Sat Sangha Salon

Be Attentively Inattentive – Osho

This is what tantra says: the royal way – behave like a king, not like a soldier. There is nobody on top of you to force you and order you; there should not be really a style of life. That is the royal way. You should live moment to moment, enjoying moment to moment – spontaneity should be the way. And why bother about tomorrow? – This moment is enough. Live it! Live it in totality. Respond, but don’t react. “No habits” should be the formula.

I am not saying live in a chaos, but don’t live through habits. Maybe, just living spontaneously, a way of life evolves in you – but that is not forced. If you enjoy the morning every day, and through enjoyment you get up early in the morning, not as a habit, and you get up every day… and you may get up for your whole life, but that is not a habit. You are not forcing yourself to get up – it happens.

It is beautiful; you enjoy it, you love it.

If it happens out of love, it is not a style, it is not a habit, not a conditioning, not a cultivated, dead thing. Less habits – you will be more alive. No habits – you will be perfectly alive. Habits surround you with a dead crust and you become enclosed in them, you become encapsulated. Like a seed a cell surrounds you, hard. Be flexible.

Yoga teaches you to cultivate the opposite of all that is bad. Fight with evil and attend to good. There is violence – kill the violence within you and become nonviolent, cultivate nonviolence. Always do the opposite and force the opposite to become your pattern. This is the soldier’s way – a small teaching. Tantra is the great teaching – the supreme. What does tantra say? Tantra says: don’t create any conflict within yourself. Accept both, and through the acceptance of both, a transcendence happens, not victory but transcendence. In yoga there are victories, in tantra there are none. In tantra . . . simply transcendence. Not that you become nonviolent against violence, you simply go beyond both, you simply become a third phenomenon – a witness.

I was sitting once in a butcher’s shop. He was a very good man and I used to go to visit him. It was evening and he was just going to close the shop when a man came and asked for a hen. And I knew because just a few minutes before he had told me that everything was sold today – only one hen was left. So he was very happy; he went in, brought the hen out, threw it on the scale and said, “That will be five rupees.”

The man said, “It is good, but I am going to give a party and many friends are coming and this hen seems to be too small. I would like to have a little bigger one.”

Now I knew that he had no hen left, this was the only one. The butcher brooded a little, took the hen back inside the room, stayed there a little, came back again, threw the hen on the scale – the same one – and said, “This will be seven rupees.”

The man said, “Tell you what, I will take both of them.”

Then the butcher was really in a fix.

And tantra puts the whole existence itself in a fix. Tantra says, “I will take both of them.”

There are not two. Hate is nothing but another aspect of love. Anger is nothing but another aspect of compassion, and violence is nothing but another face of nonviolence. Tantra says, “Tell you what, I will take both of them. I accept both.” And suddenly through this acceptance there is a transcendence, because there are not two. Violence and nonviolence are not two. Anger and compassion are not two. Love and hate are not two.

That’s why you know, you observe, but you are so unconscious that you don’t recognize the fact. Your love changes into hate within a second. How is it possible if they are two? Not even a second is needed: this moment you love, and next moment you hate the same person. In the morning you love the same person, by the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love again. This game of love and hate goes on. In fact, love and hate is not the right word: love-hate, anger-compassion – they are one phenomenon, they are not two. That’s why love can become hate, hate can become love, anger can become compassion, compassion can become anger.

Tantra says the division is brought by your mind and then you start fighting. You create the division first; you condemn one aspect and you appreciate another. You create the division first, then you create the conflict and then you are in trouble. And you will be in trouble. A yogi is constantly in trouble because whatsoever he will do the victory cannot be final, at the most temporary.

You can push down anger and act compassion, but you know well that you have pushed it down into the unconscious and it is there – and any moment, a little unawareness and it will bubble up, it will surface. So one has to constantly push it down. And this is such an ugly phenomenon if one has to constantly push down negative things – then the whole life is wasted. When will you enjoy the divine? You have no space, no time. You are fighting with the anger and greed and sex and jealousy and a thousand things. And those thousand enemies are there; you have to be constantly on watch, you can never relax. How can you be loose and natural? You will always be tense, strained, always ready to fight, always afraid.

Yogis become afraid even of sleep, because in sleep they cannot be on watch. In sleep all that they have forced down surfaces. They may have attained to celibacy while they are awake, but in dreams it becomes impossible – beautiful women keep on floating inside, and the yogi cannot do anything. Those beautiful women are not coming from some heaven as it is written in Hindu stories, that God sent them. Why should God be interested in you? A poor yogi, not doing anybody any harm, simply sitting in the Himalayas with closed eyes, fighting with his own problems – why should God be interested in him? And why should he send apsaras, beautiful women, to distract him from his path? Why? Nobody is there. There is no need for anybody to send anybody. The yogi is creating his own dreams.

Whatsoever you suppress surfaces in the dreams. Those dreams are the part the yogi has denied. And your waking hours are as much yours as your dreams are yours. So whether you love a woman in your waking hours, or you love a woman in dream, there is no difference – there cannot be, because it is not a question of a woman there or not, it is a question of you. Whether you love a picture, a dream picture, or you love a real woman, there is in fact no difference – there cannot be, because a real woman is also a picture inside. You never know the real woman; you only know the picture.

I am here. How do you know that I am really here? Maybe it is just a dream – you are dreaming m here. What will be the difference if you dream me here and you see me actually here? – and how will you make the difference? What is the criterion? … Because whether I am here or not makes no difference – you see me inside your mind. In both the cases – dream or real – your eyes take the rays in and your mind interprets that somebody is there. You have never seen any actual person, you cannot see.

That’s why Hindus say this is a maya, this is an illusory world. Tilopa says, “Transient, ghostlike, phantomlike, dreamlike is this world.” Why? – because in dream and actuality there is no difference.

In both the cases you are confined in your mind. You only see pictures, you have never seen any reality – you cannot see, because the reality can only be seen when you become real. You are a ghostlike phenomenon, a shadow – how can you see the real? The shadow can see only the shadow. You can see reality only when the mind is dropped. Through the mind everything becomes unreal. The mind projects, creates, colors, interprets – everything becomes false. Hence the emphasis, continuous emphasis on how to be no-minds.

Tantra says don’t fight. If you fight you may continue your fight for many lives and nothing will happen out of it, because in the first place you have missed – where you have seen two was only one. And if the first step has been missed, you cannot reach the goal. Your whole journey is going to be continuously a missing. The first step has to be taken absolutely rightly, otherwise you will never reach the goal.

And what is the absolutely right thing? Tantra says it is to see the one in two, to see the one in many.

Once you can see one in duality, already the transcendence has started. This is the royal path.

Now we will try to understand the sutra.

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

To transcend, not to win – to transcend. This word is very beautiful. What does it mean, to “transcend”?

It is just as if a small child is playing with his toys. You tell him to put them away and he becomes angry. Even when he goes to sleep he goes with his toys, and the mother has to remove them when he has fallen asleep. In the morning the first thing that he demands to know is where his toys are and who has taken them away. Even in the dream he dreams about the toys. Then suddenly one day he forgets about the toys. For a few days they remain in the corner of his room, and then they are removed or thrown away; never again does he ask for them. What has happened? He has transcended, he has become mature. It is not a fight and a victory; it is not that he was fighting against the desire to have toys. No, suddenly one day he sees this is childish and he is no more a child; suddenly one day he realizes that toys are toys, they are not real life and he is ready for the real life. His back is turned towards the toys. Never again in dreams will they come; never again will he think about them. And if he sees some other child playing with toys, he will laugh; he will laugh knowingly… a knowing laugh, a wise laugh. He will say, ”He’s a child, still childish, playing with toys.” He has transcended.

Transcendence is a very spontaneous phenomenon. It is not to be cultivated. You simply become more mature. You simply see the whole absurdity of a certain thing . . . and you transcend. One young man came to me and he was very much worried. He has a beautiful wife, but her nose is a little too long. So he was worried and he said, “What to do?” Even plastic surgery was done – the nose became a little more ugly; because there was nothing wrong, and when you try to improve something where nothing is wrong, it becomes more ugly, it makes more of a mess. Now he was more troubled and he asked me what to do.

I talked to him about the toys and I told him, “One day you will have to transcend. This is just childish – why are you obsessed so much with her nose? The nose is just a tiny part, and your wife is so beautiful and such a beautiful person – and why are you making her so sad because of her nose?” – because she has also become touchy about her nose, her nose has become as if it was the whole problem of life. And all problems are like this! Don’t think that your problem is something greater – all problems are like this. All problems are out of childishness, juvenile, they are born out of immaturity.

He was concerned so much with the nose that he would not even look at his wife’s face, because whenever he saw the nose he was troubled – but you cannot escape things so easily. If you are NOT looking at the face because of the nose, still you are reminded of the nose. Even if you are trying to evade the issue, the issue is there. You are obsessed. So I told him to meditate on the wife’s nose.

He said, “What? I cannot even look.”

I told him, “This is going to help – you simply meditate on the nose. People used in the ancient days, to meditate on the tip of their own nose, so what is wrong in meditating on the tip of your wife’s nose? Beautiful! You try.”

He said, “But what will happen out of it?”

“You just try,” I told him, “and after a few months you tell me what happens. Every day, let her sit before you and you meditate on her nose.” One day he came running to me and he said, “What nonsense I have been doing! Suddenly, I have transcended. The whole foolishness of it has become apparent – now it is no more a problem.”

He has not become victorious because, in fact, there is no enemy there so that you can win, there is no enemy to you – this is what tantra says. The whole life is in deep love with you. There is nobody who is to be destroyed, nobody who is to be won, nobody who is an enemy, a foe to you. The whole life loves you. From everywhere the love is flowing.

And within you also, there are no enemies – they have been created by priests. They have made a battleground; they have made you a battleground. They say, “Fight this – this is bad! Fight that – that is bad!” They have created so many enemies that you are surrounded by enemies and you have lost contact with the whole beauty of life.

I say to you: anger is not your enemy, greed is not your enemy; neither is compassion your friend, nor is nonviolence your friend – because friend or foe, you remain with the duality. Just look at the whole of your being and you will find they are one. When the foe becomes the friend and the friend becomes the foe, all duality is lost. Suddenly there is a transcendence, suddenly an awakening. And I tell you, it is sudden, because when you fight you have to fight inch by inch. This is not a fight at all. This is the way of the kings – the royal path.

Says Tilopa,

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

Transcend duality! Just watch and you will see there is no duality.

Bodhidharma, one of the rarest jewels ever born, went to China. The king came to see him, and the king said, “Sometimes I am very much disturbed. Sometimes there is much tension and anguish within me.”

Bodhidharma looked at him and said, “You come early tomorrow morning at four o’clock, and bring all your anguish, anxieties, disturbances with you. Remember, don’t come alone – bring all of them!”

The king looked at this Bodhidharma – he was a very weird-looking fellow; he could have scared anybody to death – and the king said, “What are you saying? What do you mean?”

Bodhidharma said, “If you don’t bring those things, then how can I set you right? Bring all of them and I will set everything right.”

The king thought, “It is better not to go. Four o’clock in the morning – it will be dark, and this man looks a little mad. With a big staff in his hand, he can even hit. And what does he mean that he will put everything right?”

He couldn’t sleep the whole night because Bodhidharma haunted him. By the morning he felt that it would be good to go, “because who knows? – maybe he can do something.”

So he came, grudgingly, hesitatingly, but he reached. And the first thing Bodhidharma asked – he was sitting there before the temple with his staff, was looking even more dangerous in the dark, and he said, “So you have come! Where are the other fellows that you were talking about?”

The king said, “You talk in puzzles, because they are not things that I can bring – they are inside.”

Bodhidharma said, “Okay. Inside, outside, things are things. You sit down, close your eyes and try to find them inside. Catch hold of them and immediately tell me and look at my staff. I am going to set them right!”

The king closed his eyes – there was nothing else to do – he closed his eyes, afraid a little, looked inside here and there, watched, and suddenly he became aware the more he looked in, that there was nothing – no anxiety, no anguish, no disturbance. He fell into a deep meditation. Hours passed, the sun started rising, and on his face there was tremendous silence.

Then Bodhidharma told him, “Now open your eyes. Enough is enough! Where are those fellows? Could you get hold of them?”

The king laughed, bowed down, touched the feet of Bodhidharma, and he said, “Really, you have set them right, because I could not find them – and now I know what is the matter. They are not there in the first place. They were there because I never entered within myself and looked for them. They were there because I was not present inside. Now I know – you have done the miracle.”

And this is what happened. This is transcendence: not solving a problem but seeing whether really there is a problem in the first place. First you create the problem and then you start asking for the solution. First you create the question and then you roam around the world asking for the answer. This has been my experience also, that if you watch the question, the question will disappear; there is no need for any answer. If you watch the question, the question disappears – and this is transcendence. It is not a solution because there was no question at all to solve. You don’t have a disease. Just watch inside and you will not find the disease; then what is the need of a solution?

Every man is as he should be. Every man is a born king. Nothing is lacking, you need not be improved upon. And people who try to improve you, they destroy you; they are the real mischief makers. And there are many who are just watching like cats for mice: you come near them and they pounce upon you and they start improving you immediately. There are many improvers – that’s why the world is in such a chaos – there are too many people trying to improve on you. Don’t allow anybody to improve upon you. You are already the last word. You are not only the alpha; you are the omega also. You are complete, perfect.

Even if you feel imperfection, tantra says that imperfection is perfect. You need not worry about it. It will look very strange to say that your imperfection is also perfect, nothing is lacking in it. In fact, you appear imperfect not because you are imperfect but because you are a growing perfection. This looks absurd, illogical, because we think perfection cannot grow, because we mean by perfection that which has come to its last growth – but that perfection will be dead. If it cannot grow then that perfection will be dead.

God goes on growing. God is not perfect in that way, that he has no growth. He is perfect because he lacks nothing, but he goes from one perfection to another, the growth continues. God is evolution; not from imperfection to perfection but from perfection to more perfection, to still more perfection.

When perfection is without any future, it is dead. When perfection has a future to it, still an opening, a growth, still a movement, then it looks like imperfection. And I would like to tell you: be imperfect and growing, because that is what life is. And don’t try to be perfect, otherwise you will stop growing. Then you will be like a Buddha statue, stone, but dead.

Because of this phenomenon – that perfection goes on growing – you feel it is imperfect. Let it be as it is. Allow it to be as it is. This is the royal way.

To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

Distractions are there, when you will lose your consciousness again and again. You meditate, you sit for meditation, a thought comes – and immediately you have forgotten yourself; you follow the thought, you have got involved in it. Tantra says only one thing has to be conquered, and that is distractions.

What will you do? Only one thing: when a thought comes, remain a witness. Look at it, observe it, allow it to pass your being, but don’t get attached to it in any way, for or against. It may be a bad thought, a thought to kill somebody – don’t push it, don’t say, “This is a bad thought.” The moment you say something about the thought, you have become attached, you are distracted. Now this thought will lead you to many things, from one thought to another. A good thought comes, a compassionate thought: don’t say, “Aha, so beautiful! I am a great saint. Such beautiful thoughts are coming to me that I would like to give salvation to the whole world. I would like to liberate everybody.” Don’t say that. Good or bad, you remain a witness.

Still, in the beginning, many times you will be distracted. Then what to do? If you are distracted, be distracted. Don’t be worried too much about it, otherwise that worry will become an obsession. Be distracted! For a few minutes you will be distracted, then suddenly you will remember, “I am distracted.” Then it is okay, come back. Don’t feel depressed. Don’t say, “It was bad that I was distracted” – again you are creating a dualism: bad and good. Distracted, okay – accept it, come back. Even with distraction you don’t create a conflict.

That’s what Krishnamurti goes on saying. He uses a very paradoxical concept for it. He says if you are inattentive, be attentively inattentive. That’s okay! Suddenly you find you have been inattentive, give attention to it and come back home. Krishnamurti has not been understood and the reason is that he follows the royal path. If he had been a yogi he would have been understood very easily. That’s why he goes on saying there is no method – on the royal path there is no method. He goes on saying that there is no technique – on the royal path there is none. He goes on saying no scripture will help you – on the royal path there is no scripture.

Distracted? – The moment you remember, the moment this attention comes to you that “I have been distracted,” come back. That’s all! Don’t create any conflict. Don’t say, “This was bad”; don’t feel depressed, frustrated that you have been again distracted. Nothing is wrong in distraction – enjoy it also.

If you can enjoy the distraction, less and less it will happen to you. And a day comes when there is no distraction – but this is not a victory. You have not pushed the distracting trends of your mind deep into the unconscious. No. You allowed it also. It too is good.

This is the mind of tantra, that everything is good and holy. Even if there is distraction, somehow it is needed. You may not be aware why it is needed; somehow it is needed. If you can feel good about everything that happens, then only are you following the royal path. If you start fighting with anything whatsoever, you have fallen from the royal path and you have become an ordinary soldier, a warrior.

To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

-Osho

From Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, Discourse #7

An MP3 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 Meeting of Sun and Moon – Osho

By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings.

Through pratibha, intuition, knowledge of everything.

Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.

Man is evolution. Not only that man is evolving, he is the very vehicle of evolution itself: he is evolution. A tremendous responsibility, and something to be delighted about also, because that’s the glory of man. Matter is the beginning, God, the end; matter is the alpha point, God, the omega point. Man is the bridge – matter passes through man and is transformed into God. God is not a thing and God is not waiting somewhere. God is evolving through you; God is becoming through you. You are transforming matter into God. You are the greatest experiment that reality has made. Think of the glory of it and think of the responsibility also.

Much depends on man, but if you think that you are already there because you have the form of man, then you will be misguided by your mind. You only have the form; you are only a possibility. The real is going to happen, and you have to allow it to happen. You have to open toward it.

That’s what yoga is all about: how to help you to move upward toward the omega point where your whole energy is released, transformed – the whole of matter is transmuted into divinity. Yoga has mapped the whole journey, the whole pilgrimage of man – from sex to samadhi, from the lowest center, muladhar, to the highest center, the very peak, the pinnacle of evolution: the sahasrar.

These things have to be understood before we can enter into the sutras of today. Yoga divides man into seven layers, seven steps, seven centers. The first is muladhar, the sex center, the sun center; and the last, the seventh, is sahasrar, the God center, the omega point.

The sex center is intrinsically moving downward. It is your connection with matter, what yoga calls prakriti – nature. The sex center is your relation with nature, the world that you have left behind, the past. If you go on confining yourself to the sex center, you cannot evolve. You will remain where you are. You will remain in contact with your past, but you will not be connected with the future. You are stuck there; man is stuck at the sex center.

People think they understand everything about sex. Nothing much is yet known, at least not to those who think they know – the psychologists. They think they know, but the basic thing is yet lacking: the knowledge that sex can become an upward movement, that there is no necessity that it should only move downward. It moves downward because the mechanism to move downward exists in man – already exists in man. It exists in animals also; it exists in trees also. There is nothing much significant about it that it exists in man. The significance of man is that something more exists in man that doesn’t exist yet in the plants, in the birds, in the animals. They are bound to move downward; they don’t have a staircase within them.

That is what we mean by seven centers: the staircase of evolution. It exists in you. You can fall upward – if you choose to. If you don’t choose, you will go on falling downward.

So now, with man, the evolution is going to be conscious. Up to now you have been helped. Nature has brought you to this point; from now onward, you will have to take your own responsibility. You will have to become responsible. Man has matured, man has come of age; now nature can no longer take care of you. So if you don’t move consciously, if you don’t make a conscious effort to evolve, if you don’t accept the responsibility, you will remain stuck.

So many people feel the stuckness, but they don’t know from where it is coming. Thousands of people come to me and they tell me they are feeling stuck. They know something is possible, but they don’t know what it is. They know that they should move, but they don’t know how to move, where to move. They know that they have been in the place where they are long enough and they would like to explode into new dimensions, but they are stuck.

This stuckness is coming from muladhar, from the sex center, the sun center.

Up to now there has been no problem for you. Nature has been helping; nature has mothered you up to now. But you are no longer a child, no longer a babe, and nature cannot go on feeding you on her breast. Now the mother says, “Leave the breast; be on your own.” The mother has said [this] so very long ago. Those who have understood it, they have taken the responsibility and have become siddhas, buddhas, those who have achieved.

Now the path is going to be your decision. Now you have to move on your own. This possibility exists in the muladhar center: it can open upward. So the first thing to be understood today is: don’t think that you understand sex in its totality. You don’t understand it. […]

But I would like to tell you nobody knows all about sex yet. Unless God is realized, you cannot know all about sex because God is the final possibility of sex energy – the ultimate transformation of sex energy. Unless you know who you are, you will not be able to know what sex really is in its totality. You will not be able to comprehend it. Only a part of it is known, the sun part. Even the moon part is not known yet. The psychology for the feminine energy has yet to evolve. Freud and Jung and Adler and others, whatsoever they have been doing is more or less centered around man. Woman yet remains an uncharted territory. The moon center, even the moon center, is not yet a known fact.

A few people have had a few glimpses. For example, Jung had a few glimpses. Freud remained completely sun-oriented. Jung moved a little toward the moon; of course, very hesitatingly because the whole training of the mind is scientific, and to move toward the moon is to move in a world totally different from science. It is to move in the world of myth, it is to move in the world of poetry, imagination. It is to move in the world of “irreason,” illogic.

Let me tell you a few things. Freud is sun-oriented; Jung is leaning a little toward the moon. That’s why Freud was very angry with his disciple Jung. And Freudians are very much annoyed by Jung; it seems he betrayed his master.

The sun-oriented person always feels that the moon-oriented person is dangerous. The sun-oriented person moves on the clean-cut superhighways of reason, and the moon-oriented person starts moving in labyrinths. He starts moving in the wilderness, where nothing is clear-cut – everything is alive, but nothing is clear-cut.

And the greatest fear for man is woman. Somehow man suspects that death is going to come from woman – because life has also come from her. Everybody is born out of a woman. When life has come from woman, then somehow death is also going to happen through her. Because the end always comes to meet the beginning. Only then is the circle completed.

In India, in Indian mythology, we realized it. You must have seen pictures or statues of Mother Kali, who is the symbolization of the feminine mind, and she is dancing on the body of her husband, Shiva. She has danced so terribly that Shiva is dead, and she goes on dancing. The feminine mind has killed the male mind; that is the meaning of the myth.

And why is she painted black? That’s why she is called Kali; kali means “black.” And why so dangerous? In one of her hands, she is carrying a freshly cut head with blood dripping from it. Almost a personification of death. And she is dancing wildly – and on the chest of her husband, and the husband is dead and she goes on dancing in great ecstasy. Why is she black? Because death has always been thought of as black, as a dark black night.

And why has she killed her husband? The moon always kills the sun. Once the moon arises in your being, logic dies. Then logic cannot remain, then reason cannot remain. Now you have attained a totally different dimension.

You never expect logic from a poet. You never expect logic from a painter, from a dancer, from a musician. They move in a totally dark world; they move in darkness.

Reason has always been afraid, and man has always been afraid because man is reason oriented. Have you not observed it, that always man feels it is difficult to understand a woman and the mind of a woman? And the same is the feeling of women – they cannot understand men. A gap exists, as if they are not part of one humanity, as if they are different. […]

Man is always trying to prove something. Watch. A woman takes it for granted that everything is proved, and man goes on trying to prove something – always defensive. Somewhere deep in their sexuality is the root cause of it. When a man and a woman make love, the woman need not prove anything. She can just be passive, but the man has to prove his manhood. From that very effort to prove his manhood, man is continuously defensive and always trying to prove something or other.

The whole of philosophy is nothing but finding proofs for God. Science is nothing but finding proofs for theories. Women have never been interested in philosophy. They take life for granted; they accept it. They are not defensive in any way, as if they have proved already. Their being seems to be more circular, the circle seems to be complete. That may be the cause of their body being so round. It has a shape of roundness. Man has corners and [is] always ready to fight and argue. […]

The male mind always goes on dissecting.

Jung reports in his memoirs that he was sitting with Freud, and that day he suddenly felt a great strain in his stomach, and he felt as if something was going to happen, and suddenly there was a sort of explosion in the cupboard. Both became alert. What has happened? Jung said, “It has something to do with my energy.” Freud laughed and scoffed and said, “Nonsense, how can it have anything to do with your energy?” Jung said, “Wait, within a minute it will come again” – because he again felt his stomach getting strained. And within a minute – exactly within a minute – there was another explosion.

Now this is the feminine mind. And Jung writes in his memoirs, “Since that day, Freud never trusted me.” This is dangerous because it is illogical. And Jung started to think about a new theory he calls “synchronicity.”

The theory that is the base of all scientific effort is “causality” – everything is joined with cause and effect. Whatsoever happens has a cause, and if you can produce the cause, the effect will follow. If you heat water, it will evaporate. Heating is the cause: bring it to a hundred degrees and it will evaporate. Evaporation is an effect. This is the scientific base.

Jung says there is another principle that is “synchronicity.” It is difficult to explain it because all explanations are from the scientific mind, but you can try to feel what he means. Make two clocks so similar that they are synchronized with each other: when in one clock the hand comes to twelve, the other clock chimes the twelve bells. One clock simply moves, shows the time; the other clock chimes – eleven, twelve, one, two. Anybody listening to it will be surprised because the first clock is not the cause of the second chiming. They are in no way related. It is only that the maker, the watchmaker, has synchronized them in such a way that something happens in one and simultaneously something else happens in the other. They are not connected by any cause and effect.

Jung says just by the side of causality there is another principle. The maker of the world, if there is any, he has made the world in such a way that many things happen which are not cause and effect. You see a woman and suddenly love flowers. Now is this to be explained by cause and effect or by synchronicity? Jung seems to be more accurate and closer to the truth. The woman has not caused the love in you, you have not caused the love in the woman, but man and woman, or the energy of sun and moon, has been made in such a way that when they come close love flowers. It is synchronicity.

But Freud became afraid. They were never close again. Freud had chosen Jung to be his successor, but that day he changed his will. Then they fell apart, farther and farther away.

Man cannot understand woman; woman cannot understand man. It is almost like sun and moon: when the sun is there, moon disappears. When the sun goes down, the moon appears. They never meet. They never come face to face. Your intellect, your reason, disappears when your intuition starts functioning. Women are more intuitive. They don’t have a reason for something, but they can have a hunch, and their hunches are almost always true.

Many men have come to me and told me, “This is strange. If we are having some affair and we have not told the wife, somehow or other she comes to know. But we are never able to know whether the wife is having an affair or not.” […]

It is impossible. They have another way of knowing, a separate way of knowing: the moon way of knowing.

The feminine psychology has yet to be developed, and unless the moon psychology is developed, psychology will not have the status of a science. It will remain a prejudice; it will remain male prejudice. It will not say something about human beings as such.

Freudian psychology is sun psychology; Jungian psychology is leaning a little toward the moon. And there is a man, Roberto Assagioli, his psychology is a synthesis between sun and moon, just the beginning of it. He calls his psychology “psychosynthesis.” Freud calls his psychology “psychoanalysis.” Analysis comes from the sun; synthesis comes from the moon. Observe, whenever there is light, things are separate. Then one tree is here, another tree is there, but everything is separate. And then comes the darkness of the night and everything disappears – the separation. Everything becomes one. The dark night, and all divisions disappear.

Moon psychology is going to be synthetical; sun psychology analytical, dissecting, arguing, proving. But there is a possibility of higher psychologies. I would like to give you a few hints, what I call “the psychology of the Buddhas.” Freud is sun, Jung moon, Assagioli sun plus moon. A buddha is sun plus moon plus beyond, and later on I will explain to you what I mean by “beyond.” And then that beyond can also be looked at, through many ways.

Sun plus beyond: you have Patanjali, you have Mahavir, yoga. The language is of the sun; the experience is of the beyond. Then, sun plus moon plus beyond: you have tantra, Shiva. The experience is of the beyond, but the expression is both sun plus moon. And then, you have moon plus beyond: Narad, Chaitanya, Meera, Jesus. The experience is of the beyond, but the expression is of the moon. And then there is just beyond: Bodhidharma, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Zen. They don’t believe in expression so they don’t need sun or moon expression; they say it cannot be said. Lao Tzu says, “The Tao that can be said is no longer Tao. The truth that can be uttered is already a lie; it cannot be expressed.”

These are all the possibilities, but they have not yet been actualized. Here and there a man has attained, but that attainment and realization has to be codified in such a way, classified in such a way, that it becomes a part of the collective human consciousness.

Now the sutra:

By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings.

Sahasrar is just below the crown of the head. Sahasrar is a subtle opening in your head. Just as the genital organs are a subtle opening in muladhar, from that subtle opening you move downward into nature, into life, into the visible, the material, into the form; exactly like that, you have a nonfunctioning organ in the crown of the head, there is also a subtle opening. When energy rushes there, that opening bursts open, and from there you come in contact with super nature, call it God or perfected beings, siddhas – those who have already attained.

Through sex you reproduce more bodies like you. Sex is creative; it gives birth to more children just like you – you reproduce yourself. When your energy moves through sahasrar, the seventh chakra, you reproduce yourself: that is what resurrection is. That is what is meant by Jesus when he says, “Be reborn.” Then you become father and mother to yourself. Your sun center becomes your father, your moon center becomes your mother, and the meeting of your sun and moon inside releases your energy toward the head. It is an inner orgasm – the meeting of the sun and the moon, or call it the meeting of the anima and the animus, the male and the female inside you.

Your whole body is divided into male and female. This has to be understood. Do you see how much left-handed people are suppressed? If a child writes with the left hand, immediately the whole society is against him – the parents, the peers, the teachers. The whole society forces him to write with the right hand. Right is right and left is wrong. What is the matter? Why is it that right is right and left is wrong? What is wrong with left? And ten percent of the people in the world are left-handed. Ten percent is not a small minority. Out of ten there is always one person who is left-handed. He may not have conscious awareness of it, he may have forgotten about it, because from the very beginning left-handed people are being forced to become right-handed. Why?

Right hand is connected with the sun center, with the male inside you. Left hand is connected with the female inside you, with the moon center. And the whole society is male oriented.

Your left nostril is connected with the moon center; your right nostril is connected with the sun center. You can try it. Whenever you are feeling very hot, close your right nostril and breathe from the left, and within ten minutes you will feel a subtle coolness coming to you. You can experiment; it is so easy. Or, if you are shivering and feeling chilly, close your left nostril and breathe from the right; within ten minutes you will be perspiring.

Yoga has come to understand it, and yogis say – and yogis do it: in the morning they will never get up breathing from the right nostril, because if you get up breathing from the right nostril, there is more possibility that in the day you will get angry, you will fight, you will become aggressive – you will not be cool and collected. So in yoga, it is part of the discipline that everybody getting up first looks at which nostril is functioning. If the left is functioning perfectly okay, that is the right moment to get out of bed. If it is not functioning, then turn over, close your right nostril and breathe from the left. By and by the left takes over; then get up. Always get up with the left nostril functioning and you will see a total difference in your whole day’s activity. You will be less angry, less irritated, more cool, more collected, calm. Your meditation will go deeper. If you want to fight, then the right nostril is very good. If you want to love, then the left nostril is very good.

And this breathing continuously changes. You may not have observed but observe it. Modern medicine has to come to understand it because it can be used in treatment very, very significantly. There are diseases which can be helped by the moon, and there are diseases which can be helped by the sun. If you know exactly, then the breathing can be used to treat a person. But modern medicine has not yet stumbled upon the fact. Continuously your breathing changes. Forty minutes one nostril functions, then forty minutes another nostril functions. Continuously within you the sun and moon change – you swing from sun to moon, from moon to sun.

That’s why you change your moods so often. Sometimes you suddenly feel irritated – for no reason at all. Nothing has happened, everything is the same, you are just sitting in the same room – nothing has happened – suddenly you feel irritated. Watch. Bring your hand close to your nose and feel: your breathing must have changed from left to right. Just a moment before you were feeling so good; just a moment after you are feeling so bad, just ready to fight or do something.

Remember, the whole body is divided. Your brain is also divided into two brains. You don’t have one brain; you have two brains – two hemispheres. The left-side brain is the sun brain; the right-side brain is the moon brain. You may be puzzled, because everything left is moon, why the right-side brain is moon? The right-side brain is connected with your left side body. Your left hand is connected with the right-side brain, your right hand is connected with the left side brain, that’s why. Crosswise.

The right-side brain is the seat of imagination, poetry, love, intuition. The left side brain is the seat of reason, logic, argumentation, philosophy, science.

And unless you attain to a balance between the sun and moon energy, you will not be able to transcend. Unless your left-side brain meets with the right-side brain and is bridged, you will not reach to sahasrar. You have to become one to reach sahasrar because sahasrar is the omega point in your being. You cannot reach there as man, you cannot reach there as woman. You have to reach there just as pure consciousness – one, total, whole.

Man’s sexuality is sun oriented, woman’s sexuality moon oriented. […]

Man is sun oriented, light oriented. Eyes are part of the sun; that’s why eyes can see. They correspond with the sun energy. So man is more eyes oriented. That’s why man is a voyeur and woman is an exhibitionist. Men cannot understand why women go on decorating themselves so much. […]

Women are exhibitionists – they would like to be seen. But that’s perfectly okay because that’s how men and women fit: man wants to see; woman wants to show. They fit, perfectly. It is absolutely okay. If women don’t want to exhibit, then they will create trouble, and if man is not a voyeur, for whom will women prepare so much – for whom? Nobody will look at them.

Everything fits in nature in a perfect way. It synchronizes.

But to reach to sahasrar you have to drop this duality of functioning. You cannot reach God as man or woman. You have to reach God as a simple, pure being.

By performing samyama on the light under the crown of the head comes the ability to contact all perfected beings. The energy has to move upward, and samyama is the methodology to do it. First, if you are a man, you have to be fully conscious of your sun, your solar energy center, your sex center. You have to be there at the muladhar, showering your consciousness on the muladhar. When the muladhar is showered by consciousness, you will watch and you will see that an energy is arising and moving into the hara center, into the moon.

And you will feel so blissful when the energy moves in the moon center. All your sexual orgasms are nothing compared to it – absolutely nothing. There is ten-thousand-times more intensity when your sun energy moves into your own moon energy. Then the real man meets the real woman. When you meet a woman outside, howsoever close you come, you remain separate. It is a very superficial meeting – just two surfaces meet, that’s all. Just two surfaces rub each other, that’s all. But when your sun energy moves into the moon energy, then two centers of energy meet. And the man whose sun and moon are meeting remains cheerful, blissful – continuously – because there is no need to lose this orgasm. This is permanent orgasm.

If you are a woman, bring your consciousness to the hara center and you will see your energy moving toward the sun center.

One center is nonfunctioning, one is functioning. The functioning has to be joined to the nonfunctioning: immediately, the nonfunctioning starts to function. And when the energy is meeting – sun and moon are becoming one – you will see that now the energy goes on rising upward. You start falling upward. […]

This sutra says: “Murdha jyotishi siddha darshanam.” The moment your consciousness meets with sahasrar, you suddenly become available to the world beyond – to the world of the siddhas.

In yoga symbology the muladhar, the sex center, is thought to be like a red lotus of four petals. The four petals represent four directions; redness represents the heat because it is sun center. And sahasrar is represented as a thousand-petaled lotus of all colors. A thousand-petaled – sahasrar padma – a thousand-petaled lotus of all colors because it includes the whole. The sex center is only red. Sahasrar is a rainbow – all colors included; the totality included.

Ordinarily, the sahasrar, the one-thousand-petaled lotus, hangs downward in your head. Once the energy moves through it, the energy makes it upward. It is as if a lotus is hanging without energy, downward – just the very weight of it makes it hang downward – then energy rushes into it, makes it alive. It moves upward, opens to the beyond.

When this lotus moves upward and blooms, it is said in yoga scriptures, “It is as resplendent as ten million suns and ten million moons.” One moon and one sun meet in your being. That becomes the possibility of the meeting of ten million suns and ten million moons. You have found the key of the ultimate orgasm, where ten million moons meet ten million suns – ten million females meet ten million males. You can think of the ecstasy.

Shiva must have been in that ecstasy when he was found making love to his consort Devi. He must have been at the sahasrar. His lovemaking cannot be sexual – it cannot be from the muladhar. It must have been from the omega point of his being. That’s why he was completely oblivious of who was watching, who was standing. He was not in time; he was not in space. He was beyond time, beyond space. This is the goal of yoga, of tantra, of all spiritual effort.

Meeting of the male and female energy creates the possibility of the ultimate meeting of Shiva and Shakti, life and death. In this way Hindu gods are tremendously beautiful, and tremendously humane. Hmm? . . . think of a Christian God – with no consort, with no woman. Looks a little rigid, looks a little alone, looks a little empty, looks a little too male oriented, too sun-oriented, hard. No surprise if the Jewish and Christian concept of God is of a very terrible God.

Jews say, “Be afraid of God. Remember, he is not your uncle.” But Hindus say, “Don’t be worried – he is your mother.” Jews have created a very ferocious God, who is always ready to throw fire and thunder and destroy and kill. And just a small sin, maybe just an innocent sin, and he becomes terribly upset. Seems to be almost neurotic.

And the whole Christian conception of the trinity – God, the Holy Ghost, and the Son – the whole trinity seems to be like a boys’ club. Homosexual. No woman at all. And Christians are so afraid of the moon energy, the woman, so afraid, that they have no conception. Somehow, later on, they improved upon it a little by adding Virgin Mary. Somehow, because it is totally against their ideology. And then too they insist that she is a virgin.

The meeting of sun and moon is not allowed at all. Even if they allow Mary to be respected . . . Of course, it is a secondary status because in the original trinity there is no place for her. Somehow feeling the incompleteness of it all, they have managed to bring in Virgin Mary from the back door. But then too they insist she is virgin. Why this insistence? What is wrong in a meeting of male and female energy?

And if you are so afraid of the meeting of male and female energy in the outer world, how will you be ready for the same meeting in the inner world?

Hindu gods are more human, more humane – more down-to-earth – and of course, more compassion, more love flows through them.

Pratibhad va sarvam.

Through pratibha, intuition, knowledge of everything.

The word pratibha is a difficult word; it cannot be translated into English. “Intuition” is a very, very poor substitute for it, and I will have to explain it to you. It cannot be translated; I can only describe it. The sun is intellect; the moon is intuition. When you transcend both then comes pratibha – and there is no word for it. The sun is intellect, analysis, logic. The moon is intuition, the hunch, just a flash – suddenly you jump on the conclusion. Intellect moves through method, process, syllogism. Intuition suddenly comes to the conclusion – with no process, no methodology, no syllogism. You cannot ask intuition why. There is no “therefore” in intuition. A sudden revelation – as if lightning has happened and you have come to see something, and then the lightning disappears and you don’t know how it happened and why it happened, but it has happened and you have seen something. All primitive societies are intuitive; all women are intuitive; all children are intuitive; all poets are intuitive.

Pratibha is totally different. It has been translated as “intuition” in all the English translations of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, hut I would not like to translate it that way. Pratibha means when the energy has moved beyond the duality of intellect and intuition. It is beyond both. Intuition is beyond intellect; pratibha is beyond both. Now there is no logic in it, no sudden lightning in it – everything is eternally revealed. In pratibha one becomes omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Everything is revealed simultaneously – the past, the present, the future – all. That is the meaning – Pratibhad va sarvam – “Through pratibha, all.”

When your energy moves through sahasrar and ten million moons and ten million suns meet within you and you become an oceanic experience of orgasm – which goes on and on and on, eternally, then there is no end to it – there is pratibha. Then you see – you see all, through and through, you know all, through and through. Then space and time both disappear, with all their limitations.

So, one psychology is sun oriented, another is moon oriented, but the real psychology – the real psychology of being will be pratibha oriented. It will not be divided into man and woman. It will be the highest and the greatest synthesis, and transcendence.

Intellect is like a blind man: it gropes in the dark. That’s why so much argumentation is needed. Intuition is not blind but is like a crippled man: it cannot move. Pratibha is like a healthy man, all limbs healthy.

There is an Indian story that once a forest caught fire. There was one blind man and one crippled man in the forest. The blind man could not see, he could run; but it was dangerous to run without knowing where you are running – where the fire is all over, all around. The crippled man could not walk, but he could see. They came to a tacit understanding: the blind man allowed the crippled man to ride on his back and to see for him, and the crippled man agreed to see for him if he was to run for him. In their synthesis they could get out of the forest and the fire.

Intellect is half, intuition is also half. Intuition cannot run – it is just in flashes. It cannot be a continued source of revelation. And intellect goes on groping in the dark, continuously groping in the dark.

Pratibha is a synthesis and a transcendence.

If you are too intellectual, you will miss a few things in life which are very beautiful. You will not be able to enjoy poetry, you will not be able to delight in singing, you will not be able to celebrate in dancing. They will look a little foolish, a little below you. You will be uptight, you will hold yourself back, you will remain a little repressed. Your moon will suffer.

If you are just intuitive, you may be able to enjoy much, but you will not be able to help others much because the communication will be lacking. You may be able to live a beautiful life yourself, but you will not be able to create a beautiful world around you because that is possible only through intellect.

When science and poetry meet, then a perfect world is possible. Otherwise, intellect goes on condemning intuition; intuition goes on condemning intellect. […]

The intuition thinks the intellect is odd; the intellect thinks the intuition is odd. Separately they are odd. Together they create a great orchestra, a great harmony. […]

The intellect always goes on thinking in its own idiom. The intuition remains incomprehensible to it. And the intuition cannot believe in intellect; it seems too superficial, with no depth.

You have to come to a synthesis within you. That’s what Patanjali means when he says, “Pratibhad va sarvam.” You have to come to such a deep synthesis that pratibha arises in you – which is one where logic and prayer meet, where work and worship meet, where science is not antagonistic to poetry and poetry is not antagonistic to science.

That’s why I say man is yet in the making, he is evolving. Man is yet a form without content. The content has to be achieved; that great alchemy has to be achieved. You have to make yourself a great experimental lab of evolution and you have to bring your energy from the muladhar, from the sex center, upward to the sahasrar.

Hridaye chitta samvit.

Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.

That too is not an adequate translation, but it is difficult. Translators are in a difficulty.

Hridaye chitta samvit.

First, when Patanjali uses the word hridaye, he does not mean the physical heart. In yoga terminology, just behind the physical heart is the real heart, hidden. It is not part of the physical body. The physical heart simply corresponds with the real heart, the spiritual heart. There is a synchronicity between them, but no causal relationship. And that heart can be known only when you have reached to the peak. When your energy has come to the omega point of sahasrar, only then can you realize the real heart, the very abode of God.

Hridaye chitta samvit – “Performing samyama on the heart brings awareness of the nature of mind.” That too is not true. Chitta samvit means the very nature of consciousness, not of mind. Mind is gone, left behind, because mind is either sun mind or moon mind. Once you have transcended sun and moon, mind is gone, left behind. In fact, chitta samvit is a state of no mind. If you ask Zen people, they will say no-mind. The mind is gone because it exists with the division; when the division is gone, mind is gone. They are together, two aspects of one phenomenon. The mind divides and the mind exists through division – they depend on each other, they interdepend. When division is gone, mind is gone; when mind is gone, division is gone.

There are two ways to reach this state of no-mind. One is the tantra way: you drop the mind, division disappears. The other is the yoga way: you drop the division, the mind disappears. You can do either. The ultimate result is the same – you become one, a unison arises.

Hridaye chitta samvit.

Then you come to know what is the real nature of consciousness. Again, this word “consciousness” in English denotes as if it is an antonym to “unconsciousness.” Chitta samvit is not an antonym to unconsciousness. Consciousness includes all: unconsciousness is also a sleeping state of consciousness, so there is no antagonism. Consciousness, unconsciousness, all – the very nature of consciousness – is revealed when one brings one’s awareness, samyama, to the heart.

In yoga, the heart center is called anahat chakra, anahat center. You must have heard the famous Zen koan . . . When a disciple reaches to the Master, the Master gives something absolutely absurd to meditate upon. One of the famous absurdities is, the Master says to the disciple, “Go, and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.” Now this is absurd. The one hand cannot clap, and there cannot be a sound of one hand clapping. For the sound two hands are needed to clap and create it. Ahat means by conflict; anahat means without any conflict. Anahat means: the sound of one hand clapping.

When all sounds disappear in you, you hear the sound which is constantly there, which is intrinsic to nature, which is the very nature of existence – the sound of silence, or the sound of soundlessness. The heart is called anahat chakra, the place where constantly a sound is being created – without any conflict – an eternal sound. Hindus have called that sound aumkar – aum. It has to be heard. So people who go on repeating, “Aum, aum, aum . . .” are doing a foolish thing. By your repetition you cannot come to the real aumkar, to the real sound, because if you’re making it, you are creating it by clapping.

Become completely silent, drop all thinking, become unmoving, and suddenly it is there – it has always been there, but you were not available to listen to it. It is a very, very subtle sound. When you have dropped the whole world from your mind and you are alert only for it, then by and by, you become receptive to it – by and by, you start hearing it.

Once you can hear the sound of one hand clapping, you have heard God, you have heard all.

Patanjali is taking you step by step toward the omega point. These three sutras are very significant. Ponder over them again and again, meditate on them. And try to feel them within your being. They can become keys which can open the doors of the divine.

-Osho

From Secrets of Yoga; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.8, Discourse #5 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.8)

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the fifteenth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Variations on a Theme

I offer the following story not to diminish, in any way, other’s experiences that may vary quite significantly from my own but simply to add mine to the mix.

Ma Prem Sagara, now known as Sumati, and I arrived at the ashram in Poona sometime in September 1977. I had first been to Poona in March of 1976 and was now returning with the idea of staying for as long as possible. Osho gave us both a series of groups to do. Mine were; Centering, Enlightenment Intensive, Tantra, Zazen and Awareness. On my previous stay, I had been given Tathata and Tao. During the Zazen group, one day Chaitanya Hari came and played his shakuhachi, and on another, Japanese Asanga came and led a tea ceremony. In the middle of one of those sessions, I don’t remember which, I had the realization that I would be going to Japan. It was just clear as a bell.

At this time in the ashram there was a lot of talk about a new commune that would be happening in Gujarat. Finally, this talk all came to a head when tickets were being sold for the train to Gujarat inside the ashram. Sumati (Sagara) and I were first in line. But it was not very long after this that the whole project came to a screeching halt. Apparently, there were objections raised by the military that the ashram would be too close to the Pakistan border, and so everything was put on hold while Laxmi tried to overcome their objections.

We got a refund for the tickets and decided to go to Japan to earn some money. The money that Sumati and I had arrived in Poona with was running out. I knew that Japan was a good place to teach English, and I had two-years’ experience teaching in Madagascar. Also, I had a friend, in fact the person that I travelled to Madagascar with, Peter, living in Tokyo, and so off we went.

We spent nine months in Japan. I taught English and Sumati proofread for the same company that Peter worked for. In Japan, we were very fortunate. Peter heard about a house that was owned by a journalist for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, who for some reason preferred to rent his house to foreigners, and so we got a good deal. We worked hard and hardly spent any money other than living necessities and so managed to save. In fact, when the time came for us to leave and return to India, in those short nine months, we had saved more money than I had ever had in my life before.

We arrived in Poona with the intention of turning over all the money we had earned to the ashram. Back when the plans were being drawn up for the new commune, the idea to offer living quarters for a $10,000 donation was being floated. We had saved $12,000. We were ready to give our money and start working and living in the ashram. We met with Sheela, who at that time, was Laxmi’s assistant. We offered our bounty and said we wanted to work. Both Sumati and I were assigned to work with Deeksha in Vrindavan. Sheela then explained that we could donate the money but was very clear that it was a donation and did not give any guarantee for housing provided by the ashram. At that time, housing was at a premium with the many arrivals from the west. She suggested that we keep $2,000 for our living expenses.

We lived in a shared apartment across the river in Yerwada for some time before moving into what was called the Cornfield House. And on June 21^st, 1979, after Osho’s first discourse on Buddha’s Dhammapada, Vidya stopped us as we were leaving Buddha Hall and told us to come see her. We were being moved into the ashram. From that day, and even really before that, from the time when we arrived back in Poona from Japan and our entire time living there, to the castle in New Jersey, through the years spent at Rajneeshpuram all the way through to the fall of 1986 in Boulder, CO, I was provided for by the commune, either directly or indirectly.

I am well aware that there are others who have vastly different stories concerning their money, Osho and the communes, many of whom had donated much larger sums, but for us it was everything we had. So, this was my experience, and I am eternally grateful for every minute of it. I suppose, because I never felt that the money was mine to begin with is why I never had any doubts or regrets about offering it to the commune.

I remember hearing Jean Klein say that the right relationship with money is to learn how to be good stewards; it doesn’t belong to us, and we have a responsibility to be neither hoarders nor wasteful. This is something I remain mindful of even today.

-purushottama

What does it Mean to Transcend Sex? – Osho

And the second part of the question is: What does it exactly mean to transcend sex?

Sex is a subtle subject, delicate, because centuries of exploitation, corruption, centuries of perverted ideas, conditioning, are associated with the word “sex.” The word is very loaded. It is one of the most loaded words in existence. You say “God”; it seems empty. You say “sex”; it seems too loaded. A thousand and one things arise in the mind: fear, perversion, attraction, a tremendous desire, and a tremendous anti-desire also. They all arise together. Sex — the very word creates confusion, a chaos. It is as if somebody has thrown a rock in a silent pool; millions of ripples arise — just the word “sex”! Humanity has lived under very wrong ideas.

So the first thing: why do you ask how to transcend sex? Why do you want, in the first place, to transcend sex? You are using a beautiful word, “transcend,” but out of a hundred, ninety-nine are the possibilities that you mean, “How to repress sex?”

A person who has understood that sex has to be transcended is not even worried about transcending it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it. It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences, and those experiences make you more and more mature.

Have you watched that at a certain age, sex becomes important? Not that you make it important. It is not something that you make happen; it happens. At the age of fourteen, somewhere near there, suddenly the energy is flooded with sex. It happens as if the flood-gates have been opened in you. Subtle sources of energy which were not yet open have become open, and your whole energy becomes sexual, colored with sex. You think sex, you sing sex, you walk sex — everything becomes sexual. Every act is colored. This happens; you have not done anything about it. It is natural; transcendence is also natural. If sex is lived totally, with no condemnation, with no idea of getting rid of it, then at the age of forty-two — just as at the age of fourteen sex gets opened and the whole energy becomes sexual, at the age of forty-two or near about — those flood-gates close again. And that too is as natural as sex becoming alive; it starts disappearing.

Sex is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort that will be repressive, because it has nothing to do with you. It is in-built in your body, in your biology. You are born as sexual beings; nothing is wrong in it. That is the only way to be born. To be human is to be sexual. When you were conceived, your mother and your father were not praying, they were not listening to a priest’s sermon. They were not in the church; they were making love. Even to think that your mother and father were making love when you were conceived seems to be difficult. They were making love; their sexual energies were meeting and merging into each other. Then you were conceived; in a deep sexual act you were conceived. The first cell was a sex cell, and then out of that cell other cells have arisen. But each cell remains sexual. Basically, your whole body is sexual, made of sex cells. Now they are millions.

Remember it: you exist as a sexual being. Once you accept it, the conflict that has been created down through the centuries dissolves. Once you accept it deeply, with no ideas in between, when sex is thought of as simply natural, you live it. You don’t ask me how to transcend eating, you don’t ask me how to transcend breathing — because no religion has taught you to transcend breathing, that’s why. Otherwise, you would be asking, “How to transcend breathing?” You breathe! You are a breathing animal; you are a sexual animal also. But there is a difference. Fourteen years of your life, in the beginning, are almost non-sexual, or at the most, just rudimentary sexual play which is not really sexual — just preparing, rehearsing, that’s all. At the age of fourteen, suddenly the energy is ripe.

Watch . . . a child is born — immediately, within three seconds the child has to breathe, otherwise he will die. Then breathing is to remain the whole of his life, because it has come at the first step of life. It cannot be transcended. Maybe before you die, then, just three seconds before, it will stop, but not before it. Always remember: both ends of life, the beginning and end, are exactly similar, symmetrical. The child is born, he starts breathing in three seconds. When the child is old and dying, the moment he stops breathing, within three seconds he will be dead.

Sex enters at a very late stage: for fourteen years the child has lived without sex. And if the society is not too repressed and hence obsessed with sex, a child can live completely oblivious to the fact that sex, or that anything like sex, exists. The child can remain absolutely innocent. That innocence is also not possible, because people are so repressed. When repression happens, then side by side, obsession also happens.

So priests go on repressing; and there are anti-priests, Hefners and others — they go on creating more and more pornography. So on one side there are priests who go on repressing, and then there are others, anti-priests, who go on making sexuality more and more glamorous. They both exist together — aspects of the same coin. When churches disappear, only then Playboy magazines will disappear, not before it. They are partners in the business. They look [like] enemies, but don’t be deceived by that. They talk against each other, but that’s how things work.

I have heard about two men who were out of business, had gone broke, so they decided on a business, a very simple business. They started journeying, touring from one town to another town. First one would enter, and in the night, he would throw coal tar on people’s windows and doors. After two or three days the other would come to clean. He would advise that he could clean any coal tar, or anything that had gone wrong, and he would clean the windows. In that time the other would be doing half of the business in another town. This way, they started earning much money. This is what is happening between the church and Hugh Hefners and people who are continuously creating pornography.

I have heard . . .

Pretty Miss Keneen sat in the confessional. “Father,” she said, “I want to confess that I let my boyfriend kiss me.”

“Is that all you did?” asked the priest, very interested.

“Well, no. I let him put his hand on my leg too.”

“And then what?”

“And then I let him pull down my panties.”

“And then, and then . . .?”

“And then me mother walked into the room.”

“Oh shit,” sighed the priest.

It is together; they are partners in a conspiracy. Whenever you are too repressed, you start finding a perverse interest. A perverted interest is the problem, not sex. Now this priest is neurotic. Sex is not the problem, but this man is in trouble.

Sisters Margaret Alice and Francis Catherine were out walking along a side-street. Suddenly they were grabbed by two men, dragged into a dark alley, and raped. “Father, forgive them,” said Sister Margaret Alice, “for they know not what they do.” “Shut up!” cried Sister Catherine, “this one does.”

This is bound to be so. So never carry a single idea against sex in your mind, otherwise you will never be able to transcend it. People who transcend sex are people who accept it very naturally. It is difficult, I know, because you are born in a society which is neurotic about sex. Either this way or that, but it is neurotic all the same. It is very difficult to get out of this neurosis, but if you are a little alert, you can get out of it. So the real thing is not how to transcend sex, but how to transcend this perverted ideology of the society: this fear of sex, this repression of sex, this obsession with sex.

Sex is beautiful. Sex in itself is a natural rhythmic phenomenon. It happens when the child is ready to be conceived, and it is good that it happens — otherwise life would not exist. Life exists through sex; sex is its medium. If you understand life, if you love life, you will know sex is sacred, holy. Then you live it, then you delight in it; and as naturally as it has come it goes, on its own accord. By the age of forty-two, or somewhere near there, sex starts disappearing as naturally as it had come into being. But it doesn’t happen that way.

You will be surprised when I say near about forty-two. You know people who are seventy, eighty, and yet they have not gone beyond. You know “dirty old people.” They are victims of the society. Because they could not be natural, it is a hangover — because they repressed when they should have enjoyed and delighted. In those moments of delight, they were not totally in it. They were not orgasmic, they were half-hearted.

So whenever you are half-hearted in anything, it lingers longer. If you are sitting at your table and eating, and if you eat only half-heartedly and your hunger remains, then you will continue to think about food the whole day. You can try fasting and you will see: you will continuously think about food. But if you have eaten well — and when I say eaten well, I don’t mean only that you have stuffed your stomach. Then it is not necessarily so that you have eaten well. You could have stuffed yourself, but eating well is an art. It is not just stuffing. It is great art: to taste the food, to smell the food, to touch the food, to chew the food, to digest the food, and to digest it as divine. It is divine; it is God’s gift.

Hindus say, anam brahma: food is divine. So with deep respect you eat, and while eating you forget everything, because it is prayer. It is existential prayer. You are eating God, and God is going to give you nourishment. It is a gift to be accepted with deep love and gratitude. And you don’t stuff the body, because stuffing the body is being anti-body. It is the other pole. There are people who are obsessed with fasting, and there are people who are obsessed with stuffing themselves. Both are wrong because in both the ways the body loses balance.

A real lover of the body eats only to the point where the body feels perfectly quiet, balanced, tranquil; where the body feels to be neither leaning to the left nor to the right, but just in the middle. It is an art to understand the language of the body, to understand the language of your stomach, to understand what is needed, to give only that which is needed, and to give that in an artistic way, in an aesthetic way.

Animals eat, man eats. Then what is the difference? Man makes a great aesthetic experience out of eating. What is the point of having a beautiful dining table? What is the point of having candles burning there? What is the point of incense? What is the point of asking friends to come and participate? It is to make it an art, not just stuffing. But these are outward signs of the art; the inward signs are to understand the language of your body: to listen to it, to be sensitive to its needs. And then you eat, and then the whole day you will not remember food at all. Only when the body is hungry again will the remembrance come. Then it is natural.

With sex the same happens. If you have no anti-attitude about it, you take it as a natural, divine gift, with great gratitude. You enjoy it; with prayer you enjoy it.

Tantra says that before you make love to a woman or to a man, first pray — because it is going to be a divine meeting of energies. God will surround you. Wherever two lovers are, there is God. Wherever two lovers’ energies are meeting and mingling, there is life, alive, at its best; God surrounds you. Churches are empty; love-chambers are full of God. If you have tasted love the way Tantra says to taste it, if you have known love the way Tao says to know it, then by the time you reach forty-two, love starts disappearing on its own accord. And you say goodbye to it with deep gratitude, because you are fulfilled. It has been delightful; it has been a blessing; you say good-bye to it.

And forty-two is the age for meditation, the right age. Sex disappears; that overflowing energy is no more there. One becomes more tranquil. Passion has gone, compassion arises. Now there is no more fever; one is not interested in the other. With sex disappearing, the other is no more the focus. One starts returning toward one’s own source — the return journey starts.

Sex is transcended not by your effort. It happens if you have lived it totally. So my suggestion is, drop all anti-attitudes, anti-life attitudes and accept the facticity: sex is, so who are you to drop it? And who is trying to drop it? — it is just the ego. Remember, sex creates the greatest problem for the ego.

So there are two types of people: very egoistic people are always against sex; humble people are never against sex. But who listens to humble people? In fact, humble people don’t go preaching, only egoists. Why is there a conflict between sex and ego? — because sex is something in your life where you cannot be egoistic, where the other becomes more important than you. Your woman, your man, becomes more important than you. In every other case, you remain the most important. In a love relationship the other becomes very, very important, tremendously important. You become a satellite and the other becomes the nucleus; and the same is happening for the other: you become the nucleus and he becomes a satellite. It is a reciprocal surrender. Both are surrendering to the God of love, and both become humble.

Sex is the only energy that gives you hints that there is something which you cannot control. Money you can control, politics you can control, the market you can control, knowledge you can control, science you can control, morality you can control. Somewhere, sex brings in a totally different world: you cannot control it. And the ego is the great controller. It is happy if it can control; it is unhappy if it cannot control. So there starts a conflict between ego and sex. Remember, it is a losing battle. The ego cannot win it because ego is just superficial. Sex is very deep-rooted. Sex is your life; ego is just your mind, your head. Sex has roots all over you; ego has roots only in your ideas — very superficial, just in the head.

So who is trying to transcend sex? — the head is trying to transcend sex. If you are too much in the head then you want to transcend sex, because sex brings you down to the guts. It does not allow you to remain hanging in the head. Everything else you can manage from there; sex you cannot manage from there. You cannot make love with your head. You have to come down, you have to descend from your heights, you have to come closer to earth. Sex is humiliating to the ego, so egoist people are against, always against sex. They go on finding ways and means to transcend it. They can never transcend it. They can, at the most, become perverted. Their whole effort from the very beginning is doomed to failure.

I have heard . . .

A boss was interviewing applicants to replace his private secretary who was resigning because of expectant motherhood. The boss’s right-hand man sat with him as he looked the applicants over. The first girl was a beautiful, buxom blond. She turned out to be intelligent and had excellent secretarial skills. The second was a dark-haired beauty who was even more intelligent and proficient than the first. The third one was cross-eyed, had buck teeth, and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. After interviewing all three candidates, the boss informed his associate that he was hiring the third applicant.

“But why?” asked the astonished employee.

“Well,” boomed the boss, “in the first place, she looks very intelligent to me! In the second place, it is none of your damned business, and in the third place, she is my wife’s sister.”

So you may pretend that you have won over sex, but an undercurrent . . . You may rationalize, you may find reasons, you may pretend, you may create a very hard shell around you, but deep down the real reason, the reality, will stand untouched: “She is my wife’s sister” — that is the real reason. “She looks intelligent”; that is just a rationalization. “And it is none of your damned business”; that too is getting annoyed and irritated — because the person is afraid that the other is poking his nose and may find the real cause. But the real cause will explode; you cannot hide it; it is not possible.

So, you can try to control sex, but an undercurrent of sexuality will run, and it will show itself in many ways. Out of all your rationalizations, it will again and again raise its head.

I will not suggest that you make any effort to transcend it. What I suggest is just the contrary: forget about transcending it. Move into it as deeply as you can. While the energy is there, move as deeply as you can, love as deeply as you can, and make an art of it. It is not just to be done. That is the whole meaning of Tantra: making an art of lovemaking. There are subtle nuances which only people who enter with a great aesthetic sense will be able to know. Otherwise, you can make love for your whole life and still remain unsatisfied — because you don’t know that satisfaction is something very aesthetic. It is like a subtle music arising in your soul. If through sex you fall into harmony, if through love you become non-tense and relaxed, if love is not just throwing energy because you don’t know what to do with it, if it is not just a relief but a relaxation, if you relax into your woman and your woman relaxes into you, if for a few seconds, for a few moments or a few hours you forget who you are and you are completely lost in oblivion, you will come out of it purer, more innocent, more virgin. And you will have a different type of being — at ease, centered, rooted.

If this happens, one day suddenly you will see that the flood has gone and it has left you very, very rich. You will not be sorry that it has gone. You will be thankful, because now richer worlds open. When sex leaves you, the doors of meditation open. When sex leaves you, then you are not trying to lose yourself in the other. You become capable of losing yourself in yourself.

Now another world of orgasm, inner orgasm, of being with oneself, arises. But that arises only through being with the other; one grows, matures through the other. Then a moment comes when you can be alone, tremendously happy. There is no need for any other. The need has disappeared, but you have learned much through it — you have learned much about yourself. The other became the mirror, and you have not broken the mirror. You have learned so much about yourself. Now there is no need to look into the mirror. You can close your eyes and you can see your face there. But that face you would not be able to see if there had been no mirror from the very beginning.

Let your woman be your mirror; let your man be your mirror. Look into her eyes and see your face; move into her to know yourself. Then one day the mirror will not be needed. But you will not be against the mirror; you will be so grateful to it — how can you be against it? You will be so thankful — how can you be against it? Then, transcendence.

Transcendence is not repression. Transcendence is a natural outgrowing — you grow above, you go beyond — just as a seed breaks and a sprout starts rising above the ground. When sex disappears, the seed disappears. In sex, you were able to give birth to somebody else, a child. When sex disappears, the whole energy starts giving birth to yourself. This is what Hindus have called dwija, the twice born. One birth has been given to you by your parents, the other birth is waiting. It has to be given to you by yourself. You have to father and mother yourself. Then your whole energy is turning in — it becomes an inner circle.

Right now, it will be difficult for you to make an inner circle. It will be easier to connect it with another pole — a woman or a man — and then the circle becomes complete. Then you can enjoy the blessings of the circle. But by and by you will be able to make the inner circle, because inside you also you are man and woman, woman and man. Nobody is just man, and nobody is just woman — because you come from man and woman’s communion. Both have participated; your mother has given something to you, you father has given something to you. Fifty-fifty, they have contributed to you. Both are there. There is a possibility that both can meet inside you. Again, your father and mother can love inside you. Then your reality will be born. Once they met when your body was born; now if they can meet inside you, your soul will be born. That’s what transcendence of sex is: it is a higher sex.

Let me tell you this: when you transcend sex, you reach to a higher sex. Ordinary sex is gross, higher sex is not gross at all. Ordinary sex is outward-moving, higher sex is inward-moving. In ordinary sex, two bodies meet, and the meeting happens on the outside. In higher sex, your own inner energies meet. It is not physical, it is spiritual — it is Tantra. Tantra is transcendence. If you don’t understand this and you go on fighting with sex . . .

The question has been asked by Prageeta. I know she is passing through some critical moments in her mind. She would like to be independent, but it is too early. She would like not to be bothered by anybody else, but it is too early, and it is too egoistic. Right now, transcendence is not possible, repression is possible. And if you repress now, in your old age you will repent — because then things become very messed up. Each thing has its own right time. Each thing has to be done in its moment. While young, don’t be afraid of love. If you are afraid of love while young, in old age you will become obsessed; and then it will be difficult to move deeply in love, and the mind will be obsessed.

This is my understanding: that people, if they have lived rightly, lovingly, naturally, then by the forty-second year they start transcending sex. If they have not lived naturally and they have been fighting with sex, then forty-two becomes their most dangerous time — because by the time they are forty-two their energies are declining. When you are young you can repress something because you are very energetic. Look at the irony of the fact: a young man can repress sexuality very easily because he has energy to repress it. He can just put it down and sit upon it. When the energies are going, declining, then sex will assert itself, and you will not be able to control it.

I have heard an anecdote: Stein, aged sixty-five, visited the office of his son, Dr. Stein, and asked for something that would increase his sexual potential. The M.D. gave his father a shot, and then refused to accept a fee. Nevertheless, Stein insisted on giving him ten dollars. A week later Stein was back for another injection, and this time handed his son twenty dollars.

“But Pop, shots are only ten dollars.”

“Take it!” said Stein, “the extra ten is from Momma.”

That will continue . . . so before you become a poppa or a momma, please be finished with it. Don’t wait for old age, because then things go ugly. Then everything goes out of season.

-Osho

From The Beloved, V.1, Discourse #4, Q1

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Piling Up the Zeros of Being – Osho

Samadhi parinam, the inner transformation, is the gradual settling of distractions and the simultaneous rising of one-pointedness.

Ekagrata parinam, one-pointed transformation, is the condition of the mind in which the object of the mind that is subsiding is replaced in the next moment by an exactly similar object.

By what has been said in the last four sutras, the property, character and condition transformations in the elements and sense organs are also explained.

Whether they be latent, active, or unmanifest, all properties inhere in the substratum.

The story is told of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, that he was walking in a forest one day when he came upon a clearing and saw a lizard sitting upon a rock sunning itself. Tolstoy began speaking to the lizard, “Your heart is beating.” he said, “The sun is shining, you are happy.” And after a pause, he added, “But I am not.”

Why are lizards happy and man is not? Why is the whole creation in a celebration and man is not? Why except man is everything beautifully tuned unto itself and tuned with the whole? Why is man an exception? What has happened to man? What misfortune has fallen to him? This has to be understood as deeply as possible because from that very understanding starts the path, from that very understanding you become a seeker, from that very understanding you are no longer part of the human disease. You start transcending it.

A lizard exists in the present. A lizard has no idea of the past, no idea of the future. A lizard is just here-now sunning himself. This moment is enough unto [itself for] a lizard, but this moment is not enough unto [itself for] a man, and there arises the disease because whenever you will get, you will get only one moment. You will never get two moments together. And wherever you are, you will always be here; and whenever you become aware, you will become aware in the now. The past is no more, the future not yet — and we go on missing that which is for that future which is not yet, for that past which is no more.

To be a lizard on a rock sunning is to be a meditator. Drop the past, drop the future. What does it mean? It means drop thinking because all thoughts either belong to the past or to the future. There is no thought here-now. Thinking has no present tense about it — either it is dead or unborn. It is always unreal — either part of memory or part of imagination. It is never real. The real is never a thought: The real is an experience. The real is an existential experience.

You can dance in the real, you can sun yourself in the real, you can sing in the real, you can love in the real, but you cannot think it — because thinking is always about it, and in that “about” is hidden the whole misery. In that “about” you go on moving — about and about — and you never come to the point that was always and always available.

The whole point of all meditation is to be a lizard sunning yourself on a rock, to be here-now, to be part of the whole, not trying to jump ahead in the future, not trying to carry that which is no more. Unburdened of the past, unconcerned with the future, how can you be miserable? How can Leo Tolstoy be miserable unburdened by the past, unconcerned with the future? Where can misery exist? Where can it hide itself? Suddenly, you explode into a totally different dimension; you go beyond time and you become part of eternity.

But we go on and on like a stuck gramophone record, repeating ourselves endlessly.

I have heard:

Two girls were talking in the park and one of them looked so glum, so sad, that the other was feeling very sympathetic. She put her arms around the mink coat of the other gorgeous doll and said, “Angeline, what is troubling you?”

Angeline shrugged and said, “Oh, it is nothing I suppose, but a fortnight ago old Mr. Short dropped dead. You remember him? He was always so good to me. Anyway, he dropped dead and left me fifty thousand rupees. Then last week poor old Mr. Pilkinhouse had a seizure and died and left me sixty thousand rupees. And this week nothing.”

This is the trouble, always expecting, always asking for more, for more. And there can be no end for this demand for more. Whatsoever you get you can always imagine more and you can always become miserable.

Poor people are miserable, you can understand, but rich people are also miserable. Those who have are as much miserable as those who have not. Ill people are miserable, but healthy are also miserable. Misery seems to be somewhere else. Misery does not disappear by wealth, health, or anything of that sort. It continues like an undercurrent.

The misery exists in the demand for the more, and the human mind can always imagine for more. Can you imagine a situation in which you cannot imagine for more? Impossible. Even heaven can be improved upon. Nobody can imagine a situation in which imagination can stop and you cannot imagine more and a better situation. That means you will be miserable wherever you are. Even heaven won’t be enough, so don’t wait for heaven. If you go right now into heaven it won’t be enough. You will be as miserable as here, maybe even more because here, at least, you can hope — that the heaven is there and one day or other you will enter into it. If you enter into it, even that hope is gone.

As you are, you can only be in hell because the hell or the heaven are ways of looking at things. They are not physical spaces: They are attitudes how you look at things.

A lizard is in heaven and Leo Tolstoy is in hell. Even a man like Leo Tolstoy. He was world-famous, more fame you cannot imagine. His name is going to be in the history books. His books will be read forever and forever. He was a genius. But you cannot imagine more miserable a man. He was rich, one of the richest men in Russia. He belonged to the royal family; he was a prince, married to a very beautiful princess, but you cannot imagine more miserable a man, who was continuously thinking of suicide. He started thinking maybe it is because he is so rich, that’s why he is miserable, so he started living like a poor man, like a peasant, but still the misery continued.

What was troubling him? He was a man of great imagination — a novelist has to be. He was a man of tremendous imagination, so whatsoever was available was always less. More he could imagine, better he could imagine. That became his misery.

Remember this, that if you are expecting anything from life, you will not get anything. Don’t expect and it is there in all its glory. Don’t expect, don’t ask, and it showers upon you in all its miraculousness. All its magic is there. Just wait a little while without thoughts . . . but that seems to be impossible.

Not that there are not moments when you are without thoughts. Patanjali says there are. All those who have entered into the inner space of man, they know there are gaps. But you are missing them somehow because those gaps are in the present. You jump from one thought to another and in between was the gap. In between was the heaven — you jump from one hell to another.

In between is heaven, but in between, you are not. From one thought to another thought you jump, [there] you are. Each thought feeds your ego, helps you to be, defines you, gives you a boundary, a shape, a form, an identity. You don’t look in the gap between the two thoughts because to look into that gap is to look into your original face, which has no identity. To look into that gap is to look into eternity, where you are going to be lost.

You have become so afraid of looking into the gap that you have almost managed to forget them.

Between two thoughts there is a gap, but you don’t see it. You see one thought, then you see another thought, then another thought . . . Just watch a little. The thoughts are not overlapping. Each thought is separate. In between the two there must be a gap. There is a gap, and that interval is the door. From that door you will enter into existence again. From that door you have been expelled from the Garden of Eden. From that door you will enter into the Garden of Eden again, you will again become like a lizard sunning on a rock.

I have heard.

Once a family moved from the country to the city, and his mother gave little Bobby careful instructions about traffic. “Never cross the street until the cars have passed,” she said as he started off to visit a little friend. About an hour later he returned, his eyes brimming with tears. “What has happened?” his mother asked in alarm.

“I could not go,” said Bobby. “I waited and waited but a car never did come by.

He was told to wait until the cars have passed by, but a car never did come by. The road was empty, and he was looking for the cars.

This is the situation inside you. The road is always empty — available — but you are looking for cars, thoughts, and then you become very much worried. So many thoughts. They become multiplied, they echo and reecho in you, and you go on being attentive toward them. Your gestalt is wrong.

Change the gestalt. If you look into the thoughts, you create a mind in yourself. If you look into the gaps, you create meditation into yourself. The accumulation of the gaps is meditation; the accumulation of thoughts is the mind. These are two gestalts, two possibilities of your being — either you be through the mind, or you be through meditation.

Look for the gaps. They are already there, naturally available. Meditation is not something which has to be produced by effort. It is there as much as the mind. In fact, more than the mind because mind is only on the surface, the waves, and the meditation is the depth of the ocean.

Every moment God is seeking you as much as you are seeking him. You may not be seeking him consciously. You may be seeking him under different names. You may be seeking him as bliss. You may be seeking him as happiness, joy. You may be seeking him as forgetfulness, absorption. You may be seeking him as music, as love. You may be seeking him in different ways, under different names. Those names do not matter, you are seeking him — knowingly, unknowingly. And one thing you have to understand, he is also seeking you. Because unless the search is from both the sides, the meeting is not possible.

The whole is seeking the part as much as the part is seeking the whole. The flower is seeking the sun as much as the sun is seeking the flower. The lizard is not only sunning, the sun is also lizarding. It is a connected whole. It has to be so, otherwise things will fall apart. It is one piece, it is one harmony, it is one dance. All gestures, all movements, are connected together. They have to be; otherwise they will fall apart and the existence will no longer be existence — it will disappear.

Let me tell you through a parable. Consider the following parable. Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain — because in the valley he has lived and in the valley he has dreamed and in the valley he has thought and imagined, but there has been only frustration. In the valley he has remained empty, unfulfilled, so he thinks that at the top of the mountain is God. The valley he has lived. The top remains far away; shining in the sun it remains an attraction. The far away always calls you, invites you. To look at the close is very difficult; not to look at the far away is also very difficult. To be interested in that which is close is very difficult; to be not interested in that which is very far is also very difficult. The far away has a tremendous attraction, and the top of the mountain goes on calling you.

And, when you start feeling empty in the valley, of course, it is logical to think that the one you are seeking does not live in the valley. He must be living at the top. It is natural for the mind to move from one extreme to the other, from the valley to the peak.

At the top of the mountain man thinks is God, down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. In the valley you go on gathering anxiety, in the valley you go on gathering dust, in the valley, by and by, you become dull and dead. The valley looks like a graveyard. One wants to get out of it. One starts thinking of freedom, moksha, of how to get out of the imprisonment the valley has become — how to get out of attachment, love; how to get out of ambition, violence, war; how to get out of the society, the very society which gives you the opportunity to be worried, in fact forces you towards anxiety and anguish.

One starts thinking, but this is an escape. In fact, you are not going to the peak; you are going away from the valley. It is not that the peak has called you. In fact, it is the valley which is pushing you. You are still pushed by the valley, and pushed by the valley you can never be free. It is not that you are going on your own. You are being expelled. The valley is creating a situation in which you cannot live there anymore. Life becomes too much. A moment comes in everybody’s life when it becomes too much, the world is too much, and one starts escaping.

Man starts escaping toward the peak. And now comes the most important part of the parable: God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain. Because, let us say, he is fed up with his purity and aloneness.

Man is fed up with the crowd, with the impurity; God is fed up with his aloneness and purity.

Have you ever watched? You can be happy alone very easily. To be happy with somebody else becomes very difficult. One person can be happy very easily, very cheaply, there is no cost to it. Two persons together, it becomes very difficult to be happy. It is easy to be unhappy now — without any cost, very cheaply. And if three persons are together, it is impossible to be happy — at no cost is happiness possible.

Man is fed up with the crowd, nowhere to move, nowhere where you can find a space of your own, always onlookers and onlookers — you are always on the stage, always performing — and the eyes of the crowd watching you. No privacy. By and by, one gets fed up, bored.

But God is also bored. He is alone, pure, but purity itself becomes boring when it remains and remains and remains.

God is coming down towards the valley; his desire is to plunge into the world. Man’s desire is to jump out of the world, and God’s desire is to plunge into the world. Man’s desire is to be God, and God’s desire is to be man.

There is a truth of withdrawal and there is a truth of return. Man is always withdrawing and God is always returning. Otherwise, the creation would have stopped long ago if God was not returning continuously. It must be a circle. The Ganges goes on falling into the ocean, and the ocean goes on rising into the clouds and goes on falling on the Himalayas — back to the Ganges, and the Ganges goes on flowing. The Ganges is always withdrawing, and the ocean is always returning. Man is always seeking God. God is always seeking man. This is the whole complete circle. If only man was going towards God and God was not coming, the world would have stopped long ago. It would have stopped anytime because one day all men will return and God will not be coming back. The world will disappear.

But the peak cannot exist without the valley; and God cannot exist without the world. And the day cannot exist without the night; and life is impossible to conceive of without death.

It is very difficult to understand this, that God is a constant returning, man a constant withdrawal — man a constant renunciation, sannyas, and God a constant coming back to the world, a celebration.

There is a truth of withdrawal and there is a truth of return. Separately they are both half and partial: together they become the truth, the whole truth.

Religion is a withdrawal, but then it is half. Religion should also be a return, then it is whole. Religion should teach you how to go into yourself and religion should also teach you how to come back again because somewhere in between the valley and the peak God and man meet. If you bypass God . . . And there is every possibility because if you are going up the hill and he is coming down the hill you won’t even look at him. There may even be a condemnation in your eyes. How can this be God who is going back to the valley? You may even look at him with the eyes of “holier than you.”

Remember this, whenever God will meet you, you will see him coming back to the world; and you are leaving the world. That’s why your so-called mahatmas, your so-called saints, never come to understand what God is. They go on talking about a dead concept of God, but they never know what God is because they will always miss. Somewhere on the path you will meet him, but your sense won’t even look at him. He will look like a sinner; he is going back to the world.

But if they reach to the top, they will find it empty. The world is too full; the top is too empty. They will not even find God there because he is always returning. He is always coming; he is always creating. He is never finished. The creation is an endless process. God is not an entity. He is a process, the process of returning.

If you can meet him on the way and you can recognize him, only then is there a possibility. Then you will drop the idea of going to the peak . . . you will start returning. All great ones who have understood, first have gone into withdrawal, and then they have returned to the world, back in the marketplace with all their meditation in a tremendous flowering. But they have come back to the world. They have understood the point. They have understood the point of wholeness, of holiness. They have understood the point that the outer and the inner are not two and the creation and the creator are not two and matter and mind are not two — that the sacred and the profane are not two. They are one. All duality has disappeared for them. This is what I call advait, nonduality — the real message of Vedanta, the real message of yoga.

It is very natural to get fed up with the world. It is very natural to seek freedom, nothing special in it. […]

It is very natural. The world is too troublesome. It creates so much anxiety: it creates so many imprisonments. To seek freedom, to inquire about it, is natural — nothing special in it. It becomes special when you have understood, when you come from the peak back to the valley with a new dance in your step, with a new song on your lips, with a totally new being — when you come absolutely pure into the world of impurity, unafraid because now you are incorruptible.

When you come back to the prison on your own accord, voluntarily, when you come to the prison as a free man and you accept the prison, back to your cell, now it is a prison no more because a freedom cannot be imprisoned. Only a slave can be imprisoned. A free man cannot be imprisoned — he can live in the prison, and free. And unless your freedom is that powerful, it is not worth.

Now the sutras.

Samadhi is a word very difficult to translate into English; there exists no parallel. But in Greek there is a word which is parallel; that word is ataraxia. The Greek word means quiet, calm, of deep inner contentment. That is the meaning of samadhi — so contented, so deeply contented, that nothing disturbs now, nothing distracts now. So deeply in tune with existence, in a sort of atonement — at-one-ment — that now there is no problem. There is no other who can disturb; the other has disappeared. The other disappears with your thoughts. The thoughts are the other. In the gaps is the samadhi, ataraxia. In the gaps is calm and quiet.

Not that when you have attained to it you will not be able to think, no. Not that your capacity to think will disappear. In fact, just on the contrary, when you live in the gap you become capable of thinking for the first time. Before it you were just victims, victims of a social atmosphere, victims of a thousand and one thoughts surrounding you — not a single thought of your own. They were thoughts; you were not capable of thinking. Those thoughts had settled on you as birds settle on a tree by the evening. They had entered in you. They were not original; they were all borrowed.

You had been living a life which is a borrowed life. That’s why you were sad. That’s why there was no life in you. That’s why you looked dead; there was no vibration. That’s why there was no joy, no delight. Everything was blocked by borrowed thoughts. Your whole stream was blocked. You could not flow because of borrowed thoughts. When you become a part of samadhi, ataraxia, a deep inner calm of the gaps, intervals, you become for the first time capable of seeing, of thinking — but now these thoughts will be your own. Now you will be able to create an original thought. You will be able to live an original life, fresh, fresh as the morning, fresh as the morning breeze. You will become creative.

In samadhi you become a creator because in samadhi you become part of God.

There is a saying of Pascal’s that most of man’s troubles come from his not being able to sit quietly in his chamber. Yes, that is true. If you can sit quietly in your inner chamber, almost all the troubles will disappear. You create them by running hither and thither. You create them by unnecessarily getting attached to your thoughts — which are not yours. You create them because you cannot sit at rest.

Samadhi parinam, the inner transformation, is the gradual settling of distractions and the simultaneous rising of one-pointedness.

First Patanjali talked about nirodh parinam, to look into the gap between two thoughts. If you go on looking, slowly thoughts settle, distractions settle — slowly, as if somebody has passed, bullock carts have passed from a mountain stream, and because of the passing wheels and the people much dust has risen up towards the surface. The whole stream which was just a few seconds before so crystal clear is now absolutely dirty, muddled. But then the bullock carts have gone and the people have gone and the stream goes on flowing. By and by as time passes, again the dust settles back to the bed, again the stream becomes crystal clear.

When you look into the gaps, the bullock carts, the crowd of your thoughts which has disturbed your being so completely by and by goes away, far away, and your inner stream of consciousness starts settling. This is what Patanjali calls samadhi parinam, the inner transformation “. . . is the gradual settling of distractions and the simultaneous rising of one-pointedness.” It has two parts to it. On the one hand, distractions settle, and on the other hand, one-pointedness arises.

When you are full of thoughts too much, you are not one man. You are not one consciousness; you are almost a crowd, a multitude. When there are thoughts and your gestalt is to look at thoughts, you are divided; you are divided in as many parts as there are thoughts in your mind. Each thought becomes a division of your being. You become polypsychic; you are not unipsychic. You are not one, you become many, because each thought carries a part of you and divides you — and those thoughts are running in all directions. You are almost mad. […]

You have been missing your target because you are not one-pointed. You have been missing all that you wanted because you are not one-pointed. The whole misery of man is that he is running in many directions simultaneously — absolutely undecided, indecisive, not knowing where he is going, not knowing what he is doing. […]

Where are you going? For what are you seeking?

You go on missing because your target goes on changing. It is a flux. There are a thousand and one targets around you, and you are a thousand and one, a crowd — a crowd shooting at a crowd of targets. The whole life proves to be empty.

Samadhi parinam, the inner transformation, is the gradual settling of distractions and the simultaneous rising of one-pointedness.

As thoughts disappear — thoughts are distractions — one-pointedness arises. You become one. The stream of consciousness flows in a direction, it becomes directed. It has a direction now. It can reach; it can become a fulfillment.

Ekagrata parinam, one-pointed transformation, is the condition of the mind in which the object of the mind that is subsiding is replaced in the next moment by an exactly similar object.

Ordinarily, one thought goes, another comes of a totally different character. Sadness goes, happiness comes. Happiness goes, frustration comes. Frustration goes, anger comes. Anger goes, sadness comes. The climate around you goes on changing and with the climate you. Every moment you have a different color to your being. Hence, no wonder that you don’t know who you are — because in the morning you were angry, by the lunchtime you were happy, in the afternoon you were sad, by the evening you were frustrated. You don’t know who you are. You change so much because each color that passes you becomes your identity for a few moments.

Ekagrata parinam is a state of your consciousness where this change stops. You become one-pointed. And not only that, if you want to retain one state of affairs, you become capable of retaining it. If you want to remain happy, happiness is replaced by happiness, again by happiness, again by happiness. If you want to remain happy, you remain happy. If you want to remain sad, it is up to you. But then you are the master. Otherwise, everything goes on changing.

I go on observing you. It seems almost unbelievable how you manage. One day a couple comes to me and they say, “We are in deep love. Bless us.” And the next day they are back and they say, “We have been fighting, and we have separated.” Which is true? The love, or the fight? Nothing seems to be true with you. Everything seems to be just a flux. Nothing seems to stay. Nothing seems to be a part of your being. Everything seems to be just a part of your thinking process — with one thought, one color; with another thought, another color.

It happened:

A nearsighted girl too vain to wear glasses was determined to get married. She finally found herself a husband and went off to honeymoon at Niagara Falls with him. When she returned, her mother gave a shriek, ran to the telephone and called an oculist.

“Doctor,” she gasped, “you have got to come over here right away. It is an emergency. My daughter has always refused to wear glasses, and now she is back from her honeymoon, and . . .”

“Madam,” interrupted the doctor, “please control yourself. Have your daughter come to my office. No matter how bad her eyes are, it can’t possibly be that much of an emergency.”

“Oh no?” said the mother. “Well, this fellow she has got with her is not the same one she left for Niagara Falls [with].”

But this is the situation of everybody. The man you love in the morning, you hate in the evening. The man you hate in the morning, you fall in love with by the evening. The man or the woman who looked beautiful just the other day, today has become ugly.

And it is an emergency case.

And this way you go on, like a driftwood, just at the mercy of the winds. The wind changes its course, and your course is changed. You don’t have any soul yet.

Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples. “First be because right now you are not. Let this be your only goal in life — to be.” Somebody will ask him, “How can we love?” He will say, “Don’t ask nonsense. First be because unless you are, how can you love?”

Unless you are, how can you be happy? Unless you are, how can you do something? The being is needed in the first place, then everything becomes possible.

Jesus says, “Seek first ye the kingdom of God, and then all shall be added unto you.” I would like to change it a little. “Seek first ye the being, the kingdom of being, and then all shall be added unto you.” And that is the meaning of Jesus. The kingdom of God is an old term for the kingdom of being. First be, then everything is possible, but right now when I look into you, you are not there. Many guests are there, but the host is missing.

Ekagrata parinam, one-pointedness in consciousness, is a basic necessity so that your being can arise. In a flux, the being will not be possible. At the most, you can go on becoming this and that and that, but you will never be a being.

By what has been said in the last four sutras, the property, character, and condition transformations in the elements and sense organs are also explained.

And Patanjali says this is the situation: the world is changing around you, the body is changing, the senses are changing, the mind is changing — everything is changing — and if you are also changing, then there is no possibility of finding the eternal, the unchanging one. These are changing, that is true. The world is changing continuously. It is a process: it has no being. It is a flux. Let it be so. There is only one thing permanent in the world and that is change. Everything else changes — except change. Only change remains as a permanent character.

The body is changing, continuously, every moment. Every single moment it is flowing and changing; otherwise how will you become old, how will you become a youth, how will a child become a youth? Can you say on what day the child becomes a youth? Can you say on what date the young man becomes old? Difficult. In fact, if you ask physiologists, they are not yet clear at exactly what moment one says that the man was alive and now he is dead. It is impossible to decide. The definition is still unclear because life is a process. In fact, when you have died, almost, and your friends have abandoned you, a few processes still continue in the body — nails go on growing, hairs go on growing. A part of you still seems to be alive and functioning.

When exactly a man dies, it is still undefined. In fact, life and death cannot be defined; it is a flux phenomenon. Body goes on changing, mind goes on changing — every moment the mind is changing.

If you are looking into this changing world — in these distractions of your being — and searching for truth, God, bliss, then you will be frustrated. Move within. Go into the gaps where neither the world exists nor the body nor the mind. There, for the first time, you come face to face with eternity, which has no beginning and no end, which has no change in it.

Whether they be latent, active, or unmanifest, all properties inhere in the substratum.

Patanjali says whether a flower has died or whether a flower is in bloom makes no difference. When a flower is in bloom he is dying, and when a flower has died, he is again trying to come back up. Creation goes on through a process of uncreation and creation, uncreation and creation. This is what Patanjali calls prakriti. Prakriti, again, is a word which cannot be translated. It is not creation only: it is the very process of creation and uncreation.

Everything becomes manifest, disappears, becomes unmanifest: but it remains in the substratum, the prakriti. Again it will come back. Summer comes and then goes: again the summer is back, coming. Winter is there, going: again it will come. It goes on moving. Flowers appear, disappear. Clouds come, disappear. The world goes on moving in a cycle.

Things have two states: manifest and unmanifest. You are beyond them. You are neither manifest nor unmanifest. You are the witness. Through nirodh parinam, through the gap between two thoughts, you will have the first glimpse of it. Then go on gathering those gaps, go on piling up those gaps. And always remember, whenever two gaps are there, they become one. Two gaps cannot be two. They are not like two things; they are two emptinesses. They cannot be two. You bring two zeros near they become one. They jump into each other because two zeros cannot be two zeros. Zero is always one. You bring a thousand and one zeros home — they will jump into each other and become one.

So go on piling up those gaps, zeros of being, and by and by what Patanjali first calls nirodh becomes samadhi. In samadhi distractions disappear, go distant and distant and distant . . . and then disappear; and one-pointedness arises in your being. That is the first glimpse of who you are beyond prakriti, beyond this game of creation and uncreation, beyond this game of waves and no waves, flowers and no flowers, of change, movement, momentariness. You become a witness.

That witness is your being.

And to attain that is the whole goal of yoga.

Yoga means: unio mystica. It means the union, the mystic union with oneself. And if you are one with yourself, suddenly you realize you have become one with the whole, with God, because when you move into your being, it is an emptiness again, a silence, a tremendous nonending silence . . . and God is also silence. Two silences cannot be two — they jump into each other and become one.

You withdraw in yourself, and God is returning. You meet on the way; you become one. This oneness is the meaning of the word “yoga.” Yoga means to become one.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Science of Living; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.7, Discourse #5 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega)

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the fourteenth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Be a Light unto Yourself

Recently Amido and I were in Playa del Carmen, Mexico on a 40-day working holiday. We spent our days working on editing and assembling the A Course in Witnessing, interspersed with walks on the beach and swimming in the cenote and the sea.

On one of those walks on the beach, the realization struck me while enjoying the show on display of suntans, tattoos and undulating buttocks that we seek attention in many ways and that it is natural to seek attention until we are ourselves giving attention to our true being in self-remembering or right-remembering. Once we begin to nourish our being with our own light of attention, the need for getting attention from others simply evaporates. This must be at least one of the meanings of Buddha’s statement, “Be a light unto yourself.”

-purushottama

This Silence, This Moment, So Precious – Osho

This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. To keep avoiding it and missing it seems so absurd.

Beloved Master, why? What is so difficult about dropping this whole game and just being?

Deva Gayan, the question you have asked is beautiful. “This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. To keep avoiding it and missing it seems so absurd. Beloved Master, why? What is so difficult about dropping this whole game and just being?”

If the whole game is dropped, and you remain just being. . . soon you will get tired of it, bored with it. The game also has its significance. Its whole significance is that it makes your being just silent, a beauty. Without this game, this crowd, this noise, without this marketplace your temple will not have the beauty that it has. Life is a dialectic.

In the night you see the whole sky full of stars. Do you think that in the day the stars hide somewhere? They are still there where you see them in the night, but in the light of the sun it is difficult to see them. You can see them if you go into a deep well, where it is almost as dark as night.

I used to have, by my house, a deep well. My family used to keep me away from it, and finally they closed it, because it had chains and you could go deep into it. Whenever I could get a chance – nobody was looking at the well – I would simply go into it. There was a place from where it was so dark that for the first time I became aware that from that darkness you can see stars in the sky.

To see the stars, you need the darkness. And stars are so beautiful, but they will not be there without darkness. You have to understand the beauty of darkness too.

Life is so beautiful, but it would not be so beautiful if there was no death. Just think – if you go on and on and on living, a point will come where you would like to die. You have lived enough; now life itself has become a boring experience because it is the same round every day, and the wheel has moved for so many years, again and again.

When I say life is a dialectic, I mean it exists between two polarities, and both the polarities help each other. You cannot take one polarity away; if you take one away the other will also disappear. The silence is beautiful – nobody will disagree with you, Deva Gayan – but the great moment is when you understand that the noise of the marketplace is also beautiful because the beautiful silence and the beautiful noise are part of one whole. The day and the night, the summer and the winter, childhood and old age, all have tremendous beauty. The moment you see the beauty of [both] together you have transcended them.

This transcendental experience, you can call enlightenment; you can call awakening; you can call realization; you can call the truth – these are only different names for the same experience. But our mind always goes on trying to keep one and avoid the other.

You are asking, “This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. Then why do we go on avoiding it, missing it?” That too is beautiful. That makes the contrast. It is just a silver line on a black cloud. You can write with white chalk only on a blackboard. If you take away the blackboard, the writing will also disappear.

To see this contradictoriness as complementary is to become mature. Then you don’t want to drop anything, then you don’t want to escape from the world, then whatever happens, you love it. The noise has its own place, and the silence has its own place, and they both enrich each other. There is no need to get out of the game. The game is tremendously beautiful. Just understand that this is the game, and because of the game, we have divided it into two parts; otherwise, nobody is the enemy, not even death. In this absolute acceptance of everything, you have already gone beyond.

Grandma Faginbaum takes her grandchildren shopping and leaves the house empty, except for her parrot standing on its perch by the door. The plumber arrives to fix something in the house and knocks on the door.

“Who is it?” asks the parrot.

“It’s the plumber,” replies the man. Nothing happens. The plumber knocks again.

“Who is it?” asks the parrot.

“The plumber,” he replies.

There is silence. The plumber, who has a heart condition, is getting impatient. He knocks again.

“Who is it?” squawks the parrot.

“It’s the plumber!” he yells and collapses in a faint.

Half an hour later, grandma returns with the kids. The little girl points at the body on the ground.

“Who is that?” she asks.

The parrot squawks, “It’s the plumber!”

It is a game.

Let it continue.

Just go on laughing and enjoying – it is the plumber!

-Osho

From Hari Om Tat Sat, Discourse #11, Q4

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Loneliness is a Misunderstanding – Osho

I have often heard you speak of aloneness and loneliness as being opposed; of aloneness being a state in which one is so full – fulfilled; of loneliness being a state in which one is missing the other, feeling very empty. Reading Ryokan’s poetry, I feel some loneliness, yet that man is known as an enlightened Zen monk.

Standing alone beneath the solitary pine,

Quickly the time passes.

Overhead the endless sky.

Who can I call to join me on the path?

In the hankering for a true companion, in the need to share that richness, I wonder if in the heart of aloneness, there is a kind of loneliness. Please explain if aloneness and loneliness are interrelated.

Kavisho, loneliness is loneliness, and aloneness is aloneness — and the two never meet anywhere. They cannot by their very nature. Aloneness is so full, so abundantly full of yourself there is no space for anybody else. And loneliness is so empty, so dark, so miserable that it is nothing but a constant hunger for someone to fill it . . . if not to fill it, at least to help you to forget it.

You are quoting from Ryokan’s poetry. I don’t think Ryokan is yet enlightened. He was certainly a Zen monk, and a great poet, but he fell short of being a mystic. He reached very close, but even to reach very close is not to be enlightened.

I have also loved Ryokan’s poetry. But beware of poets, because they appear so close to the mystics. Sometimes their words are more juicy than the words of the mystics because the poet is the artist of words; the mystic is an expert of silence.

Ryokan was a Zen monk; hence something of the mystic echoes in his poetry. But that is because he lived in an atmosphere in communion with the mystics. But he himself was not a mystic.

These are his lines, and you can see immediately what I mean:

Standing alone beneath the solitary pine,

Quickly the time passes.

Overhead the endless sky.

Who can I call to join me on the path?

He is still in need of a companion, and he is still searching. He is still talking of “the path,” and the enlightened man knows there is no path. All paths are wrong, without exception, because every path leads you away from yourself. And to come to yourself you don’t need any path: you have to be just awake, and you are there.

It is almost like you are asleep in your room and dreaming that you are far away in London, in New York, in San Francisco. Do you think that if suddenly you are awakened you will find yourself in San Francisco? You were there but that was only a dream. Awake, suddenly you find you are in your miserable room, and you have not even gone out of the door. You may be angry with the person who has awakened you, but he has brought you back to the reality. And there was no need of booking a ticket because you had never gone out; you were only dreaming.

You are only dreaming what you are. If you wake up, suddenly you will find all that you used to think your personality, your body, your mind, your knowledge, your feelings, your love — they were all dreams. You are only a witness. But you cannot dream about the witness; that is an impossibility.

The witness remains a witness, never becomes a dream. Your aloneness is your witness, is your being. And it is so full, there is no need of any companion. And what is the need of a path? Where are you going? You have arrived.

Ryokan was a beautiful poet, and perhaps a very disciplined monk, but he was not a mystic and certainly not an enlightened man.

Kavisho, let this be an opportunity to remind you again: beware of poets. They are like false coins, although they look exactly like authentic coins. But the false is false, and there is no way to make it real. Ryokan has still to wake up and see there is no solitary pine tree standing alone, there is no need of a companion, and there is no path. One is, and has always been, at home.

To realize this at-homeness is aloneness.

Going around in your dreams you will always find yourself lonely. Loneliness is a misunderstanding. Aloneness is an awakening.

-Osho

From The Golden Future, Discourse #20, Q2

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

The Inside of the Inside – Osho

Samyama is to be employed in stages.

These three — dharana, dhyan, and samadhi — are internal compared to the five that preceded them.

But the three are external compared to seedless samadhi.

Nirodh parinam is the transformation of the mind in which the mind becomes permeated by the condition of nirodh, which intervenes momentarily between an impression that is disappearing and the impression that is taking its place.

This flow becomes peaceful with repeated impressions.

I have been told that traditionally there are two schools of thought in Germany. The industrial, practical northern part of the country has this philosophy: The situation is serious but not hopeless. In the southern part of Germany, more romantic and perhaps less practical, the philosophy seems to be: The situation is hopeless but not serious. If you ask me, then the situation is neither — neither is it hopeless nor serious. And I am talking about the human situation.

The human situation looks serious because we have been taught and conditioned to be serious for centuries. The human situation looks hopeless because we have been doing something with ourselves which is wrong. We have not yet found that to be natural is the goal, and all the goals that we have been taught make us more and more unnatural.

To be natural, to be just in tune with the cosmic law, is what Patanjali means by samyama. To be natural and to be in tune with the cosmic law is samyama. Samyama is not anything forced upon you. Samyama is not anything that comes from the outside. Samyama is a flowering of your innermost nature. Samyama is to become that which you already are. Samyama is to come back to nature. How to come back to nature? And what is human nature? Unless you dig deep within your own being, you will never come to know what human nature is.

One has to move inward; and the whole process of yoga is a pilgrimage, an inward journey. Step by step, in eight steps, Patanjali is bringing you home. The first five steps — yam, niyam, asan, pranayam, pratyahar — they help you to go deep in you beyond the body. The body is your first periphery, the first concentric circle of your existence. The second step is to go beyond the mind. The three internal steps of dharana, dhyan, samadhi, lead you beyond the mind. Beyond the body and beyond the mind is your nature, is your center of being. That center of being Patanjali calls seedless samadhi — kaivalya. That he calls to come face to face to your own grounding, to your own being, to come to know who you are.

So the whole process can be divided in three parts: first, how to transcend the body; second, how to transcend the mind; and third, how to fall into your own being.

We have been taught, almost all over the world, in every culture, in every country, in every climate, to seek goals somewhere outside ourselves. The goal may be money, the goal may be power, the goal may be prestige, or the goal may be God, heaven, it makes no difference: all the goals are outside you. And the real goal is to come to the source from where you come. Then the circle is complete.

Drop all the outer goals and move inward. That’s the message of yoga. Outer goals are just forced. You have just been taught somewhere to go. They never become natural; they cannot become natural.

I have heard an anecdote about G.K. Chesterton:

He was on a train, reading earnestly, when the conductor asked for his ticket. Frantically, Chesterton fumbled for it.

“Never mind, sir,” the conductor said reassuringly. “I will come later on to punch it. I am certain you have it.”

“I know I have it,” Chesterton stammered, “but what I want to know is, where in the world am I going?”

Where are you going? What’s your destiny? You have been taught certain things to achieve. You have been made into an achiever. The mind has been manipulated, pushed and pulled. The mind has been controlled by the outside — by the parents, by the family, by the school, by the society, by the government. Everybody is trying to pull you outside your being, and they are trying to fix a goal for you; and you have fallen in the trap. And the goal is already there inside you.

There is nowhere to go. One has to realize oneself — who one is already. And once you realize that, wherever you go you will find your goal because you carry your goal with yourself. Then wherever you go, you will have a deep contentment, a peace surrounding you, a coolness, a collectedness, a calm as a milieu that you carry around you as an aura. That’s what Patanjali calls samyama — a cool, collected, calm atmosphere that moves with you.

Wherever you go you bring your own atmosphere with you, and everybody can feel it. Almost it can be touched by others also, whether they become aware or not. Suddenly, if a man of samyama comes close to you, suddenly, you become aware of a certain calm breeze blowing near you, a fragrance coming from the unknown. It touches you; it pacifies you. It is like a beautiful lullaby. You were in turmoil; if a man of samyama comes near you, suddenly your turmoil subsides. You were angry; if a man of samyama comes near you, your anger disappears because a man of samyama is a magnetic force. On his wave you start riding; on him, with him, you start moving higher than you can move alone.

So, in the East we developed a beautiful tradition of going to people who have attained to samyama and just sitting by their side. That’s what we call darshan, that’s what we call satsang: just going to a man of samyama and just being near him. To the Western mind sometimes it looks almost absurd because sometimes the man may not even speak; he may be in silence. And people go on coming, they touch his feet, they sit by his side, they close their eyes . . . There is no conversation, there is no verbal communication, and they sit for hours; and then, fulfilled in some unknown way, they touch the feet in deep gratitude, and they go back. And you can watch from their faces that something has been communicated; they have attained to something. And there has been no verbal communication — nothing visible has been given or taken. This is satsang, just being with a man of truth, with an authentic being, a man of samyama.

Just by being close to him, something starts happening in you, something starts responding in you.

But the concept of the man of samyama has also become very muddled because people started to do it from the outside. People started to still themselves from the outside, to practice a certain calmness, a certain silence, to force themselves into a particular pattern and discipline. They will look almost like a man of samyama. They will look almost, but they will not be: and when you go near them, their appearance may be of silence, but if you sit near them silently, you will not feel any silence. Deep down the turmoil is hidden. They are like volcanoes. On the surface everything is quiet: deep down the volcano is getting ready to explode, any moment.

Remember this: never try to force anything upon yourself. That is the way to get divided, that’s the way to become hopeless, and that’s the way to miss the point. Your innermost being has to flow through you. You are only to remove the hindrances on the path. Nothing new is to be added to you. In fact, something minus, and you will be perfect. Something plus — no. You are already perfect. Something more is there than the spring — some rocks on the path. Minus those rocks, and you are perfect, and the flow is attained. These eight steps, ashtang, of Patanjali are nothing but a methodological way of removing the rocks.

But why does man become so obsessed with an outer discipline? There must be a cause to it, a reason for it. The reason is there. The reason is because to force anything from the outside seems easier, cheap, at no cost. It is as if you are not beautiful, but you can purchase a beautiful mask from the market and you can put it on your face. Cheap, not costly, and you can deceive others a little bit. Not long because a mask is a dead thing and a dead thing can have an appearance of beauty, but it cannot be really beautiful. In fact, you have become more ugly than you were before. Whatsoever your original face was, was at least alive, radiating life, intelligence. Now you have a dead mask and you are hiding behind it.

People become interested in cultivating samyama from the outside. You are a man of anger: to attain to a state of no anger much effort will be needed, and long is the journey, and you will have to pay for it. But just to force yourself, repress anger, is easier. In fact, you can use your energy of anger in repressing anger immediately. There is no problem because anybody who is a man of anger can easily conquer anger. The only one thing is, he has to turn the anger upon himself. First, he was angry with others: now he has to be angry with himself and suppress the anger. But if you look into his eyes, anger will be there lurking like a shadow.

And remember, to be angry sometimes is not bad, but to suppress anger and to remain angry constantly is very dangerous. That is the difference between hatred and hate. When you flare up in anger there is hate, but it is momentary. It comes and it goes. Nothing much to be worried about. When you suppress anger, then hate disappears and hatred arises, which becomes a permanent style of your life. The repressed anger continuously affects you — your behavior, your relationship. Now it is not that you sometimes become angry, now you are angry all the time. Your anger is not addressed to anybody now: it has become unaddressed, just a quality of your being. Now it clings to you. You cannot exactly say with whom you are angry because in the past you have been accumulating anger. Now it has become a reservoir. You are simply angry.

This is bad; this is chronic. First the anger was just a flare-up, something happened. It was situational. It was like as small children become angry: they flare up like a flame and then they subside, and immediately the storm is gone and the silence is there and they are again loving and beautiful. But by and by the more you suppress anger, anger enters into your bones, into your blood. It circulates within you. It moves in your breathing. Then, whatsoever you do you do in anger. Even if you love a person, you love in an angry way. Aggression is there: destructiveness is there. You may not bring it up, but it is always there. And it becomes a great rock.

To force anything from the outside seems in the beginning very cheap, but in the end, it proves very fatal.

And people find it cheap because there are experts who go on telling them how to do it. A child is born and parents become the experts. They are not. They have not solved their own problems yet. If they really love the child, they will not force the same pattern on him.

But who loves? Nobody knows what love is.

They start forcing their pattern, the same old pattern in which they are caught. They are not even aware what they are doing. They themselves are caught in the same pattern and their whole life has been a life of misery, and now they are giving the same pattern to their children. Innocent children, not knowing what is right and what is wrong, will become victims.

And these experts who are not experts, because they don’t know anything — they have not solved any problem themselves — simply take it for granted that because, just because they have given birth to a child they have become, in a certain way, authoritative: and they start molding the soft child into a fixed pattern. And the child has to follow them; the child is helpless. By the time he becomes aware, he is already caught, trapped. Then there are schools, universities, and a thousand and one ways of conditioning all around, and all sorts of experts, and everybody pretending that he knows. Nobody seems to know.

Beware of the experts. Take your life in your own hands if you want to reach someday to your innermost core. Don’t listen to the experts; you have listened long enough. […]

The expert always thinks in terms of knowledge. Go to a wise man. He does not think in terms of knowledge. He looks at you through his knowing eyes. The world is ruled by experts too much, and the world has almost forgotten to go to the wise men. And the difference is the expert is as ordinary as you are. The only difference between you and the expert is that he has accumulated some dead information. He knows more than you know, but his information is not his own realization. He has just accumulated it from the outside, and he goes on giving advice to you.

Seek, search for a wise man. That is the search for the guru. In the East people travel for thousands of miles to seek and search for somebody who has really come to know and to be with him, to be with the man of samyama — one who has attained — who has not cultivated, who has grown, who has flowered in his inner being. The flower is not borrowed from the outside. It is an inner flowering.

Remember, Patanjali’s samyama is not the concept of ordinary cultivation. It is the concept of flowering, of helping and allowing that which is hidden in you to be manifested. You are already carrying the seed. The seed only needs the right soil. A little care, a loving care, and it will sprout, and it will come one day to flower. And the fragrance that was carried by the seed will be spread to the winds, and the winds will carry it to all the directions.

A man of samyama cannot hide himself. He tries. He cannot hide himself because the winds will continuously carry his fragrance. He can go to a cave in the mountains and sit there, and people will start coming to him there. Somehow, in some unknown way, those who are growing, those who are intelligent, they will find him. He need not seek them; they will seek him.

Can you watch something similar in your own being because then it will be easy to understand the sutras? You love somebody really; and, you show love to somebody. Have you watched the difference? Somebody comes, a guest. You really welcome. It is a flowering; from your very being you welcome him. It is not only a welcome to your home; it is a welcome to your heart. And then some other guest comes and you welcome him because you have to welcome. Have you watched the difference between the two?

When you really welcome, you are one flow — the welcome is total. When you don’t really welcome, and you are simply following etiquette, manners, you are not one flow; and if the guest is perceptive, he will immediately turn back. He will not enter your house. If he is really perceptive, he can immediately see the contradiction in you. Your extended hand for a handshake is not really extended. The energy in it is not moving towards the guest; the energy is being withheld. Only a dead hand has been spread out.

You are a contradiction whenever you are following anything outer, just following a discipline. It is not true; you are not in it.

Remember, whatsoever you do — if you are doing it at all — do it totally. If you don’t want to do it at all, then don’t do it — then don’t do it totally. The totalness has to be remembered because that totalness is the most significant thing. If you continuously go on doing things in which you are contradictory, inconsistent, in which a part of you moves and another part doesn’t move, you are destroying your inner flowering. By and by, you will become a plastic flower — with no fragrance, with no life. […]

Don’t live a life of mere manners, don’t live a life of mere etiquette. Live an authentic life.

I know the life of etiquette, manners, is comfortable, convenient, but it is poisonous. It kills you slowly, slowly. The life of authenticity is not so convenient and comfortable. It is risky, it is dangerous — but it is real, and the danger is worth it. And you will never repent for it. Once you start enjoying the real life, the real feeling, the real flow of your energy, and you are not divided and split, then you will understand that if everything is to be staked for it, it is worth it. For a single moment of real life, your whole unreal life can be staked, and it is worth it — because in that single moment you would have known what life is and its destiny. And your whole long life of a hundred years, you will simply live on the surface, always afraid of the depth, and you will miss the whole opportunity.

This is the hopelessness that we have created all around us: living and not living at all; doing things we never intended to do; being in relationships we never wanted to be in; following a profession which has never been a call to you — being false in a thousand and one ways. And how do you expect that out of this falsity — layer upon layer — you can know what life is? It is because of your falsity you are missing it. It is because of your falsity you cannot make contact with the living stream of life.

And sometimes when you become aware of it, a second problem arises. Whenever people become aware of the falsity of life, they immediately move to the opposite extreme. That is another trap of the mind, because if you move from one falsity to the exact opposite, you will move to another falsity again. Somewhere in between, somewhere between the two opposites, is the real. Samyama means balance. It means absolute balance not moving to the extremes, remaining just in the middle. When you are neither a rightist nor a leftist, when you are neither a socialist nor an individualist, when you are neither this nor that, suddenly in between, the flowering, the flowering of samyama. […]

You can move from one extreme to another, from one falsity to another falsity, from one fear to another fear. You can move from the marketplace to the monastery. Those are the polarities. The people who live in the marketplace are unbalanced, and the people who live in the monasteries are also unbalanced on the other extreme, but both are lopsided.

Samyama means balance. That’s what I mean by sannyas: to be balanced, to be in the marketplace and yet not be of it, to be in the bazaar but to not allow the bazaar to be in you. If your mind can remain free from the marketplace, you can be in the marketplace and there is no problem, you can move to the monastery and live alone. But if the bazaar follows inside you . . . which is bound to follow because the bazaar is not really outside — it is in the buzzing thoughts, in the inner traffic noise of the thoughts — it is going to follow you. How can you leave yourself here and escape somewhere else? You will go with yourself, and wherever you go, you will be the same.

So don’t try to escape from situations. Rather, try to become more and more aware. Change the inner climate and don’t be worried about the outer situations. Insist continuously on it because the cheaper is always alluring. It says, “Because you are worried in the market, escape to the monastery and all worries will disappear: because worries are because of the business, because of the market, because of the relationship.” No, worries are not because of the market, worries are not because of the family, worries are not because of the relationship: Worries are because of you. These are just excuses. If you go to the monastery, these worries will find some new objects to hang on to, but the worries will continue.

Just look at your mind, in what a mess it is. And this mess is not created by the situations. This mess is in you. Situations, at the most, work as excuses.

Sometime, do one experiment. You think people make you angry, then go for a twenty-one-day silence. Remain silent and you will suddenly become aware that many times in the day, for no reason at all — because now there is nobody to make you angry — you become angry. You think because you come across a beautiful woman or a man that’s why you become sexual? You are wrong. Go for a twenty-one-day silence. Remain alone and you will find many times, suddenly for no reason at all, sexuality arises. It is within you.

Two women were talking. I have simply overheard them; excuse my trespass.

Mistress Brown, very annoyed: “Look here, Mistress Green. Mistress Gray told me that you told her the secret I told you not to tell her.”

Mistress Green: “Oh! The mean creature. And I told her not to tell you that I told her.”

Mistress Brown: “Well. Look here, don’t tell her that I told you she told me.”

This is the traffic noise that goes on continuously in the mind. This has to be stilled not by any force but by understanding.

The first sutra:

Samyama is to be employed in stages.

Patanjali is not for sudden enlightenment, and sudden enlightenment is not for everybody. It is rare, it is exceptional. And Patanjali has a very scientific outlook. He does not bother with the exceptional. He discovers the rule, and the exceptional simply proves the rule, nothing else. And the exceptional can take care of itself. There is no need to think about it. The ordinary, the ordinary human being, grows only in stages, step by step, because for a sudden enlightenment, tremendous courage is needed, which is not available.

And for a sudden enlightenment, there is such a risk in it — one can go mad or one can become enlightened. Both the possibilities remain open because it is so sudden that the mechanism of your body and mind is not ready for it. It can shatter you completely.

Patanjali does not talk about it. In fact, he insists that the samyama should be attained in stages so that by and by you move, in small doses you grow, and before you take another step you have become ready and prepared for it. Enlightenment, for Patanjali, does not take you unawares. Because it is such a tremendous event, you may be so shocked — shocked to death or shocked to madness — he simply debars any talk about it. He does not pay any attention to it.

That is the difference between Patanjali and Zen. Zen is for the exceptional, Patanjali is for the rule. If Zen disappears from the world, nothing will be lost because the exceptional can always take care of itself. But if Patanjali disappears from the world, much will be lost because he is the rule. He is simply for the common, ordinary human being — for all. A Tilopa may take the jump, or a Bodhidharma may take a jump, and disappear. These are adventurers, people who enjoy risk, but that is not the way of everybody. You need a staircase to go up and to go down: You simply don’t jump out of the balconies. And there is no need to take that risk while one can move gracefully.

Zen is a little eccentric because the whole point is of the unique experience. The whole point is of the exceptional, the rare, in a way, the non-ordinary. Patanjali, in that way, moves on plain ground. For the common humanity he is a great help.

He says, “Samyama is to be employed in stages.” Don’t be in a hurry, move slowly, grow slowly, so everything becomes solid before you take another step. After each growth, let there be an interval. In that interval, whatsoever you have attained is absorbed, digested, becomes part of your being . . . then go ahead. There is no need to run because in running you can come to a point for which you are not ready, and if you are not ready, it is dangerous.

The greedy mind would like to attain everything now. People come to me and they say, “Why don’t you give us something which can make us suddenly enlightened?” But these are exactly the people who are not ready. If they were ready, they would have patience. If they were ready, they would say, “Whenever it comes. We are not in a hurry, we can wait.” They are not the real people: they are greedy people. In fact, they don’t know what they are asking. They are inviting the sky. You will burst; you won’t be able to contain it.

Patanjali says, “Samyama is to be employed in stages,” and these eight stages he has described.

These three . . .

The three that we discussed the other day . . .

— dharana, dhyan, and samadhi — are internal compared to the five that precede them.

We have discussed those five stages.

These three are internal compared to the five that have preceded them . . .

But the three are external compared to seedless samadhi.

If you compare them with yam, niyam, asan, pranayam, pratyahar, then they are internal, but if you compare with the experience, the ultimate experience of a Buddha or Patanjali, they are yet external. They are just in between. First you transcend the body, those are the external steps. Then you transcend the mind, these are internal steps. But when you reach to your being, even that which was internal, now will look external. Even that was not internal enough. Your mind is not internal enough. It is more internal than the body. It is external if you become a witness — then you can watch your own thoughts. When you can watch your own thoughts, your thoughts become external. They become objects: You are the watcher.

The seedless samadhi means when there is going to be no birth anymore, when there is going to be no coming back to the world anymore, when there is going to be no entry again in time. The seedless means the seed of desire is burned completely.

When you move, even toward yoga, when you start the journey inward, that too is still a desire — desire to achieve oneself, desire to achieve peace, bliss, desire to achieve truth. It is still desire. When you attain the first samadhi . . . after dharana, concentration; [after] dhyan, contemplation; when you come to samadhi where subject and object become one, even there, a slight shadow of desire is present — the desire to know the truth, the desire to become one, the desire to know God — or whatsoever you name it. Still that desire, very subtle, almost invisible, almost as if it is not — but still it is there. It has to be there because you have been using it all throughout the way. Now, that desire also has to be dropped.

Samadhi has also to be dropped. Meditation becomes complete when meditation has to be dropped . . . when meditation can be dropped. When you forget all about meditation and you drop it, when there is no need to meditate, when there is no need to go anywhere — neither outside nor inside — when all journeying stops, then desire disappears.

Desire is the seed. First it moves you outward; then, if you are intelligent enough to understand that you are moving in a wrong direction, it starts moving you inward; but the desire is still there. The same desire, feeling frustrated outside, starts searching inside. That desire has to be dropped.

After samadhi, even samadhi has to be dropped. Then the seedless samadhi arises. That is the ultimate. It arises not because you desired it, because if you desire then it will not be seedless. That has to be understood. It arises only because understanding the futility of desire itself — even the desire to go in — the very understanding of the futility of desire, desire disappears. You cannot desire the seedless samadhi. When desire disappears, suddenly, the seedless samadhi is there. It has nothing to do with your effort. This is the happening.

Up to now, up to samadhi, there is effort because effort needs desire, motivation. When desire disappears, effort also disappears. When desire disappears, there is no motivation to do anything — neither is there any motivation to do nor is there any motivation to be anything. Total emptiness, nothingness, what Buddha calls shunya arises — on its own accord. And that’s the beauty of it, untouched by your desire, uncorrupted by your motivation, it is purity itself, it is innocence itself. This is seedless samadhi.

Now there will no longer be any birth. Buddha used to tell his disciples, “When you come to samadhi become alert. Cling to samadhi so that you can be a help to people.” Because if you don’t cling to samadhi, and the seedless samadhi appears, you are gone, gone forever, gate, gate, para gate — Gone, gone, gone forever. Then you cannot help. You must have heard the word bodhisattva. I have given the word to many sannyasins. Bodhisattva means one who has come to samadhi and is denying seedless samadhi, is clinging to samadhi because while he clings to samadhi he can help people, he can still be there, at least one chain with the world is still there.

There is a story that Buddha comes to the ultimate heaven, doors open, and he is invited in, but he stands outside. The devas tell him, “Come in. We have been waiting so long for you.” But he says, “How can I come in right now? There are many who need me. I will stand at the door and help to show people the door. I will be the last to enter. When everybody has entered the door, when there is nobody else left outside, then I will enter. If I enter right now, with my entry the door will be lost again, and there are millions who are struggling. They are just coming closer and closer. I will stand outside. I am not going to enter because you will have to keep the door open while I stand here. You will have to wait for me, and while you are waiting, the door will be there, open, and I can show people this is the door.”

This is the state of bodhisattva. Bodhisattva means one who has already come to the door of being a buddha. In essence he is ready to disappear into the whole, but he resists for compassion. He clings to it. The last desire, to help people — that too is a desire — keeps him in existence. It is very difficult, it is almost impossible, when all the chains are broken from the world, just to depend on a very fragile relationship of compassion — almost impossible. But those are the few moments — when somebody comes to the state of bodhisattva and stays there — those are the few moments when the door is open for the whole of humanity, to look at the door, to realize the door, to recognize, and to enter it.

These three — dharana, dhyan, samadhi — are internal compared to the five that preceded them.

But the three are external compared to seedless samadhi.

This sutra is very, very significant for you because you can immediately use it. Patanjali calls it nirodh. Nirodh means a momentary suspension of the mind, a momentary state of no-mind. It is happening to you all, but it is very subtle and the moment is very small. Unless you are a little more aware, you will not be able to see it. First let me describe what it is.

Whenever a thought appears in the mind, the mind is covered with it, like a cloud appears in the sky. But no thought can be permanent. The very nature of thought is to be nonpermanent; one thought comes, it goes; another thought comes and replaces it. Between these two thoughts there is a very subtle interval. One thought goes, another has not come yet that is the moment of nirodh — a subtle interval when you are thoughtless. One cloud has passed, another has not come yet, and the sky is open. You can look at it.

Just sitting silently watch. Thoughts go on coming like traffic on the road. One car has passed, another is coming — but between the two there is a gap and the road is vacant. Soon the other will come and the road will again be full and will not be empty. If you can look between the gap that exists between two thoughts, you are for a moment in the same state as when somebody comes to realize samadhi — a momentary samadhi, just a glimpse. Immediately it will be filled by another thought which is already on the way.

Watch. Watch carefully. One thought going, another coming, and the gap between: In that gap you are exactly in the same state as one who has attained to samadhi. But your state is just a momentary phenomenon. Patanjali calls it nirodh. It is momentary, dynamic, it is changing all the time. It is a flux-like thing one wave going, another coming between the two . . . no wave. Just try to watch it.

This is one of the most significant meditations. There is no need to do anything else. You can just sit silently and you can go on watching. Just look in the gap. In the beginning it will be difficult. By and by you will become more alert and you will not miss the gaps. Don’t pay attention to the thoughts. Focus yourself for the gap, not for the thoughts. Focus yourself when the road is vacant and nobody is passing. Change your gestalt. Ordinarily we focus on thoughts and we don’t focus in between.

It happened once. A great yoga Master was teaching about nirodh to his disciples. He had a blackboard. On the blackboard, with white chalk, he made a very small point, just visible, and then he asked his disciples, “What do you see?” They all said, “A small white point.” The Master laughed. He said, “Nobody can see this blackboard? All are seeing only the small white point?”

Nobody has seen the blackboard. The blackboard was there, the white dot was there, but they all looked at the white dot.

Change the gestalt.

Have you looked in children’s books? There are pictures, pictures which are very, very meaningful to be understood. In a certain picture there is a young woman, you can see it, but in the same lines, in the same picture, there is hiding an old woman. If you go on looking, go on looking, suddenly the young woman disappears and you see the old woman’s face. Then you go on looking at the old woman’s face — suddenly it disappears and again the young woman’s face appears. You cannot see both together: That is impossible. You can see one face one time, another face another time. Once you have seen both the faces, you know very well that the other face is also there, but still you cannot see it together. And the mind is constantly changing, so one time you see the young face, another time you see the old face.

The gestalt changes from the old to the young, from the young to the old, from the old to the young, but you cannot focus on both. So, when you focus on thoughts, you cannot focus on the gaps. The gaps are always there. Focus on the gaps, and suddenly you will become aware that gaps are there and thoughts are disappearing — and in those gaps, the first glimpses of samadhi will be attained.

And that taste is needed in order to go on because whatsoever I say, whatsoever Patanjali says, can only become meaningful to you when you have already tasted something of it. If once you know the gap is blissful, a tremendous bliss descends — just for a moment, then it disappears — then you know if this gap can become permanent, if this gap can become my nature, then this bliss will be available as a continuum. Then you start working hard.

This is nirodh parinam:

Just ten years ago, an inventory was made of the Imperial Japanese Jewels. The royal treasure has been kept in a guarded building called the Soshuen. For nine hundred years the jewels had rested in that palace. When a string of amber beads was examined, one bead in the center of the string appeared to be different from the others. The accumulated dust of centuries was washed off the beads and the center stone was examined with deep curiosity. The examiners found a treasure within a treasure. The special bead was not made of common amber as were the other beads. It was a high-quality pearl of pink-green color. For hundreds of years, the unique pearl had been mistaken for a piece of amber but no longer.

No matter how long we have lived in a mistaken identity, self-examination can reveal our true and tranquil nature.

Once you have a glimpse of the reality that you are, then all false identities which have existed for centuries suddenly disappear. Now, no longer can you be deceived by those identities. This nirodh parinam gives you the first glimpse of your real nature. It gives you a glimpse, behind the layers of dust, of the real pearl. The layers of dust are nothing but layers of thought, impressions, imaginations, dreams, desires — all thoughts.

Once you can have one glimpse, you are already converted. This I call conversion. Not when a Hindu becomes a Christian, not when a Christian becomes a Hindu, that is not a conversion. That is moving from one prison to another prison, The conversion is when you move from thought to no-thought, when you move from mind to no-mind. The conversion is when you look in nirodh parinam, when you look between two thoughts and suddenly your reality is revealed — almost like lightning. Then again there is darkness, but you are not the same. You have seen something you cannot forget now. Now you will be searching again and again.

This is what the following sutra says:

This flow becomes peaceful with repeated impressions.

If again and again you fall in the gap, if again and again you taste the experience, if again and again you look through the nirodh — cessation of the mind — without thought you look into your own being, this flow becomes peaceful, this flow becomes natural, this flow becomes spontaneous. You attain, you begin to attain, your own treasure, first as glimpses, small gaps, then bigger gaps, then still bigger. Then one day it happens the last thought is gone and no other thought comes. You are in deep silence, eternal silence. That’s the goal.

It is hard, arduous, but available.

Tradition has it that when Jesus was crucified, just before he died, a soldier pierced his side with a spear, just to see whether he is dead or still alive. He was still alive. He opened his eyes. Looked at the soldier, and said, “Friend, there is a shorter road to my heart than that.” He has pierced his heart with a spear, and Jesus says, “Friend, there is a shorter road to my heart than that.”

For centuries, people have wondered what he really meant. A thousand and one explanations are possible because the sentence is very cryptic, but the way I look into it and the meaning that I think into it is that if you go into your own heart, that is the shortest, the most shortcut way to reach to Jesus’s heart. If you go into your own heart, if you go withinward, you will come closer to Jesus.

And whether Jesus is alive or not, you have to look withinward, you have to seek the source of your own life, and then you will know that Jesus can never be dead. He is eternal life. He may disappear from this body on the cross; he will appear somewhere else. He may not appear anywhere else, but then too he will remain for eternity in the heart of the whole.

When Jesus said, “Friend, there is a shorter road to my heart than that.” he meant “Go withinward. Look into your own nature, and you will find me there. The kingdom of God is within you.” And it is eternal. It is unending life; it is deathless life.

If you look into nirodh, you will look into deathless life, life that has no beginning and no end.

And once you have tasted of that ambrosia, that elixir, then nothing else can become the object of your desire — nothing else. Then that becomes the object of desire. That desire can lead you up to samadhi, and then that desire has also to be left, that desire has also to be dropped. It has done its work. It gave you a momentum, it brought you to your very door of being; now that has to be dropped also.

Once you drop it, you are there no more . . . only God is. This is seedless samadhi.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Science of Living; Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.7, Discourse #3 (Previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega).

This discourse is the Listening Meditation in the thirteenth program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Meditation is Mind Relaxed – Osho

Meditation, understanding, awareness, love and enlightenment, and now transcendence of enlightenment, seem to be inalienable parts of your teaching. And they also seem to be organically interconnected.

Would you please explain to us the whole thing once again?

It is so obvious, so simple. It needs no explanation.

It needs only description.

Meditation is nothing but your mind in a silent state. Just as a lake is silent, not even ripples on it . . . thoughts are ripples. Meditation is mind relaxed – don’t make things very complex – mind in a state of not doing anything, just at ease.

And the moment you are relaxed, silent, peaceful, there is great insight and understanding of things that you have never understood before. Nobody is explaining anything to you. Just your clarity of vision makes things clear.

It is the same rose, but now you know its beauty in its multi-dimensional way. You had seen it many times – it was just an ordinary rose. But today it is no more ordinary; today it has become extraordinary because you have a clarity. All the dust is removed from your insight and the rose has an aura that you were not aware of before.

Everything around you, inside you, outside you, becomes crystal clear. And as understanding reaches to the ultimate point, there is an explosion of light.

Clarity, in its ultimate stage, becomes an explosion of light we have called ‘enlightenment.’

Just don’t use big words; that makes things difficult.

It is simply in the intensity of clarity that darkness disappears. It is because you can see so clearly that darkness is no more there. You know perfectly well that there are animals who can see in darkness; their eyes are more clear, more penetrating. Your insight becomes so penetrating that all darkness is dispelled. In other words, you have an explosion of light. Call it enlightenment, liberation, realization. But you are still beyond it: it is your experience, and you are the experiencer. This is an objective experience; you are a subjectivity. You know all this is happening; hence the transcendence, hence going beyond enlightenment. At that peak, at that Everest . . . only witnessing, just pure awareness; not aware of anything, not witnessing anything – just a pure mirror, not mirroring anything at all. They are all organically related.

And don’t bother about the whole thing.

Move step by step; the other step will follow automatically.

-Osho

From The Osho Upanishad, Discourse #12, Q4

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

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