He turned to his disciples and said, “Look, this is how a man who thinks himself very superior behaves. He will never reach the target. He runs so fast that he will bypass the goal, and he will not stop at the goal. He is too confident. He is also unbalanced.”

The crowd again became silent: “Yes, there is a lesson.”

And Mulla tried the third time … and the arrow went directly into the target. Now the crowd was silent and waiting for what Mulla was going to teach to his disciples.

He went to the owner and demanded the money. The owner said, “Why?”

He said, “This is me! The first was the arrow of a man who suffers from an inferiority complex; the second the arrow of the man who suffers from a superiority complex — and this is Mulla Nasruddin’s arrow. Where is the money?”

This is what we go on doing. In each situation, watch. When you fail, it is God, it is fate, it is society, circumstances … a thousand and one names. But the simple phenomenon is that you don’t want to take the responsibility because it hurts the ego. But when you succeed, it is always you—it is never God, never fate, never circumstances, never your cunning strategies, no. It is simply you, your talents, your genius, your intelligence. It is always you when you succeed.

Watch the ego, and don’t feed it. It dies if you don’t feed it. If you stop feeding it, it starves to death.

Mrs. Cochrane was standing beside the coffin of her dead husband. Their son stood at her elbow. The mourners, one by one, passed in review.

“He is feeling no pain now,” said Mrs. Croy. “What did he die of?”

“Poor fella,” said Mrs. Cochrane. “He died of the gonorrhea.”

Another woman gazed at the corpse. “He is well out of it now,” she said. “He has got a smile of serenity on his face. What did he die from?”

“He died of the gonorrhea!” said the widow.

Suddenly, the son pulled his mother aside. “Mom,” he said, “that’s a terrible thing to say about Pop. He did not die of gonorrhea—he died of diarrhea!”

“I know that,” said Mrs. Cochrane, “but I would rather have them thinking he died like a sport — instead of the shit that he was!”

The ego is constantly there, in every situation—it will not miss any situation to feed itself, to strengthen itself. Stop feeding the ego—that is the first thing to do.

And the second thing is: become more aware. Walking, walk with awareness; listening,  listen with total awareness—not in a kind of sleep, not so-so, not lukewarm. Talking, talk with awareness. Whatsoever you are doing, let your whole life be coloured by awareness. And slowly, slowly that awareness will bring you a vision of your real self.

So this is a double attack on the ego. First, don’t feed it; second, become more aware—so the ego disappears by starvation and the self appears by being aware. And once the clouds of ego are no more there, the self rises like a sun. And that self has nothing to do with your ‘I’. Still the word will be used. I use it, Jesus uses it, Buddha uses it—it has to be used, but now it has a totally different meaning. On the lips of a Buddha or a Krishna or a Christ it has a totally different connotation.

When the being is transformed, everything is transformed—even the language that is uttered by a Buddha has a totally different meaning. His words can’t have the same meaning. It is impossible! Because now a new light has happened, and in that new light everything becomes new.

You live in darkness, you stumble in darkness, you grope in darkness. The man of awareness lives in light. He never stumbles, he never gropes. He moves with grace, he has a totally different quality of being, life, love.

Do two things, Eva: first, don’t feed the ego any more—enough is enough—and second, become more aware. This is a double attack, from two sides. It always succeeds; it has never failed.

-Osho

From The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty, Chapter Two

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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Yes, it exactly means that—to live as an awareness: awareness of all the programs the mind has been conditioned for, awareness of all the impulses, desires, memories, imaginations… all that the mind can do. One has to be not part of it, but separate—seeing it but not being it—watching it.

And this is one of the most essential things to remember, that you cannot watch your watchfulness. If you watch your watchfulness, then the watcher is you, not the watched. So you cannot go beyond watchfulness. The point that you cannot transcend is your being. The point that you cannot go beyond is you. You can watch very easily any thought, any emotion, any sentiment. Just one thing you cannot watch—and that is your watchfulness. And if you manage to watch it, that means you have shifted: the first watchfulness has become just a thought; now you are the second watcher.

You can go on shifting back, but you cannot get out of watchfulness because it is you: you cannot be otherwise.

So when I say, “Just be yourself,” I am saying to you, “Just be unprogrammed, unconditioned awareness.” That’s how you had come into the world, and that’s how the enlightened person leaves the world. He lives in the world but remains totally separate.

One of the great mystics, Kabir, has a beautiful poem about it. All his poems are just perfect—nothing can be better. One of his poems says, “I will give back the soul that was given to me at the time of my birth as pure, as clean, as it was given to me. I will give it back that way when I die.” He is talking about awareness, that it has remained unpolluted. The whole world was there to pollute it, but he has remained watchful.

All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence—all the treasures that you have been endowed with.

But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. And you need not be an ascetic, you need not be anti-life; you need not renounce the world and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can continue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved: whatever you do, you do with awareness—even the smallest act of the body or the mind—and with each act of awareness you will become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the eternity of your being.

-Osho

From Beyond Psychology, Chapter 22

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Both audio and pdf files can be downloaded from Osho World.