Month: November 2016

Repentance Becomes Forgiveness – Osho

Christianity has a tremendously beautiful concept of forgiveness. Christianity says: If you ask to be forgiven from your deepest core, you will be forgiven. Why? Is there somebody who can forgive you? No, but if you ask in intense passion to be forgiven, the very idea of repentance becomes forgiveness. If you have really asked, realized that you have done something wrong; if it has been a total realization and you accept the responsibility that it was wrong and that you are ready to repent for it and you repent wholeheartedly, the very repentance becomes the forgiveness. Then there is no need to do anything else, because all sins are nothing but unconscious acts. Repentance makes you conscious, alert. Sin is like darkness. You bring a light, a lamp into darkness and darkness disappears. Sin is because you are asleep.

If you repent, you awake yourself. Because there is no other way to repent unless you awake yourself, unless you come to realize and see what you have been doing, how you have been living, how you have been wasting, how you have been hurting. When you come to realize it, a flame starts burning in you, an awareness; and in that awareness, in that light, darkness disappears. It is not that there is a God personified sitting somewhere on a throne in heaven who goes on forgiving you. There is nobody to forgive you. But if you repent, you will be forgiven.

God is not a person; God is the totality. God is existence, the totality of being. It is not that you have to pray to Him so that He can forgive, no. In your praying you are forgiven. The very prayer, the very recognition that you have been wrong and you recognize it and you repent, is enough. All that you have been up to then is wiped, washed. You are cleansed of it. The old is gone, the new is born. This is resurrection.

-Osho

Excerpt from Come Follow To You, V. 4, Discourse #11 (previously titled Come Follow Me, V. 4)

come-follow-me-v-4

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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.

Never Really Here – Jean Klein

klein2Here is something which strikes me as being rather significant, and it happens every day, one does one thing while thinking about another. For instance I often happen to put my keys down somewhere, and the next moment I can’t remember where they are, because I was thinking of something else and I was not really present. Is this not a very ordinary example showing that most of the time we are not present to ourselves?

 Yes it is. We are always somewhere else, living ahead or behind in time, we long for the future or we regret the past. We are never really here. This flight in time is of great significance. If we turn away from the present, or rather if the present is so often unable to hold our attention, it is because we conceive of it as being a known and registered reality, therefore devoid of interest, or as a disappointing one. Just so long as we have not understood that true bliss is not in objects, but in us, we continue to place our hope in the future and keep racing ahead. We thus live in a state of imbalance, bent upon, and striving endlessly towards, the future.

What we must come to understand is that awareness in the present is the only true starting point and that this starting point is at the same time the point of arrival.

-Jean Klein

From Be Who You Are, Chapter One

You can read more from Jean Klein here.

Your Responsibility is Great – Osho

You spoke the other day about the great responsibility we have to get your words out to the world. Can you say some more?

The most important need of humanity today is to be made aware that its past has betrayed it. There is no point in continuing the past, it will be suicidal.

A new humanity is absolutely and urgently needed.

The new humanity will not be a society in the old sense, where individuals are only parts of it. The new humanity will be a meeting of individuals, where individuals are the masters and society is to serve them. It will have many different aspects to it. It will not have so many religions; it will have only a religious consciousness. It will not have a despot God as a creator, because that implies the slavery of man. It will have godliness as a quality of ultimate achievement, a quality of enlightenment. God will be spread all over – in everything, in every being.

The individual, for the first time, will not be programmed; he will be helped to be himself. He will not be given any ideals, any discipline, any certain pattern. He will be given only a tremendous love for freedom, so that he can sacrifice everything, even his own life, but he cannot sacrifice freedom. The new individual will not be repressive; he will be natural, with no inhibitions, expressive of everything that he has. Just the way plants express themselves in different colors, in different fragrances, each individual will be doing the same.

The new individual will not have the false idea that all human beings are equal. They are not. They are unique, which is a far higher concept than equality. Although the new individuals will not be equal, they will have equal opportunity to develop their potential, whatever it is.

There will be no marriage; love will be the only law. Children will be part of the commune, and only the commune will decide who is capable of being a mother and who is capable of being a father. It cannot be at random and accidental. And it will be according to the needs of the earth. The new humanity will have an ecology in which nature is not to be conquered, but lived and loved.

We are part of it – how can we conquer it? It will not have any races, no distinctions between nations, between colors, castes. It will not have any nations, any states. It will have only a functional world government, and the world government will not be chosen by mediocre voters – because they necessarily chose people of their own category.

It will have a totally different pattern. Just as we don’t allow anybody to vote before he is twenty-one years old – he has to be adult – in exactly the same way, unless everybody is well-educated and has at least a bachelor’s degree, he will not be allowed to vote. And the people will vote, not for any party – because there will be no party at all, it will be a no-party system – people will vote directly for individuals.

An education minister, a foreign minister, an interior minister, a president – these people will stand on their individual merit. Just as no voter can have less than a bachelor’s degree, nobody can stand for any post who does not have a doctorate in that particular subject. So all those who will be standing for the post will be experts on the same subject, and the choice will be by the educated, by the intelligent.

And the government will not be in the old sense a government. It won’t have any power, it will be simply functional. It will be the servant of the society in the real sense, not only in words.

Life has so many dimensions, and politics has dominated them all. Looking at a newspaper, somebody on some other planet could not conceive what kind of people live on the earth – only politicians? Murderers? Suicides? Rapists? Criminals?  Because your newspapers are full of these people. And on top of everything is the politician.

Every creative dimension of life will be brought out into the light, and the ugly aspects don’t need to be advertised. If somebody has murdered, it should be brought to light – not to say that he was a criminal, but to show how the very psychology of the man, the upbringing of the man went wrong, and why he had to commit murder. In his place, with the same background, anybody would have done the same. So you are not condemning the person, you are condemning the training, the background, the upbringing; this is absolutely scientific.

Why does a man become a rapist? – Because his background was creating the energy to be a rapist… although he was trying to be a Baptist, he ended up being a rapist! So the negative part should be brought out, but the individual should never be condemned because no action is equal to the whole individual. The action is a small part of his whole life.

The newspapers should be full of creativity, positivity. Ninety percent of a newspaper should give coverage to musicians, poets, sculptors, dancers, actors, philosophers and only ten percent should be given to the politicians and the negative elements. The negative elements should be analyzed so the individual is not condemned. And the politicians should only be given space as information, not more than that. If they are doing something good it should be said, if they are doing something not good it should be said – but they should not be dominating our whole life.

The new humanity will have to change the whole structure of its education. It will not be ambitious; it will not create a desperate desire in everybody to become somebody powerful. On the contrary, it will create creators. It will create people who know how to rejoice. Its basic function should be to teach people the art of living, loving, laughing, the capacity to sing, dance, paint.

There will be people who have to be trained for technology, science, but even those who are being trained for technology and science or medicine should not be kept completely unconscious of the beautiful side of life. They should not become robots – because what you do, you become. If you are continuously researching about objects, soon you forget that you are a subject; you become an object.

And each individual who enters a school, college, or university should have hypnotic sessions in which he can be encouraged to meditate – so meditation comes from within him, it is not imposed from the outside. It is not compulsory to meditate, but it becomes compulsory to meditate because it is coming from the inside.

And that is the beauty of hypnosis, that it can put the seed in your very heart, and when things come from there you never feel that something has been forced on you. And things like meditation cannot be forced; then there is resentment. But hypnosis is a great art: it can help man drop all kinds of resentment, all kinds of jealousies, hatred, competition. It can clean man’s inner shrine so completely that everybody grows up and does not only grow old.

So when I said the word has to be spread, I meant that the new man is an absolute necessity. The old is dead or is dying… cannot survive long. And if we cannot produce a new human being, then humanity will disappear from the earth – and that will be ugly.

And I told you to spread the word because they are trying every hindrance to keep me from approaching people. But I will approach people. They are mediocre politicians: they cannot prevent me. They can delay me, but they cannot stop me unless some idiot goes absolutely mad and kills me.

In that case you have the word. And if I am not there, your responsibility becomes great. When I am here your responsibility is none; I can do it alone without any difficulty. But if I am not here, then your responsibilities tremendously increase. Then each of you has to represent me, and we have to see how many people they can crucify.

But the word has to go out because the word cannot be crucified. Ways and means have to be found for the word to reach to every corner of the earth, to every human being who can understand.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #34

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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.

He is the Breath Inside the Breath – Osho

Kabir says, ‘Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.’

Whenever you ask about God you ask as if God is there like a problem to be encountered. You ask as if you are standing outside God and speculating, observing Him. You ask as if God is an object. God is not an object, God is your subjectivity. God is not there outside, God is your interiority, your innerness. That is the meaning when Kabir says:

He is the breath inside the breath. 

Watch your breath and you will come to know what he means – you will see one thing which cannot be seen unless you watch your breath. Buddha made it a great technique for meditation, watching the breath, because through watching it you will come to know the breath inside the breath.

The word ‘breath’ means life. In Sanskrit the word for breath is prana: prana means life. In Hebrew the word for breath means spirit. In all the languages of the world, breath is thought to be synonymous with life or spirit or soul. But breath is not the real soul – you will come to this experience only when you watch.

Try a small experiment: sitting silently, just start watching your breath. The easiest way to watch is from the entrance of the nose. When the breath comes in, feel the touch of the breath at the entrance of the nose – watch it there. The touch will be easier to watch, breath will be too subtle; in the beginning just watch the touch. The breath goes in, and you feel it going in: watch it. And then follow it, go with it. You will find there comes a point where it stops. Just somewhere near your navel it stops – for a tiny, tiny moment, for a pal, it stops. Then it moves outwards again; then follow it – again feel the touch, the breath going out of the nose. Follow it, go with it outside – again you will come to a point, the breath stops for a very tiny moment. Then again the cycle starts.

Inhalation, gap, exhalation, gap, inhalation, gap. That gap is the most mysterious phenomenon inside you. When the breath comes in and stops and there is no movement, that is the point where one can meet God. Or when the breath goes out and stops and there is no movement.

Remember, you are not to stop it; it stops on its own. If you stop it you will miss the whole point, because the doer will come in and witnessing will disappear. You are not to do anything about it. You are not to change the breath pattern, you are neither to inhale nor to exhale. It is not like pranayama of yoga, where you start manipulating the breath; it is not that. You don’t touch the breath at all – you allow its naturalness, its natural flow. When it goes out you follow it, when it comes in you follow it.

And soon you will become aware that there are two gaps. In those two gaps is the door. And in those two gaps you will understand, you will see, that breath itself is not life – maybe a food for life, just like other foods, but not life itself. Because when the breathing stops you are there, perfectly there – you are perfectly conscious, utterly conscious. And the breath has stopped, breathing is no more there, and you are there.

And once you continue this watching of the breath – what Buddha calls vipassana or anapanasati you – if you go on watching it, watching it, watching it, slowly, slowly you will see the gap is increasing and becoming bigger. Finally it happens that for minutes together the gap remains. One breath goes in, and the gap… and for minutes the breath does not go out. All has stopped. The world has stopped, time has stopped, thinking has stopped. Because when the breath stops, thinking is not possible. And when the breath stops for minutes together, thinking is impossible, absolutely impossible – because the thought process needs continuous oxygen, and your thought process and your breathing are very deeply related.

When you are angry your breath has a different rhythm, when you are sexually stimulated you have a different breath rhythm, when you are silent a different breath rhythm again. When you are happy a different breath rhythm, when you are sad a different rhythm again. Your breathing goes on changing with the moods of the mind. The vice versa is also true – when the breath changes, the moods of the mind change. And when breath stops, mind stops.

In that stopping of the mind the whole world stops – because the mind is the world. And in that stopping you come to know for the first time what is the breath inside the breath: life inside life. That experience is liberating. That experience makes you alert of God – and God is not a person but the experience of life itself.

-Osho

From The Revolution, Discourse #3

 

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

Here you can listen to the discourse excerpt He is the Breath Inside the Breath.

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.

All a Bunch of Hogwash

robert-adamsYou have heard it said that you are your own worst enemy and this is true, you are your own worst enemy. Why? Because you live in a universe of light and bliss and yet you’re not seeing or feeling this light or bliss. You’re feeling something else. You’re seeing something else. And in your erroneous thinking you believe and feel if only things were going this way I would be so happy. This is an illusion. It really makes no difference which way things are going the only thing that matters is how you react to things that are moving along in your life. That is the only thing that matters. How you react to every situation that comes into your life. You begin by learning to leave the world alone. Have no feelings for or against. What do I mean by this, “Have no feelings for or against?” How would you be able to function? Yet there is truth in this statement.

As an example, you know the elections are coming up. Some of you like Clinton. Some of you like Bush. Some of you like Perot. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with this as long as you do not become emotional over it. As long as you do not become wild and feel it in your heart and begin to stick up for your rights. Telling everybody how good your man is and how bad the other party is, do you see what I’m saying? You’re not supposed to do nothing really, if you’re working with this world. You can get involved in the world but not mentally. That’s the secret. Physically you will do something, go out and vote if you like. Join the Peace Corp, protest, do whatever you like but mentally realize that it’s all a bunch of hogwash. In your mind be completely free. This is the way to live in this world.

-Robert Adams

From Satsang of Oct. 22, 1992