Tag Archives: death

August 16, 2012 · 3:53 pm

Where Does Your Body End? – Osho

Does the soul leave the body when you die? Where does it go? 

This whole way of thinking – that something remains and something leaves – is fallacious. The gross body that we know is just a seed, the outer mask. There are also subtle bodies which continue to surround your soul even when it is leaving. These bodies are also part of you.

The body that is with me now is part of the universe, but because we conceive of our self as ours, it becomes a problem: where does my body end?

If you go into it deeply, you will see that the whole universe is part of you, part of your body. For example, if the sun were to cease this very moment, your body could not continue to exist. It could not exist if there were no oceans, it could not exist if there were no atmosphere. Your body is just a part, a constantly changing part of the universe. When the sun rises, something rises in you. When the sun sets, something sets in you. When there is a moon, you are different. When there is no moon, you are different. Your body is in a constant, dynamic relationship with the whole.

Wherever you are, whatever state you are in, you will still be in a body. If your body is taken by the universe then the universe will give you another body, unless you consciously become the whole universe. Then there is no need for a body, because the universe itself has no body.

Individuals are bound to have bodies. But where does your body end and where does it begin? It is a problem, a multidimensional problem. Your body could not exist if your father’s body had not been in existence. Your body is part of a long series, of an eternal series. Your body exists in the trees, in the sea, in everything. It is a small cosmos related to every part of the total.

Our language is very crude and limited, so when we say that the soul leaves the body, it gives a mistaken idea. The soul moves into the body of the universe, but the universe is constantly giving it another body. That body which you have left behind is still related to you, because the whole is related to you.

You are swimming in the sea. You have left part of the sea behind and gone ahead, but the part that has been left behind is still a part of the sea in which you are now swimming. The sea is one and you are swimming in it just like the fish which is born of the sea and will dissolve into the sea. A fish is nothing but the sea itself, frozen somewhere, which will soon dissolve back into the sea again.

Our concept of coming into life and going out of life is primitive. You cannot go anywhere beyond this universe. Wherever you go, the universe behaves like a body to you. Your body is not only your body: it is a big community of many souls; you are only one of them. Every cell of the body has a soul, and each body has seventy million living soul cells.

Your body is a crowd of many, many souls living in a big city, and you are only one soul living in it.

Each part of you is a soul in its own right. It can live and grow without you, it can love and reproduce without you; you are not needed. So when you have leave the body, the body is still a living thing. The central soul has gone, but there are multi-millions of cells still living in the body which can ultimately develop, like you have, into a human being.

So it is a complex thing. But one thing is certain: nothing is dead. We are part of the ocean of life; we are aliveness.

It seems inconceivable to us because we go on seeing the universe from a particular point of view. That point is the disturbance. If that point dissolves and there is no ego to look from, then you cannot say that when you die you have gone somewhere. You have been. You will continue to be. Even though everything dissolves, nothing really dissolves; nothing ends. But that is possible only when there is no ego to say, “This is me.”

We think that we are the center of the universe, just as mankind has always thought that the earth is the center of the universe. But even science has proven that this is not so. The fallacy that the sun goes around the earth is the same mental fallacy that we have about ourselves. It looks true even today, when we know it is not true. If we look, the sun seems to be circling the earth.

The same phenomenon happens deep down also. In religion also we are earthbound, ego-bound: everything seems to move around the ego. It is a fallacious idea; the reality is that you are going round the universe. You are part of it; you cannot be otherwise.

Whatever you think from an egocentric point of view will be wrong. For me, right and wrong have different connotations. For me, anything that has ego at the center is wrong and anything that has no ego at the center is right. And unless you become one with the universe, unless the ego dissolves, you cannot have the right vision.

-Osho

From The Great Challenge, Chapter Ten

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March 2, 2011 · 9:00 am

Crystallize Your Experience – Osho

When you said that if we don’t achieve total consciousness in this life, we will have to start from the very beginning again, and go through the whole evolution of mankind one more time, I was very touched. Is it possible that we will totally lose these few glimpses of light, beauty and consciousness that we’ve go through being sannyasins?

 

Antar Ashiko, it is a very complicated question. Whatever you achieve in this life will remain with you, but it has to be an achievement not just a glimpse. And there is a great difference between an achievement and a glimpse. You can see the Himalayan peaks from thousands of miles away—it is a glimpse; but to reach those peaks will be an achievement.

A glimpse helps you to move onward, towards achievement; but unless something becomes a crystallized experience in your life, it is going to be lost—you will have to start from the very beginning.

There will be a little difference, and that will be that in your unconscious a shadow of your past life, a faraway echo—as if you have seen something—will remain. And when you again get the glimpse you may feel that this is not new, I have known it before. But otherwise, only crystallized achievements go with you, consciously, into the other life… knowingly, not just a dark shadow, a faraway echo in the unconscious, but consciously knowing that these Himalayan peaks exist, and you have been on those peaks. There will be no doubt about it, no wavering about it, no question about it.

You are asking, “Is it possible that we will totally lose these few glimpses of light, beauty, and consciousness that we have got through being sannyasins?” Such glimpses you have got in many lives before too, and you have lost them. They never became part of your being; they remained only beautiful memories. But the memories are not achievements. It is as if you have seen something in a dream — perhaps it may be true, perhaps it may not be true.

So if you feel that there is something happening now, make every effort that it does not remain only a glimpse but becomes an actual experience, becomes part of your being. Only then can it go with you into another life.

It is possible to take all your experiences with you into another life, and never to begin from scratch but always to begin where you had left off in the past life. But be clear that just a glimpse is very fragile, just a glimpse is very superficial. Howsoever touching it may be in the moment, even tomorrow you may start doubting whether it really happened or you imagined it. And the life after this life is a faraway journey.

Glimpses are simply incentives to move towards crystallization. Make it an experience so deep that it becomes part of you, and there is no way to forget it or to lose it. Don’t remain satisfied with glimpses. Enjoy them, but use them only as an indicator towards greater things to happen.

To see something from far away is one thing, and to become that thing is totally another.

A glimpse of love is just like a breeze that passes within seconds; a glimpse of silence is just like the fragrance of a rose flower that you felt for a moment, and now you don’t know where it has gone.

When I say, “Crystallize your experience,” I mean it is not enough to have beautiful glimpses. It is good, but not good enough. You should become the fragrance of the rose itself; the glimpse was only an arrow pointing towards the possibility—it did its work, but you remain there. In the past life also, many times you have come across many beautiful experiences and right now you don’t know even that there have been past lives. Only once in a while you see somebody, and you have a very strange feeling, almost weird, as if you have seen this man before—and certainly not in this life. You come to a place, and suddenly you are startled, as if you had come to this place before too–although certainly not in this life. Everything seems to be known, but has been dormant in your unconscious.

Life has a mechanism that whenever a person dies, unless he is enlightened, he becomes almost unconscious; he goes into a coma before death, actual death, happens. So he knows nothing about the death, and he remains in a state of coma till he is born again. All those nine months in the mother’s womb are a state of coma; the child is fast asleep twenty-four hours a day for nine months.

It rarely happens that somebody dies consciously. It happens only to great meditators, who know well the path death will be coming on because in their meditations they have traveled on the path again and again—it is the same path. As they go deep in their meditation the body is left far away, mind is left far away; the heart is left far away; only a beautiful silence—fully alert and conscious—remains.

The same happens when you die. If you have been meditating, then death is not a new experience. You will be surprised that in your meditation you have been dying every day, and you have been coming back to life every day. Such a person dies very consciously, so he knows what death is—and such a person remains conscious in the mother’s womb. He is also born consciously. From his very first moment on the earth, he knows all that has passed before in the past life, and he remembers it.

I have come across many children…. And this happens most particularly in India, because outside India—where Christianity is prominent or Judaism is prominent or Mohammedanism is prominent—they have conditioned the mind that there is only one life. They don’t know anything about meditation. They have substituted meditation with prayer, and prayer is praising a fictitious god; it is very childish.

Meditation needs no god—you are enough. You are a reality, and you explore your reality to the deepest core.

In India all the religions are agreed on one point; they differ in their philosophies, they differ on every other thing, but on one thing they are all agreed—that life is a continuity; death comes millions of times. Death is only a change of the body, a change of the house, and this process goes on—unless you become totally enlightened. Then there is no need to enter another womb, because life was just a school, a training; you have completed it. Your enlightenment is the culmination of your education about existence. Now you need not enter into another body. You can enter into the womb of the universe itself—you are prepared for it.

So whenever you are having glimpses, don’t be satisfied with them. Your glimpses should create great discontent in you, not content. They should create a longing that what is seen far away you would like to come closer, and closer, and closer. You don’t want just to see it, even from closeness; you want to become it.

You can become love, you can become silence, you can become joy, you can become all these experiences: beauty, light, consciousness. These are not things that you cannot become; they are your potentials. So take every glimpse to its ultimate end. That’s what I call crystallization.

Once it is crystallized, once you have known yourself to be love, yourself to be light, yourself to be consciousness, then there is no problem of forgetting it. Then these experiences will go with you. And in your future life you will be growing further ahead, from consciousness to super-consciousness; you will be going beyond these experiences. But if you remain satisfied with your glimpses, there is every danger they will be erased. Death is such a shock and such a surgery and such a long coma that when you wake up, you will have forgotten all those glimpses.

“Someone stole my bike,” complained a priest to his minister friend.

“Bring up the Ten Commandments in your sermon tomorrow and as soon as you mention, `Thou shalt not steal,’ look around in your congregation; you will find the guilty party. Invite him to come forward. Tell him that this is the way to confess, and this is the way to get the forgiveness of God,” the minister said confidently.

The next day the priest visited the minister and happily reported that he had found his bike. “Yes”, he went on, “when I came to `Thou shalt not commit adultery’ I remembered where I had left it.”

-Osho

From The Golden Future, Chapter Two

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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August 13, 2010 · 7:40 pm

The Ultimate in Consciousness – Osho

What happened to Gurdjieff when he had his car accident?

The system of George Gurdjieff is a little bit strange, and it is certainly different from all other, old approaches. His whole work was concentrated on creating an absolute feeling of distinction between the body and consciousness – not just as a philosophical idea but as an actual experience.

It happens to everybody in death, but most people die unconsciously. The consciousness separates completely from the body to go on its pilgrimage which is eternal. The journey of the body is very small, but it all happens in unconsciousness. It is a natural surgery.

A surgeon cannot remove a small piece of your body while you are conscious. He has to make you unconscious, then he can remove anything. He can kill you; you will never know about it. But if you are conscious, then the pain of a deep-rooted identity being broken is so terrible, so unbearable, that you won’t allow him to do it. It has happened only once in India just at the beginning of this century.

The maharajah of Varanasi had to go through an operation to remove his appendix. The best surgeons from all over the world were attending him. But a great problem arose: he was not ready to take anything from which he loses his consciousness. His whole life’s work was exactly like Gurdjieff’s: he was trying to be conscious and to be separate from the body. And he said, “You can remove the appendix. I will not disturb you.”

But surgeons cannot believe a patient. And such an operation… removing his appendix while he is conscious! He may jump off the table, he may do something; he may destroy not only the operation but even his life.

But on both sides there was a problem. If the operation was delayed there was a danger that the appendix would explode and then death was certain. And because he was no ordinary man, they could not force him. He was ready to die, but he was not ready to take any anesthesia which would make him unconscious.

Finally the surgeons decided, “There is no harm in taking a chance; let him remain awake. Anyway he is going to die. If we don’t operate, he will die. But there is a possibility that perhaps he is right. He may have attained that quality of consolidation such that his consciousness is separate from the body and he may be saved. So it is worth taking a chance. And he is a stubborn man, he won’t listen; he has never listened to anyone.”

And the decision had to be made within minutes; otherwise it would be out of the question. So finally they decided to operate on him. He remained conscious. The operation was done, the appendix removed, and he remained as if nothing was happening. It was an unprecedented phenomenon in the whole history of medicine. It was a miracle.

Gurdjieff’s whole work consisted of separating the consciousness from the body and making the consciousness such a solid force that the body cannot drag it, that the body becomes only a servant and is not a master. And he was trying many kinds of experiments.

For example, he used to drink alcohol. One cannot imagine such a quantity of alcohol… but he would remain perfectly conscious. No quantity of alcohol was able to make him unconscious. His disciples and he, they all would start drinking together, and within a few minutes all were flat on the ground – and he was still drinking.

He was trying in different ways to feel where he was still attached to the body. He would fast, he would not eat for many days – and this was not anything religious, it was purely scientific experimentation. He would eat too much, so much that the whole body would be saying, “Stop!” and he would go on eating just to make the body completely understand that he was not under its control: he would do what he wanted, he was not going to listen to the body.

The car accident was the very culmination of his experiments. It is wrong to say it was an accident; it was not. He did it – purposely, consideredly, consciously. It looked like an accident to everybody.

He always used to drive very fast. All those who were sitting inside the car were just trembling: any moment the car was going to crash with something or other. But that day he was alone in the car, and he knowingly put it on full speed and crashed it into a big tree. He had multiple fractures – the car was completely finished. Doctors said it was unimaginable how he got out of it. He got out of it with all those fractures, blood all over his body, and he walked to the ashram – which was almost one and a half miles from there – and said, ”Call some doctors to check what has happened in the body.”

The doctors could not believe it when they saw the car. Nobody could remain alive after that; the accident was absolutely total. And with so many fractures, he was not unconscious; with so much blood gone, he was not unconscious. He managed to walk one and a half miles… which was absolutely miraculous. He was not supposed to be able to do it!

It was not an accident; he did it on purpose, and within three weeks he was perfectly okay. He wanted to know death before death. That was the purpose of the accident. He wanted to know that even if the body goes through such torture, it is not going to affect his consciousness. And he was immensely happy that he had succeeded, that he had attained what, in his terminology, is ‘crystallization’. Now death meant nothing and now he could die consciously, watching what was happening.

The way he had chosen was a long and hard way. But he was a strange type of man: for him, it was neither long nor hard, for him it was perfectly natural and normal. The car accident should be remembered as a voluntary entering into death. He had almost died, but just through his crystallized consciousness he managed not to die. He refused to die. It is a beautiful experiment, although outlandish.

What he tried to do with it can be done very easily by just becoming aware of your day-to-day activities: walking, sitting, eating, sleeping. They will not be so dramatic, but they will be more simple, more human, more sane.

And Gurdjieff is not a normal human being. He should be taken as an exception, not the rule. Nobody should try to follow him because he will be in trouble. That kind of person cannot be followed, that kind of person is born. You can understand much from their life, but you should never try to imitate them.

And it is not only so with Gurdjieff. There have been many other people in the East, who have died unknown… A few are known, but even the normal Eastern humanity has tried to forget them because their experiments looked outrageous.

In India there are eighty-four siddhas. In the whole history of India there have been eighty-four people who could have talked with Gurdjieff in the same language, who tried all kinds of experiments. Perhaps in a few experiments Gurdjieff may not have been able to compete with those people.

I have been to one of the monasteries of the siddhas. Their monasteries have gone underground. Because of their experiments, the masses were so against them that they have burned their literature, killed their masters, tried to erase… saying that they are not part of the heritage of the East.

In Ladakh, in the Himalayas, there is a small monastery hidden deep in the mountains. They don’t tell anybody that it belongs to the siddhas. There are a few others in India. But unless they trust you, they will not tell you about other monasteries. They are all linked.

In this monastery I saw one experiment that will help to explain Gurdjieff’s experiment to you. They start drinking poison in small quantities, and slowly, slowly they increase the quantity every day. The poison is so dangerous that just a single dose is enough to finish a person. But they come to a point where they can take any quantity of poison and it does not affect their consciousness at all. They remain absolutely normal. And they have absorbed so much poison that if they bite you, you will die; they are full of poison.

And in the monastery they keep big cobra snakes, which have the most dangerous poison. Out of one hundred snakes there are only three percent which have real poison; ninety-seven are just hypocrites, they don’t have real poison. But they can make you freak out if you see them because they look like real snakes. They are snakes, only one thing is missing: they don’t have the poison.

The cobra is the best as far as poison is concerned. And these siddhas, as they are called, have come to a point where drinking poison from the outside, ordinary poison, is just meaningless. They make the cobra bite on their tongue, and the cobra turns upside down and pours all its poison in their mouth. And you will be surprised that the cobra dies! – because that man is so full of poison. The cobra has only very little poison in a small bag attached in his mouth. That’s why the Chinese eat snakes just as a vegetable. Just cut the head off and it is all vegetable!

There is a famous story about a master who was sitting with his disciples and a guest master. And as the cobra is a very delicious dish, cobra was prepared. But the master was suddenly shocked, seeing on the guest master’s plate, the head of the cobra. So he took away the plate and called the cook, who was also a monk and proved to be not only a monk but a master.

The master was very angry, but before he could show his anger the cook said, ”What is the matter?”

The master said, “Look what the matter is. You have cooked even the head of the cobra!”

The cook said, “Don’t be worried.” He took the head and gulped it down in front of everybody else.

And he said, “Now you can eat. Don’t be worried; I have taken care of the head.” There was utter silence and shock. But perhaps he was connected with a certain secret school of siddhas in China too, so there was no danger. He did not die.

These experiments are certainly outrageous, but they have proved that a man is capable of becoming so conscious that there is nothing that can make him unconscious again. He has achieved the ultimate in consciousness. That’s the meaning of Gurdjieff’s experiment. Don’t call it an accident.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Chapter Thirty-Five

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July 3, 2010 · 12:20 pm

Only Life Goes Beyond Death – Osho

LIFE is an opportunity. You can use it, you can misuse it, or you can simply waste it. It depends on you. Except you, nobody is going to be responsible. Responsibility is of the individual.

Once you realize this then you start becoming alert, aware. Then you start living in a totally different way. Then, in fact, for the first time you become alive.

Otherwise, people live in a sort of dream – half-asleep, half-awake… just somewhere in between consciousness and unconsciousness. That life is not really a life. You exist – but you don’t live.

Existence is given to you. Existence is a gift. Life has to be earned. When existence turns upon itself, it becomes life. Existence has been given by the whole; you have not done anything for it.

It is simply there, a given fact. When existence becomes life… the moment you start existing in a conscious way, immediately existence becomes life. Existence lived consciously is life.

Life is a great challenge, an adventure into the unknown, an adventure into oneself, and adventure into that which is. If you live an unconscious life, if you simply exist, you will always remain afraid of death. Death will always be just somewhere near the comer, hanging around you. Only life goes beyond death.

Existence comes, disappears. It is given to you, taken away. It is a wave in the ocean… arises, falls back, disappears.

But life is eternal. Once you have it, you have it forever. Life knows no death. Life is not afraid of death. Once you know what life is, death disappears. If you are still afraid of death, know well – you have not known life yet.

Death exists only in the ignorance – in the ignorance of what life is. One goes on living. One goes on moving from one moment to another, from one action to another, completely unaware what one is doing, why one is doing, why one is drifting from this point to that point. If you become a little meditative, many times in a day you will catch hold of yourself completely drifting unconscious.

The whole effort of religion is to make you aware of your existence. Existence plus awareness is life eternal – what Jesus calls life in abundance, what Jesus calls the kingdom of god.

That kingdom of god is within you. You have already the seed within you. You just have to allow it to sprout. You have to allow it to come in the sunlit world of the sky, to become free, to move in freedom, to move higher and higher, to touch the very infinity. It is possible to soar high – but the basic thing is awareness.

Shortly before Carl Jung died, he said in an interview, ‘We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man.’

One fallacy continues and that fallacy is that because you are, you think you know who you are. You feel that you are, but you don’t know who you are. Just a confused feeling, a mixed feeling, a shadowy feeling that you are, is not enough. It should become crystal-clear. It should become an unwavering light within you. Only then one knows what man is.

In Sanskrit, for ‘man’ we have the word ‘purusha’. That word is tremendously beautiful. It is difficult to translate it because it has three meanings. It can be pronounced with three different emphases.

The word is purusha. It can be pronounced as pur u sha. Then it means ‘the dawn in the city… he who is filled with light’.

It can be pronounced as puru sha. Then it means ‘filled with wisdom and eternal happiness… a citizen of heaven’.

It can be pronounced as pu rusha. Then it means ‘whose passions are purified and who has become deathless’.

There are many possibilities within you, layer upon layer. The first layer is of the body. If you get identified with the body, you are getting identified with the temporal, the momentary. Then there is bound to be fear of death.

The body is a flux, like a river – continuously changing, moving. It has nothing of the eternal in it. Each moment the body is changing. In fact, the body is dying every moment. It is not that after seventy years suddenly one day you die. The body dies every day. Death continues for seventy years; it is a process.

Death is not an event; it is a long process. By and by, by and by, the body comes to a point where it cannot hold itself. It disintegrates. If you are identified with the body, of course the fear will be constantly there that death is approaching. You can live, but you can live only in fear. And what type of life is possible when one’s foundations are constantly shaking? and one is sitting on a volcano and death is possible any moment? And only one thing is certain – that death is coming – and everything else is uncertain. How can one live? How can one celebrate? How can one dance and sing and be? Impossible. The death won’t allow it. The death is too much and too close.

Then there is a second layer within you: that of the mind – which is even more temporal and more fleeting than the body. Mind is also continuously disintegrating. Mind is the inner part of the body and the body is the outer part of the mind. These are not two things. Mind and body is not a right expression. The right expression is mind-body. You are psychosomatic. Not that the body exists and the mind exists. The body is the gross mind, and the mind is the subtle body… aspects of the same coin – one outer, the second inner.

So there are people who are identified with the body. These are the materialists. They cannot live. Desperately they try, of course, but they cannot live. A materialist only pretends that he is living; he cannot live. His life cannot be very deep; it can only be superficial, shallow – because he is trying to live through the body which is continuously dying.He is living in a house which is on fire. He is trying to rest in a house which is on fire. How can you rest? How can you love?

The materialist can have only sex, cannot love. Because sex is temporal; love is something of the eternal. He can make hit-and-run contacts with people but he cannot relate. He is constantly running, because he is identified with the body. The body is never at rest; it is a continuous movement.

At the most he can have sex – a temporal, a momentary thing; nothing deeper, nothing of the soul, nothing of the innermost core. Beings remain far away; bodies meet and mingle and separate again. The materialist is the most idiotic person, because he is trying to live through death. That is the stupidity.

Then another type of person is the idealist – one who is identified with the mind, with ideas, ideologies, ideals. He lives in a very ephemeral world – not in any way better than the materialist. Of course, more ego-fulfilling, because he can condemn the materialist.

He talks about god, he talks about the soul, he talks about religion and great things. He talks about the other world – but that is all mere talk. He lives in the mind: continuously thinking, brooding, playing with ideas and words. He creates utopias of the mind, great beautiful dreams – but he is also wasting the opportunity. Because the opportunity is here and now, and he always thinks of somewhere else.

The word ‘utopia’ is beautiful. It means ‘that which never comes’. He thinks of something which never comes, which cannot come. He lives somewhere else. He exists here and lives somewhere else. He lives in a dichotomy, in a dualism. With great tension he exists. The politicians, the revolutionaries, the so-called theologians, the priests, they all live a life identified with the mind.

And real life is beyond both body and mind. You are in the body, you are in the mind, but you are neither. The body is your outer shell, the mind is your inner shell, but you are beyond both.

This insight is the beginning of real life. How to start this insight? That’s what meditation is all about.

Start witnessing. Walking on the street, become a witness. Watch the body walking… and you, from the innermost core, are just watching, witnessing, observing. Suddenly you will have a sense of freedom. Suddenly you will see that the body is walking, you are not walking.

Sometimes the body is healthy, sometimes the body is ill. Watch, just watch, and suddenly you will have a sense of a totally different quality of being. You are not the body. The body is ill, of course, but you are not ill. The body is healthy, but it has nothing to do with you. You are a witness, a watcher on the hills… far beyond. Of course, tethered to the body, but not identified with the body; rooted in the body, but always beyond and transcending.

The first meditation is to separate yourself from the body. And by and by, when you become more acute in your observation of the body, start observing the thoughts that continuously go on within your mind. But first watch the body, because it is gross, can be observed more easily, will not need much awareness. Once you become attuned, then start watching the mind.

Whatsoever can be watched becomes separate from you. Whatsoever you can witness, you are not it. You are the witnessing consciousness. The witnessed is the object; you are the subjectivity. The body, and the mind also, remain far away when you become a witness. Suddenly you are there – with no body and no mind… a pure consciousness, just simple sheer purity, an innocence, a mirror.

In this innocence, for the first time you know who you are. In this purity, for the first time existence becomes life. For the first time you are. Before it, you were simply asleep, dreaming; now you are. And when you are, then there is no death. Then you know that you will be witnessing your death also. One who has become capable of witnessing life has become capable of witnessing death. Because death is not the end of life; it is the very culmination of it. It is the very pinnacle of it. Life comes to its peak in death. Because you are afraid, you miss. Otherwise death is the greatest orgasm there is.

You have known the small orgasm of sex. In sex also, a small, a little death happens. Some life energy is released from your body – you feel orgasmic, unburdened, relaxed, just think of death. The whole energy that you have is released. Death is the greatest orgasm.

In sexual orgasm just a small, minute part of your energy is relaxed. Then too you feel so beautiful. Then too you feel so relaxed and you fall in deep sleep, all tensions dissolved. You become a harmony. Think of death as the whole life released. From every pore of your body, the whole life released back to the whole. It is the greatest orgasm there is. Yes, death is the greatest orgasm.

But people go on missing it because of fear. The same happens with sexual orgasm. Many people go on missing it. They cannot have any orgasm because of the fear. They cannot move totally in it.

Remember this; people who are afraid of death will be afraid of sex also.

You can watch this happening in this country. This country has remained afraid of sex, and this country is very much afraid of death also. You cannot find more cowards anywhere. You cannot find more cowardly people anywhere. What has happened? Those people who are afraid of  death will become afraid of sex also, because a small death happens in sex. Those people who become afraid of sex, cling too much to life. They become miserly. Misers miss sexual orgasms and then they miss the great orgasm, the fulfillment of the whole life.

Once you know what death is, you will receive it with great celebration. You will welcome it. It is the fulfillment of your whole life’s effort. It is the fruition of your whole life’s effort. The journey ends. One comes back home.

But in death you don’t die. Just the energy that was given to you through the body and through the mind is released, goes back to the world. You return back home.

If you don’t die rightly, you will be born again. Now let me explain it to you. If you don’t die rightly, if you don’t achieve the total orgasm that death is, you will be born again, because you missed and you have to be given another opportunity.

God is very patient with you. He goes on giving you more opportunities. He has compassion. If you have missed this life, he will give you another. If you have failed this time, for another session you will be sent back to the world. Unless you fulfill the goal, you will be sent back again and again. That is the meaning of the theory of rebirth.

The Christian god is a little miserly. He gives only one life. That creates much tension. Just one life? No time even to err, no time to go astray. That creates very deep inner tension. In the East we have created the concept of a more compassionate god who goes on giving. You have missed this one? Take another. And in a way it is very sensible. There is no god personified as such who gives life to you. It is in fact you.

Have you watched sometimes? In the night you go to sleep. Just watch. When you fall asleep, when you are falling asleep, just watch the last thought, the last desire, the last fragment in your mind. And then when in the morning you feel awake, don’t open the eyes; just again watch. The last fragment will be the first fragment again.

If you were thinking of money when you were falling asleep, exactly the same thought will be the first thought in the morning. You will be thinking of money again – because that thought remained in your mind, waited for you to come back to it. If you were thinking of sex, in the morning you will be thinking of sex. Whatsoever…. If you were thinking of god and you prayed and that was your last thing in the night, first thing in the morning you will find a prayer arising in you.

The last thought in the night is the first thought in the morning. The last thought of this life will be the first thought of another life. The last thought when you are dying this time will become the first seed of your next life.

But when a buddha dies, a man who has attained, he simply dies with no thought. He enjoys the orgasm. It is so fulfilling, it is so totally fulfilling that there is no need to come back. He disappears into the cosmos. There is no need to be embodied again.

In the East we have been watching the death experience of people. How you die reflects your whole life, how you lived. If I can see just your death, I can write your whole biography – because in that one moment your whole life becomes condensed. In that one moment, like a lightning, you show everything.

A miserly person will die with clenched fists – still holding and clinging, still trying not to die, still trying not to relax. A loving person will die with open fists – sharing… even sharing his death as he shared his life. You can see everything written on the face – whether this man has lived his life fully alert, aware. If he has, then on his face there will be a light shining; around his body there will be an aura. You come close to him and you will feel silent – not sad, but silent. It even happens that if a person has died blissfully in a total orgasm you will feel suddenly happy near him.

It happened in my childhood. A very saintly person in my village died. I had a certain attachment towards him. He was a priest in a small temple, a very poor man, and whenever I would pass – and I used to pass at least twice a day; when going to the school near the temple, I would pass – he would call me and he would always give me some fruit, some sweet.

When he died, I was the only child who went to see him. The whole town gathered. Suddenly I could not believe what happened – I started laughing. My father was there; he tried to stop me because he felt embarrassed. A death is not a time to laugh. He tried to shut me up. He told me again and again, ‘You keep quiet!’

But I have never felt that urge again. Since then I have never felt it; never before had I ever felt it – to laugh so loudly, as if something beautiful has happened. And I could not hold myself. I laughed loudly, everybody was angry, I was sent back, and my father told me, ‘Never again are you to be allowed in any serious situation! Because of you, even I was feeling very embarrassed. Why were you laughing? What was happening there? What is there in death to laugh about? Everybody was crying and weeping and you were laughing.’

And I told him, ‘Something happened. That old man released something and it was tremendously beautiful. He died an orgasmic death.’ Not exactly these words, but I told him that I felt he was very happy dying, very blissful dying, and I wanted to participate in his laughter. He was laughing, his energy was laughing.

I was thought mad. How can a man die laughing? Since then I have been watching many deaths, but I have not seen that type of death again.

When you die, you release your energy and with that energy your whole life’s experience.

Whatsoever you have been – sad, happy, loving, angry, passionate, compassionate – whatsoever you have been, that energy carries the vibrations of your whole life. Whenever a saint is dying, just being near him is a great gift; just to be showered with his energy is a great inspiration. You will be put in a totally different dimension. You will be drugged by his energy, you will feel drunk.

Death can be a total fulfillment, but that is possible only if life has been lived.

-Osho

From Nirvana: The Last Nightmare, Chapter 9

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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June 30, 2010 · 10:24 am

Witnessing is the Purest Consciousness – Osho

I have heard you say that if we lose consciousness—through fear—at the point of death we re-enter the circle of birth and death. Is witnessing all we can do at this crucial moment or is there any specific technique?

Maneesha, there is nothing except witnessing, and witnessing is not a technique.

Witnessing is your nature, your very nature. You are nothing but witnessing. Witnessing is the purest consciousness.

And it is not only fear that makes you unconscious. Fear is only one element. When you are dying, it is not only fear that makes you unconscious; you already have too much unconsciousness – fear only takes away the thin layer of consciousness. One-tenth is conscious, nine-tenths is unconscious. Fear takes away the thin layer of consciousness and you are drowned in your own unconsciousness. It is so deep. It does not come from outside.

In meditation, when you are witnessing, you are by and by, without your knowing it, dispelling unconsciousness. You are becoming more and more conscious. The thin layer of consciousness becomes thicker and thicker and thicker, and a moment comes when your whole being is full of consciousness. This is witnessing.

So when death comes, you witness death. When life was there, you witnessed life. It is nothing new: death is only an object, just as life was an object. If you have learned how to witness, there is no question of being afraid. You will be a witness in your death too.

And if you are a witness in your death, you will never be born again into any other prison of the body.

[...]

Maneesha, there is no technique as such. Your being, your consciousness, has to transform all the dark corners inside you. The light has to reach into every nook and corner.

That’s what we call meditation.

Witnessing penetrates to every nook and corner – slowly slowly, all darkness, all unconsciousness disappears. And if you die consciously, witnessing death, you are freed from the imprisonment of the birth and death circle. Then you can melt into the cosmic whole, into absolute silence, into great ecstasy. That is the only authentic religiousness.

-Osho

Excerpt from Yakusan: Straight to the Point of Enlightenment, Chapter 2

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April 7, 2010 · 8:07 am

The Light That Remains Forever – Osho

The Light that Remains Forever

Does the Being, or Self, in the person die with the death of the person; or does it live beyond death in another body?

The question is a little complicated.

First you have to understand that your personality is not your reality; it is given by the culture, by the society.

Individuality is yours, but personality is not yours.

As personality you are always dead; only as individuality are you alive. But to be an individual you have to rebel against personality and against all those people who are forcing a certain personality on you.

Each child is born with a certain potential to be – and each society tries to make him something else.

I have heard about a man who was celebrating the golden jubilee of his marriage. All his friends, relatives, acquaintances, had gathered. There was much joy, laughter. But suddenly they realized that the man was missing. They could not understand where he had gone. They looked in the garden and he was sitting in the shadows, in darkness, by the side of a tree, very sad.

His friends said, “This is strange. You have called all of us to celebrate, and you are sitting here in such sadness as if somebody has died! What is the problem?”

He said, “The problem is… This woman that I married has tortured me so much that twenty-five years ago I enquired of my attorney, ‘If I shoot her what will be the result?’ and he said, ‘Are you mad? If you shoot her you will get twenty-five years in jail!’ I am feeling sad because today I would have been free. That idiot attorney has died; otherwise I would have killed him! He made me afraid.”

A man has to live with a woman he does not love, which is simply misery. A woman has to live with a man… which is simply misery, hell. A man has to work in a certain profession he hates. Everybody becomes something that he does not like. This is your personality. Society distracts everybody from his natural individuality and makes him something other than he was destined to be.

So the first thing to be understood is that you are not a person, you are not a personality. The word ‘person’ comes from Greek drama. In Greek drama the actors used masks, and the mask… you could not see the person’s real face; you could only hear his sound. Sona means sound. Persona means you don’t know who is speaking; you just hear the sound, the face is missing. The word ‘personality’ comes from that Greek drama.

Everybody is wearing a mask. You can hear the sound but you can’t see the face; you can’t see the individual. So the first thing: you are not a ‘person’. If you are a person, you are already dead. If you are only a personality, you have dragged yourself from the cradle to the grave but you never lived. You live only when you are an individuality – when you assert yourself against every tradition, every religion, every past that wants you to be someone other than existence wants you to be. Then you live.

Again I am reminded: a great surgeon I used to know – perhaps he was the most famous surgeon in India – was retiring, and all his friends, his colleagues, had given him a party, a farewell party, but he was very sad. I asked him, “Why are you sad? You should be happy: you are the topmost surgeon in the whole country.”

He said, “You don’t understand. I never wanted to become a surgeon in the first place, so who cares that I am the topmost surgeon? I hate to hear that! I wanted to become a musician, but my parents forced me to become a surgeon – against my will I became a surgeon. By chance I became the topmost surgeon; perhaps I would not have been able to become the topmost musician. I am rich, I have everything, I have respectability, but that does not help me to be happy.

“Even if I had remained a beggar, as a musician I would have been blissful because I would have been myself. This surgeon seems to be somebody else; it is a role that I have played, but it is not me. These people are celebrating, and I am crying within myself that my whole life is lost.”

So first, you are not a ‘person’; otherwise you are dead before death. And there are millions of people who die thirty, forty, or fifty years before they actually die. You are an individual, and only individuality is capable of knowing your real self. Personality has no self – only an ego, as false as personality. Individuality has a self, a soul. The individual is a living principle of life.

If you know life you will never ask this kind of question. Knowing life authentically means you also know that it is immortal. The knowledge of its immortality is intrinsic. It is not something informed, from outside. Just living your true being in totality you slowly, slowly become aware of the immortal current of life within you. You know the body will die, but this soul, which is life’s whole essence, cannot die.

In existence nothing is destructible.

And it is not something to believe in, it is a scientific truth that you cannot destroy anything. You cannot destroy even a small piece of stone. Whatever you do it will remain in some form or other.

Science enquires into the objective world and finds that even objective reality is immortal. Religion works exactly like science in the inner world and finds the dancing life is intrinsically immortal.

It will be good to remember Socrates at this point because he was not a man to believe anything. If you had asked him whether your soul would survive after bodily death he would say, “Let me first die – because unless I die, how can I say?” And the day he was given poison is one of the most significant days in the history of man. His disciples were sitting around him and he was lying down. He told his disciples, “I will tell you what is happening. As long as I can, I will go on informing you.”

Then he said, “Up to my knees, my legs are dead. Please somebody pinch my legs so I can know whether I can feel it or not.” Somebody pinched his legs. He said, “I cannot feel it; the legs have died. But remember one thing: I am as alive as I ever was. The death of the legs has not cut a part of my life; my life is as whole as it ever was.” Then all of the legs became dead, half of the body. And he said, “Half of my body is dead, but I am whole, as whole as ever.”

Then his hands became dead and he said, “I am still here and I am still whole. Perhaps now my heart will stop, but I can say to you that even though I may not be able to inform you, I will remain, because if all these parts are gone and I am whole, then it doesn’t matter: the heart is only a part.”

And when he died his face was so delighted, so joyous, that Plato, his disciple, remembers, “We have never seen his face so full of light, so radiant. Perhaps the last moment when the soul is leaving the body is just like the sunset when the sun is going down and the whole sky becomes so beautiful and radiant.”

It is not a question of belief. I am not a believer in anything, so I will not say to you to believe me that the soul is immortal. But it is my experience that it is immortal because I can remember my past lives, and that is a solid proof that there are going to be future lives. I can teach you techniques for remembering past lives and that will become a solid proof for you that you have a future. You have an eternity of past and an eternity of future.

You have always been here and you will always be here.

But first drop your fake personality.

Grow into your authentic individuality.

Live the way existence wanted you to live. Your very life should be so intense and so total that you burn your life’s torch from both ends. In that very intensity you will know that you have touched something of eternity. And if you have known it in your life, in your death you will find a deeper confirmation of the fact.

People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don’t know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That’s why we don’t  remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness.

But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying – so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too.

In the East there are three great religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. They disagree on every point – their philosophies are different about everything – but on one point they agree, and that is the eternal existence of the soul, because it is not a question of theoretical discussion, it is a question of existential experience. You can’t disagree about it – it is exactly so.

Against these three religions in the East, outside of India there are three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. They all believe in one life, and that simply shows their poverty. They have not explored deeply enough to find past lives, and they cannot guarantee anything about the future. These three religions born outside India are superficial. Their work is not in-depth research.

But in India for ten thousand years thousands of people have entered into self-realization and have found that there is some light that remains forever. It goes on moving from one body to another body but is indestructible.

I will not tell you to believe it. I will only tell you to experiment. I am against all beliefs, because every belief destroys you, destroys your thinking. I am in favor of experimenting, and there are techniques available.

That has been my whole life’s work – to make those techniques available to anybody who really wants to search and to find, to one who is not only a curious person but is a seeker who is ready to risk everything for the search. And it is a search for which you need to risk everything because you are going to find the greatest treasure.

-Osho

Taken from The Path of the Mystic, Chapter 1.

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January 29, 2010 · 11:50 am

Awakened Consciousness Speaks – Ajja

Ajja in his animated fashion

Three Subjects of Enquiry

One state is Sakshatkara[1].

A second state is Aikya-[2] the living essence in individual (Jivatma) merging itself in Paramatma[3].

A third one is birth death[4].

These are the only three subjects of enquiry.

There is death for the one who has birth – is it not so? He takes birth; dies and then takes his birth again. We are not talking about the death of the body – it is composed of earth;[5] should return to earth. There is one inside, isn’t it? When death occurs to the one[6] who comes and goes…there the issue is to be examined.

In Aikyatha, there is (individual) existence; There is possibility of returning if one is willing to do so.

The earth, planets, stars and galaxies exist in place only due to mutual attraction – isn’t it? In the same way, mutual attraction exists inside individuals also. There is the bond of attraction between the Jivatma and his astral body. Otherwise how can the Jivatma stay in the body? Does he have a cage? It stays because of the bond of attraction of his astral body. If he detaches himself from the karmic bond, he becomes one with the original power (creator). He attains Aikya. When the river joins the ocean, it becomes one with the ocean. The river attained Aikya with the ocean. The river ceases to exist. The ocean and this river become one. But the ocean exists, is it not so? The water exists, isn’t it? That may evaporate, then condense to form clouds thereafter and into rain. And the same water may form a river. Is it not so?

But in Sakshatkara, when transformed mind is concentrated on the transformed power, one who is the enquirer becomes the object of enquiry. This enquirer then loses itself in the enquiry ‘Who am I’, there threefold annihilation (Triputinasa) takes place.

There remains no enquirer, no enquiry and no object of enquiry.

-Bhagavan Arabbi-Nithyanandam (Ajja)

Taken from Anandopanishat (Inspirations From the Unmanifest to the Manifest), Chapter 3

The entire book may be downloaded.

[1]To become the ever existing One

[2] Unification, union

[3] Creator, sustainer and annihilator of the creation-the universe-the manifested.

[4] The process of individual spiral cycle of evolution.

[5] Five elements

[6] Living essence, the soul that is bound by residue of actions done with motives (Sankalpa)

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