God Is Dead – Osho

Why did Friedrich Nietzsche declare that God is dead?

Narayana, he had to declare it, because God was dead. The God that had been worshipped for thousands of years was dead; not the real God, but the God that the human mind had created – the God that was in the temples and the mosques and the churches and the synagogues, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Vedas. Man has outgrown those concepts.

Nietzsche simply declared a fact. Of course, he was as shocked by it as everybody else was. He himself was not ready to accept it. In fact, for his whole life he struggled to accept it. He tried to convince himself by arguing that God is really dead, but it was difficult for the poor man. It would have been difficult for anybody. And he was a man of steel; he was no ordinary man, he was really a strong man, but still it was too much. He had to suffer tremendously because he was the first to declare it, and to be a pioneer is always dangerous. He went through a nervous breakdown. The last part of his life was a state of madness. He risked much for this declaration.

In his great book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, this parable appears….

‘God is dead’ is now almost a cliché. But when Nietzsche used that phrase it was like an earthquake, a thunderbolt from the skies – it shattered man’s illusions. But it is only half of his message, remember; the other half has been almost forgotten. He declared ’God is dead’ because he wanted to declare the coming of a new man. He called that new man ‘overman’ or ‘superman’. He said: If God continues to live the old way, man cannot assert himself in total freedom. Man cannot grow, man cannot mature. He will always remain dependent on the father-figure. God as the great father is dead: this is half of the message.

The other half is: now be on your own, stand on your own. Now become mature. Enough of this dependence! Enough of this stupid praying! Enough of your rituals! Stop these games!

Man has been playing many, many games in the name of God, and priests have been exploiting man in the name of God. Nietzsche put an end to all that; the world has never been the same again.

Although Nietzsche suffered much for his declaration, he has served humanity in a tremendous way: he heralded a new age.

The old God is dead – that is a very basic requirement for the new God to appear, a new vision of God, more in harmony with the modern, contemporary consciousness. The God of the Old Testament was perfectly right for the people who invented it. It was perfectly right for the people Moses was talking to; it was a language that they understood. Now thousands of years have passed; God needs new garments, and you go on and on putting the old, rotten garments on Him.

God is not dead. God cannot be dead! But the old concept is dead.

Zarathustra is entrusted by Nietzsche with the task of conveying the news of God’s death to the world.

As he starts on his journey he meets an old hermit, a saint. The saint tells Zarathustra that he himself loves God but not man, because man is too imperfect. Zarathustra replies that he loves man, and then he asks the saint what he is doing in the forest. The saint replies, “I make songs and sing them; and when I make songs I laugh, cry, and hum: thus I praise God.”

The two separate, laughing like young boys. But when Zarathustra is alone again he wonders to himself, “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!”

The old saint says he loves God, not man because man is imperfect, and Zarathustra says he loves man, and God is dead….

This is going to be the new religion. It has not yet become a reality, although a hundred years have passed since Nietzsche’s declaration, although the declaration has spread all over the world like wildfire. But the destructive part has happened; the creative part has not happened yet: Nietzsche declares the superman.

Man has to be loved, because it is only through the nourishment of love that man can grow. Man has to know that he is alone, and he has to know that he has to depend on his own resources and not on some heavenly father. Once man takes responsibility, total responsibility on his own shoulders, a great revolution is bound to happen, because man has infinite potential to grow. Remaining dependent on some God, he has completely become oblivious to his potential, to his future, to his growth.

It is good that God has been discarded. Now man has to take his life in his own hands. And the beauty is, if you become responsible, responsible for yourself, if you declare your freedom – you have to declare it because God is dead; there is nobody higher than you – if you accept that now you have to seek and search your way, you have to grope for it on your own, life will take a new plunge into the depths of the unknown. Life will become again an adventure. Life will again be an ecstatic discovery of new facts, new truths, of new territories, of new peaks of joy.

And it is only by becoming an adventurer that you will come upon the new face of God – which will be far more true than the old, because it will be far more mature than the old.

Nietzsche remained in difficulty: on the one hand he continued to fight with the old God; on the other hand, in moments when he was not so strong, he became scared too.

Zarathustra says,

Away!

He himself fled

My last, only companion,

My great enemy,

My unknown,

My hangman-god.

No! Do come back

With all thy tortures!

To the last of all that are lonely

Oh, come back!

All my tear-streams run

Their course to thee;

And my heart’s final flame –

Flares up for thee!

Oh, come back,

My unknown god! My pain!

My last – happiness!

These words look almost insane: “My unknown god! My pain! My last happiness! Ah, come back!”

Nietzsche remained divided, split, schizophrenic. One part of him was still afraid: “Maybe God IS alive”; maybe he was wrong. Who knows? How could one be certain about such profound matters? And he was the first to say it, so naturally he was scared. He wanted to get rid of the enemy. He called God ‘the enemy’, enemy of man, because God had been like a rock on the chest of man – your so-called God. I am not talking about the God of Buddha and Mahavir and Zarathustra and Jesus and Moses, no. I am talking about the God of the common masses, of the mob. Nietzsche is also talking about the mob.

The God of the crowds is an ugly concept: it shows much about your weaknesses, but shows nothing about the truth of existence. When you pray on your knees you simply show your weakness, not that you know what prayer is. When you go to the temple you go to demand something, to beg for something. You simply show your beggarliness but nothing about God. Very few people have known the truth of God.

If Nietzsche had met Buddha, Buddha would have perfectly agreed, and yet disagreed. He would have said, “You are right: God is dead, the God of the crowds. But there is another vision, the vision of the enlightened ones. Their God is not a person; their God is life in its essence. And how can life be dead? Trees are still green, birds are still singing, the sun is still there, the night still becomes poetry, love still happens. How can God be dead?”

God as existence can never be dead; God as a concept has to die many times. Each time man grows, the old concept has to be dropped. The old has been dropped.

The problem with the contemporary mind is: the old has been dropped, half the purpose of

Nietzsche’s declaration is fulfilled. The other half is missing: man has not yet become rooted in his own being; hence there is great meaninglessness all over the world. Everybody is feeling a kind of dullness, sadness, frustration. Everybody is living nothing but a kind of long, drawn-out misery, anxiety, anguish. Life has become synonymous with a kind of agony. All that you can do is use pain killers, tranquilizers, somehow go on pulling yourself together till death comes and you can rest forever.

Sigmund Freud says that man can never be happy. At the most we can reduce his unhappiness a little bit. At the most we can make him normally unhappy. That is the goal of psychoanalysis: to make people normally unhappy, to help them not to become abnormally unhappy. What kind of goal is this? But this has happened, and Freud was simply stating a fact. Looking at the modern man, looking into the unconscious of the modern man – and he was the one man who had looked deepest into the conscious and the unconscious mind – how could he lie? He had to say the truth.

He came to understand that it is impossible for happiness to happen. How can man ever be happy? – when God is dead, and when man has not searched for another vision, for another goal, for another star so that the journey can start again, the journey of meaning and significance. Without God, man can at the most be normally unhappy.

Freud’s conclusion is part of Nietzsche’s declaration.

My work here consists in doing the other half; hence I don’t talk much about God. Hence even if atheists come and want to become sannyasins, I accept them with an open heart. Even they are a little suspicious of why I am accepting them. They say, “We are atheists. We don’t believe in God. Are you still ready to accept us as sannyasins? Can we still meditate?”

And I say to them: you are the persons who can meditate! The person who believes in the old God cannot meditate: he depends too much on God; he is never a grown-up person. Meditation needs a certain growth. You can meditate; God is not needed. God is not a prerequisite for meditation, but when you meditate, slowly, slowly you become aware of God.

God is the ultimate revelation, not the prerequisite. God is not a condition to become a sannyasin; God is the ultimate realization of sannyas.

But then you will not be angry with Nietzsche, remember, because you will know that what he was saying is also true. He was talking about the concept of God.

Moses’s concept of God is certainly dead. When Moses died, his concept of God died. In fact, it lived too long; for three thousand years it continued to prevail. That simply shows the stupidity of humanity. Otherwise the moment an enlightened person leaves the world, his concept of God will also disappear. If we have learned anything from the enlightened person, we will go ahead, further ahead. We will stand on the shoulders of the enlightened person and we will be able to look further ahead than him. We will create better visions of God, beautiful visions of God. We will come closer and closer to the truth.

And remember, one can only come closer and closer to the truth. The moment you come absolutely to the truth, you disappear. Then only truth is.

Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” I say: I am dead and God is alive, very alive.

That’s what happens if you go on meditating: one day suddenly you find you are not, only God is.

-Osho

From The Guest, Discourse #14

The Guest

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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Translucent Darkness – Osho

Man up to now has lived in a very schizophrenic way. The reason why he has become divided is not very difficult to understand. For centuries he has been told that the world consists not of one world but of two worlds: the world of matter and the world of the spirit. This is absolute nonsense.

The world consists only of one truth. Of course, that truth has two aspects to it, but those aspects are indivisible. The outer aspect appears as matter and the inner as spirit. It is like a center and its circumference. This division has penetrated human mind in a thousand and one ways. It has become the separation between the body and the soul. It has become the separation between the lower and the higher. It has become the separation between the sin and the virtue. It has become the separation between the East and the West.

Man stands today so fragmented, so divided, that it is almost a miracle how we are managing to keep ourselves together. The whole energy is exhausted in just keeping ourselves together, because we are constantly falling apart.

The greatest need of the day it to get beyond this schizophrenia, to get beyond all divisions, to reach to the ‘one” which is neither this nor that, which is neither East nor West, which is neither man nor woman. That “one” has been called by the mystics God, truth, mokshanirvana, the absolute, Dhamma, Logos, Tao – different names but pointing to the same one reality. It was possible up to now somehow to go on living in a schizophrenic way, but now it is no longer possible.

We have come to a point where the decision has to be made. If we want to exist we have to create a synthesis, or rather a transcendence, of all dualities. If we don’t want to exist then there is no problem. If we want to commit a global suicide, then of course all problems are solved – but I don’t think anybody wants or desires a global suicide.

Man has achieved much in spite of all kinds of madness. Man has reached many peaks: religious, aesthetic, poetic, musical. And all this has happened in spite of all kinds of madness that we go on supporting, nourishing, because the vested interests don’t want you to be united and one; the vested interests want you to remain divided.

When Rudyard Kipling said, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he was giving expression to all the vested interests. They want the world to remain divided, they want man to remain divided – into many religions, philosophies, political ideologies, in every possible way they would like you not to become one. Why? – Because the man who is integrated and one is impossible to enslave. He cannot be exploited by the priests or by the politicians. In fact, he becomes absolutely free from all possibilities of exploitation and oppression. He becomes an individual, he becomes rebellious, he becomes intelligent. He becomes so sharp and clear that he can see through all superstitions, howsoever old and ancient. He can see the stupidity in which humanity has lived – and not only lived in but glorified. He can see the foolishness of nationalities, the utter nonsense of so many religions in the world.

There are three hundred religions’ in the world and at least three thousand sub-sects. He can see clearly that to divide matter from spirit is to create a division in the very being of man – because the body, matter, is nothing but spirit manifest, and the spirit is nothing but matter, body, unmanifest.

God and the world are not two things. God is not the creator and the world is not the created; God and the world are one. It is a process of creativity. You can divide creativity in two parts, the creator and the created, but in fact that division is arbitrary. It is ONE flow of creativity God is not the creator, let me remind you again and again and the world is not the created. This whole existence is a river-like creative energy.

My sannyasins have to understand this oneness in as many ways as possible so that no nook and corner of your being remains divided. The West is very proud of its materialism, science, technology. That pride hinders it from getting into a deep communion with the East, but that pride is nothing compared to the Eastern ego.

The Eastern ego is far more subtle and far more dangerous, far more poisonous. The Eastern ego pretends, projects, brags about its spirituality. Of course, the people who think they are spiritual can condemn the people who are materialists more easily than vice versa, because even the materialist feels somehow that matter is a lower reality. He may not even consciously believe in any higher reality, but the conditioning is so old – it has penetrated into the blood, into the bones, into the very marrow – that a man can become consciously a materialist but deep down he remains part of the whole heritage of humanity. Hence the Western ego is not much of a danger, but the Eastern ego is very dangerous – for the simple reason that it is more subtle, more hidden, not on the surface, more unconscious.

The East goes on proclaiming itself as the source of all spirituality, the source of all mysticism – which is patent nonsense. It depends only on ignorance. If you ask any Eastern so-called mahatma, you will be surprised that he knows nothing about other spiritual Masters who have existed in other parts of the world. He has not heard about Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Ko Hsuan. He has not heard about Lin Chi, Basho, Bokuju. He has not heard anything about Pythagoras, Heraclitus or Dionysius.

We are going to discuss Dionysius in this series. Dionysius is one of the greatest Buddhas ever.

And whenever the Eastern scholar by any chance, if at all, comes across a person like Dionysius, he starts thinking that he must have borrowed from the East. That seems to be a tacit assumption: that the East has some monopoly over spiritualism. Nobody has any monopoly. East or West cannot make any difference in man s spiritual growth. Jesus could become a Buddha in Jerusalem, Lao Tzu could become a Buddha in China, Dionysius could become a Buddha in Athens. There is no need to borrow from anybody.

Yes, in scientific experimentation we have discovered very recently a strange phenomenon: that whenever one scientist discovers something, almost simultaneously many people all around the earth discover the same thing in different ways. Albert Einstein is reported to have said, ”If I had not discovered the Theory of Relativity, then within two years somebody else was bound to discover it.”

Why does it happen that some scientist working somewhere far away in Soviet Russia discovers something almost simultaneously with some other scientist who is working in England or in America or in India or in Japan – not knowing anything of the other, not even being aware of the existence of the other, not knowing that somebody else is also working on the same problem?

Now it is becoming more and clearer that with all the great discoveries, although the initial effort is made by the conscious mind, the ultimate result always comes through the unconscious. And the deepest layer of the unconscious mind is collective. I am different from you as a person, you are different from me AS persons – as far as conscious mind is concerned. If you go a little deeper, we are not so different in the unconscious mind. If you go a little deeper still, we come even closer in the collective unconscious.

And the mystics say there is even a little more than the collective unconscious; they call it the universal unconscious, or God. That is the very center. At that center we all meet and we all are one. All the great insights come from that center. It is only a question of who is looking in that direction – he will get the insight first. Otherwise the insight starts happening to many people; they may not be looking at it and therefore they will miss it.

Alan Watts, writing on this small treatise of tremendous beauty, the Theologia Mystica of St. Dionysius, says that one is tempted, greatly tempted, to think that Dionysius must have visited the East; if not, then some Eastern mystic must have traveled to Athens.

In those days, when Dionysius lived, many Western travelers had started coming to India. With the coming of Alexander the Great many barriers were broken, many bridges were made. And it was not one sided: Eastern mystics also started traveling towards the West. Even Jaina monks, who live totally naked, for whom the Western climate is bound to be far more harmful than Poona is for you, they went to Alexandria, to Athens, to the farthest corners of the known world. The Jainas are referred to in ancient Athenian treatises as “gymnosophists.” Sophist means one who is searching for the truth and gymno comes from Jainu. “Gymnosophist” is the name for the Jaina mystics who had penetrated Athens. And there was great business going on between India and Greece. And, of course, with the businessmen, the traders coming and going, there was a great exchange of thoughts.

Alan Watts thinks either Dionysius visited India… because the way he speaks is so Eastern, the insight that he reveals is so Eastern. Even his words remind one of the Upanishads and nothing else. So Watts thinks either he visited the East or somebody from the East or many influences from the East somehow became available to him. But I am not tempted that way at all.

My own experience and understanding is this: that great truths erupt in many places in almost similar ways. Lao Tzu never came to India and nobody from India ever visited Lao Tzu. China and India were divided by the great Himalayan mountains; there was no business going on between India and China, no communication of any kind. Still, what Lao Tzu says is so similar to the Upanishads, is so synonymous with the teachings of Buddha, that there is a great temptation to believe that there must have been some communication – either Buddha has borrowed from Lao Tzu or Lao Tzu has borrowed from Buddha.

But I say to you, nobody has borrowed from anybody else, they have all drunk from the same source. And when you taste the ocean, whether you taste it on an Indian shore or on the Chinese shore, it makes no difference; it always tastes the same, the same salty taste. So is truth: it has the same taste, the same flavor, the same fragrance. Maybe in expressing it there is a possibility of a few differences of language, but that does not matter much. Sometimes even those differences are not there.

Dionysius is a Christian, and one of the real Christians. It seems Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of Dionysius and his Mystica; otherwise he would not have said that the first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago. In fact, there have been a few more Christs in the tradition of Christ. Dionysius is one of the most beautiful of them all. Then there is Meister Eckhart, St. Francis, Jacob Boehme and a few more – not many of course, because Christianity became such an organized religion that it became impossible for mystics to exist, or even if they existed they went underground. They had to; there was no other way.

It is just like today in Russia you cannot be a mystic without hiding yourself. Because to be a mystic in Russia means you are insane, you have to be hospitalized, you have to be given insulin shocks or electric shocks.

It is fortunate that Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mahavira were not born in today’s Soviet Russia. Jesus would not have been crucified in Soviet Russia, that is true, but he would have gone through far more sophisticated tortures. Crucifixion is a very primitive phenomenon, and not so dangerous either; it kills you, that’s all. Electric shocks will not kill you, but they will destroy all your splendor, all your glory, all your intelligence. They will force you to vegetate. Your life will become as lifeless as possible. You will continue to exist but it will be a mere existence, mere survival. Your dignity will be gone.

Jesus died a dignified man. He died with tremendous joy, he died fulfilled. But if he is born in Russia today he will have to die a very undignified death, or if he lives he will have to live a very undignified life.

In Russia now, a really religious person has to go underground. There are my sannyasins who have to go underground. They are working underground – in basements they meet in the darkness of the night. What an ugly world we have created, where you cannot meditate openly when you cannot discuss about truth, about love openly To meditate as if you are committing some crime does not show that humanity has progressed; in many ways it has regressed.

Christianity did the same for two thousand years in the West. Communism is an offshoot of Christianity. Whatsoever communists are doing now they have learned from the Christian popes. Christianity destroyed all possibilities of mysticism.

There were only two ways to avoid being persecuted. One was to go underground or escape to some desert, to some mountains. And the second possibility was to exist as a formal Christian on the surface, use the Christian language, and go on doing your inner work privately. That’s what Dionysius did.

You will be surprised to know: he was the first Bishop of Athens. He must have been a man of rare intelligence. To remain a Bishop of Athens and yet to penetrate the deepest mysteries of life like Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, he must have been a man of rare intelligence. He managed a facade. He deceived the Christian organization.

His treatise was not published while he was alive. He must have managed it in such a way that it was published only when he was dead. If the treatise had been published while he was alive he would have been expelled from the Church, persecuted, tortured. And a man of understanding, a man who is not suicidal in some way, would not like to be persecuted unnecessarily. If it becomes a necessity he accepts the challenge. But he is not looking for it; he is not in some way hankering to be a martyr. He is not suicidal, he is not violent towards himself.

Dionysius is a rare man: living with stupid Christianity and its rigid organization, being a bishop and still being able to reach to the ultimate peaks of consciousness is something worthy of praise.

Before we enter into these beautiful sutras of Dionysius, a few things have to be understood.

One: these sutras were written as letters to one of his disciples, Timothy. All that is really great, all that is really of the ultimate, of the transcendental, can only be communicated to disciples. It has to be addressed to those who love you, to those who have a deep attunement with your heart. It cannot be addressed to the mass, to the crowd, to the indifferent, to the antagonistic. Great truths are communed only when there is love. It is possible only between a Master and a disciple that a truth can be transferred.

The disciple means one who is open to receive. The disciple means one who trusts so totally that there is no question of arguing, because these profound mysteries cannot be argued about. Either you know or you don’t know – you cannot argue. There are no proofs for them, except your trust in the Master. Of course, if you trust the Master, the Master can take you to the window from where you can see the vast sky with all its splendor… millions of stars. But you will have to trust him at least this much: to allow him to hold your hand, to allow him to take you to the window. If you start arguing about the window and its existence and there is no way to convince you.

There are no proofs for God; there have never been there will never be. Those who have known have known; only because of deep intimacy, because of a love affair with the Master. It is not a question of convincing somebody, it is not conversion to a certain ideology; it is simply a mad love affair. You come across a man like Dionysius and the very presence of the man is enough: the very presence becomes a proof that there are many more things in life than you have ever dreamt of. The presence of the man penetrates your very heart. The presence of the man transpires something in you, triggers something in you of which you were never aware before. You start hearing a song, you start seeing a beauty, you start feeling a new mood of elation, ecstasy – for no visible reason. Then it becomes possible to surrender your ego to such a person.

When you surrender your ego to the Master, the Master is only an excuse. You are really surrendering to God, not to the Master. In fact you are simply surrendering. It is not of any importance to whom: the question is not to whom; the question is that you are surrendering the ego. The moment the ego is surrendered there is a possibility of communion.

These are letters from Dionysius to his most beloved disciple, Timothy.

The second thing to remember is: Christianity, in becoming the religion about Jesus, missed something of tremendous importance. Because it tried to become the religion about Jesus it could not become the religion of Jesus. And a religion about Jesus is not a religion of Jesus. In fact, the religion about Jesus is against the religion of Jesus, because when a religion becomes about a person you lose contact with his inner reality; you become concerned with his outer expressions.

Christianity became too much concerned about following Jesus as an example. Now, that is getting into a wrong direction. Nobody can follow Jesus as an example, his life cannot be an example to anybody else, because a certain life exists in a certain context. To be exactly like Jesus you will need the whole situation, the whole context in which Jesus existed. Where can you find the same context again? Life goes on changing; it is never the same even for two consecutive moments. You cannot be Jesus of Nazareth, impossible; there is no Nazareth anymore. You cannot be Jesus because that Jewish mind which crucified Jesus exists no more.

Amongst my sannyasins there are thousands of Jews. Jesus could not have believed his eyes if he had seen this! He was a Jew – he was born a Jew, he spoke the language of the Jews, he believed in all the fundamentals of the Judaic religion – still he could not find many followers. I am not a Jew – I don’t speak the language of the Jews, I don’t believe in the Judaic fundamentals – still I have been able to find thousands of Jews. The context has changed; it is a totally different world. Twenty centuries have passed.

Also, whenever you start trying to follow a certain person as an example you become imitative, you become false, you lose authenticity, you are no more yourself. And to make the point very emphatic, Christianity has insisted for two thousand years on a very absurd thing. The absurdity is that on the one hand Christianity says, “Follow Jesus, imitate Jesus! Let Jesus be your example!” and on the other hand the same Christianity goes on telling you that “Jesus is God, God’s only begotten Son, and you cannot be related to God in the same way.” Can you see the absurdity? On the one hand you say, “Follow Jesus, be like Jesus!” and on the other hand you make it absolutely impossible for yourself to be like Jesus, because Jesus has a special relationship with God and you cannot have that relationship; that is not possible.

Hence Christianity has created an impossible religion on the earth, telling people such nonsense. Such an absurd approach is bound to create guilt. People try to follow Jesus, but they cannot be Jesus-like; hence guilt arises, they feel guilty. No other religion has created so much guilt on the earth as Christianity. Christianity has proved the greatest calamity for the simple reason that religion is not supposed to create guilt. If religion creates guilt then it makes you depressed, then it makes you frustrated with yourself, then it creates a subtle suicidal instinct in you.

A true religion elates you, enhances, enriches your being, makes your life more festive, creates more possibilities for you to celebrate and rejoice. And Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, “Rejoice! Rejoice! I say unto you rejoice!” And what has Christianity done? It has done just the opposite. Dionysius was aware of this fact.

The third thing: the experience of truth is like music – yes, more like music than like anything else, because you cannot describe music to anybody else. You can say it was beautiful, but that is an evaluation, your judgment. You are not describing music, you are describing your mood that happened through the music. There is no way to describe the beauty of music.

The same is true about religious experience. That’s why authentic religion is always mystic. By “mystic” I mean something that can be felt, experienced, but can never be described. Even though you know it, you are incapable of making it known to others; you are almost dumb. The more you know, the more dumb you are. When you have known it absolutely you become almost an absolutely ignorant man.

Dionysius has a special word for it; he calls it agnosia. You must have heard the word “agnostic”; Bertrand Russell used the word for himself. The atheist says there is no God, but he says it as if he knows – that “as if” is always there – as if he has explored the whole reality and has come to know that there is no God. In declaring there is no God he is declaring his knowledge. He is a gnostic: he knows.Gnosis means knowledge. The theist says there is a God – as if he knows, as if he has attained, arrived. He is also a gnostic; he has gnosis, knowledge.

An agnostic means one who says, “I don’t know, neither this way nor that. I don’t know whether God is or God is not. I am utterly ignorant. ” Hence Bertrand Russell says, “I am agnostic.” He must have discovered the word in Dionysius: Agnosia. But Dionysius’ use of the word is far more potential, far more pregnant than Bertrand Russell’s; Bertrand Russell’s cannot be more than a logical statement. He is a logician, a mathematician; he has never meditated, he has never gone within himself. He says he is an agnostic, but he has never tried to go beyond it, as if agnosticism is the ultimate and there is nothing more to do about it.

My feeling is that he is not a true agnostic. The atheist says, “I know there is no God,” the theist says, ”I know that there is a God,” and the Bertrand Russellian agnosticism says, “I know there is no way of knowing” – but that knowledge, that tacit knowledge is there.

Dionysius says that one can know God only when one comes to the moment when one knows nothing: the state of not-knowing is the opening of the door. By agnosia he means exactly the same as the Upanishads mean. One of the most famous Upanishads, the Kenopanishad, says:

“It is conceived by him who conceives it not.
Who conceives it, knows it not.
It is not understood by those who understand it.
It is understood by those who understand it not.”

Or it reminds one of the Zen Master Yung-chia. In his Song of Enlightenment he says:

“You cannot grasp it;
you cannot get rid of it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
when you speak, it is silent.”

Or it reminds one of the great Socratic statement: “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.”

Agnosia means the state of not-knowing. That’s what samadhi is, that’s what meditation is all about: the state of not-knowing.

Meditation creates that state, agnosia. When meditation has helped you to burn all your knowledge, to unburden you of mountainous loads of conditioning when it has left you utterly silent, like a small child full of wonder and awe, that state is called in India samadhi. Samandhi means all is solved: there is no longer any question and there is no longer any answer; one is utterly silent. There is no longer any belief and no longer any doubt. Dionysius calls it agnosia. It is through agnosia that one comes to know.

This is the ultimate paradox of mysticism: that by not-knowing one comes to know it and by knowing one misses it. Not-knowing is far higher than all knowledge. The universities give you knowledge, but when you enter into the Buddhafield of a Master you are entering into an anti-university. In the university you learn more and more knowledge, information; you accumulate. In the anti-university of a Master you unlearn more and more… a moment comes when you know nothing.

It is a very strange moment, hence it has been described by Dionysius with tremendous beauty: he calls it “translucent darkness.” Many mystics have called it different names, but Dionysius seems to surpass them all. Translucent darkness… darkness which is pure light. He also calls it Docta Ignorantia, the doctrine of ignorance. He also calls it “knowing ignorance.” You can compare it with the knowledge of the knowledgeable people. The knowledgeable people are called by Dionysius people who have “ignorant knowledge.” So he divides people in two categories: those who belong to the world of ignorant knowledge – they know much, knowing nothing – and the second category, the people who belong to the world of knowing ignorance – they know nothing, hence they know all.

-Osho

From Theologia Mystica, Discourse #1

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.

Nothing Is Found – Osho

I was brought up in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, but I could not yet break through my barriers towards him. Although I believe him to be right in the way he shows that for the West, the possibility to free ourselves from ‘maya’ is to learn to think in the right way. By doing this and by meditating, he says we are able to lose our egos and find our ‘I”.

The central figure for him is Christ, whom he differentiates from Jesus as a totally different being. Your way seems different to me. Can you please advise me? I am somehow torn between you and the way Steiner shows.

Rudolph Steiner was a great mind, but mind you, I say ‘a great mind’, and mind as such has nothing to do with religion. He was tremendously talented. In fact, it is very rare to find another mind to compare with Rudolph Steiner. He was so talented in so many directions and dimensions; it looks almost super-human: a great logical thinker, a great philosopher, a great architect, a great educator, and so on and so forth. And whatsoever he touched, he brought very novel ideas to that subject. Wherever he moved his eyes, he created new patterns of thought. He was a great man, a great mind, but mind as such, small or great, has nothing to do with religion.

Religion comes out of no-mind. Religion is not a talent, it is your nature. If you want to be a great painter, you have to be talented; if you want to be a great poet, you have to be talented; if you want to be a scientist, of course, you have to be talented; but if you want to be religious, no special talent is needed. Anybody, small or great, who is willing to drop his mind, enters into the dimension of the divine. And of course, great talented men find it very difficult to drop their minds; their investment is bigger. For an ordinary man who has no talent, it is very easy to drop the mind. Even then it seems so difficult. He has nothing to lose; still he goes on clinging. Of course, the difficulty is multiplied when you have a talented mind, when you are a genius. Then your whole ego is invested in your mind. You cannot drop it.

Rudolph Steiner founded a new movement called anthroposophy, against theosophy. He was a theosophist in the beginning, then his ego started fighting other egos in the movement. He wanted to become the very head, the supreme-most of the theosophical movement in the world, the world head. That was not possible; there were many other egos. And the greatest problem was coming from J. Krishnamurti, who is not an ego at all. And of course, theosophists were thinking more and more towards Krishnamurti. He was becoming, by and by, the messiah. That created trouble in Rudolph Steiner’s mind. He broke off from the movement. The whole German section of theosophy broke with him. He was really a very, very convincing orator, a convincing writer; he convinced people. He destroyed theosophy very badly, he divided it. And since then theosophy could never become whole and healthy.

Rudolph Steiner has an appeal for the Western mind, and that is the danger – because the Western mind is basically logic-oriented: reason, thinking, logos. He talks about it, and he says, “This is the way for the Western mind.” No, Eastern or Western, mind is mind; and the way is no-mind. If you are Eastern, you will have to drop the Eastern mind. If you are Western, you will have to drop the Western mind. To move into meditation, mind, as such, has to be dropped. If you are a Christian you will have to drop a Christian mind. If you are a Hindu, you will have to drop the Hindu mind. Meditation is not concerned with Christian, Hindu, Eastern, Western, Indian or German, no.

What is mind? Mind is a conditioning given to you by the society. It is an over-imposition on the original mind, which we call no-mind. Just so that you don’t get confused, all mind, as such, has to be dropped. The passage has to be completely empty for the divine to enter into you. Thinking is not meditation. Even right thinking is not meditation. Wrong or right, thinking has to be dropped. When there is no thought in you, no clouds of thinking in you, the ego disappears. And remember, when the ego disappears the ‘I’ is not found. The questioner says that Rudolf Steiner says, “When the ego disappears, the ‘I’ is found.” No, when the ego disappears ‘I’ is not found. Nothing is found. Yes, exactly; nothing… is found.

Just the other night I was telling a story of a great Zen master, To-san. He became empty, he became enlightened, he became a non-being; what Buddhists call anatta, no-mind. The rumor reached to the gods that somebody had again become enlightened. And of course, when somebody becomes enlightened, gods want to see his face – the beauty of it, the beauty of the original, the virginity of it. Gods came down to the monastery To-san lived in. They looked and looked, and they tried, and they would enter into him from one side, and get out from another side, and nobody was found inside To-san. They were very frustrated. They wanted to see the face, the original face, and there was nobody. They tried many devices, and then one very cunning god, clever, said, “Do one thing”: he ran into the kitchen of the monastery, brought handfuls of rice and wheat. To-san was coming from his morning walk and he threw it on his path.

In a Zen monastery, everything has to be respected absolutely; even rice and wheat, stones, everything has to be respected. One has to be continuously careful and aware. Not even a grain of rice can you find in a Zen monastery lying here and there. You have to be respectful. And remember, that respect has nothing to do with Gandhian economics. It is not a question of economy, because Gandhian economy is nothing but rationalized miserliness. It has nothing to do with miserliness. It is a simple respect for everything, absolute respect. This was disrespectful. This is the original idea of the Upanishads where seers have said, anambrahma – food is God – because food gives you life, food is your energy. God comes into your body through food, becomes your blood, your bones, so a god should be treated as a god. When those gods threw rice and wheat on the path where To-san came, he could not believe: “Who has done this? Who has been so careless?” A thought arose in his mind, and the story is that gods could see his face for a single moment, because for a single moment the ‘I’ arose in a very subtle way: “Who has done this? Something has gone wrong.”

And whenever you decide what is wrong and what is right, you are there, immediately. Between the right and the wrong exists the ego. Between one thought and another thought exists the ego. Each thought brings its own ego. For a moment, a cloud arose in To-san’s consciousness – “Who has done this?” – a tension. Each thought is a tension. Even very ordinary, very innocent-looking thoughts are tensions.

You see the garden is beautiful, and the sun is rising, and the birds are singing, and an idea arises, “How beautiful!” Even that, that is a tension. That’s why if somebody is walking by your side, you will immediately say to him, “Look, what a beautiful morning!” What are you doing? You are simply releasing the tension that has come through the thought. Beautiful morning… a thought has come; it has created a tension around it. Your being is no more non-tense. It has to be released, so you speak to the other. It is meaningless because he is also standing just where you are standing. He is also listening to the birds, he is also seeing the sun rise, he is also looking at the flowers, so what is the point of saying something like “this is beautiful”? Is he blind? But that is not the point. You are not communicating any message to him. The message is as clear to him as to you. In fact, you are relieving yourself of a tension. By saying it, the thought is dispersed into the atmosphere; you are relieved of the burden.

A thought arose in To-san’s mind, a cloud gathered, and through that cloud the gods were able to see his face, just a glimpse. Again the cloud disappeared, again there was no longer any To-san.

Remember, this is what meditation is all about, to destroy you so utterly that even if gods come they cannot seek you, they cannot find you. You yourself have found when such a situation arises, that not even gods can find you. There is nobody inside to be found. That ‘somebodiness’ is a sort of tension. That’s why people who think they are somebodies are more tense. People who think that they are nobodies are less tense. People who have completely forgotten that they are, are tensionless. So remember, when the ego is lost, the ’I’ is not found. When the ego is lost nothing is found. That nothingness, that purity of nothingness is your being, your innermost core, your very nature, your Buddha-nature, your awareness – like a vast sky with no clouds gathered in it.

Now, listen to the question again.

I was brought up in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner.

Yes, they are teachings, and what I am doing here is not teaching you anything. Rather, on the contrary, I am taking all teachings away from you. I am not a teacher. I am not imparting knowledge to you. My whole effort is to destroy all that you think you know. My whole effort is to take all knowledge from you. I’m here to help you to unlearn.

I was brought up in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, but I could not yet break through my barriers towards him.

Nobody is able to break his barriers towards a person who is himself ego-oriented. It is difficult to break your barriers towards a person who is no more. Even then, it is so difficult to break your barriers because your ego resists. But when you are around a teacher who has his own ego-trip still alive, who is still, who is still trying to be somebody, who is still tense, it is impossible to drop down your ego.

Although I believe him to be right in the way he shows that for the West, the possibility to free ourselves from maya is to learn to think in the right way.

No, the way for the East or for the West is: how to unlearn thinking, how not to think, and just be. And it is needed more for the West than for the East, because in the West the whole two millennia since Aristotle have been of conditioning you for thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking has been the goal. The thinking mind has been the goal in the West: how to become more and more accurate, scientific in your thinking. The whole scientific world arose out of this effort, because when you are working as a scientist you have to think. You have to work out in the objective world, and you have to find more accurate, exact, valid ways of thinking. And it has paid off too much. Science has been a great success, so of course people think that the same methodology will be helpful when you go inwards. That is the fallacy of Rudolph Steiner.

He thinks that in the same way as we have been able to penetrate into matter, the same method will help to go in. It cannot help, because to go in one has to move in just the opposite direction, diametrically opposite. If thinking helps to know matter, no thinking will help to know yourself. If logic helps to know matter, something like a Zen koan, something absurd, illogical, will help you to go in: faith, trust, love, maybe; but logic, never. Whatsoever has helped you to know the world better is going to be a barrier inside. And the same is true about the outer world also: whatsoever helps you to know yourself will not necessarily help you to know matter. That’s why the East could not develop science.

The first glimpses of science had come to the East, but the East could not develop it. The East did not move in that direction. The basic rudimentary knowledge was developed in the East.

For example: mathematical symbols, figures from one to ten, were developed in India. That made mathematics possible. It was a great discovery, but there it stopped. The beginning happened, but the East could not go very far in that direction. Because of that, in all the languages of the world, the numerals, mathematical numerals, carry Sanskrit roots.

For example: two is Sanskrit dwa – it became twa, and then two. Three is Sanskrit tri – it became three. Six is Sanskrit sasth – it became six. Seven is Sanskrit sapt – it became seven. Eight is Sanskrit ast – it became eight. Nine is Sanskrit nawa – it became nine. The basic discovery is Indian, but then it stopped there.

In China they developed ammunition for the first time, almost five thousand years back, but they never made any bombs out of it. They made only fireworks. They enjoyed, they loved it, they played with it, but it was a toy. They never killed anybody through it. They never went too far into it.

The East has discovered many basic things, but has not gone deep into it. It cannot go, because the whole effort is to go within. Science is a Western effort; religion is an Eastern effort. In the West even religion tries to be scientific. That was what Rudolph Steiner was doing: trying to make the religious approach more and more scientific – because in the West, science is valuable. If you can prove that religion is also scientific, then religion also becomes valuable in a vicarious way, indirectly. So in the West, every religious person goes on trying to prove that science is not the only science, religion is also a science. In the East we have not bothered. It is just the other way round: if there was some scientific discovery, the people who had discovered it had to prove that it had some religious significance. Otherwise, it was meaningless.

By doing this and by meditating, he says we are able to lose our ego and find our ’I’.

Rudolph Steiner does not know what meditation is, and what he calls meditation is concentration. He’s completely confused: he calls concentration meditation. Concentration is not meditation.

Concentration is again a very, very useful means for scientific thinking. It is to concentrate the mind, narrow the mind, focus the mind on a certain thing. But the mind remains, becomes more focused, becomes more integrated.

Meditation is not concentrating on anything. In fact, it is a relaxing, not narrowing. In concentration there is an object. In meditation there is no object at all. You are simply lost in an objectless consciousness, a diffusion of consciousness. Concentration is exclusive to something, and everything else is excluded from it. It includes only one thing; it excludes everything else.

For example: if you are listening to me you can listen in two ways: you can listen through concentration; then you are tense, and you are focused on what I am saying. Then the birds will be singing, but you will not listen to them. You will think that is a distraction.

Distraction arises out of your-effort to concentrate. Distraction is a by-product of concentration. You can listen to me in a meditative way; then you are simply open, available – you listen to me, and you listen to the birds also, and the wind passes through the trees and creates a sound; you listen to that also – then you are simultaneously here. Then whatsoever is happening here, you are available to it without any mind of your own, without any choice of your own. You don’t say, “I will listen to this and I will not listen. to that.” No, you listen to the whole existence. Then birds and I and the wind are not three separate things. They are not. They are happening simultaneously, together, all together, and you listen to the whole. Of course, then your understanding will be tremendously enriched because the birds are also saying the same thing in their way, and the wind is also carrying the same message in its way, and I am also saying the same thing in a linguistic way, so that you can understand it more. Otherwise, the message is the same. Mediums differ, but the message is the same, because God is the message.

When a cuckoo goes crazy, it is God going crazy. Don’t exclude, don’t exclude him; you will be excluding God. Don’t exclude anything; be inclusive.

Concentration is a narrowing of consciousness; meditation is expansion: all doors are open, all windows are open, and you are not choosing. Then of course, when you don’t choose you cannot be distracted. This is the beauty of meditation: a meditator cannot be distracted. And let that be the criterion: if you are distracted, know that you are doing concentration, not meditation. A dog starts barking – a meditator is not distracted. He absorbs that too, he enjoys that too. So he says, “Look… so God is barking in the dog. Perfectly good. Thank you for barking while I’m meditating. So you take care of me in so many ways,” but no tension arises. He does not say, “This dog is antagonistic. He is trying to destroy my concentration. I am such a religious, serious man, and this foolish dog… what is he doing here?” Then enmity arises, anger arises. And you think this is meditation? – No, this is not of worth if you become angry at the dog, poor dog who is doing his own thing. He is not destroying your meditation or concentration or anything. He is not worried about your religion at all, nor about you. He may not even be aware of what nonsense you are doing. He’s simply enjoying his way, his life. No, he is not your enemy.

Watch… if one person becomes religious in a house, the whole house becomes disturbed because that person is continuously on the verge of being distracted. He’s praying; nobody should make any sound. He’s meditating; children should remain silent, nobody should play. You are imposing unnecessary conditions on existence. And then if you are distracted and you feel disturbed, only you are responsible. Only you are to be blamed, nobody else.

What Rudolph Steiner calls meditation is nothing but concentration. And through concentration you can lose the ego and you will gain the ‘I’, and the ‘I’ will be nothing but a very, very subtle ego. You will become a pious egoist. Your ego will now be decorated in religious language, but it will be there.

The central figure for him is Christ, whom he differentiates from Jesus as a totally different being.

Now, for a meditator there cannot be any central figure. There need not be. But for one who concentrates, something is needed to concentrate upon. Rudolph Steiner says Christ is the central figure. Why not Buddha? Why not Patanjali? Why not Mahavir? Why Christ? For Buddhists, Buddha is the central figure, not Christ. They all need some object to concentrate upon, something on which to focus their minds. For a religious man there is no central figure. If your own central ego has disappeared, or is disappearing, you need not have any other ego outside to support it. That Christ or Buddha is again an ego somewhere. You are creating a polarity of I-thou. You say, “Christ, thou art my master,” but who will say this? An ‘I’ is needed to assert. Look, listen to Zen Buddhists. They say, “If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him immediately.” If you meet Buddha on the way, kill him immediately, otherwise he will kill you. Don’t allow him a single chance, otherwise he will possess you and he will become a central figure. Your mind will arise around him again. You will become a Buddhist mind. You will become a Christian mind. For a certain mind, a certain central object is needed.

And of course, he is more in favor of Christ than Jesus. That too has to be understood. That’s how the pious ego arises. Jesus is just like us: a human being with a body, with ordinary life; very human. Now, for a very great egoist this won’t do. He needs a very, very purified figure. Christ is nothing but Jesus purified. It is just like if you make curd out of your milk, then take cream out of it, and then you make ghee out of the cream. Then ghee is the purest part, the most essential. Now you cannot make anything out of ghee. Ghee is the last refinement, the white petrol. From kerosene, petrol; from petrol, white petrol. Now, no more; it is finished. Christ is just the purified Jesus. It is difficult for Rudolph Steiner to accept Jesus, and it is difficult for all egoists. They try to reject in many ways.

For example: Christians say that he was born out of a virgin. The basic problem is that Christians cannot accept that he was born just like we ordinary human beings. Then he will also look ordinary. He has to be special, and we have to be followers of a special Master. Not like Buddha, born out of ordinary human love, ordinary human sexual copulation, no – Jesus is special. Special people need a special Master, out of a virgin. And he’s the only begotten Son of God, the only. Because if there are other sons, then he is no longer special. He is the only Christ, the only one who has been crowned by God. All others, at the most, can be messengers, but cannot be of the same level and plane as Christ. Christians have done it in their own way, but I would like you to understand Jesus more than Christ – because Jesus will be more blissful to understand, peaceful to understand, and will be of great help on the path. Because you are in the situation of being a Jesus; Christ is just a dream.

First you have to pass through being a Jesus, and only then someday will Christ arise within you.

Christ is just a state of being, just as Buddha is a state of being. Gautama became Buddha; Jesus became Christ. You can also become Christ, but right now Christ is too far. You can think about it and create philosophies and theologies about it, but that is not going to help. Right now it is better to understand Jesus, because that is where you are. That is from where the journey has to start. Love Jesus, because through loving Jesus you will love your humanity. Try to understand Jesus, and the paradox, and through that paradox you will be able to feel less guilty. Through understanding Jesus you will be able to love yourself more.

Now, Christians go on trying somehow to drop the paradox of Jesus through bringing the concept of Christ. For example: there are moments when Jesus is angry, and it is a problem; what to do? It is very difficult to avoid the fact because many times he is angry, and that goes against his very teaching. He continually talks about love, and is angry. And he talks about forgiving your enemies – not only that, but loving your enemies – but he himself lashes out his anger. In the temple of Jerusalem he took a whip, started beating the money changers, and threw them out of the temple singlehanded. He must have been in a real fury, in a rage, almost mad. Now this… how to reconcile this? The way that Christians have found to reconcile – and Rudolph Steiner bases his own ideology on it – is to create a Christ, which is completely reconciled. Forget all about Jesus; bring a pure concept of Christ. You can say in that moment, “He was Jesus when he was angry.” And when he said on the cross, “God my Father, forgive these people, because they don’t know what they are doing,” he was Christ. Now the paradox can be managed. When he was moving with women he was Jesus; when he told Magdalene not to touch him he was Christ. Two concepts help to figure things out – but you destroy the beauty of Jesus, because the whole beauty is in paradox.

There is no need to reconcile, because deep in Jesus’ being they are reconciled. In fact, he could become angry because he loved so much. He loved so tremendously, that’s why he could become angry. His anger was not part of hatred; it was part of his love. Have you not sometimes known anger out of love? Then where is the problem? You love your child: sometimes you spank the child, you beat the child, sometimes you are almost in a fury, but it is because of love. It is not because you hate. He loved so much – that’s my understanding of Jesus – he loved so much that he forgot all about anger and he became angry. His love was so much. He was not just a dead saint, he was an alive person; and his love was not just philosophy, it was a reality. When love is a reality, sometimes love becomes anger also.

He was as human as you are. Yes, he was not finished there. He was more than human also, but first and basically he was human, human plus. Christians have been trying to prove that he was super-human and the humanity was just accidental, a necessary evil because he had to come into a body. That’s why he was angry. Otherwise, he was just purity. That purity will be dead.

If purity is real and authentic, it is not afraid of impurity. If love is true it is not afraid of anger; if love is true it is not afraid of fighting. It shows that even fight will not destroy it; it will survive. There are saints who talk about loving humanity, but cannot love a single human being. It is very easy to love humanity. Always remember: if you cannot love, you love humanity. It is very easy, because you can never come across humanity, and humanity is not going to create any trouble. A single human being will create many troubles, many more. And you can feel very, very good that you love humanity. How can you love human beings? – you love humanity. You are vast, your love is great. But I will tell you: love a human being; that is the basic preparation for loving humanity. It is going to be difficult, and it is going to be a great crisis, a continuous crisis and challenge. If you can transcend it, and you don’t destroy love because of the difficulties but you go on strengthening your love so that it can face all difficulties – possible, impossible – you will become integrated. Christ loved human beings, and loved so much, and his love was so great that it transcended human beings and became the love for humanity. Then it transcended humanity and became love for existence. That is love for God.

Your way seems different to me.

Not only different; it is diametrically opposite. In the first place, it is not a way at all. It is not a path, or if you love the word then call it a pathless path, a gateless gate. But it is not a path, because a path or way is needed if your reality is far away from you. Then it has to be joined by a path. But my whole insistence is that your reality is available to you right now. It is just within you. A path is not needed to reach to it. In fact, if you drop all paths, you will suddenly find yourself standing in it. The more you follow paths, the farther away you go from yourself. Paths misguide, mislead, because you are already that which you are seeking. So paths are not needed, but if you are trained to think in those terms, then I will say that my way is diametrically opposite. Steiner says right-thinking; and I say, right or wrong, all thinking is wrong. Thinking as such is wrong; no-thinking is right.

Can you please advise me? because I am somehow torn between you and the way Steiner shows.

No, you will have to remain in that state of tension for a few days. I will not advise and I will not help. Because if I advise and I help you, you can come and lean towards me; that may be immature. You will have to have a good fight with Steiner before you can come to me, and he will certainly give you a good fight. He is not going to leave you so easily. And I’m not going to give you any help, so that you come on your own. Only then do you come, when you come on your own. When a fruit is ripe it falls on its own accord. No, I will not throw even a small stone at it, because the fruit may not be ripe and the stone may bring it down… and that will be a calamity. You would remain in your torn state of mind.

You will have to decide, because nobody can remain in a torn state of mind for long. There is a point where one has to decide. And it will not be just towards Rudolph Steiner if I help you. He’s dead; he cannot fight with me. It is easier for me to pull you towards me than it will be for him. So to also be just to him it is better that I leave it to you. You just go on fighting. Either you will drop me… that will also be a gain, because then you will follow Rudolph Steiner more totally.

But I don’t think that is possible now… the poison has entered you. Now it is only a question of time.

-Osho

From Yoga: The Supreme Science, Discourse #6 (formerly Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V. 10)

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.

The Church is Always Anti-Christ – Osho

I will speak on Christ, but not on Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. In fact, Christianity is anti-Christ — just as Buddhism is anti-Buddha and Jainism anti-Mahavir. Christ has something in him which cannot be organized: the very nature of it is rebellion and a rebellion cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it. Then the dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you. That’s why, from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you want Christ, you have to go beyond Christianity. If you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ. Christ is beyond all churches.

Christ is the very principle of religion. In Christ all the aspirations of humanity are fulfilled. He is a rare synthesis. Ordinarily a human being lives in agony, anguish, anxiety, pain and misery. If you look at Krishna, he has moved to the other polarity: he lives in ecstasy. There is no agony left; the anguish has disappeared. You can love him, you can dance with him for a while, but the bridge will be missing. You are in agony, he is in ecstasy — where is the bridge?

A Buddha has gone even farther away. He is neither in agony, nor in ecstasy. He is absolutely quiet and calm. He is so far away that you can look at him, but you cannot believe that he is. It looks like a myth — maybe a wish fulfillment of humanity. How can such a man walk on this earth, so transcendental to all agony and ecstasy? He is too far away.

Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born — in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves: he celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see that his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but transcendence.

That’s the beauty of Christ: there exists a bridge. You can move towards him by and by, and he can lead you towards the unknown — and so slowly that you will not even be aware when you cross the boundary, when you enter the unknown from the known, when the world disappears and God appears. You can trust him, because he is so like you and yet so unlike. You can believe in him because he is part of your agony; you can understand his language.

That’s why Jesus became a great milestone in the history of consciousness. It is not just coincidental that Jesus’ birth has become the most important date in history. It has to be so. Before Christ, one world; after Christ, a totally different world has existed — a demarcation in the consciousness of man. There are so many calendars, so many ways, but the calendar that is based on Christ is the most significant. With him something has changed in man; with him something has penetrated into the consciousness of man. Buddha is beautiful, superb, but not of this world; Krishna is lovable — but still the bridge is missing. Christ is the bridge.

Hence I have chosen to talk on Christ. But remember always, I am not talking on Christianity. The Church is always anti-Christ. Once you try to organize a rebellion, the rebellion has to be subsided. You cannot organize a storm — how can you organize a rebellion? A rebellion is true and alive only when it is a chaos.

With Jesus, a chaos entered into human consciousness. Now the organization is not to be done on the outside, in the society; the order has to be brought into the innermost core of your being. Christ has brought a chaos. Now, out of that chaos, you have to be born totally new, an order coming from the innermost being — not a new Church but a new man, not a new society but a new human consciousness. That is the message.

And these words from the gospel of St. John — you must have heard them so many times, you must have read them so many times. They have become almost useless, meaningless, insignificant, trivial. They have been repeated so many times that now no bell rings within you when you hear them. But these words are tremendously potential. You may have lost the significance of them, but if you become a little alert, aware, the meaning of these words can be reclaimed. It is going to be a struggle to reclaim the meaning… just like you reclaim a land from the ocean.

Christianity has covered these beautiful words with so many interpretations that the original freshness is lost — through the mouths of the priests who are simply repeating like parrots without knowing what they are saying: without knowing, without hesitating, without trembling before the sacredness of these words. They are simply repeating words like mechanical robots. Their gestures are false, because everything has been trained.

Once I was invited to a Christian theological college. I was surprised when they took me around the college. It is one of the greatest theological colleges in India: every year they prepare two hundred to three hundred Christian priests and missionaries there — a five-year training. And everything has to be taught: even how to stand on the pulpit, how to speak, where to give more emphasis, how to move your hands — everything has to be taught. Then everything becomes false, then the person is just making empty gestures.

These words are like fire, but through centuries of repetition, parrot-like repetition, much dust has gathered around the fire. My effort will be to uncover them again. Be very alert because we will be treading on a well-known path in a very unknown way, treading on very well-known territory with a very different, totally new attitude. The territory is going to be old. My effort will be to give you a new consciousness to see it. I would like to lend you my eyes so that you can see the old things in new light. And when you have new eyes, everything becomes new.

-Osho

Excerpt from Come Follow To You,Vol.1 (Originally titled Come Follow Me, Vol. 1), Discourse #1

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 Understands Zen Intellectually – Osho

If I understand him rightly, Hubert Benoit seems to think that one does not need a Master to learn how to let go. He writes, “I have need of a Master to learn some movements that I wish to make with my limbs, but I have no need to learn how to decontract my muscles. I have need of a professor of philosophy, or of poetry in order to learn how to think in the truest or most beautiful way; I have no need of such a person if I wish to learn not to think.”

Would you please comment?

Maneesha, the content of Hubert Benoit’s statement is absolutely true, but in practice it does not happen so. It is true that if you want to learn philosophy you need a professor, but if you don’t want to learn you don’t need a professor. He has forgotten one thing, and that is: you have already learned a philosophy; now what to do with that philosophy? You will need a professor to help you to get rid of that philosophy. In practice, nobody is unconditioned, hence, somebody is needed to indicate that your mind is conditioned, and a conditioned mind cannot know the truth.

So in content, he is right, but in practice, he is just philosophizing. He understands Zen intellectually, and perhaps he has written the most complete treatise on Zen, but what he is writing, he himself has not practiced.

Practice is a totally different phenomenon from learning. You will have to be told how to relax, although you don’t need to be told. But if you don’t need – according to this man who has written extensively on Zen . . . If nobody needs to relax, if nobody needs to be told to relax, why are people tense? If nobody needs to be told to unlearn, then why are there not innocent people? In practice, things take a totally different standpoint.

I will agree with him philosophically, but I know practically – you have to be told how to relax. You have to be told how to unlearn. You need a master. In reality, there is no need, because you are the Buddha. But who is going to remind you? You have forgotten it for so long that you have become accustomed to the idea that you are not the Buddha.

Maneesha, even beautiful things can be said, but only with intellectual understanding. It is not Hubert Benoit’s experience. His intellectual grasp is clear, but his existential experience is missing.

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom from Oneself, Discourse #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.

Magga Baba – Osho

On this pilgrimage I have met many more remarkable men than Gurdjieff recounts in his book Meeting With Remarable Men. By and by, as and when it happens, I will talk about them.

Magga Baba

Today I can talk about one of those remarkable men.

His real name is not known, nor his real age but he was called “Magga Baba.” Magga simply means “big cup.” He always used to keep his magga, his cup, in his hand. He used it for everything – for his tea, his milk, his food, for the money people gave him, or whatsoever the moment demanded. All he possessed was his magga and that is why he was known as Magga Baba. Baba is a respectful word. It simply means “grandfather,” your father’s father. In Hindi your mother’s father is Nana, your father’s father is Baba.

Magga Baba was certainly one of the most remarkable men that may ever have lived on this planet. He was really one of the chosen ones. You can count him with Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu. I know nothing about his childhood or his parents. Nobody knows from where he came – one day suddenly he appeared in the town.

He did not speak. People persisted in asking questions of all kinds. He either remained silent, or if they nagged too much he started shouting gibberish, rubbish, just meaningless sounds. Those poor people thought he was speaking in a language that perhaps they didn’t understand. He was not using language at all. He was just making sounds. For example, “Higgalal hoo hoo hoo guloo higga hee hee.” Then he would wait and again ask, “Hee hee hee?” It seemed as if he was asking, “Have you understood?”

And the poor people would say, “Yes, Baba, yes.”

Then he would show his magga and make the sign. This sign in India means money. It comes from the old days when there were real gold and silver coins. People used to check whether it was real gold or not, by throwing the coin to the ground and listening to its sound. Real gold has its own sound, and nobody can fake it. So Magga Baba would show his magga with one hand and with the other give the sign for money, meaning, “If you have understood then give something to me.” And people would give.

I would laugh myself to tears because he had not said anything. But he was not greedy for money. He would take from one person and give it to another. His magga was always empty. Once in a while there would be something in it, but rarely. It was a passage: money would come into it and go; food would come into it and go; and it always remained empty. He was always cleaning it. I have seen him morning, evening and afternoon, always cleaning it.

I want to confess to you – “you” means the world – that I was the only person to whom he used to speak, but only in privacy, when nobody else was present. I would go to him deep in the night, perhaps two o’clock in the morning, because that was the most likely time to find him alone. He would be hugged up in his old blanket, on a winter’s night, by the side of a fire. I would sit at his side for a while. I never disturbed him; that was the one reason why he loved me. Once in a while it would happen that he would turn on his side, open his eyes and see me sitting there and start talking of his own accord.

He was not a Hindi-speaking person so people thought it was difficult to communicate with him, but that is not true. He was certainly not a Hindi-oriented person, but he knew not only Hindi but many other languages too. Of course he knew the language of silence the most; he remained silent almost all his life. In the day he would not speak to anybody, but in the night he would speak to me, only when I was alone. It was such a blessing to hear his few words.

Magga Baba never said anything about his own life, but he said many things about life. He was the first man who told me, “Life is more than what it appears to be. Don’t judge by its appearances but go deep down into the valleys where the roots of life are.” He would suddenly speak, and suddenly he would be silent. That was his way. There was no way to persuade him to speak: either he spoke or not. He would not answer any questions, and the conversations between us two were an absolute secret. Nobody knew about it. This is for the first time that I am saying it.

I have heard many great speakers, and he was just a poor man, but his words were pure honey, so sweet and nourishing, and so pregnant with meaning. ”But,” he told me, “you are not to tell anybody that I have been speaking to you, until I die, because many people think I am deaf. It is good for me that they think so. Many think that I am mad – that is even better as far as I am concerned. Many who are very intellectual try to figure out what I say, and it is just gibberish.

I wonder when I hear the meaning that they have derived from it. I say to myself, ‘My God! If these people are the intellectuals, the professors, the pundits, the scholars, then what about the poor crowd? I had not said anything, yet they have made up so many things out of nothing, just like soap bubbles.’ For some reason or maybe for no reason at all, he loved me.

I have had the fortune to be loved by many strange people. Magga Baba is the first on my list.

The whole day he was surrounded by people. He was really a free man, yet not even free to move a single inch because people were holding on to him. They would put him into a rickshaw and take him away wherever they wanted. Of course he would not say no, because he was pretending to be either deaf or dumb or mad. And he never uttered any word that could be found in any dictionary. Obviously he could not say yes or no; he would simply go.

Once or twice he was stolen. He disappeared for months because people from another town had stolen him. When the police found him and asked him whether he wanted to return, of course he did his thing again. He said some nonsense, “Yuddle fuddle shuddle….”

The police said, “This man is mad. What are we going to write in our reports: ‘Yuddle fuddle shuddle’? What does it mean? Can anyone make any sense out of it?” So he remained there until he was stolen back again by a crowd from the original town. That was my town where I was living soon after the death of my grandfather.

I visited him almost every night without fail, under his neem tree, where he used to sleep and live. Even when I was sick and my grandmother would not allow me to go out, even then, during the night when she was asleep, I would escape. But I had to go; Magga Baba had to be visited at least once each day. He was a kind of spiritual nourishment.

He helped me tremendously although he never gave any directions except by his very being. Just by his very presence he triggered unknown forces in me, unknown to me. I am most grateful to this man Magga Baba, and the greatest blessing of all was that I, a small child, was the only one to whom he used to speak. Those moments of privacy, knowing that he spoke to no one else in the whole world, were tremendously strengthening, vitalizing.

If sometimes I would go to him and somebody else was present, he would do something so terrible that the other person would escape. For example he would throw things, or jump, or dance like a madman, in the middle of the night. Anybody was bound to become afraid – after all, you have a wife, children, and a job, and this man seems to be just mad; he could do anything. Then, when the person had gone we would both laugh together.

I have never laughed like that with anybody else, and I don’t think it is going to happen again in this lifetime… and I don’t have any other life. The wheel has stopped. Yes, it is running a little bit, but that is only past momentum; no new energy is being fed into it.

Magga Baba was so beautiful that I have not seen any other man who can be put by his side. He was just like a Roman sculpture, just perfect. Even more perfect than any sculpture can be, because he was alive – so full of life, I mean. I don’t know whether it is possible to meet a man like Magga Baba again, and I don’t want to either because one Magga Baba is enough, more than enough.

He was so satisfying and who cares for repetition? And I know perfectly, one cannot be higher than that. I myself have come to the point where you cannot go any higher. Howsoever high you go; you are still on the same height. In other words, there comes a moment in spiritual growth which is untranscendable. That moment is called, paradoxically, the transcendental.

The day he left for the Himalayas was the first time he called me. During the night somebody came to my house and knocked on the door. My father opened it and the man said that Magga Baba wanted me.

My father said, “Magga Baba? What has he to do with my son? Moreover he never speaks, so how could he call for him?”

The man said, “I am not concerned about anything else. This was all I had to convey. Please tell the person concerned. If it happens to be your son that is not my business.” And the man disappeared.

My father woke me in the middle of the night and said, ”Listen, this is something: Magga Baba wants you. In the first place he does not speak….”

I laughed because I knew he spoke to me, but I did not tell my father.

He went on, “He wants you right now, in the middle of the night. What do you want to do? Do you want to go to this madman?”

I said, “I have to go.”

He said, “Sometimes I think that you are a little mad too. Okay, go, and lock the door from the outside so that you don’t disturb me again when you come in.”

I rushed, I ran. This was the first time he had called me. When I got to him I said, “What’s the matter?”

He said, “This is my last night here. I am leaving perhaps for ever. You are the only one I have spoken to. Forgive me, I had to speak to that man I sent to you, but he knows nothing. He does not know me as a spiritual man. He was a stranger and I bribed him simply by giving him one rupee, and told him to deliver the message to your house.”

In those days, one gold rupee was too much. Forty years ago in India one gold rupee was almost enough to live on, in perfect comfort, for one month. Do you know the English word “rupee” comes from the Hindi word rupaiya which means “the golden.” In fact the paper note should not be called a rupee; it is not golden. At least the fools could have painted it in golden colors, but they didn’t even do that. One rupee, of those days, is almost seven hundred rupees of today. So much has changed in just forty years. Things have become seven hundred times costlier.

He said, “I just gave him one rupee and told him to deliver the message. He was so bewildered by the rupee that he did not even look at me. He was a stranger – I have never seen him before.”

I said, “I can also say the same. I have never seen the man either in this town; perhaps he is a passer-by. But there is no need to be worried about it. Why did you have to call me?” Magga Baba said, “I am leaving and there is nobody whom I could call to say goodbye to. You are the only one.” He hugged me, kissed my forehead, said goodbye and went away, just like that.

Magga Baba had disappeared many times in his life – people had taken him and brought him back again – so when he disappeared last, nobody bothered much. Only after a few months did people become aware that he had really disappeared, that he had not come back for many months. They started looking around the places he had been before but nobody knew about him.

That night, before he disappeared he told me, ”I may not be able to see you blossom to a flower but my blessings will be with you. It may not be possible for me to return. I am going to the Himalayas. Don’t say anything to anybody about my whereabouts.” He was so happy when he was saying this to me, so blissful that he was going to the Himalayas. The Himalayas have always been the home of all those who have searched and found.

I didn’t know where he had gone because the Himalayas is the biggest range of mountains in the world, but once while traveling in the Himalayas I came to a place which seemed to be his grave. Strange to say it was by the side of Moses and Jesus. Those two persons are also buried deep in the Himalayas. I had gone there to see the grave of Jesus; it was just a coincidence that I found Moses and Magga Baba too. It was a surprise of course.

I could never have imagined that Magga Baba had anything to do with Moses or Jesus, but seeing his grave there I understood immediately why his face was so beautiful; why he looked more like Moses than any other Hindu. Perhaps he belonged to the lost tribe. Moses had lost a tribe while he was on the way to Israel. That tribe settled in Kashmir in the Himalayas. And I say it authoritatively, that that tribe was more correct in finding Israel than Moses himself. What Moses found in Israel was just a desert, utterly useless. What they had found in Kashmir was really the garden of God.

Moses went there in search for his lost tribe. Jesus also went there after his so-called crucifixion. I’m calling it so-called because it did not really happen, he remained alive. After six hours on the cross Jesus was not dead.

The way Jews used to crucify people was such a crude method that it took almost thirty-six hours for a person to die. It was arranged by a very rich disciple of Jesus that the crucifixion should happen on a Friday. It was an arrangement, because on Saturday Jews don’t allow any work to be continued; it is their holy day. Jesus had to be put down off the cross into a cave temporarily, until the coming Monday. Meanwhile he was stolen from the cave.

That’s the story Christians tell. The real fact is that on the night he was in the cave, after having been taken down from the cross, he was taken away from Israel. He was alive although he had lost much blood. It took a few days to heal him, but he was healed and he lived up to the age of one hundred and twelve in a small village called Pahalgam in the Kashmiri Himalayas.

He chose the place, Pahalgam, because he found the grave of Moses there. Moses had gone before him to search for his lost tribe. He found it but also found that Israel is nothing compared to Kashmir. There is no other place to be compared to Kashmir. He lived and died there – I mean Moses. And when Jesus went to Kashmir with Thomas, his beloved disciple, he sent Thomas to show India his way. He himself lived in Kashmir, near the grave of Moses, for his remaining life.

Magga Baba is buried in the same small village of Pahalgam. When I was in Pahalgam I discovered a strange relationship running from Moses to Jesus to Magga Baba and to me.

Before Magga Baba left my village he gave me his blanket saying, “This is my only possession and you are the only one I would like to give it to.”

I said, “That’s okay, but my father will not allow me to bring this blanket inside the house.”

He laughed, I laughed… we both enjoyed. He knew perfectly well that my father would not allow such a dirty blanket in his house. But I was sad and sorry not to have preserved that blanket. It was nothing much – a dirty old rag – but it belonged to a man of the category of Buddha and Jesus. I could not take it to my house because my father was a clothes merchant and very careful about clothes. I knew perfectly well that he would not allow it. I could not take it to my grandmother’s house either. She would not allow it because she was very fussy about cleanliness.

I have got my fussiness about cleanliness from her. It is her fault, not my responsibility at all. I cannot tolerate anything used or dirty – impossible.

I used to say to her, laughingly of course, “You are spoiling me.” But it is a truth. She has spoiled me forever, but I am grateful to her. She spoiled me in favor of purity, cleanliness and beauty.

To me Magga Baba was important, but if I had to choose between my Nani and him I would still choose my Nani. Although she was not enlightened then and Magga Baba was, sometimes an unenlightened person is so beautiful that one would choose them, even though the enlightened one is available as an alternative.

Of course if I could choose both I would. Or, if I had a choice of two among the whole world of millions of people, then I would have them both. Magga Baba on the outside… he won’t enter my grandmother’s house; he would remain outside under his neem tree. And of course my Nani could not sit at the side of Magga Baba. ”That fellow!” she used to call him. “That fellow! Forget about him and never go close to him; even when you just pass by him, always take a shower.” She was always afraid he had lice, because nobody had ever seen him take a bath.

Perhaps she was right: he had never taken a bath as long as I had known him. They could not coexist together, that too is true. Coexistence could not be possible in this case, but we could always make arrangements. Magga Baba could always be under the neem tree outside in the courtyard, and Nani could be the queen in the house. And I could have the love of them both, without having to choose this or that. I hate “either/or.”

-Osho

From Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, Chapter #15

An interesting footnote is that in 1949 Meher Baba visited Magga Baba. See TrustMeher.com.

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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.

On Nietzsche’s “God Is Dead” – Osho

Friends, a new series of talks begins today: God Is Dead, Now Zen Is the Only Living Truth. The series is dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the first man in the history of mankind to declare, “God is dead, therefore man is free.”

It was a tremendous statement; its implications are many. First I would like to discuss Nietzsche’s statement.

All the religions believe that God created the world and also mankind. But if you are created by someone, you are only a puppet; you don’t have your own soul. And if you are created by somebody, he can uncreate you any moment. He neither asked you whether you wanted to be created, nor is he going to ask you, “Do you want to be uncreated?”

God is the greatest dictator, if you accept the fiction that he created the world and also created mankind. If God is a reality, then man is a slave, a puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even your life. Then there is no question of any enlightenment. Then there is no question of there being any Gautam the Buddha, because there is no freedom at all. He pulls the strings, you dance; he pulls the strings, you cry; he pulls the strings, you start murders, suicide, war. You are just a puppet and he is the puppeteer.

Then there is no question of sin or virtue, no question of sinners and saints. Nothing is good and nothing is bad, because you are only a puppet. A puppet cannot be responsible for its actions.

Responsibility belongs to someone who has the freedom to act. Either God can exist or freedom, both cannot exist together. That is the basic implication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement: God is dead, therefore man is free.

No theologian, no founder of religions thought about this, that if you accept God as the creator, you are destroying the whole dignity of consciousness, of freedom, of love. You are taking all responsibility from man, and you are taking all his freedom away. You are reducing the whole of existence to just the whim of a strange fellow called God.

But Nietzsche’s statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. It is not based on meditation.

Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness.

There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness?

Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of any meditations – that is the other side of the coin. Man is free, but his freedom can only be a joy and a blessing to him if he is rooted in meditation. Remove God – that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom – but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence. Zen is the other side of the coin.

Zen does not have any God, that’s its beauty. But it has a tremendous science to transform your consciousness, to bring so much awareness to you that you cannot commit evil. It is not a commandment from outside; it comes from your innermost being. Once you know your center of being, once you know you are one with the cosmos – and the cosmos has never been created, it has been there always and always, and will be there always and always, from eternity to eternity – once you know your luminous being, your hidden Gautam Buddha, it is impossible to do anything wrong, it is impossible to do anything evil, it is impossible to do any sin.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded, “God is dead,” but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom FROM God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane.

Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. A tree cannot live without roots, nor can you.

God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people’s interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond – the unknown darkness. God has been a tremendous consolation, although it was a lie. Lies can console you, you have to understand it. In fact lies are sweeter than the truth.

Gautam Buddha is reported to have said, “Truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end” – when they are exposed. Then comes a tremendous bitterness, that you have been deceived by all your parents, by all your teachers, by all your priests, by all your so-called leaders. You have been continuously deceived. That frustration brings up a great distrust in everybody. “Nobody is worthy of trust…” It creates a vacuum.

So Nietzsche was insane in this last phase of his life, it was the inevitable conclusion of his negative approach. An intellect can only be negative; it can argue and criticize and be sarcastic, but it cannot give you any nourishment. From no negative standpoint can you get any nourishment. So he lost his God, and he lost his consolation. He became free just to be mad.

And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that it was just an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or commit suicide, because nobody can live in a negative darkness. One needs light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished the light and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him.

If you feel deep down a vacuum, utter emptiness with no meaning, it is because of Friedrich Nietzsche. A whole philosophy has grown in the West: Nietzsche is the founder of this very negative approach to life.

Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel, and Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger – all the great giants of the first half of this century – were talking only about meaninglessness, anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread, fear, angst. And this philosophy has been called in the West existentialism. It is not. It is simply non-existentialism. It destroys everything that has consoled you.

I agree with the destruction because what was consoling man were only lies. God, heaven, hell – all were fictions created to console man. It is good they are destroyed, but you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. Out of that vacuum existentialism is born, that’s why it talks only about meaninglessness: “Life has no meaning.” It talks about no significance: “You are just an accident. Whether you are here or not does not matter at all to existence.” And these people call their philosophy existentialism. They should call it accidentalism. You are not needed; just by accident, on the margin, somehow you have popped up. God was making you a puppet, and these philosophers from Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre are making you accidental.

And there is a tremendous need in man’s being to be related to existence. He needs roots in existence, because only when the roots go deep into existence will he blossom into a buddha, will he blossom into millions of flowers, will his life not be meaningless. Then his life will be tremendously overflowing with meaning, significance, blissfulness; his life will be simply a celebration.

But the conclusion of the so-called existentialists is that you are unnecessary, that your life has no meaning, no significance. Existence is not in need of you at all!

So I want to complete Friedrich Nietzsche’s work; it is incomplete. It will lead the whole of humanity to madness – not only Friedrich Nietzsche, but the whole of humanity. Without God certainly you are free, but for what? You are left with empty hands. You were with empty hands before also, because the hands that looked full were full of lies. Now you are absolutely aware that the hands are empty and there is nowhere to go.

I have heard about one very famous atheist. He died, and his wife brought his best clothes, best shoes, before he was put in the coffin – the best tie, the costliest possible. She wanted to give him a good farewell, a good send-off. He was dressed as he had never dressed in his whole life.

And then friends came, and neighbors came. And one woman said, “Wow! He’s all dressed up and nowhere to go.” He was an atheist, so he did not believe in God, he did not believe in heaven, he did not believe in hell – nowhere to go, and so well-dressed!

But this is the situation any negative philosophy is going to leave for the whole of mankind: well dressed, ready to go, but nowhere to go! This situation creates insanity.

It was not an accident that Friedrich Nietzsche became insane; it was the outcome of his negative philosophy. Hence, I am calling this series, “God is Dead, Now Zen Is the Only Living Truth.”

I absolutely agree with Friedrich Nietzsche as far as God is concerned, but I want to complete his statement, which he could not do. He was not an awakened being; he was not an enlightened being.

Gautam Buddha also does not have a God, nor does Mahavira have a God, but they never went mad. All the Zen masters and all the great Tao masters – Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu – nobody went mad, and they don’t have any God. They don’t have any hell or heaven. What is the difference? Why did Gautam Buddha not go mad?

And it is not only Gautam Buddha. In twenty-five centuries hundreds of his people have become enlightened, and they don’t even talk about a God. They don’t even say that there is no God, because there is no point. They are not atheists. I am not an atheist, nor am I a theist. God simply is not there, so there is no question of atheism or theism.

But I am not mad. You are my witnesses. It does not create a vacuum in me; on the contrary, there being no God, I have gained the dignity of an individual who is free – free to become a buddha. That is the ultimate goal of freedom. Unless your freedom becomes your very flowering of awareness, and the experience of freedom leads you into eternity, leads you into the roots, into the cosmos and existence, you are going to be mad. Your life will be meaningless, with no significance. Whatever you do it does not matter.

Existence according to the so-called existentialists, who are all following Friedrich Nietzsche, the founder, is absolutely unintelligent. They have taken away God, so they think – according to logic it seems apparently true – if there is no God, existence also becomes dead, with no intelligence, with no life. God used to be the life, God used to be the consciousness. God used to be the very meaning, the very salt of our being. With God no longer there, this whole existence becomes soulless, life becomes just a by-product of matter. So when you die, everything will die, nothing will remain.

And there is no question of being good or bad. Existence is absolutely indifferent; it does not care about you. God used to care about you. Once God is removed, a great strangeness starts happening between you and existence. There is no relationship, existence does not care, cannot care because it is not conscious anymore. It is no longer an intelligent universe; it is simply dead matter, just as you are. And the life that you know is only a by-product.

A by-product disappears immediately when the elements that were creating it separate. For example, some religions believe that man is made of five elements: earth, air, fire, water, sky.

Once these five elements are together, life is produced as a by-product. When these five elements separate in death, life disappears.

To make it clear to you… in the beginning as you learn to ride a bicycle you fall many times. I have also learned, but I did not fall while learning, because first I watched the learners and why they fall.

They fall because they don’t have confidence. To be on two wheels you need tremendous balance, and if you hesitate… it is just like walking on a tightrope. If you hesitate just for a moment those two wheels cannot keep you on your seat. Those two wheels can keep you in balance only at a certain speed, and the learner is bound to move slowly. Obviously – it seems to be rational – if you are a learner, you should not go with great speed.

I watched all my friends learning to bicycle, and they always said to me, “Why don’t you learn?”

I said, “I am watching first. I am watching why you fall, and why after a few days you stop falling.” And once I got the point, the very first time I went as fast as possible!

All my friends were puzzled. They said, “We have never seen a learner go that fast. A learner is bound to fall a few times, then he learns how to balance.”

I said, “I have been watching, and I got the clue. The clue is you are not confident, not alert that a certain speed is needed to keep the bicycle moving. You cannot stop it and sit on top of it without falling; a certain momentum is needed, so you have to go on pedaling.”

Once I knew exactly what the problem was, I simply went so fast that my whole village wondered, “What will happen to him, because he does not know… and he is going with such speed!”

It was difficult for me to know how to stop; if I stopped, the cycle was going to fall. So I had to go to a place where there was a huge bodhi tree near the railway station, almost three miles from my house. Three miles I rushed so fast that people gave way, stood aside. They said, “This is absolute madness!”

But my madness had a method in it. I was going directly to that tree, because I knew the tree had become hollow. I rode my bicycle into the hollow tree so the front wheel was inside the tree. Then I could stop, there was no problem about falling.

One villager who was working in his field saw this. He said, “This is strange.” He asked me, “If there is no tree like this how are you going to stop?”

I said, “Now I have learned how to stop, because I just did it; I will not need a tree anymore. But this was my first experience. I had not seen the other people stopping, I had seen them falling. So I had no experience about stopping, that’s why I was riding so fast to reach to the bodhi tree.” One part of it had become completely hollow, and it was a huge tree, so I knew that it would be right to put my wheel inside and be held up by the tree. But once I had stopped, I had learned how to stop.

When I came to learn driving… Majid will be surprised that the man who was teaching me driving was called Majid, he was a Mohammedan. He was one of the best drivers in the city, and he loved me very much. In fact, he chose my first car. So he told me, “I will teach you.”

I said, “I don’t like to be taught. You just drive slowly so I can see and watch.”

He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “I learn only by watching. I don’t want any teacher ever!”

He said, “But it is dangerous! A bicycle was okay. At the most you could have hurt yourself or one other, and not much. But a car is a dangerous thing.”

I said, “I am a dangerous man. You just drive it slowly and tell me everything about where is the pedal, where is the accelerator, where is the brake… you just tell me. And then you slowly move, and I will be walking by your side, just watching what you are doing.”

He said, “If you want it this way, I can do it, but I am very much afraid. If you do the same thing with the car as you have done with the bicycle…”

I said, “That’s why I am trying to watch more closely.” And once I got the idea I told him to get out. And I did the same thing as I had done with the bicycle.

I went so fast. Majid, my teacher, was running behind me, shouting, “Not that fast!” And in that city there was no limit on speed, because in Indian streets you cannot go above fifty-five. There is no need to put a sign everywhere that the speed limit is fifty-five miles per hour, you cannot go above fifty-five anyway.

But that poor fellow was very much afraid. He came running after me. He was a very tall man, a champion runner, there was every possibility that he could have become champion of the whole of India, and he might perhaps someday have participated in the Olympics. He tried hard to follow me, but soon I disappeared from his vision.

When I came back, he was praying under a tree, praying to God for my safety. And when I stopped by his side, so close that he jumped, he forgot all the prayer.

I said, “Don’t be worried. I have learned the whole thing. What were you doing here?”

He said, “I followed you, but soon you disappeared. Then I thought, the only thing is to pray to God to help him, because he knows nothing about driving. He is sitting in the driver’s seat for the first time, and he has gone nobody knows where. How did you turn? Where did you turn back?”

I said, “I had no idea how to turn, because you were just moving straight and I was walking by your side. So I had to go around the city. I had no idea how to turn, what signals to give, because you had not given any signals. But I managed. I went round the whole city so fast, the traffic was simply giving way. And I came back.”

And he said, “Khuda hafiz.” It means, “God saved you.”

I said, “Don’t bring God in.”

Once you know that a certain balance is needed between the negative and the positive, then you have your roots in existence. It is one extreme to believe in God; it is another extreme not to believe in God, and you have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced. Atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant. But your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you, a new intelligence which is not of the mind. That intelligence which is not of the mind makes you aware that the whole existence is tremendously intelligent. It is not only alive, it has sensitivity, it has intelligence.

Once you know your inner being is balanced and silent and peaceful, suddenly doors that have been closed by your thoughts simply move, and the whole existence becomes clear to you. You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it.

That’s what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you. The stars and sun and moon, the trees and birds and earth – everything in the universe will feel a small place is vacant which cannot be filled by anybody except you. This gives you a tremendous joy, a fulfillment that you are related to existence, and existence cares for you. Once you are clean and clear, you can see tremendous love falling on you from all dimensions.

You are the highest evolution of existence, of intelligence, and it is dependent on you. If you grow higher than the mind and its intelligence, towards no-mind and its intelligence, existence is going to celebrate: one man again has reached to the ultimate peak. One part of existence has suddenly risen to the highest possibilities of the intrinsic potential in everybody.

There is a parable that the day Gautam Buddha became enlightened, the tree under which he had become enlightened, suddenly without any wind, started moving. He was amazed because there was no wind, no other tree around was moving, not even a single leaf was moving. But the tree under which he was sitting was moving, as if it was dancing. It does not have legs, it is so rooted in the earth, but it can at least show its joy.

It is a very strange phenomenon that certain chemicals which make you intelligent, which give you a better mind, are found in the bodhi tree in greater amounts than in any other tree. So it is not just coincidence that the tree under which Gautam Buddha became enlightened is still called according to his name. Bodhi means enlightenment. And the tree, scientists have found, has a larger amount of intelligence than any other tree in the world. It has so much of those chemicals it is overflowing.

When Manjushri, one of Gautam Buddha’s closest disciples, became enlightened, the story is that the tree under which he was sitting suddenly started showering with flowers, and it was not the season for the tree to bring flowers.

It may be just a parable. But these parables indicate that we are not separate from existence, that our joy will be shared even by the trees, even by the rocks, that our enlightenment will be a festival for the whole of existence.

It is meditation that fulfills your inner being and takes away the vacuum that used to be filled by a great lie, God. And many lies have grown around him.

If you remain with the negative you are going to be insane sooner or later, because you have lost all contact with existence, you have lost every meaning, every possibility of finding meaning. You have certainly dropped lies, which is good, but that is not enough to find the truth.

Drop the lies and make some effort to go inwards to find the truth. That is the whole science of Zen. That’s why I have entitled the series, God Is Dead, Now Zen Is the Only Living Truth. If God is dead and you don’t come close to the experience of Zen, you will become insane. Your sanity depends now only on Zen, that is the only way to find the truth. Then you are absolutely related with existence, and you are no longer a puppet, you are a master.

And a man who knows his relation, his deep relation with existence, cannot commit anything against existence, against life. It is simply impossible. He can only pour as much blissfulness, as much benediction, as much grace as you are ready to receive. But his sources are inexhaustible. When you have found your inexhaustible sources of life and its ecstasy, then it does not matter whether you have a God or not. It does not matter whether there is a hell or a heaven. It does not matter at all.

So religious people when they read Zen are simply puzzled, because it is not talking about anything they have been taught from the very beginning. It is talking about strange dialogues which have nothing… NO place for God, no place for paradise, no place for hell. It is a scientific religion. Its search is not based on belief; its search is based on experience. Just as science is objectively based on experiment, Zen is based subjectively on experience. One science goes outward, another science goes inward.

Nietzsche has no idea how to go inward. The West has been a wrong place for people like Friedrich Nietzsche. If he had been in the East, he would have been a far greater master, a man of absolute sanity. He would have been in the same category, in the same family, as the buddhas.

But unfortunately the West has not learned the lesson even now. It goes on working so hard on objects. Even one tenth of our energy will be enough to find the inner truth. Even an Albert Einstein dies in deep frustration. The frustration was so great that before he died he was asked, “If you are born again, what are you going to be?” He said, “Never again a physicist. I would rather be a plumber.”

The greatest physicist the world has known dies in such frustration that he does not want anything to do with physics, anything to do with science. He wants a simple job like plumbing. But even that is not going to help. If physics has not helped, if mathematics has not helped, if such a great intelligence like Albert Einstein dies in frustration, being a plumber is not going to help. Still you are outside. A scientist may be too deeply involved; a plumber may not be that much involved, but he is still working outside. Being a plumber is not going to give him what he needs. He needs the silence of meditation. From that silence flowers meaning, significance, a tremendous joy that you are not accidental.

I say unto you, that what I am teaching you is authentic existentialism, and what in the West is thought to be existentialism is only accidentalism. I am teaching you how to come in contact with existence, how to find out where you are connected, wired with existence. From where are you getting your life moment to moment? Where is your intelligence coming from? If existence is unintelligent, how can you be intelligent? Where will you get it from?

When you see the rose flowers blossoming, have you ever thought that all this color, all this softness, all this beauty was hidden somewhere in the seed? But the seed alone was not enough to become a rose; it needed the support of existence – the soil, the water, the sun. Then the seed disappeared into the soil and the rosebush started growing. Now it needs air, it needs water, it needs the earth, it needs the sun, it needs the moon. All these together transform the seed which was almost like a dead piece of stone. Suddenly a transformation, a metamorphosis. These roses, these colors, this beauty, this fragrance, cannot come from it unless existence has it already. It all may be hidden; it may be covered in the seed. But anything that happens means it was there already – maybe as a potential.

You have intelligence…

I have told you the story of Ramakrishna and Keshav Chandra Sen. Keshav Chandra was one of the most intelligent people of his time. He founded a religion just on his intellectual philosophy, brahmasamaj, the society for God. And he had hundreds and thousands of intelligent people, a very intelligent group, as his followers. And he was puzzled that this uneducated Ramakrishna, who had not even completed the primary school – in India the primary school, the lowest school, takes four years; he had done only half…. Why were thousands of people going to this idiot? That was in Keshav Chandra Sen’s mind.

Finally he decided he had to go and defeat this man, because he could not think that the man could not be defeated by argument. That was impossible for him to imagine. This idiot from a small village is collecting thousands of people every day! From far and wide people are coming to see him, and to touch his feet!

Keshav Chandra with his followers informed Ramakrishna: “I am coming on such and such a day to challenge you on every point in which you believe. Be ready!”

Ramakrishna’s followers were very much afraid. They knew Keshav Chandra was a great logician; poor Ramakrishna would not be able to answer anything. But Ramakrishna was very joyful, he danced. He said, “I have been waiting all this time. When Keshav Chandra comes that will be a great day of joy!”

His disciples said, “What are you saying? That will be a day of great sadness, because you cannot argue with him.”

Ramakrishna said, “Wait. Who is going to argue with him? I don’t need to argue. Let him come.”

But his disciples were shaky, very shaky, very much afraid that their master was going to be defeated, completely crushed. They knew Keshav Chandra. In that century there was no parallel to Keshav Chandra’s intelligence in this country.

And Keshav Chandra came with one hundred of his topmost disciples to see the argument, the debate, the challenge. Ramakrishna was standing on the road to receive him, far away from the temple where he used to live. And he hugged Keshav Chandra. And Keshav Chandra felt a little embarrassed, and that embarrassment went on growing.

Ramakrishna took his hand in his hand and took him inside. He said, “I have been waiting and waiting for years. Why did you not come before?”

Keshav Chandra said, “He seems to be a strange man, seems not to be afraid at all. Do you understand? I have come here for a discussion!”

Ramakrishna said, “Of course.”

So they sat near the temple by the side of the Ganges, a beautiful place, under a tree.

And Ramakrishna said, “Start.”

So Keshav Chandra asked him, “What do you say about God?”

Ramakrishna said, “Have I to say anything about God? Can’t you see God in my eyes?”

Keshav Chandra looked a little puzzled – “What kind of argument is this?”

And Ramakrishna said, “Can’t you feel God in my hand? Come closer, boy.”

And Keshav Chandra said, “What kind of argument…?”

He had been in many debates; he had defeated many great scholars, and this villager… In Hindi the word for idiot is gamar, but it actually means the villager gaon means village, and gamar means from the village. But gamar is used as stupid, retarded, idiot.

Ramakrishna said, “If you can understand the language of my eyes, if you can understand the energy of my hand, you are proof enough that existence is intelligent. Where have you got your intelligence from?”

This was a grand argument. He was saying, “If you have got this great intelligence – and I know you are a highly intelligent person; I have always loved you – tell me from where it comes? If existence is without intelligence you cannot get it. From where? You are the proof that existence is intelligent, and that is what I mean by God. To me God is not somebody sitting on a cloud. To me God simply means existence is not unintelligent. It is an intelligent universe; we belong and we are needed. It rejoices in our rejoicings, it celebrates in our celebrations, it dances with our dance. Have you seen my dance?” – And he started dancing.

Keshav Chandra said, “What to do!”

But he danced so beautifully. He was a good dancer, because he used to dance in the temple sometimes from morning till evening – no coffee break! He would dance and dance till he would fall on the ground.

So he started dancing with such joy and such grace that suddenly there was a transformation in

Keshav Chandra. He forgot all his logic, he saw the beauty of this man, he saw the splendor of this man, he saw a joy which he had never felt.

All that intellect, all those arguments were just superficial, inside there was utter emptiness. This man was so overflowing. He touched the feet of Ramakrishna and said, “Forgive me. I was absolutely wrong about you. I know nothing, and I have been just philosophizing. You know everything, and you are not saying a single word.”

Ramakrishna said, “I will forgive you only on one condition.”

Keshav Chandra said, “Any condition from your side. I am ready.”

Ramakrishna said, “The condition is that once in a while you have to come to discuss with me, to debate with me, to challenge me.”

This is the way of a mystic; and Keshav Chandra was completely finished. He became a totally different man; he started to come every day. Soon his disciples deserted him: “He has gone mad. That madman infected him so much. There was only one madman, now there are two. He is even dancing with him.”

But Keshav Chandra, who had been a sad man, grudging, complaining about everything, because he was living in a negative space, suddenly blossomed, flowers came to his being, a new fragrance. He forgot all logic. This man helped him have a taste of something that is beyond mind.

Zen is the method to go beyond mind. So we will be discussing God and Zen together. God has to be negated, and Zen has to be planted deep in your being. The lie has to be destroyed and the truth has to be revealed. That’s why I have chosen God and Zen together. God is a lie, Zen is a truth.

-Osho

Excerpt from God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, Discourse #1

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.

Zen is a Deprogramming – Osho

In his book, ‘The Way of Zen,’ Alan Watts writes, “One must not forget the social context of Zen. It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention, of the conditioning of the individual by the group. Zen is a medicine for the ill effects of this conditioning, for the mental paralysis and anxiety which come from extensive self-consciousness.”

Beloved Master, First, I don’t see any need to master social conventions to be ready for the way of Zen. On the contrary, trying to master dead, old rules shows stupidity. Why not drop them immediately?

Second, do you see Zen as a medicine for the ill effect of conditioning?

Whenever you are reading a book, remember the man who is writing it, because those words are not coming from the sky, they are coming from an individual mind.

Alan Watts was a trained Christian missionary. That training continues to affect his effort to understand Zen. And finally, when he came a little closer to Zen, the Christian church expelled him. That brought a crisis in that man’s life. He was not yet a man of Zen, and he had lost his credibility as a Christian. Under this stress he started drinking wine, became an alcoholic and died because of alcoholism. If you know this man you will understand why he is saying what he is saying.

His statement that “One must not forget the social context of Zen,” is simply saying something about himself – that if he had not forgotten the social context and remained a docile Christian, things would have been better. His interest in Zen, rather than bringing him freedom, brought him catastrophe. But Zen is not responsible for it; he could not go the whole way.

He tried somehow to make a Christian context for Zen. Neither did Christians like it, nor the men of Zen. They don’t need any Christian context; they don’t need any social context. It is an individual rebellion. Whether you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian does not matter. Whatever load you are carrying, drop it. Whatever the name of the load, just drop it.

Zen is a deprogramming.

You are all programmed – as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan… everybody is programmed. Zen is a deprogramming. So it does not matter what kind of program you bring; what kind of cage you have lived in does not matter. The cage has to be broken and the bird has to be released. There is no social context of Zen. Zen is the most intimate and the most individualistic rebellion against the collective mass and its pressure.

Alan Watts is not right. His understanding of Zen is absolutely intellectual. He says, “It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention.” All nonsense. It has nothing to do with social convention. There is no need to master something which you have to drop finally. There is no point in wasting time. In other words, he is saying, “First, get into a cage, become a slave of a certain conventionality, a certain religion, a certain belief system, and then try to be free of it.”

He is simply showing his mind, unconsciously. He was encaged, and for years trained as a Christian priest. You can expel a Christian, but it is very difficult for the Christian to expel the Christianity that has gone deep into his bones, into his blood. He could not expel it, hence his advice for others who may follow: “It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the discipline of social convention, of the conditioning of the individual by the group.” Absolutely no.

It does not matter whether you are conditioned this way or that way. Conditioned fifty percent, sixty percent, or one hundred percent – it does not matter. From any point freedom is available. And you will have to drop it, so the less you are conditioned the better, because you will be dropping a small load. It is better if your cage is very small. But if you have a palace and an empire, then it is very difficult to drop it.

When Jesus asked the fishermen to drop their jobs and “come follow me,” they really dropped. There was nothing much to be dropped – just a fisherman’s net, a rotten net. A good bargain: dropping this net and following this man, you will enter into the kingdom of God. But when he asked the rich young man to drop everything and “come and follow me,” the rich man hesitated and disappeared into the crowd. The less you have, as far as conditioning is concerned, the easier it is to drop it.

And he is asking that first you should be conditioned by the group, and master the discipline of social convention. Strange… Do you have to become first a soldier just to get retired from the army? If you don’t want to fight, you don’t have to become a soldier. Why not be fresh? But he was not fresh.

He was contaminated by Christianity, and he hopes – according to his programming – that everybody first should be conditioned, chained, handcuffed, put into a jail, so that he can enjoy freedom one day. A strange way of experiencing freedom!

When you are free there is no need of being conditioned by any group, by any belief. There is no need. As you are, you are already too conditioned. Society does not allow their children to grow like the lilies in the field, pure, uncontaminated. They pollute them with all their conditionings, centuries old. The older the conditioning, the more precious it is thought to be.

And contradictorily… the second statement he makes: “Zen is a medicine for the ill effects of this conditioning.”

Zen is not a medicine. Zen is the explosion of health. Medicine is needed only by sick people, but health is needed by everyone – more health, a more juicy life. Zen is not a medicine; Zen is the inner explosion of your wholeness, your health, your ultimate immortality.

The questioner has said, “Beloved Master, first, I don’t see any need to master social conventions to be ready for the way of Zen” – you are right. ”On the contrary, trying to master dead, old rules shows stupidity” – you are again right. ”Why not drop them immediately?” That’s what Zen is asking you: “Why not drop it immediately? Why go part by part?”

I have told you a story in Ramakrishna’s life….

A man had gathered ten thousand golden rupees. And at that time, the rupee was really gold; the word ‘rupee’ simply means gold. And this was his desire – that one day when they were ten thousand, he would offer them to Ramakrishna, of course, to gain virtue in the other life. When small donations are given and people are getting great virtues… for ten thousand gold pieces you can purchase even God’s own house!

He went, dropped his bags of golden coins, and told Ramakrishna, “I want to offer them to you.

Please accept them.”

Ramakrishna was a strange man. Ordinarily, a traditional sannyasin would not have accepted.

He would have said, “I have renounced the world, I cannot accept.” But Ramakrishna was not a conventional type. He said, “Okay, I accept. Now do me a favor.”

The man said, “I am at your feet. Whatever you want.”

“Take all these coins to the Ganges” – which was just behind the temple where Ramakrishna lived – “and drop all the coins into the Ganges.”

The man could not believe it. “What kind of… ten thousand gold pieces?” But now he cannot say that this is not right, he has already lost possession of them. Now they belong to Ramakrishna, and Ramakrishna is saying, “Go and drop them. Just do me a favor.”

Hesitantly, reluctantly, the man went. Hours passed. Ramakrishna said, “What happened to that man? He should have come back within five minutes.”

So Ramakrishna sent a sannyasin to look for him….

The man had gathered a big crowd. He was first checking each golden coin on a stone, and then he would throw them one by one. And people were jumping into the Ganges and collecting, and it had become a great show, and the man was enjoying.

When informed, Ramakrishna said, “That man is an idiot. Just tell him: when you are collecting something you can count them, but when you are throwing, what is the point of wasting time? Just drop the whole load.”

Ramakrishna was, in a simple way, indicating that when you are dropping your conditioning, your mental conceptions, your beliefs, don’t drop by and by. They are all interconnected; drop them all. If you cannot drop them all in a single moment, you will not be able to drop them at all. Either now, or never.

Secondly, the questioner has asked, “Do you see Zen as a medicine for the ill effect of conditioning?”

I don’t see Zen as a medicine, because a medicine sooner or later becomes useless. When your cold is over, you don’t go carrying on with the Greek aspirin!

Mukta keeps them for everybody; she has taken the responsibility. By being Greek she has to carry Greek aspirins. And everybody knows, so whenever somebody needs one, they look for Mukta.

If Zen is a medicine, when you are cured, what will you do with Zen? You will have to throw it away, or give it to the Lions Club. But Zen cannot be thrown away, nor can it be given to the Lions Club. In the first place, there is not a single lion.

Zen is your very nature; there is no way of throwing it away. All that you can do with Zen is two things: you can remember, or you can forget. This is the only possibility. If you forget your nature, your buddhahood… this is the only sin in the world of Zen: forgetfulness.

Gautam Buddha’s last words on the earth have to be remembered: sammasati. Sammasati means right remembrance. His whole life is condensed into a single word, remembrance, as if on dying, he is condensing all his teachings, all his scriptures into a single word. Nobody has uttered a more significant word when dying. His last message, his whole message: sammasati, remember. And when you remember, there is no way to throw your consciousness away.

Zen is not a meditation. Zen is exactly sammasati – remembrance of your ultimateness, remembrance of your immortality, remembrance of your divineness, of your sacredness.

Remembering it, and rejoicing it, and dancing out of joy that you are rooted, so deeply rooted in existence that there is no way for you to be worried, to be concerned.

Existence is within you and without you – it is one whole.

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom from Oneself, Discourse #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.

 

I Don’t Belong to Any Path – Osho

I took sannyas from Swami Shivand of Rishikesh after reading his book Brahmacharya and other books of his.

After some years, I was attracted to Sri Ramana Maharshi and thereafter to Sri Aurobindo due to his integral approach to the divine. From 1959 onwards I was doing meditation on the lines indicated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Thereafter J. Krishnamurti’s approach attracted me, now yours.

I enjoy and feel happy whenever I read Sri Aurobindo’s works, since he emphasizes living a full life and realization of Integral Divine and gives much emphasis to physical transformation.

You also emphasize not to negate life but to live fully, and have given a new meaning to sannyas.

Hence I am here to embrace this also.

I wonder whether I am on the right path or drifting?

What is this multifarious attraction in me?

Could you help me with a right path if I am drifting?

The first thing to be understood: Before one can come to the right door, one has to knock on many doors. Life is an adventure – of courage, daring, and basically it is trial and error. One has to go astray many times to come to the right path. And when I say the right path, I don’t mean that Sri Ramana’s path is not right, but it must not have been right for the questioner; otherwise there is no need.

Once you have come to the right path for you… and it is always a question of the individual, it has nothing to do with Ramana, Aurobindo or me; it is a question of you. If you have come to me and you feel at home, then your journey has finished. Now there is no need to drift any more, now you can settle and start working – because in drifting work is impossible.

It is as if you start constructing a house and just in the middle you are attracted to something else and you leave it and you start another house; and just in the middle again you are attracted to something else. Then you will live like a vagabond. The house will never be completed. One has to settle somewhere, one has to commit somewhere, one has to take the fatal decision. But it is not difficult. If you have courage, it happens.

One has to be available to many sources. It is good that you have been to Shivanand, to Ramana, to Aurobindo. It shows you have been seeking – but it also shows that nowhere could you feel at home. So the journey continues. The journey has to continue until you come to a point where you can say: Yes, I have arrived. Now there is no need for any more departures. And you can relax. Then the real work starts.

Whatsoever you have been doing is just moving from one place to another. The journey is exciting, but the journey is not the goal. One becomes enriched by the journey. You must have become enriched being open to so many sources; you must have learnt many things – but still the journey continues. Then you will have to seek again and again.

Now you are here. Try to see and try to understand: do you fit with me, or do I fit with you?

Sometimes it is possible that you may have learnt only one thing – how to drift again and again, how to go away again and again. It can become a mechanical habit. Then you will be gone from here also. So don’t allow mechanical habits to lead you. If you don’t fit with me it is perfectly good to go away, because then your being here is going to be a sheer wastage of time for you. But if you fit, then take courage and be committed – because only after the commitment does real work start, never before it.

You think you have been to Shivanand and you think you have been initiated by him, but the initiation has not happened yet, otherwise you would not have been here. Initiation means a commitment: that now one has looked all around – now this is the place to settle. Shivanand may have initiated you, but you have not taken the initiation yet. You have been just a visitor. You have not become intimate with any system of growth.

It is as if the plant has been removed from one place to another again and again. The plant cannot grow; the plant needs that it should settle on one ground so that roots can go deep. If you go on removing the plant again and again, the roots will never grow; and if roots cannot go deeper, the plant cannot go higher.

Hence commitment. Commitment means: now this is the soil for me and I am ready to settle for it. It is risky because, who knows, a better soil may be available somewhere else. So the risk is there, but one has to take that risk some day or other. If you go on and on just waiting for something better, something better, the time may be lost, and by the time you have arrived you will be dead.

The real thing is work. It is good to go around, have a look, visit many places, many people – but don’t make it a habit. That habit is dangerous. It won’t allow you roots. And if roots are not there, the tree cannot be alive, flowers are not possible; fragrance will not spread from you, your life will remain empty.

So the first thing: don’t make your past a pattern to be repeated in the future. Now you are here: don’t do the same thing to me as you have been doing to Shivanand, Ramana, Aurobindo. You don’t know what you have done.

It happened:

A great painter, James McNeill Whistler, is reported to have displayed a just-completed painting to Mark Twain.

Mark looked at the painting judiciously from a variety of angles and distances while Whistler waited impatiently for the verdict.

Finally, Mark leaned forward and, making an erasing gesture with his hand, said, “I’d eradicate that cloud if I were you.”

Whistler cried out in agony, “Careful! The paint is still wet!”

“That’s all right,” said Mark coolly, “I’m wearing gloves.”

You must be wearing gloves. You think you were initiated by Shivanand, but it has not happened. Your gloves won’t allow it. You must be living in a capsule, closed. You must be clever, logical, cunning. You have been on the alert not to be committed anywhere deeply. Hence, before the commitment happens, you move.

You say: “I took sannyas from Swami Shivanand of Rishikesh after reading his book, Brahmacharya, and other books of his.”

Now, if you are impressed by a book written on brahmacharya, it shows much about you. You must have something of a problem concerning sex. It has nothing to do with brahmacharya or Shivanand. You must be obsessed somehow with sex – hence the appeal of brahmacharya. You must have been repressing sex. You must have been brought up with wrong ideas about sex; hence you become impressed by Shivanand’s book on celibacy.

It is not that you are impressed by Shivanand – you are still following your own mind. You could not surrender to him. The phenomenon that you call initiation was intellectual; by reading the books, not by being in the presence of the master. You must be an intellectual, calculating, theorizing. This won’t allow you to move in a deep relationship – and the relationship between a master and a disciple is the deepest, deeper than the relationship between a lover and the beloved.

You may have been impressed by what Shivanand has written, but deep down you search for it again and again. It is not Shivanand that you are impressed, influenced by. You have certain ideas in your mind; wherever you find those ideas appreciated, you feel good. With me it is going to be dangerous. I am not going to appreciate any of your ideas; they are all rubbish. I say that even without knowing what your ideas are, because that is not needed. Unless you are aware, all your ideas are rubbish. So it is not a question of saying that this idea is rubbish and that is good. To me, all thoughts are rubbish; only awareness is valuable. And awareness has no ideas in it. It is a simple, pure light of consciousness.

So it is going to be difficult with me. You may have come to the man now who can shake and shock you. With Shivanand, you thought you were with Shivanand, but basically, deep down, you felt that Shivanand was with you; that’s why you lingered there a little while. This is not going to be so here with me. I am not going to be with you, remember; you have to be with me. I am not going to be with you, I repeat, you have to be with me.

So I am not going to fulfill your expectations in any way. If you have theories, I am against them already without knowing them, because I am against mind and my whole emphasis is how to become a no-mind.

But the questioner seems to be too much in the head: then he became interested in Sri Aurobindo, “because he emphasizes living a full life and realization of the integral divine.” You have some fixed ideas, so whosoever seems to be following your ideas you become impressed by. In fact, you remain impressed only with your own ego. You have been playing an ego game. You have been on an ego trip – that’s why Shivanand, Ramana, Aurobindo, nobody could help you.

As far as I know, if somebody comes back from Ramana, then there must be something very deeply wrong. With Shivanand it is not much of a problem, with Aurobindo also it is not much of a problem. Shivanand is just ordinary. Aurobindo is a great intellectual – a mahapundit, a great scholar. So if somebody comes away, nothing is lost; you have not lost much because there was nothing in the first place to be gained. But if you have come away from Ramana, that shows something deep like a cancer in your soul, because persons like Ramana are very rare – thousands of years pass, then sometimes that quality of being arises. Ramana is like a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Krishna – a very rare phenomenon. But I know why you could not get in tune with Ramana – because of your Shivanands and your Aurobindos. To get in tune with a Ramana means to drop your ego completely. Great courage is needed.

Now you are here. If you are really a seeker, then gather courage and drop the ego and the past. Forget the past; it has been nothing but a nightmare. And don’t go on repeating it; otherwise, you can go on repeating to the very end of time, changing from one person to another. This can become a habit; this shows simply your restlessness. Otherwise to come back from Krishnamurti would have been almost impossible. There is no need.

So now become aware of your basic trouble: something in you is betraying your whole effort; something in you is continuously causing clouds around your intelligence. Your awareness is not sharp.

It happened:

The little girl was invited to dinner one night at the home of a friend. The hostess, knowing that many children don’t like spinach, asked if she liked it.

“Oh yes,” the little girl replied. ”I love it.”

When the platter was passed, however, she refused to take any.

“But, dear,” said the hostess, “I thought you said you liked spinach.”

“Oh, I do,” explained the child, “but not enough to eat it.”

Going to Shivanand, Aurobindo, Ramana, Krishnamurti – and you have some idea that you like and you love these people, but your liking is not enough. You don’t love enough; otherwise you would have eaten them and they would have transformed you.

Become aware! As it is you have wasted a long time already. You can also go from this door empty-handed, but remember, the responsibility is yours. If you take courage I am ready to give you whatsoever can be given. But for visitors nothing can be given, and even if it is given they will not be able to understand.

If you are tired of your journey, going from one place to another, from one person to another, if you are really tired, then here I am ready to give you whatsoever you are seeking – but you will have to fulfill one condition, and that is: a total commitment. Unless you become part of my family, nothing can be given. I would like to give you something even then, but you will not be able to take it; or, even if you take it, you will think it is nothing – because your mind will continuously befog you. It won’t allow you to understand, it won’t allow you to see directly. It won’t allow you to see what type of game you have been playing with yourself.

Up to now it has been a drifting. Become aware how much you have wasted. Many opportunities were there but you have missed them. Now don’t miss this opportunity! But I know: the mind gets in a rut, it becomes a pattern. You go on repeating the same thing again and again, because you become very efficient in repeating it. Now get out of that vicious circle. I am ready to help if you are ready to take my help. And such a help as this cannot be forced on you. You have to take it or not take it. Your freedom has to decide it; it is your choice.

And don’t ask: What is the right path? All paths are right or wrong. It is not a question of deciding which path is right. The only thing to be decided is which path fits you. Of course, Ramana has a certain path – very simple, absolutely nonintellectual. The head was not required at all on that path; the head was to be dropped. If you had allowed him, you would have been beheaded by him. The head was not part of his path. It is a path of the heart.

Just the opposite is Krishnamurti. The path is absolutely true, but the head has to be used and transcended, not to be dropped. That’s why Krishnamurti appeals tremendously to intellectuals – nothing of the heart; everything is analysis, dissection. He is a great surgeon; he goes on dissecting. You give him any problem – he does not, in fact, answer it; he simply dissects it. And if you are listening with deep participation, sympathy, it will be possible that through his dissection he gives you an insight – not the answer, but the insight – and that is your insight. He simply dissects the problem. He is a rare intellectual man; gone beyond intellect, but has gone through it. Ramana bypasses intellect, he never passes through the intellect; his path is of the heart. Krishnamurti’s path is of intellect, of the head, of understanding, dissection, analysis.

Shivanand is not yet enlightened. He has no path – stumbling in the dark. A traditional man, he can make you knowledgeable, but he cannot help you towards the ultimate understanding. A good man, a very good man, but just a good man, not yet a Jesus or a Buddha, not yet a Krishnamurti or Ramana – a simple man. If he becomes enlightened some day in some life, he will be like Ramana – his path will not be of the head. But he is not yet realized.

And then there is Aurobindo: his path is as yet the path of an unenlightened person, moving towards it but yet in the dark. The morning is not very far away, but it has not happened yet. If some day it happens, then he will be a man like Krishnamurti; he will go through the head – a great scholar, he has much appeal for those who like logic-chopping, hair-splitting.

And here I am: all paths are mine, or no path is mine. I am more concerned with individuals. When you come to me, I don’t have a certain path to give you. I look at you to find which path will be suitable for you. I have no fixed path; I have wandered on all the paths, and all paths are true. If it fits, then any path can lead you to the ultimate. If it doesn’t fit, then you can go on struggling, fighting, but nothing is going to happen; you are trying to pass through a wall. You will be hurt, wounded, that’s all; nothing is going to happen.

I don’t belong to any path, hence all paths belong to me. And I am more concerned with the individual seeker. If I see that devotion, worship, prayer, will be helpful to you, I teach you that. If I see meditation will be helpful to you, I teach that. If I see that just understanding, pure awareness, will be helpful, I teach that. If I feel that awareness is going to make you very tense, does not fit with your type, then I teach you to be lost completely in something, absorbed completely in something. Dancing, get into it so much that you become the dance and there is nobody watching it; don’t create any separation and division between you, become the act.

Hence I am going to be very, very contradictory, because to one person I will say something, to another I will say something else, sometimes even just the opposite, diametrically opposite. So whatsoever I have said to you, somebody may come and say to you: Osho has said something else to me. Don’t listen to anybody. Whatsoever I have said to you, I have said to you. Otherwise, you will be confused.

Millions of paths go towards God. In fact there is nowhere else to go. Wherever you are going, you are going towards God. All paths lead to him. But when you are seeking, only one path can lead you. If you start walking on all paths together, you will be lost. One has to choose a path. So please don’t repeat your old pattern.

Now it will be very difficult. I am hurting your ego knowingly – because when I say Aurobindo is not enlightened, I immediately can feel what is happening to you. It is not a question of Aurobindo – whether he is enlightened or not enlightened, who bothers? It is his problem; it is not my problem, it is not your problem. But if you have been following Aurobindo and I say he has not yet become enlightened, your ego is hurt. You, and following an unenlightened person? – never, it is not possible!

When I say Shivanand is good but ordinary, mediocre, of course you will feel hurt because you have been initiated by Shivanand, and how is it possible? – You, so intelligent, being initiated by a mediocre man? No, it is going to hurt, but I do it knowingly.

I will create every sort of trouble for you so that if you stay, you really stay. If you decide to stay, it will be a real decision to stay with me. I am going to be hard. Shivanand, Ramana, Krishnamurti, Aurobindo, it seems, have been too compassionate towards you; hence you could drift.

I will make every effort so that you can go away. I will create a struggle within you, a friction, because that is the only way now; otherwise your old habit will go on functioning. If you come and ask for sannyas from me, I am not going to give it to you easily… because you have been taking things very easily. This sannyas is going to be arduous.

-Osho

From The Search, Discourse #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.

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Aurobindo, Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi – Osho

This talk was from a series that was originally given in Hindi and subsequently translated into English.

Questioner: Shree Arvind (Aurobindo) has written a commentary on the Geeta in which he talks about the relationship between the creation and its perception. From one point of view it is reality that is important, and from another its perception is important. In his concept of the supramental he believes that divine consciousness is going to descend on this earth, but this concept of his seems to be dualistic. What do you say? And do you think that Raman Maharshi’s concept of ajatvad, of unborn reality, is closer to you and to Chaitanya’s concept of achintya bhedabhedvad, or unthinkable dualistic non-dualism?….

All Arvind’s (Aurobindo) talk of supraconsciousness and the supramental is within the confines of the rational mind. He never goes beyond reason. Even when he speaks about the transcendence of reason, he uses rationalistic concepts. Arvind is a rationalist. Everything he says and the words and concepts he uses to say it belong to the grammar of rationalism. There is a great consistency in the statements of Arvind which is not there in statements from supra-rationalism. You cannot find the same logical consistency in the statements of mystics. A mystic speaks in terms of contradictions and paradoxes. He says one word and soon contradicts it by another word that follows it. A mystic is self-contradictory. Arvind never contradicts himself.

Arvind is a great system-maker, and a system maker can never be a supra-rational. A system is made with the help of reason. Supra-rational people are always unsystematic; they don’t have a system. System is integral to logic; that which is illogical cannot follow a methodology or order.

The unthinkable cannot be systematized. All the thinkers of this century who have crossed the threshold of reason are fragmentary in their statements; none of them followed a logical order. Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Marlo Ponti and the rest of them, have made fragmentary statements. Krishnamurti belongs to the same category which denies system, order. Their statements are atomic, and they contradict themselves.

Arvind’s case is very different. The truth is, after Shankara there has been no greater system-builder in India than Arvind. But this is what makes for the weakness and poverty of his philosophy. He is very skilled in playing with words, concepts and theories. But the irony is that the reality of life is far beyond words, concepts and doctrines. His trouble is that he was wholly educated in the West where he learned Aristotelian logic, Darwinian Theory of Evolution and the scientific way of thinking.

His mind is wholly western; no one in India today is more western in his way of thinking than Arvind.

And ironically he chose to interpret the eastern philosophy, with the result that he reduced the whole thing into a system. The East has no logical system. All its profound insights transcend logic and thought; they cannot be achieved through thinking. Eastern experiences go beyond the known. The knower and knowledge itself; they all belong to the unknown and the unknowable – what we call mystery. And Arvind applies his western mind to interpret the transmental experiences and insights of the East. He divides them into categories and makes a system out of them, which no other eastern person could have done.

So while Arvind always talks of the unthinkable he uses the instrument of thought and the thinkable throughout. Consequently his unthinkable is nothing but a bundle of words. If Arvind had the experience of the unthinkable he could not have categorized it, because it defies all categories. One who really knows the unthinkable cannot live with categories and concepts.

Curiously enough, Arvind creates concepts out of things that have never been conceptualized. His concept of the supramental is a case in point. But he goes on fabricating categories and concepts and fitting them into logic and reason. And he does it without any inhibitions.

The other part of your question is relevant in this context. In a sense, no religious thinking subscribes to the concept of evolution.

In this respect, we can divide the religions of the world into two groups. One group believes in the theory of creation with a beginning and an end, and the other believes in an existence that has no beginning and no end. Hinduism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism believe in creation; they believe that God created the universe. The other group of religions like Jainism and Buddhism, deny the theory of creation; according to them, that which is, is beginningless. It was never created.

All those who believe in creation cannot accept the theory of evolution. If they accept it, it would mean God created an incomplete world which developed gradually to its present state. But how can a perfect God create an imperfect world? Evolution means that the world grows gradually, and creation means that the whole world comes into being altogether.

It is significant that originally the word shristhi, meaning creation, belonged to the Hindus, and prakriti, meaning pre-creation, belonged to the Jainas and Buddhists and Sankhyaites. In the course of time, however, they got mixed up. But the Hindus cannot accept the word prakriti, which means that which is is there from the time before creation, that which is uncreated, which is eternal.

Creation means something which was not always there and which was created and which can be terminated.

The concept of the pre-created, the uncreated, of prakriti, belongs to an altogether different school which does not believe in creation. Sankhyaites, Jainas, and Buddhists don’t have the concept of a creator because when nothing is created, the question of a creator does not arise. So God disappeared, he has no place in their philosophies. God is needed only in the form of a creator, and so those who rejected creation also rejected God. God as creator belongs only to those who accept the idea of creation.

Arvind brought with him the idea of evolution from the West. When Arvind was a student in England, Darwin’s ideas were sweeping across Europe. Evidently he was very much influenced by them.

After his return to India he studied eastern philosophy, and studied it deeply. I deliberately use the word ”studied” to say that he did not know the truth on his own, his knowledge was merely intellectual. Although he possessed a sharp intellect, his direct experience of truth was very dim.

Consequently he produced a crossbreed of eastern mysticism and western rationalism, which is an anomaly. India’s psyche is not much concerned with the study of nature, matter and their evolution, it is basically concerned with the understanding of mind and spirit. The meeting of the western thought of evolution with the eastern understanding of the psyche gave rise to a strange idea of psychic evolution, which became Arvind’s lifework. Like nature, he thought consciousness evolves too.

Arvind added something new to the idea of evolution which is his own, and for this very reason it is utterly wrong. Very often original ideas are wrong, because they happen to be the finding of a single person. It is true that traditional beliefs, in the course of time, degenerate into fossils, but they have a validity of their own because millions of people go out to find them. This new idea which built Arvind’s reputation concerns the descent of divine consciousness.

Down the centuries we have believed that man has to rise and ascend to God; it is always an upward journey, an ascent. Arvind thinks otherwise: he thinks that God will descend and meet man. In a way this is also like the two sides of a coin. The truth happens to be exactly in the middle. That truth is that both man and God move towards each other and meet somewhere midway. This meeting always happens somewhere midway, but the old idea emphasized man’s efforts – and not without reason. As far as God is concerned, he is always available to man providing man wants to meet him. That much is certain, and therefore God can be left out of this consideration. But it is not certain that man will make a move to meet God. So it mostly depends on man and his journey towards God, his efforts. God’s journey towards man can be taken for granted. Too much emphasis on God moving toward man is likely to weaken man’s efforts.

Arvind starts from the wrong end when he says that God is going to descend on us. But he has great appeal to people who are not interested in doing anything on their own. They took enthusiastically to Arvind’s idea of the descent of the supramental energy and they rushed to Pondicherry. In recent years more Indians have gone to Pondicherry than anywhere else. There, God could be had for a song. They need not move a finger, because God on his own was on his way to them. There could not be a cheaper bargain than this. And when God descends he will descend on one and all; he will not make any distinctions. Many people believe that Arvind alone, sitting in seclusion at Pondicherry, will work for it and divine energy will be available to all, like the river Ganges was available when it was brought to earth by Bhagirath. Arvind is to be another Bhagirath, and at a much higher level. It has put a premium on man’s greed and led to a lot of illusions.

I think that is a very wrong idea. It is true God descends, but he descends only on those who ascend to him. A great deal depends on the individual and his efforts. Divine energy descends on those who prepare themselves for it, who deserve it. And there is no reason for God to be collectively available to one and all. In fact, God is always available, but only to those who aspire and strive for him. And it is always the individual, not a collective or a society, who walks the path to God. And he has to go all alone. And if God is going to descend on all, why do you think he will exclude animals, trees and rocks?

The experiment that is in process at Pondicherry is utterly meaningless; there has not been a more meaningless experiment in man’s history. It is a waste of effort, but it goes on because it is very comforting to our greed.

In this context, the questioner has remembered Raman who is just the opposite of Arvind. While Arvind is a great scholar, Raman has nothing to do with scholarship. Arvind is very knowledgeable, he is well informed; Raman is utterly unscholarly, you cannot come across a more unscholarly man than him. While Arvind seems to be all-knowing, Raman is preparing for the non-knowing state; he does not seem to know a thing. That is why man’s highest potentiality is actualized in Raman, and Arvind has missed it. Arvind remains just knowledgeable; Raman really knows the truth. Raman attained to self-knowledge, not knowledge. So his statements are straight and simple, free from the jargon of scriptures and scholarship. Raman is poor in language and logic, but his richness of experience, of being, is immense; as such he is incomparable.

Raman is not a system-maker like Arvind. His statements are atomic; they are just like sutras, aphorisms. He does not have much to say, and he says only that which he knows. Even his words are not enough to say what he really knows. Raman’s whole teaching can be collected on a postcard, not even a full page will be needed. And if you want to make a collection of Arvind’s writings, they will fill a whole library. And it is not that Arvind has said all that he wanted to say. He will have to be born again and again to say it all; he had too much to say. This does not mean that he did not bother to attain real knowing because he had already so much to say. No, this was not the difficulty.

Buddha had much to say and he said it. Buddha was like Raman so far as his experience of truth was concerned, and he was like Arvind in general knowledge. Mahavira has said little, he spent most of his time in silence. His statements are few and far between; they are telegraphic. In his statements Mahavira resembles Raman. Digambaras, one of the two Jaina sects, don’t have any collection of his teachings, while the Shwetambaras have a few scriptures which were compiled five hundred years after Mahavira’s death.

Questioner: You compare Raman with Buddha who happened in distant past. Why not compare him with Krishnamurti, who is so close by?

The question of being close or distant does not arise. Krishnamurti is exactly like Raman. I compare Arvind with Raman and Buddha for a special reason. In the experience of truth, Krishnamurti is very much like Raman, but he lags behind Arvind in knowledge. Of course, he is more articulate and logical than Raman. And there is a great difference between Krishnamurti and Arvind in so far as the use of logic and reason is concerned.

Arvind uses logic to reinforce his arguments; Krishnamurti uses logic to destroy logic; he makes full use of reason in order to lead you beyond reason. But he is not much knowledgeable. That is why I chose Buddha as an example; he compares well with Arvind in knowledge and with Raman in self-knowledge.

As far as Krishnamurti is concerned, he is like Raman in transcendental experience, but he is not scholarly like Arvind.

There is yet another difference between Raman and Krishnamurti. While Raman’s statements are very brief, Krishnamurti’s statements are voluminous. But in spite of their large volume, Krishnamurti’s teachings can be condensed in a brief statement. For forty years Krishnamurti has been repeating the same thing over and over again. His statements can be condensed to a postcard.

But because he uses reason in his statements, they grow in volume. Raman is precise and brief; he avoids volume. You can say that the statements of both Krishnamurti and Raman are atomic, but while Krishnamurti embellishes them with arguments, Raman does not. Raman speaks, like the seers of the Upanishads, in aphorisms. The Upanishads just proclaim: the Brahman, the supreme is; they don’t bother to advance any argument in their support. They make bare statements that, “It is so” and “It is not so.” Raman can be compared with the Upanishadic rishis.

Questioner: Please tell us something about Raman’s ajatvad or the principle of no-birth.

According to Raman and people like him, that which is has no beginning, it was never born, it is unborn. The same thing has always been said in another way: that which is will never die, it is deathless, it is immortal. There are hundreds of statements which proclaim the immortality of Brahman, the ultimate, who is without beginning and without end. Only that which is never born can be immortal, that which is beginningless. This is Raman’s way of describing the eternal.

Do you know when you were born? You don’t. Yes, there are records of your birth which others have kept, and through them that you came to know that you were born on a certain date, month and year. This is just information received from others. Apart from this information you have no way to know that you were born. There is no intrinsic, inbuilt source of information within you which can tell you about it; you have no evidence whatsoever to support the fact of your birth. The truth of your innermost being is eternal, so the question of its birth does not arise. In fact, you were never born; you are as eternal as eternity.

You say you will die someday, but how do you know it? Do you know what death is? Do you have any experience of death? No, you will say you have seen others die, and so you infer that you too will die someday. But suppose we arrange things and it is quite possible, that a certain person is not allowed to see any other person die. Can he know on his own that he is ever going to die? He cannot. So it is just your conjecture, based on external evidence that you will die in some future.

There is no internal evidence, no intrinsic source of knowledge within you which can sustain your conjecture that you will die. That is why a strange thing happens, that in spite of so many deaths taking place all around, no one really believes that he is going to die; he believes while others will die he is going to live. Your innermost being knows no birth and no death; it is eternal. You only know that you are.

Raman asks you not to guess, but find out for yourself if there is really birth and death. You have no inner evidence in support of birth and death; the only dependable evidence available within you says, “I am.”

I too, say to you there is every evidence that makes you know, “I am.” And if you go still deeper you will know, “I am not.” Then you will know only a state of “am ness” within you.

– Osho

Excerpted from: Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, Chapter 14.

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.