The Journey in Consciousness – Osho

Man is mind.

The word ‘man’ itself comes from the Sanskrit root man, which means mind. If you understand the workings of the mind, you will understand the reality of man and the possibility too. If you understand the inner mechanism of the mind, you will understand the past of man, the present and the future too.

Man in himself is not a being but a passage. In himself man is not a being, because man is continuously a becoming. There is no rest in being a man. Rest is below man or above man.

Below is nature, above is God. Man is just in between – a link, a ladder. You cannot rest on a ladder, you cannot stop on the ladder. The ladder cannot become your abode. Man has to be surpassed, man has to be transcended.

Man is a journey between your two infinities. One is your nature, one infinity; another is your hidden God, the other infinity. And man is just between the two, a ferry boat. Use it, but don’t be confined by it. Use it, but don’t be defined by it. Always remember that you have to go beyond.

The whole message of Jesus is how to go beyond man. That’s why he again and again says: I am the Son of man and the Son of God. He goes on insisting on this contradiction, because he wants it to be completely clear that man is both: on the one hand part of nature, on the other hand part of God. That is the meaning of the word ’son’: son means a part of the father.

And because man belongs to these two realities – two separate realities – there is anxiety in man, there is tension in man, there is constant conflict in man, because these two natures go on fighting. Hence, as man, there is no possibility of peace. Either you have to become absolutely unconscious, like a drunkard when he has taken so much alcohol that he has lost all his consciousness – then there is peace, or you will have to become so conscious that all the nooks and corners of your being are full of light – you become a Buddha or a Christ – then there is peace. Either fall below man, or go beyond man. Don’t go on clinging to being a man, because then you are clinging to a disease.

That’s exactly what man is: a disease, a constant tension – to be or not to be, to be this or to be that – a constant fight between the soul and the body, the lower and the higher, unconsciousness and consciousness. To understand man as a conflict, to understand man as a constant tension will help immensely, because then you stop clinging to man as such. Rather, on the contrary, you start thinking ’How to go beyond, how to transcend, how to surpass?’

Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says that man is the only animal who tries to surpass himself, the only animal who can surpass himself. It is the greatest miracle in the world: to surpass oneself. But it has happened. It has happened in a Christ, in a Buddha, in a Krishna. It can happen in you! You are a great promise, a project, an adventure. But don’t start thinking about yourself as if you have arrived. Then you cling somewhere in between, and a part of you will be pulled to one side and the other part to another side – you will be torn apart. And you will remain in anguish, and your existence will be nothing but a long, long, on-going nightmare.

Before we enter the sutras, a few things about the mind – because man is mind.

The first state of mind we can call ‘pre-mind’. It exists in a very small child – very primitive, animal-like. Hence the beauty of the children, and the innocence, and the grace – because that anxiety which we call man has not yet evolved. The child is at ease. The child is not yet a traveller; he has yet not left his home in search for some other home. The pilgrimage has not started yet. The child is at rest – perfectly at ease and happy to be whatsoever he is. That’s why his eyes have no anxiety, and the child has a certain grace around him.

But this grace is going to be lost. This grace cannot stay forever, because it is unconscious, because it has not been earned, because it is a natural gift, and the child is completely oblivious to it. He cannot hold onto it. How can you hold onto something when you are unconscious of it? It has to be lost. The only way to gain it is to lose it. The child will have to go into corruption, into perversion. The child will have to go into the cunningness of the mind, and then the child will understand that he has lost something – something immensely valuable.

But one can know it only when it is lost. There is no other way to know it. Then the search starts. Religion is nothing but the search for the lost childhood. Everybody carries the memory of it, the very alive memory of it, somewhere deep down. Maybe not very consciously, but it functions like an unconscious substratum that something has been lost, something has been forgotten, something was there which is no more there; something is being missed, and one starts searching for it.

The first stage is pre-mind. There is no responsibility, because a child knows nothing of duty, the child knows nothing of values, virtues. The child knows nothing of sainthood, so he is not aware of sin either. He exists before the diversion, he exists before those two paths of sin and sainthood diverge, separate and go apart. He is in a kind of primitive unity. This cannot last for long, this is going to go, but it has not gone yet. This is the state of the child near about three years of age.

Between three and four the child loses his innocence, loses his virginity, loses nature and becomes part of the civilised world – really becomes man.

This pre-mind is instinctive. It is very intelligent, but the intelligence is not intellectual, the intelligence is purely instinctive. The child functions very intelligently but not intellectually. The intelligence that a child shows is natural, he has not learned it. It is part of the wisdom of his body, it is inherited.

The child has no idea of good and bad, so there is never any conflict. His desires are pure.

Whatsoever he desires, he desires passionately, totally. No problem arises in his mind whether this desire is right or wrong. Whenever he is in a certain mood, he is totally in it – but his moods are momentary. He has no identity, he is unpredictable: one moment he is loving, another moment he is angry. And you cannot tell him ‘You are contradictory’; he is very inconsistent because he is always true to the moment. Not that he does anything consciously, it is just natural.

So the innocence is there, but it is not very deep. The innocence is there, but it has no meditativeness in it. It is shallow, momentary, temporary, tentative.

The child is more like an animal than like a man. The child is the link between the man and the animal. The child passes through all the stages that man has passed through down the ages.

The scientists say that during nine months in the mother’s womb the child passes through millions of years of evolution. He starts like a fish – as life started on the earth – and then by and by, he goes on growing. Within days he is passing through thousands, millions of years; in nine months he has passed through the whole of evolution. But even when the child is born, he is still not yet man – not at least, civilised – he is primitive, the cave-man.

The child lives in an inner chaos. He has no idea what he is going to do. He has no future, he carries no past; he lives utterly in the present. But because he lives utterly in the present and unconsciously, his life cannot have a discipline, an order. It is chaotic, it is anarchic. This is the first stage of man, the first stage of mind. And remember, that although sooner or later you lose it, it remains like a substratum in you. You can lose it totally only when meditation has gone deep, when meditation has transformed your being. Otherwise it remains there, and you can fall into it at any moment; in any stress, in any strain you can again become childish.

For example, your house is on fire, and you can start crying like a child. And you are not a man who cries ordinarily – nobody may have ever seen you crying. And your house is on fire and suddenly you forget that you are a grown-up man. You become like a small child, you start crying – tears come to your eyes – you are completely lost, helpless. What has happened? That pre-mind has reclaimed you. It was always there. You had grown a second layer upon it, on top of it, but it was there deep down. When the second layer cannot function, in a deep helplessness you fall to the first layer. This happens every day.

In anger you become more childish, in love also you become more childish. Listen to the dialogue of two lovers, and you will find it very childish. Remember your own memories when you first fell in love: how you behaved, what you said to your beloved or your lover, and you will find childishness. Or remember when somebody provokes you and you become angry – you start doing things which are very illogical, unintelligent, undisciplined, chaotic. You repent for them later on, because later on, when the second layer comes back, the second layer repents for the first layer. When the civilized mind comes back, takes hold again, it repents. It says ‘It was not good of me. It was not good to do.’

The first layer never completely goes unless you become a Christ or a Buddha. It remains there.

Watch it.

The first layer is very chaotic. The second layer is collective. The second mind I call the ‘collective mind’. Now the group, the family, the society, the nation become more important than yourself. A child is very, very, self-oriented, he thinks only of himself. He does not care for anything else, he is utterly selfish. The second mind starts thinking of others, starts sacrificing its own interests, becomes more collective, becomes more part of society, a clan, a tribe – starts becoming civilised. Civilisation means to become part of a society, to become part of many people: to become responsible, not to go on living a selfish existence. Civilisation means sacrificing oneself for others.

This second mind is very prevalent. Except in very rare cases, the first mind sooner or later disappears. Some imbeciles, idiots – in them the first layer never disappears, it remains predominant. They never learn how to be social, they remain primitive. Otherwise, normally the second layer evolves – the schooling, the family training, the teachers, the society, the experiences, the observation… And the child starts learning that he is not an island, but a member of an organism – the society, the church, the nation.

This second, collective mind has a certain identity. The first mind knows no identity. If you ask a child ‘Who are you?’ he can’t answer it. He does not know the answer – who he is. But a grown-up person can say ‘Yes, I am a Catholic, I am a communist, I am a Hindu, I am an Indian, I am a

German, I am an Italian.’ What is he saying? He is saying ‘I belong to this group called Hindu, or Christian, or Mohammedan. I belong to this nation, to this geography – India, Germany. Italy.’ Or ‘I belong to this ideology – communism, Catholicism, fascism.’ He is saying ‘I am to whom I belong’.

Now he has an identity. He can say ‘I am a doctor, or an engineer, or a businessman’ – then too he is saying ‘This is what I do. This is my function in the society.’ When you ask somebody ‘Who are you?’ – he answers by showing you where he belongs, to whom he belongs, what his function is in the society. Now this is not much of a self-knowledge. If this is self-knowledge then everybody knows who he is. But for utilitarian purposes it is enough, and many people stop there.

If you stop there you will never know who you are. Then you have taken just a false identity.

Just a few labels and you think ‘This is me’. This is not you. You exist on a far higher plane, or in a deeper depth. These labels that you have collected about yourself are good for functioning in the society as a member, but they don’t show anything about your reality. The inward reality remains untouched by them. But this is the second layer where almost everybody stops. The society does not want you to go beyond it. The school, the college, the university – their effort is that you should not remain childish, you should become civilised, and then their effort ends. Then the society’s work is finished.

The society has made you a member of the mass, has made you a kind of slave, has given you a certain imprisonment, has taken all that was dangerous in you – the chaos, the freedom, the irresponsibility; has made you dutiful, responsible, given you values what is good and what is not good; has pigeonholed you, categorised you. Now the society is finished. Now live silently, go to the office, come home, take care of your children, your parents, and so on and so forth – one day, die: your existence is complete. This is a very false completion: a routine existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche has called this state ‘the camel’, the beast of burden. This is the ‘camel state’. People go on carrying great loads and burdens for no reason at all. And they go on moving in a desert, like the camel moves in a desert. You can see these camels all around dry, dull, dead, still carrying, carrying great loads. The loads are crushing them, killing them, but they are carrying – maybe just out of habit. Because yesterday also they were carrying and the day before yesterday also they were carrying; it has become part of their habit, it has become part of their definition. Their load, their anxiety, their sadness, their misery have become part of their definition, their identity. These camels you will find everywhere, and this desert is all over the earth.

The child has to come from the first to the second, but nobody should stop there. To be a camel is not the goal. Something more is needed, something more existential is needed. Yes, you will have respectability if you are a good camel and carry great loads. People will respect you; they will all show honour towards you. That’s a kind of mutual understanding. When a person is carrying so much load, he has to be given some awards – that’s what respect is.

The word ‘respect’ is beautiful, it means to look again: respect. When a person is carrying a great load of responsibility, duty, family, society, people look at him and say ‘Look, what a great man!’ Re-spect: they look again and again and they say ‘Look! How much of a burden he is carrying. What sacrifice!’ He has sacrificed his whole being.

Naturally if you sacrifice yourself for the religion, the religion will sanctify you, will call you a saint. If you sacrifice for the country, the country will give you respect. If you sacrifice for something else, they will give you respect. One can go on collecting this respect, and one can go on dying without living at all. Beware of this situation!

In this state, there is a collective responsibility: the collective mind functions; you don’t have a personal responsibility yet. The child has no responsibility. The second stage has a responsibility, but it is collective. You don’t feel Personally responsible for anything, you feel responsible only because you are part of a certain collectivity.

In an Indian village you can find this state the camel, very, very pronounced. A Brahmin has no responsibility of his own. His whole responsibility is that he is a Brahmin; he has to behave like a Brahmin. In Indian villages you will not find individualities, you will only find collectivities.

The Brahmin, the Shudra, the Kshatriya – they all function according to their community, according to the rules. Nobody has any responsibility to think, there is no question of thinking.

The rules have been given down the ages, they are written in the scriptures. Everything is clear-cut – there is no need to speculate, to philosophise, to ponder, to meditate. All problems have been solved – Manu, the Indian Moses, has solved them.

That’s where Jesus found the Jews – at the second stage. Moses had done the first work; he had brought the primitive mind to a civilised state. Now Jesus was needed to bring another revolution, another transformation. People were existing just as cogs in a wheel, parts of a great mechanism. The only question was how to function efficiently.

That is not enough to live a joyous life. To be efficient is because the efficiency makes you a good mechanism but does not give you a soul. It does not give you a celebration, it can’t be ecstatic. But there are a few beautiful things about the second mind you have to remember; they will help you to understand the third.

The second mind is non-tense: there is no anxiety in it. The Indian villager, or the people of the East are more calm, quiet. They move with a certain ease, dignity. Even if they are starving, hungry, ill, they have a patience, a deep accep-tance. They don’t rebel. Rebellion has no appeal for them, they live in acceptance. They don’t have that much individual-ity to rebel. Indians feel very good about it, they think America is going mad; they think ‘We are fortunate.’ But this is not my observation.

America is in a difficulty. America is in great anguish, but that anguish is higher than the so-called Indian peace. That anguish can be more creative, that anguish can bring a higher stage of mind and consciousness into the world than this cow-like peace. This peace is not very creative. Yes, it is good in a way – one lives one’s life without much anguish. But nothing comes out of that life, just peaceful and peaceful, and that peace is never creative – creative of something out, or creative of something in. That peace seems to be very impotent. But in this second stage the peace is there, obedience is there, patience is there, and there is a feeling of belonging to the community, to the church. Nobody feels alone.

In America people are very alone. Even in a crowd they are alone. In India, even if people are alone, they are not alone. They know they belong, they know they have a certain function somewhere, they know they are needed. They know that they need not choose, everything has been chosen beforehand. A Brahmin is born a Brahmin. He will be respected by the society, he will become the priest. He has not to work for it; it is already decided by fate, by God.

When you don’t have to decide, naturally you don’t feel any anxiety. Decision brings anxiety. You have to decide, then there is a problem. Then to go this way or that? And there are a thousand ways, and so many alternatives – and choose in trembling, because who knows whether you are choosing the right or the wrong? The only way to know is to choose it. But then it will be too late. After ten years if you come to know that it was a wrong choice it will be too difficult to go back and choose again, because then those ten years will be gone – gone down the drain. There is a kind of belonging in the second state of mind. You need not choose, everything has been chosen, decided already; there is a kind of fatalism. All that happens has to be accepted because it cannot be otherwise. If it cannot be otherwise then why be worried? That’s why in India there are less psychological breakdowns than in America. But it is not a good state, remember. And I am not saying that a psychological breakdown is a great thing, and I am not saying that to be tense and to be anxious is something valuable. But I am saying that just not to be anxious and not to be tense is not some achievement either.

This state – the second state – is a kind of patriarchy. The father remains very important. The father-figures are very important. God is thought to be a father.

There is a difference between the mother and the father. The father is very demanding, the mother is non-demanding. Mother’s love is unconditional, father’s love is conditional. The father says ‘Do this then I will love you; if you don’t do this you will not get my love.’ And the father can get very angry.

This state is a state of patriarchy: father remains important, mother is not important. Unconditional love is not known. Society appreciates you, respects you if you follow the society. If you go a little bit astray, all respect is taken away and the society is ready to destroy you. The Jewish God says ‘I am a very jealous God. If you go against me I will destroy you!’ – And that’s what the state says, the government says, the priest says, the pope says. They are all very jealous. They are very dominating.

This state is very repressive: it does not allow anybody to have his own say; it does not allow anybody to have his own being. It is repressive: it does not allow one’s own impulses. It is dictatorial: it teaches you to say yes; no is not accepted, yes is enforced violently, aggressively. Of course this yes cannot be of much value, because if you cannot say no your yes is going to be impotent.  But this is the yes that exists all around. People believe in God because they have been told to believe in God. People go to the church because they have been told to go to the church. People go on doing things formally, ritualistically. Jesus called these people hypocrites.

Before we enter into the sutras, these things will be good to understand, then the sutras will be very, very clear.

This state of mind has only a painted exterior; the interior remains untouched, unevolved. A kind of theism – people believe in God, people believe in hell and heaven, and people believe in punishment and reward – but people believe, people don’t know. Yes is there, but it has been forced. It has not been given a chance to evolve and unfold within you. There is a communal solidarity because you are never alone, you are always together with people, and the crowd is all around you and it feels good. The moment you are alone, trembling arises. When the great crowd is all around you, you can trust. So many people can’t be wrong, so you must be right, because so many people are going in the same way, in the same direction, and you are also going with them.

The third mind I call the ‘individual mind’; Nietzsche calls it ‘the lion’. It is independence, it is assertion, it is rebellion. The ego has evolved. The ego has become very, very, crystallised. The man is no more just a part of a church, country, tribe, clan, family; he is himself. The real culture can only start when you have become an individual. The sense of the self is a must, and this is the third stage of the mind.

The identity is no more of belonging, the identity is no more that you are a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian. The identity is more personal – that you are a painter, that you are a poet. The identity is more creative; it is not of belonging but of contribution – what you have contributed to the world.

In the nebulous mind a centre arises by and by. In the child’s mind there was no centre. In the collective mind there was a false centre imposed from the outside. In the individual mind an inner centre arises. The first was a kind of chaos – no order. The second was a kind of patriarchy – an imposed order by the father, by the demanding society and the father-figures. The third is a kind of fraternity: a brotherhood arises. You don’t belong to any crowd; nobody can impose anything upon you, nor do you want to impose anything upon anybody. You respect others’ freedom as much as you respect your own freedom. All are brothers.

In the second, the basic question was ‘Who is the father-figure?’ In the third, the question is not who is the father-figure – there is none, God is dead. That is the situation in which Nietzsche declares that God is dead: God, as father, is dead. That is the situation where Buddha says there is no God, and Mahavir says there is no God. And Patanjali says that God is just a hypothesis – needed in certain stages, and then is needed no more.

Responsibility arises, and a very personal responsibility. You start feeling responsible for each of your acts, because now you know what is right and what is wrong. Not that somebody says ‘This is right’, but because you feel this is right, because you feel this is good. A greater understanding, a greater consciousness will be needed. There will be more joy because you will be more crystallised, but there will be more anxiety too, because now if something goes wrong you go wrong. And you alone are responsible for each step. You cannot look to a father-figure, and you cannot throw your responsibility onto somebody else – no fate, no father exists, you are left alone on the road, with thousands of alternatives. And you have to choose. And each choice is going to be decisive, because you cannot go back in time. Great anxiety arises. This is the place where people start having psychological breakdowns. This is a higher stage than the second, and the West exists at a higher stage than your so-called East. But of course there are problems. And those problems can be solved, and those problems should be solved rather than slipping back to a lower stage of mind.

There is freedom, so there is tension. There is thinking, there is concentration – abstract philosophy is born, science grows, and no becomes very important. Doubt becomes very significant. In the collective mind faith was the rule; in the individual mind doubt becomes the rule. No becomes very basic, because rebellion cannot exist without no, and the ego cannot grow and ripen without no. You have to say no to a thousand and one things, so that you can say yes to the one thing you would like to say yes to. Now the yes is significant, because the man is capable of saying no. Now the yes has a potency, power.

The man who always says yes – his yes is not of much worth. But the man who says no ninety-nine times and says yes one time – he means it. It has an authenticity.

It is a very creative crisis because if you go above it, it will be creative. If you fall from it, you will not fall to the second, you will fall to the first. This has to be understood. If you fall from the third, the individual mind, you will go immediately into madness, because the second is no more possible. You have learnt no-saying, you have learnt being rebellious, you have tasted freedom, now you cannot fall back to the second. That door no more exists for you. If you fall from the third you will fall to the first: you will go mad.

That’s exactly what happened to Friedrich Nietzsche himself. He was a ‘lion’, but the lion went mad, roaring and roaring and roaring, and could not find a Way beyond the third.

When a man falls from the third, he falls to the first. This has to be remembered. Then you cannot go to the second – that is finished forever. Once your no has become very conscious you cannot go back to faith. A man who has doubted, and who has learnt to doubt, cannot go to faith again – that is impossible. Now the faith will be simply cunningness and deception, and you cannot deceive yourself. Once a man has become an atheist then ordinary theism won’t do. Then he will have to find a man like me. Then ordinary theism won’t do – he has gone beyond it.

Nietzsche needed a man like Buddha. And because Buddha was not available, and because the Western mind has not yet been able to make it possible for people to go beyond the third, he had to go mad. In the West it is almost a certainty that whenever a person becomes really evolved at the third stage, he starts slipping into madness, because the fourth is not available there yet. If the fourth is available, then the third is very creative. If there is a possibility to surrender the ego, then the ego is of immense value. But the value is in its surrender! If you cannot surrender it, then it will become a load – a great load on you. It will be unbearable. Then the lion will go on roaring and roaring and there will be no other way than to go mad.

This is a very critical stage – the third; it is just in the middle. Two minds are below it and two minds are above it. It is exactly the mid-link. If you fall, you go into the abyss of madness; if you rise, you go into the beatitude of being a Christ or a Buddha.

The fourth mind is ‘universal mind’. Remember, it looks collective but it is not collective. ‘Collective’ means belonging to a society, a certain time, a certain period, a certain country. ‘Universal’ means belonging to the whole existence, to existence as such. The ego, when ripe, can be dropped; in fact, drops itself if the fourth door is available. And that is the function of religion: to make the fourth door available. That is the problem in the .West now: the third mind has developed to its uttermost, and the fourth door is not available. The West Urgently needs the fourth door.

Carl Gustav Jung has said in his memoirs that through observing thousands of people in his whole life, he has come to a few conclusions. One conclusion is that people who are near about forty to forty-five are always facing a religious crisis. Their problem is not psychological, their problem is religious. Near the age of forty-two, forty-five, a man starts looking for the fourth mind. If he cannot find it, then he goes berserk. Then the hunger is there and the nourishment is not available. If he can find it, great beatitude, great benediction arises.

It is almost like at the age of fourteen you become sexually mature. Then you start looking for a partner – for a woman, for a man. You want a love object – near the age of fourteen. Exactly near the age of forty-two another thing in you matures, and you start looking for samadhi, for meditation, for something that goes higher than love, something that goes higher than sex, something that can lead to a more eternal orgasm, more total orgasm. If you can find it then life remains smooth. If you cannot find the door – hunger has arisen and the nourishment is not available – what will you do? You start breaking down: your whole structure is shaken. And when a man breaks down. He always breaks down to the first; he falls to the lowest.

This fourth I call the ‘universal mind’ – the ego can be dissolved because the ego has matured. Remember, let me repeat: the ego can be dissolved only when it has become mature. I am not against the ego, I am all for it – but I don’t confine myself to it. One has to go beyond it.

Just the other day I was reading Frankl’s book. He says ‘We must be willing to discard personality.’ Why should we be willing to discard personality? And how can you discard personality if you have not grown it? Only the perfectly ripe can be discarded.

What is personality? Personality is a persona, a mask. It is needed. The child has no mask, that’s why he looks so animal-like. The collective mind has a mask, but imposed from the outside; it has no interior definition of its being. The egoist, the individual mind, has an interior definition; he knows who he is, he has a kind of integration. Of course, the integration is not ultimate and will have to be dropped, but it can be dropped only when it has been attained.

‘We must be willing to discard personality. God is no respecter of persons.’ That’s true. God loves individuals, but not persons. And the difference is great. A person is one who has an ego definition. An individual is one who has dropped his ego, and knows who he is. A person is a circle with a centre; and the individual is a circle without the centre – just pure space.

‘The personality is only a mask, it is a theatrical creation, a mere stage-prop.’ The longing for freedom, salvation or nirvana, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality and the prison that it creates.

‘The trouble with the self is that it is derived from others.’ Your ego is also derived from others. You depend for your ego on the others. If you go to the Himalayas and sit in a cave, what ego will you have? By and by the ego will start disappearing. It needs support. Somebody needs to appreciate it. Somebody needs to say to you that you are a beautiful person. Somebody needs to go on feeding it. The ego can exist only in society. Although it tries to get rid of society, in a subtle, unconscious way it remains dependent on the society.

‘The trouble with the self is that it is derived from others. It is constructed in an attempt to live up to the expectation of others. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves.’

The self is not you. It belongs to others who surround you. It exists in you, but it is possessed by others. That’s why it is so easy to manipulate an egoistic person. That’s what flattery is: flattery is a trick to manipulate the egoistic person. You go and say to him that he is the greatest man in the world, and he is ready to fall at your feet; you are manipulating. He knows, you know and everybody else knows that this is just false. He also knows that he is not the greatest man in the world, but he will believe it. He would like to believe it. And he would like to do anything that you want him to do. At least one person in the world believes that he is the greatest person. He cannot afford to lose you.

The ego exists in you but is possessed by others. It is the subtlest slavery yet invented by the priests and the politicians. It is like a Delgado electrode inserted in your head and manipulated by remote control.

The society is very clever. First, it tries to keep you at the second level. If you go beyond that, then it starts manipulating you through flattery.

You will be surprised that in India there has never been a revolution. And the reason? The reason is that the Brahmin, the intellectual, was so much flattered down the ages that he was never angry enough to revolt against the society. And only intellectuals revolt – only intellectuals, because they are the most egoistic people. They are the most independent people – the intelligentsia. And because in India the Brahmin was the highest… There was no one higher than him – even the king was lower than the Brahmin. A beggar Brahmin was higher than the emperor, and the emperor used to touch his feet. Now there was no possibility of revolution because who would do the revolution? These are the people, these intellectuals, who create trouble. Now they are respected highly, they are flattered highly… The revolution could not exist – it was not possible.

It has been the same thing in Soviet Russia. For these fifty years in Soviet society, the intellectual has been praised as much as anything. The academician, the writer, the poet, the professor – they are the most highly respected persons. Now who is going to do the revolution? Revolution is not possible, because the revolutionary has much investment in the conventional mode of the society, in the traditional society.

In India revolution didn’t happen, and in Russia it cannot happen. Revolution is possible only through the egoist. But the egoist can be manipulated very easily. Give him the Nobel Prize, give him a doctorate, and he is ready to do anything.

This third state of mind is now prevalent all over the world. If it is satisfied, then you are stuck in it. If it is not satisfied, then you fall back and become mad. Both are not healthy situations.

One has to go beyond it, and the fourth state, the universal mind, has to be created. The separation with the cosmos has to disappear. You have to become one with the whole. In fact you Are One, you just think that you are not. That barrier of the thought has to be dissolved. Then there is relaxation, peace, non-violence. In India we say: Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam: Then there is truth, there is good, and there is beauty. With the universal mind these three things flower: Satyam – truth, Shivam – good, Sunderam – beauty. With the universal mind these three flowers come into bloom, and there is great joy. You have disappeared, and all the energy that was involved in the ego is freed. That energy becomes beauty, good, truth.

This is the state of matriarchy. The collective mind is patriarchy; the individual mind is fraternity; and the universal mind is matriarchy. Mother love is non-demanding, so is the love of the universe towards you. It demands nothing, it is unconditional, it is simply showering on you. It is for you to take or not to take, but it is showering on you. If you have the ego then your doors are closed and you don’t take it. If the ego has disappeared, then it goes on and on showering on you, goes on nourishing you, goes on fulfilling you.

The first stage was chaotic, the second was intellectual, the third was intelligent. The fourth is emotional: it is of love, of the heart. With the third, intellect comes to its peak; with the fourth, love starts flowing.

This state can be called ‘God as mother’. When God as father has died, God as mother has to arise. This is a higher stage of religion. When father is important, the religion is more institutional, formal – because father himself is formal, institutional. Mother is more natural, more biological, more intrinsic. Father is external, mother is internal.

The universal mind brings the matriarchy. Mother becomes more important. God is no more a he, but becomes a she. Life is thought about, not according to logic, but according to love.

The poet Schiller has called it ‘the universal kiss’. If you are available, the universal mother can kiss you, can embrace you, can take you again into her womb. Yes comes again into existence, but it is no more imposed from the outside, it comes from your innermost core. This is trust. The collective mind lives in faith. The individual mind lives in doubt, the universal mind lives in trust – Shraddha. It is not belief, it is not that somebody has forced you to believe; it is your own vision, it is your own experience.

This is true religion: when you can become a witness of God, of Samadhi, of prayer; when you are the witness; when you have not taken it as borrowed – it is no more knowledge, no more belief – it has become your own existential experience. Solidarity again enters, but it is solidarity with existence itself, not with society. Creativity again comes, but it is no more the egoistic creativity. It is not you as doer – you become instrumental – God is the doer. Then God flows through you. You may create great poetry. In fact, you cannot create great poetry before it. The ego will create a shadow; the ego can never be transparent. The real creativity is possible only with the universal.

You must have read Gopi Krishna’s books on kundalini. He says that when kundalini arises, great creativity arises. That’s true. But whatsoever he gives as examples are not true. He says Sri Aurobindo became creative when his kundalini arose. But Sri Aurobindo has written poetry which is simply mediocre. Although it is not creative, at least it is mediocre. But Gopi Krishna has written poetry which cannot even be called mediocre – just rubbish, junk.

Yes, when you come to the universal, great creativity is born. Your very touch becomes creative.

There is an ancient story in Buddhist scriptures…

A very rich man accumulated much wealth – accumulated so much gold that there was no place to hoard it any more. But suddenly something happened. One morning he woke up and saw that all his gold had turned into dust. You can think he must have gone mad.

Somebody helped him towards Buddha – Buddha was staying in the town – and the man went there. And Buddha said ‘You do one thing. Take all your gold into the market-place, and if somebody recognises it as gold, bring that man to me.’

But he said ‘How is it going to help me?’

Buddha said ‘It is going to help you. Go.’

So he took all his gold – thousands of bullock-carts of dust, because now it was all dust. The whole market was full of his bullock-carts. And people were coming and asking ‘What nonsense is this? Why are you carrying so much dust to the market-place? For what?’

But the man kept quiet.

Then a woman came. Her name was Kisagautami. And she said to this man ‘So much gold?

From where could you get so much gold?’

He asked the woman ‘Can you see the gold here?’

She said ‘Oh yes. These thousand bullock-carts are full of gold.’

He took hold of the woman and asked her what secret she had. ‘How can she see? Because nobody… not even I can see that there is any gold; it is all dust.’

He took the woman to Buddha, and Buddha said ‘You have found the right woman – she will teach you the art. It is only a question of seeing. The world is as you see it. It can be hell, it can be heaven. Gold can be dust, and dust can be gold. It is a question of how you look at it. This is the right woman. You become a disciple of Kisagautami. She will teach you. And the day you know how to see rightly, the whole world turns into gold. That is the secret of alchemy.’

That Kisagautami was a rare woman of those days. And the man learnt through her the art of turning the whole world into gold.

When you enter the universal mind you are capable of creativity – not as you, but as God. You become a hollow bamboo and his song starts descending through you. He turns you into a flute.

If from the third, the fourth is not available you will fall into madness. Nietzsche talks only of three minds: the camel, the lion and the child. From the lion he falls back into the child: becomes mad.

There is another door too, and that is the universal mind – which is really childhood again, but a second childhood. It is no more like the first; it is not chaotic, it has a self-discipline. It has an inner cosmos, an inner order – not irresponsible like the first, not responsible like the second. A new responsibility, not towards any values, not towards any society, but a second kind of valuation arises because you can see what is right – how can you do otherwise? You see the right and the right has to be done. Knowledge here becomes virtue. You act according to your awareness; your life is transformed. There is innocence, there is intelligence, there is love, but all is coming from your innermost core; your inner fountain is flowing.

And then the fifth, the last, when you go even beyond the universal. Because even to think that it is the universal mind is to think. You have some ideas of the individual and the universe still left lingering somewhere. You are still conscious that you are one with the whole, but you Are, and you Are one with the whole. The unity is not yet total, is not utter, is not ultimate. When the unity is really ultimate, there is no individual, no universal. This is the fifth mind: Christ-mind, Buddha-mind.

Now three other characteristics appear: Satchitananda. Sat means being, Chit means consciousness, Ananda means bliss. Now these three qualities appear, now these new flowers bloom in your being. You are for the first time a being, becoming is no more. Man has surpassed himself, the bridge is no more. You have come home, you are a being: Sat. And you are utterly conscious because there is no darkness left: Chit. And you are Ananda, because there is no anxiety, no tension, no misery. All that is gone; the nightmare is over. You are fully awake. In that wakefulness is Buddha-hood, or Christhood.

These are the five stages. And remember, the third is the central. Two are below it, two are above it. If you don’t go above you will fall below. And you cannot go above without passing through the third, remember. These are the complexities. If you try to avoid the third you will remain stuck in the second, and you can think that it is universal. It is not, it is simply collective. If you try to avoid the third, you may even remain in the first, which is idiotic. And sometimes the idiotic looks saintly.

In Hindi we have two words from one root for both the stages; that root is Budh. The fifth we call Buddha, the ultimate stage, and the first we call Buddhu, the idiotic stage. Sometimes the idiot looks like the saint – he has some similarities, and sometimes the saint looks like the idiot. But they are far away – the farthest points in existence. Jesus sometimes looks idiotic. And there have been many idiots who looked like Jesus. The similarity is that both are without mind. The idiot is below mind and the Christ is above mind, but both are beyond mind. That is the similarity, but that is where it ends too. Beyond that nothing is similar.

Remember, the first is not the goal, it is the beginning. The second is very comfortable, but comfort is not the question – creativity. The third is creative but very uncomfortable, very anxious, tense. And how long can you remain creative? – There is so much tension. The tension has to be lost; hence, the fourth. In the fourth all is silent. Just the last lingering of the ego has remained, that one feels ‘I am one with the whole.’

A disciple of Rinzai came to the Master and said ‘I have become one with the whole! Now what next?’

The Master turned him out and told him ‘Now you get rid of this idea that you have become one with the whole. Get rid of this idea – this is the last barrier.’

Another disciple said to Rinzai ‘I have attained to nothing.’

And Rinzai said ‘Drop it. Drop that too!’

With the fourth just a very thin wall-almost transparent, you cannot see it – remains. That also has to be dropped; then arises the fifth.

– Osho

From I Say Unto You, V. 1, Discourse #5

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