on Upanishads – Sat Sangha Salon

The Art of Dying – Osho

In this seventh stage, the state of videhamukti, liberation while living in the body is achieved. This stage is totally silent and cannot be communicated in words. It is the end of all stages, where all the processes of yoga come to their conclusion. In this stage, all activities – worldly, bodily, and scriptural – cease. The whole universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum. There is no division here between speech and the speaker. If however, any such division remains, the state has not been attained. The first sound ‘a’ of aum, stands for the world, the second ‘u’ for radiance and the third ‘m’ for intelligence.

Before entering samadhi, the seeker should contemplate on aum most strenuously, and subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal, pure, enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudev and Pranava himself.

Since the whole visible world comprising a beginning, a middle, and an end, is sorrow-stricken, he must renounce everything and merge into the supreme. He should feel that he is blissful, taintless, without ignorance, without appearance, inexpressible in words, and that he is Brahman, the essence of knowledge.

This is the Upanishadic mystery.

-Akshi Upanishad

The first three stages are just like the waking state of the mind, the surface of your personality – just a fragment, the part where waves exist. The fourth and the fifth stages are deeper than the surface. They are like the dream state of the mind, where for the first time you are no longer in contact with the outer world. The outer world has ceased to be, you live only in your dreams. You enter subjectivity. The objects have disappeared, only the subject has remained.

The sixth stage is still deeper, just like the dreamless sleep – the third state of mind – where even dreams cease to be. Objects have disappeared, now subjects also disappear. The world is no more, even the reflections of the world in the mind are no more. You are fast asleep with no disturbance, not a single ripple. These are the three stages of the mind, and parallel stages to these the seeker has to pass through on the spiritual path also.

The seventh is like the fourth. The Upanishads have not given it any name, because no name can be given to it. The first is waking, the second dreaming, the third sleep – but the fourth has been left simply as the fourth, without giving it any name. It is symbolic. The Upanishads call it turiya. The word turiya means simply the fourth, it doesn’t say anything more. It is nameless because it cannot be defined. Words cannot express it, it can only be indicated. Even that indication has to be negative. It can be experienced but not formulated in concepts, hence it is called the fourth. The seventh stage of the seeker’s consciousness is like the fourth stage of the mind.

Before we enter into the seventh stage and try to penetrate its mysteries, a few things will help to create the base for the understanding of something which is the most difficult to understand. First, the six are stages, but the seventh is really not a stage. It is called a stage because there is no other way to call it, but the seventh is not a stage. The six are stages, the seventh you are. The seventh is not a stage, it is your very nature; it is you, your being.

For example, you were a child once; childhood was a stage. You were not childhood, you passed through childhood. It was a station, a stage, a phase, but you were not identified with it. If you were the childhood itself, then there would have been no possibility of becoming a youth. Who would have become a youth? The child could not have become a youth, the child would have remained the child. But you were not the child. You passed through childhood; you became a youth. Then youth is again a stage, you are not one with it. If you are one with it you could not have been a child and you cannot grow old. You will pass through it also; it is a phase.

So this is the definition of a stage: you come into it, you pass through it, you go beyond it – but you are not it. Then you will become old, that too is a stage. You will pass into death. Birth is a stage; death is a stage. One who passes through all these stages . . . The being, the life force, the energy that you are, the consciousness that you are – that one is not a stage because you can never pass through it, you can never go beyond it. That is not a stage, that is your very nature; that you are. So the seventh is not a stage. It is called a stage because there is no other way of talking about it. Six are stages, the seventh is the one who passes through these stages. The seventh is your very nature. This is the first thing.

The second thing, all the six can be described, they have a defined nature. You enter into them, they have a beginning; you pass through them, they have a middle; you finish with them, they have an end – they can be defined. Anything which has a beginning, a middle and an end can be defined, but you – you are indefinable. You don’t have any beginning, you don’t have any middle, you don’t have any end. You never begin, you will never end. You are the eternal. The life energy that exists in you has always been in existence, will always be so. There was never a time when you were not, and there will never be a time when you will not be. You will always be, you are nontemporal.

The temporal can be defined through time. The nontemporal cannot be defined, it is timeless. Just as you are nontemporal you are nonspatial also. You exist in this space you call your body, but you have existed in many spaces, […] many types of bodies – sometimes a tree, sometimes a bird, sometimes an animal.

Hindus say that there are eight hundred and forty million types of existence, lives, and a man is born only when he has passed through eight hundred and forty million spaces. In the beginning Westerners used to laugh about this – such a great number! There seemed no possibility that eight hundred and forty million life forms exist. But now biologists say that this is almost the exact number, almost exactly this many species exist. And this is a miracle! How could Hindus fall upon this number? . . . because they had no biological research, they had known no Darwin, no Huxley. They must have come to this number through some other way. They say that they have come to this number through those who have remembered their past lives – Buddhas, Mahaviras, who could remember all the past lives.

Eight hundred and forty million is a very big number. And that’s why Hindus say that once you are born a man, don’t waste this life, because it is so precious, you have struggled for it for so long, for millions of lives you have waited for it. And for what are you wasting it – food, drink, sex? Eight hundred and forty million lives spent waiting for this life, and then wasting this life in futile things!

You were in many spaces, so you are not confined to space. If you can be an elephant, then a tiger, then a bird flying in the sky, then a small ant, and then you can be a man, that means that no space contains you. You can pass through many types of bodies, but you are bodiless. If you are bodiless, if consciousness is a bodiless phenomenon, then you are nonspatial. And these two things, time and space, are very, very insignificant.

Physicists say that existence consists of two elements: time and space. And Einstein turned even these two into one. He said that these are not two. So he used to call it spatiotime – one word, not two. He used to say that there is not space and time, there is only spacetime, and space is nothing but the fourth dimension of time. Hindus say that you are neither in space nor in time; you pass through them but you are not them, you may be in them but you are not them. You pass through them, you go beyond; you enter, you come out. Space and time is your temporal abode, it is not you – hence transcendence is possible, you can go beyond both.

Somebody asked Jesus, “Tell us something about your kingdom of God, something special which will be there, some main characteristic.”

Jesus answered in a very strange way, he said a very strange thing. He said, “There shall be time no longer.” Hindus have always been saying that – but not only about time. They say there will be time no longer, there will be space no longer, because time and space are really not two things, they are one.

And this you can feel even in deep meditation. The deeper you move the less time will be. You are not aware of how much time has passed – as if time is just on the surface. The more inwards you move, the further and further away time goes. Then a moment comes when there is no time. And the same happens to space: the more inward you move the more you go on forgetting where you are. When you move more inward then you forget whether you are confined in a body or not. When you reach to the innermost center there is no time and no space, you simply exist without any boundary of time or space. Because you are not confined in any way you cannot be defined. Things which are limited and confined can be defined. So the seventh stage, or the seventh no-stage, is indefinable.

The third thing. About the six there is not much mystery, reason can understand them; they are rational in a way, you can argue about them. The seventh is total mystery, absolute mystery. We must understand what mystery is, because this Upanishad ends on the word mystery. What is a mystery? The mystery is that phenomenon which exists but has no cause to exist, the mystery is a phenomenon which is there but is paradoxical, contradictory, the mystery is that phenomenon which is not only unknown but unknowable. […]

Religion says, that the substratum of existence is unknowable. Whatsoever you do is irrelevant it will remain unknowable; it cannot be reduced to history. Why? Religion has a point, and that point is: How can a part know the whole? Man is just a part; how can the part know the whole? Man is just a by-product of this existence, just a throbbing of this existence. How can this throbbing know the whole? Your heart throbs, beats; how can the beats of the heart know you, the whole?

The part cannot know the whole, and the whole is vast, really infinite. You cannot conceive of any end to the universe, there can be no boundary to it – or can there be? Can you conceive of any boundary to existence? How will you conceive the boundary? – because a boundary needs two. Your house has a boundary because of your neighbor, the earth has a boundary because of space. The other is needed for the boundary. If there is only one it cannot be bounded, because who will bound it?

The existence is one; then it cannot be bounded, there can be no boundary. If you stand on the boundary, what will you see? If you can see anything beyond, this is not the boundary. Even if you can see emptiness ahead then that emptiness is there. Can you conceive of a point in existence where a scientist can stand and there is nothing? But Hindus say that even nothing is something. If you can say that there is nothing then space exists, you will have to move ahead. There cannot come a point where you can say, “Existence ends here!” It cannot end, it cannot have any boundary. The whole is infinite. And you can know something which is finite, you cannot know the infinite. The mystery will remain.

Secondly, man is part, he is not apart from existence. You cannot kiss your own lips – or can you? You will need somebody else’s lips to kiss, you cannot kiss your own. Man is part of this whole. To know this whole, you will need to be apart, you will have to be separate; the knower must be separate from the known, only then knowledge is possible. The knower is not separate. The existence flows in you, you are just a wave. The existence trees in the trees, it waves in the waves, it mans in you. As it trees the earth, so it mans the earth. ‘Manning’, if I can coin a new word, manning is just like waving; it is a process. You are not apart from it, not separate.

You cannot kiss your own lips, religion says, hence the mystery. And the more science progresses the more religion is proved right. A few days before Einstein died, he asserted, “When I started my journey on the scientific path I was certain that the universe can be known, but now I am not so certain. On the contrary, my uncertainty has been growing every day, and I feel that it is impossible to know the existence in its totality. It is a mystery.” […]

And that has been the feeling of all individual scientists – not of science, but individual scientists. Science as a body remains adamant, goes on saying that there can be no mystery, and if there is it is only a question of time and we will dissolve it. So the effort of science is to demystify the universe. That may be one of the reasons why people are so unhappy today. That may be one of the basic reasons why people are so bored, that may be one of the basic reasons why people are feeling so meaningless – because without mystery there can be no meaning in life.

If everything is explained then everything is explained away, if everything is known then there is nothing worthwhile, if everything becomes just factual you are finished with it. Just go to a biologist and ask him what love is or go to a chemist and ask him what love is. He will explain to you the whole mystery, he will talk of hormones, secretions of certain chemicals in the body, and he will say, “You are just a fool! Love is nothing. It is just a question of certain chemicals flowing in the bloodstream.”

He can explain everything about love, and when he explains everything about love then all your Kalidases and Shakespeares and Byrons will look stupid – because he can explain. But this same man who is explaining will fall in love. He will sit with a woman under the sky and then start talking poetry. This is the mystery. Life remains alive for mystery. And it is a good sign that even a scientist can fall in love, and a few great scientists sometimes even write poetry. This is a good sign. Man can still survive – there is a possibility, we can hope; otherwise, everything explained, poetry dies.

This age is very nonpoetic. Even poets write things which are facts, not mysteries; they talk about mundane things in their poetry. The poetry that has been created in this age is not very poetic, it is more prose than poetry. There is no music in it, because music can come only through mystery. Something unknowable throbs around you; you become part of that unknown mystery, you dissolve into it, become a drop in the ocean.

That’s why children are so happy, old men so unhappy. The reason is that the old man knows more – he has explained many things, more facts are known to him – and children are ignorant, more mystery is around them. That’s why even in old age you go on thinking that childhood was the golden period, the real paradise.

Why is childhood so paradise-like? – because the child exists in mystery. Everything is mysterious – even the shade of a tree moving with the sun is so mysterious, so poetic. An ordinary flower, maybe a grass flower, is so mysterious because the whole life is expressed through it. A breeze blowing in the tree and creating rhythmic sounds, echoes in the valley, reflections in the water . . . Everything is mysterious for a child, nothing is known. He is happy. Remember this, your happiness will be in the same proportion as your mystery – less mystery, less happiness, more mystery, more happiness.

This Upanishad ends with the word mystery. Make that word mystery a secret in your heart, and try to live in such a way that nothing is reduced to facts and even facts become just doors for more mysteries. And unless you can turn facts into mysteries you will not become religious. So I can conclude, a scientist goes on reducing mystery to facts, and a religious man goes on changing facts into mysteries.

The world was happier when it was religious. It was less affluent, it was poorer, food was scarce, wealth was not there; everything was just poor, poverty existed – but people were happier . . . because you cannot live by bread alone. They lived through mystery. Everything they saw they treated as poetry of life. All these Upanishads are written in poetry. If life can appear to you not like prose but like poetry, a song, a bird in flight always towards the unknown . . . only then will religious consciousness dawn upon you.

Now we will enter the sutra.

In the seventh stage, the state of videhamukti, liberation while living in the body achieved.

The Upanishads divide liberation in two. One, liberation while you are in the body. That is called videhamukti, liberation while in the body. And then the ultimate liberation when this body dissolves and you no longer enter into another body, you remain bodiless. So liberation with the body and bodiless liberation. Buddhists have used two words: nirvana, and mahanirvana. Nirvana means liberation in the body, and mahanirvana means liberation from the body also – freed from all embodiments, bodiless consciousness. Then you have become cosmos.

The seventh stage is of videhamukti. You are living in the body, but living in the body you are no longer the body; the body has become just an abode, a house or your clothes. You are no longer attached to it in any way. You use it, you live in it, you take care of it, but you are no longer concerned, no longer afraid that if the body dies you will die. Now you know you are deathless; only the body can die, never you. You are not identified with the body, that is the liberation – videhamukti.

This stage is totally silent and cannot be communicated in words.

A person who exists in this stage remains inwardly totally silent. There is no inner talk, he never talks with himself. Really, to talk with oneself is a sort of insanity. If you see a man sitting outside alone talking, you will think he is mad. But you are also doing the same, only less loudly. He is a little more daring, that’s all. You also go on talking within; continuously the inner talk is there, not for a single moment do you stop. Your mind is a marketplace – so many voices, crowded – and it goes on and on and on. And look, observe what goes on there: just futile things, absurd, senseless, with no rhyme or reason. You are just flooded.

In the seventh stage the inner world becomes totally liberated from inner talk, everything is silent within. You can talk, but only with someone else, not with yourself. In that stage Buddha speaks, but he never speaks with himself. Buddha speaks to others, but that speech is qualitatively different from yours. Look! Whenever you are talking with others, then too the other is just an excuse – you continue your inner talk. Observe people talking. When you are talking with someone else you are not really talking with someone else, you go on talking within. You just catch some words from the other, and then you hang your inner talk on those words and continue. […]

Look at two persons discussing anything, they are never talking about the same thing. Ninety-nine percent of debates and discussions are just mad; people are not talking about the same thing, they are not using the words in the same way, they are not communicating at all. Just look at a wife and husband talking, they are not communicating at all. The husband is saying something, and he goes on saying, “You are not understanding me.” And the wife goes on saying something else, and she also says, “You are not understanding me, you don’t understand what I am saying.”

Nobody understands anybody. You cannot understand because understanding can flower only in inner silence, it cannot flower while you are talking in words. So you are not listening to the other at all. The mind cannot do two things simultaneously – you can listen to yourself or the other. Communication has become such a great problem, everybody feels that one cannot relate. What is the problem? Why can’t you relate with the other? – because you are relating with yourself.

A man who has attained the seventh stage is silent inwardly. He can listen, he can communicate, he can relate, he can answer. In India this was taken as a basic condition: one should not start preaching unless one has attained the inner silence . . . because if somebody starts teaching, advising, and his inner talk has not stopped, he is going to create more mischief in the world than there already is. He will be destructive. He cannot help anybody; he is not interested really in helping anybody. He is not interested in giving advice, he is interested only in bringing his inner talk out in the name of giving advice. He is throwing his rubbish on others, he is using you, your mind. He is too burdened, he shares only his burden with you. He may feel a little relief, but for his relief he has created much mischief all around.

Political leaders, social reformers, so-called revolutionaries, they all belong to this category. They go on throwing rubbish on more and more people. And if you go on insisting and telling people something, it is possible they may start believing, because belief is created by constant repetition. […]

In India it has been one of the basic laws that one should not start teaching people unless one becomes inwardly totally silent. When dreams have stopped, only then should one start advising anybody. If you still have dreams don’t advise anybody, because you are still in a state of dreaming. Your advice is of no use, you will create more mischief and misery for others. If somebody follows your advice he will be in danger.

Fortunately, nobody follows anybody’s advice. They say that advice is the thing which everybody gives wholeheartedly, without any cause, but which nobody takes. It is good, fortunate, that nobody takes anybody’s advice, otherwise the world would be in more misery, because the advisor – not the advice, but the advisor – is significant.

This stage is totally silent.

And because it is totally silent it cannot be communicated in words. It can be indicated; that is all that can be done, and that is what this sutra is going to do.

It is the end of all stages, where all the processes of yoga have come to their conclusion. In this stage all activities – worldly, bodily, scriptural – cease.

In this stage there is no activity – activity as action, by effort. The person who has achieved the seventh stage leaves all activities. That doesn’t mean that he will not do anything, but now he will be spontaneous. He will not be active; he will be spontaneous. He will move like a wind. Whatsoever happens will happen; whatsoever doesn’t happen, he will not think about it happening. He will become a flow. Now he will not force anything. That’s the meaning that he will not be active.

Buddha was active. After he attained enlightenment, for forty years he was active, but that activity was not activity, he was spontaneous. He moved, but with no conscious effort on his part, as if the existence was moving him, he had become just a passage, a passive vehicle. If life wanted to move through him it would move, if it didn’t want it was okay. He had no mind to do anything. Many things would happen, and really only in such a state do many things happen that are wonderful, that are mysterious.

When you are not the doer, then you become capable of receiving existence. This is what is meant by Jesus’ saying, “Not I, but he, lives in me. My father lives in me.” Jesus is a vehicle, Mahavira is a vehicle, Krishna is a vehicle – just passages. The total can move through them, they don’t create any hindrance, they don’t change in any way. They have no will of their own, no mind of their own.

The whole universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum.

In this seventh stage of consciousness the person has really dissolved and become the whole universe, he has become Aum. This word aum is very symbolic. First, this word aum consists of three sounds: a, u, m. These three sounds are the basic sounds, all the sounds are created out of them. All the languages, all the words, are created out of these three sounds: a, u, m. And this is not a myth, now phonetics agrees that these are the basic root sounds. And the word aum is meaningless, it is simply a combination of all the three basic sounds.

Hindus say that aum is the sound of existence, and then it divides in three: a, u, m, and then the three become many. From one, three; from three, many and millions. Now even science agrees that there is only one energy in existence; that one energy is divided in three. You may call it electron, proton and neutron; you may call it a, u, m; you may call it the Christian trinity: God, the Son, the Holy Ghost; you may call it the Hindu trimurti: Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu – whatsoever the name, the name is irrelevant, but one thing is certain: one becomes three, and then three becomes many.

And if you want to move backwards to the one, move from the many to three and then let the three combine – it will become one. Aum is a way, it is a mantra, a path, to combine all the sounds in three, to first reduce all the sounds to three – and then aum becomes the door for the one.

And this has been the experience of all the mystics all over the world, not only Hindus. They all have the same experience. They may have interpreted it differently. Mohammedans, Christians, and Jews end their prayers with amen. Hindu mystics say it is the same, aum. They interpreted differently, because the sound can be interpreted in many ways. You are traveling in a train and you can interpret the sound of the train in many ways; you can even feel that there is a song going on, because the interpretation is yours – sound is not creating the interpretation, the mind is creating the interpretation. Hindus say it is like aum; Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans have felt it as aumen, or amen.

English has three or four words which are mysterious for linguists. They are omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and such words. They cannot reduce them to any logical order. What does omnipotent mean? And from where does omni come? It comes from the Hindu word aum. What does omniscient mean? From where does the word omni come? Linguists have no way to explain it, these words have remained unexplained in English. But if you can understand aum then those words become clear, because aum is the symbol of the universe for Hindus. So omnipotent means one who knows all, one who is all-powerful; omnipresent means one who is everywhere present – present in the aum, seeing the aum, powerful like the aum.

If you enter deeper meditation soon you will realize that a sound is continuously happening there. It is the sound of existence itself, the humming sound of existence itself. And if you listen without interpreting it, if you don’t force any interpretation on it, if you simply listen and watch and observe, sooner or later you will realize it is aum vibrating inside.

In this stage all activities . . . cease. The universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum.

In this stage only aum exists – the sound, the ultimate sound. Or you can call it the soundless sound, the uncreated sound.

There is no division here between speech and the speaker.

This has to be understood. You speak but there is always you, the speaker, and that which you speak. You walk, there is always the division: the walker, you, and the walk, the activity. You eat, there is always the division: the eater, you, and the activity. You can fast but the division will remain: you, the faster, and the activity, fasting. The activity and the active agent remain two, a division exists.

At this stage, the seventh, this division also disappears. The walker is the walk, the observer is the observed, the speaker is the speech – life becomes a process undivided. If you ask a question of the person who is in the seventh stage, he never thinks about it, because there is no thinker. You ask the question, he responds. That response is not a thinking one, the response is just like a valley responding, a valley echoing. You sing a song in the valley and the whole valley echoes it. The valley doesn’t think that this sound is beautiful and should be echoed in such and such a way.

A buddha is a valley. You throw a question, the valley echoes. There is nobody who can think, there is nobody who can plan, there is nobody who can choose – really there is nobody now. It is emptiness, shunyata, it is a void. There is a valley; the valley responds. The speaker and the speech are one, the mover and the movement are one. This inner division falls immediately.

This exists because of the ego. Who thinks when somebody asks a question? Who thinks inside you? The ego. You have to give the right answer, or an answer which will be appreciated. But why are you worried about it? If you are the right person the right answer will flower through you. You are worried because you are not the right person. You have to force an answer, you have to create it, manufacture it somehow through the memory. You have to choose, combine, look at the person, at what type of person he is, and then it is a whole process of planning, choosing and thinking, but you are not spontaneous.

If you are a valley, if you have reached the seventh stage and the ego has disappeared, who will choose? The answer will flow. It will flow from the total person, not from the ego. Because of your ego you cannot be spontaneous – because you are always afraid you may not look good; you may not be appreciated. Your ego is exhibitionist. The speech and the speaker become one because there is no exhibitionist ego. Buddha responds with his totality; whatsoever the response, he is not concerned really.

If however, any such division remains, the state has not been attained.

So this is the criterion: if you feel any division inside, then know well this state has not been attained.

The first sound ‘a’ of aum, stands for the world – the universe; the second ‘u’ for radiance – life, elan vital; and the third ‘m’ for intelligence – consciousness, awareness. Before entering samadhi – that is, ultimate ecstasy, the final ecstasy . . .

This path has to be remembered well, it will be very helpful. This is the last advice of this Upanishad, the final. And only Hindus and Tibetans have used this advice for millions of years. This is their last secret.

Before entering samadhi – that is, death with consciousness . . . Samadhi means death with consciousness, dying fully alert. You have died many times, but it was not samadhi, it was simple death, because whenever you died you were unconscious. Before death happens, you are unconscious, it is just a surgical procedure. Because death will be so painful for you, you cannot be allowed to be conscious – just as a surgeon gives you anesthetic, chloroform, before he operates on you, and then his operation is just nothing.

Death’s operation is so big because the whole being has to be taken out of your body with which it has become so attached, identified. It is not simply removing a bone; it is removing the whole body from you. So nature has a process: before you die you fall unconscious, fast asleep, you are no longer in your senses, and then your being can be removed. This is not samadhi.

And remember, if a person dies in unconsciousness he is born in unconsciousness, because the birth, the coming birth, will be the same, the same quality. If in this life you die unconsciously, in the next life you will be born unconscious in a womb. If you can die consciously then you can be born consciously. And if you can die with total awareness, the whole being alert, not a single part unconscious, then you will not be born at all. Then there is no need, then you can simply discard this body and become bodiless.

Before entering samadhi – that is, conscious, alert, aware of death . . . And only the person who has attained the seventh stage can enter it. He will be born no more; he will be out of the wheel of existence.

. . . The seeker should contemplate on aum most strenuously, and subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal, pure enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudeva and Pranava himself – I am the Brahman.

Before entering death the seeker should try this.

Many things. First, before you enter death ordinarily you cling to the body, you don’t want to give it up. That is the ordinary reaction of the mind, to cling. Death is snatching everything, and you cling, you start a fight with death. In this fight you will be defeated. This sutra says: Give up consciously. From the gross to the subtle to the self, give up everything. Just say to death, “Take it. This is not me. Take this body, take this mind, take this self, this ego. I am not this.”

Don’t cling, let your life be a gift to death. Don’t create any fight and resistance. If you create fight, you will become unconscious and you will miss an opportunity again. Give up. Give death whatsoever you have – from the gross to the subtle to the very self, go on giving. Don’t create any resistance. This is the foundational thing. Don’t create resistance, don’t fight with death. What will happen? If you can give up knowingly, consciously, blissfully, you will not fall unconscious, there is no need. Your clinging creates the problem. […]

If there is no resistance, there is no problem. Resistance creates conflict, conflict creates problem. So at the moment of death the seeker should contemplate on aum. He should feel himself as the aum, the universe, the very life, the very existence, the very awareness. And subsequently he should surrender everything – from gross to subtle. And this is not only for the seeker, even an enlightened person who has achieved the seventh has to surrender.

It is reported of Buddha that he told his disciples one day just in the morning, “This evening I am going to surrender my body back to nature, so if you have to ask anything you can ask. This is the last day.”

They were very worried, depressed, sad; they started weeping and crying. And Buddha said, “Don’t waste time. If you have to ask anything this is the last day. In the evening when the sun is setting, I will surrender my body. I have used so many bodies and I have never thanked nature before. This is the last, now I will never move in a body again. This is the last house I have been living in, this is my last residence, so I have to thank nature and give the body back. It served many purposes; it led me really to this enlightenment. It was a means and was a good means. It helped me in every way. So I have to thank nature and surrender the whole abode back, because it is a gift from nature and I must surrender it consciously. So there is no time . . .”

But nobody asked any question, they were not in the mood to ask. They were sad and they said, “You have said everything, and we have not followed, so just give us your blessing that we may follow whatsoever you have said.”

Then by the evening Buddha retired. He went behind a tree to surrender. And it is said that a man named Subhadra who lived in a nearby town came running – there are many Subhadras always. He came running in the evening when Buddha had retired and he said, “I have some questions to ask.”

Buddha’s disciples said, “It is too late now, we cannot disturb him now. This is not good. You could have come before. Buddha passed through your village many times, at least ten times in his life, and we have never seen you come to him.”

The man said, “Every time Buddha was passing through my village there was something or other which prevented me. Sometimes my wife was ill, sometimes there was too much of a crowd in my shop, too many customers; sometimes I was ill, sometimes there was some other urgent thing to be done, sometimes there was some marriage going on – so I went on postponing. But now I have heard that he is going to die. There is no time to postpone now, and I must ask him. So allow me.”

They prevented him. They said, “It is impossible.”

Buddha came back from his retirement, and he said, “Let it not be written in history that while I was still alive somebody came and knocked at my door and went away empty-handed. Let him ask.”

Then he again retired. First, he surrendered his body. It is reported that when he surrendered his body there was a radiance around the body as if the body had become energy and was moving into the cosmos – a conscious surrender. Then he surrendered his mind. It is said a fragrance spread, went on spreading. A buddha’s mind is a fragrance, the condensed fragrance of such a great and pure and innocent life, it was felt. Then he surrendered his self. These three things surrendered, he died. This was mahaparinirvana, mahasamadhi. But it was a conscious surrender, death was given back everything that nature had given. This man will never be back again. Only such a conscious surrender can become samadhi, the ultimate samadhi.

Even if you have not attained the seventh stage, wherever you are, at any stage, when death approaches you try to be conscious, surrendering. Don’t fight with death. If you fight with death, death will conquer. If you don’t fight with death there is no possibility of conquering.

This is the way with death, to be in a let-go. And this has been done even by buddhas who have attained the seventh stage. So try it. For you it will be an effort, but worth doing. Even if you fail it is good to do, because doing it many times you will succeed. And once you succeed with death fear disappears, surrender becomes easy.

This is the difficulty with surrender. Many people come to me – one girl was here just the other day and she said, “I feel very sad because everybody else seems to be surrendered to you, trusting, in deep faith. I cannot surrender. Meditation is good, I feel good, but I cannot surrender.”

What is the problem in surrendering? Surrender is a death; you are afraid of dying. Whenever you think of surrender you feel, “Then I am no more, then I dissolve,” and you want to persist.

If you can surrender in death you can surrender in love, you can surrender in trust, you can surrender in faith. And the reverse is also true, vice-versa is also true; if you can surrender in love, surrender in faith, you will be able to surrender in death. Surrender is the same, the same phenomenon – and surrender is the key.

Learn to surrender in death, and if you cannot surrender in death you cannot surrender in life also. Those who are afraid of death are always afraid of life. They miss everything.

And subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal . . .

While dying, or while in deep meditation, which is a sort of death, or while making love, which is a sort of death – wherever you feel a surrender, think:

I am the eternal, the pure, enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudeva and Pranava himself – God himself.

It will be a thought for you, because you have not attained the seventh stage. But if you attain the seventh these will be spontaneous feelings, not thoughts. Then you will not do them, they will happen to you. This is the difference: for a seeker who is yet below the fourth stage, this will be an effort; for a seeker who has gone beyond the third, this will be a spontaneous feeling. He will feel this way – that he is God, he is Brahma himself, Vasudeva.

Since the whole visible world, comprising a beginning, a middle, and an end, is sorrow stricken, he must renounce everything and merge into the supreme. He should feel that he is blissful, taintless, without ignorance, without appearance, inexpressible in words, and that he is Brahman, the essence of knowledge.

This is the Upanishadic mystery.

What is the Upanishadic mystery? The art of dying is the Upanishadic mystery. And one who knows how to die knows how to live. One who knows how to surrender conquers the whole.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #16

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The Motionless Flame of a Lamp – Osho

On the attainment of the fifth state, the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains. In this state, worldly desires do not arise at all. During this state all thoughts of division in the seeker are stilled and he remains rooted in nonduality.

On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.

On the accomplishment of this stage, the desire-free seeker enters the sixth one. Both truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness and all sorts of mentation cease to exist in this state, and rooted in pure-nonduality, the seeker is free from fear.

As the entanglements of his heart dissolve, so all his doubts drop. This is the moment when he is completely emptied of all thought. Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state and becomes free while yet dwelling in the body.

This state is like that of the motionless flame of a lamp. And then comes the seventh stage.

-Akshi Upanishad

The first three stages belong to the part of your mind which is called will. The first three belong to the realm of effort. You have to do them; they will not happen on their own; and unless you have done them, the other states will not follow.

After the third stage everything becomes spontaneous. There is a sequence: one after another things will happen, but you will not be doing them. The only thing to remember for the other stages after the third is to allow them to happen. The first three you have to force to happen, they will not happen by themselves. After the third you have to allow them to happen, if you don’t allow, they will not happen.

So the first three belong to the positive effort and the remaining belong to the negative effort. Let it be understood well what I mean by positive effort and negative effort. By positive effort is meant: you have to do something, only then will something happen. By negative effort is meant: you are only to allow, you have to remain passive, not doing anything, open, receptive, that’s all, and things will happen. For example, the sun is rising outside. You can close your doors. If the doors are closed you can leave them closed. The sun will be outside, the sunrays will be outside, but you will remain in darkness. Negative effort means let your doors be open, that’s all. But you have to open the doors, that is positive effort in the beginning. Open the doors, then you have not to do anything else. The sun will rise, the light will enter. And as the sun rises more and more, more and more light will come to your room. The darkness will disappear.

You cannot bring the sunrays inside; you cannot put them in a bucket and bring them inside. You cannot force the sunrays to come in. No positive effort is needed, only to open the doors you have to be positive, that’s all. Then the sun by itself will fill the room. If you are open, passive, receptive like a womb, nothing can then prevent the light from entering. Or in other words, the first three steps are male, and the remaining steps are female. In the first three steps you have to be aggressive, masculine; in the remaining steps you have to be female, feminine, passive, receptive. That’s why I say that in the negative steps you have to be just a womb to receive. […]

The first steps are male, the last steps are female. Then there are a few things implied. The first three steps will be difficult for women, they will have to make more effort for them. The first three steps will be easy for men. The last steps will be easy for women and they will be difficult for men. This will be the difference in sadhana. The first three steps will come easily to a man. There is no problem because they suit his nature, he can be aggressive easily. The first three steps will be difficult for a woman; she will have to exert force; she will get tired easily. But if she can wait for the fourth then the whole wheel turns. The last steps will be very easy for a woman – she can wait, she can be receptive. Negative effort just suits her nature.

Nobody is at any advantage and nobody is at any disadvantage. The whole – half is male, half is female. So remember this: if you are a woman the first three steps are going to be a little difficult. Knowing it well, make all efforts. If you are a man then remember that after the third difficulty will arise for you, because it is difficult for a man to be in a let-go. He can do something, that’s easy. But to not do anything, to just remain waiting, is difficult. But if the first three steps have been done well that difficulty will not be so difficult, it will dissolve by and by.

Now the sutra. Before we enter it one thing more: that after the third the fourth will follow, you are not to drag it. After the fourth the fifth will follow, after the fifth the sixth will follow, after the sixth the seventh will follow. They will come automatically. Once your life energy starts moving things will happen automatically.

That’s why it is said that samadhi, the last, the seventh step, happens by the grace of God. That’s true in a way, because you will not be making any effort for it. Suddenly one day you will feel yourself filled with grace – suddenly, not knowing any visible cause. So sometimes samadhi has happened in such moments that one was not even aware, one could not even imagine that samadhi would happen in such a state. […]

It can happen anywhere, no buddha tree is needed.

It can happen anywhere because every spot on the earth is his, and every spot on the earth is sacred. Wherever you are, if you have done the right effort then things will grow, and one day – the happening. And that happening is going to be grace, because you cannot say, “I have done it.” You were not doing anything at all. That’s why so much insistence that the ultimate happens through grace, it is a gift of God. It is nothing which you have produced.

But remember, you have still been doing something which is negative: you were not creating hindrances. If you create hindrances even God’s grace cannot be available to you. There is a reason for it. As I told you, love cannot be aggressive, and grace is the supreme most love – the love that existence has for you. It cannot be aggressive; it cannot even knock at your door. If the doors remain closed the grace will simply wait there for millions of your lives. If the doors remain closed the grace will not knock, because knocking is aggression. Unless you open the doors on your own the grace will not enter. It is not aggressive; it has no sex center in it. It can wait infinitely.

One thing you have to do: don’t create hindrances after the third. And once the fourth has happened these stages will follow. They follow just as a river flows to the sea. Once it has started, once it has crossed mountains – because in the mountains there will be a little struggle, effort, resistance; the rocks, the valleys, the mountains . . . Once the river has followed the mountains, has crossed them and has come to the flat land, then there is no problem, things flow easily. It will reach one day to the ocean.

The three stages for your river are as if in the mountains, then from the fourth you are on plain ground, you can flow. Sooner or later the ocean will be there, and you will fall down into it. And the whole course is now going to be spontaneous, you have just to flow and not do anything. And for flowing one need not do anything, flowing is not something to do.

You enter a river: if you want to swim, then you will have to do something. But if you just want to flow with the river, you need not do anything, you have simply to allow the river to take you – no resistance. That’s why a miracle happens. A live man may be drowned, but no river can drown a dead man, no river is so powerful it can drown a dead man. And any man who is live, alive, can be drowned by a small river also. The dead man must know some secret which alive men don’t know. The alive man fights with the river. The river is not drowning him; through his own fight he gets exhausted, he becomes tired, dissipates energy, becomes impotent – through his own fight, unnecessary fight. The river is not fighting him, he is fighting the river and wants to swim upstream.

Every one of you wants to swim upstream, because only when you fight with the river and swim upstream is ego created. Then you feel you are winning; you are becoming victorious. The swimming upstream creates the ego.

One day you are bound to get tired of it, and then the river will drown you because then you will have no energy left. But a dead man knows a secret. He cannot fight, he is dead; he cannot flow upstream. He simply allows the river to take him anywhere it wants. Not he, but the river now wills. No river can drown him. He can move, he can become the flow.

After the third stage you have to become like a dead man, that is the negative effort. That’s what is meant by old Indian scriptures when they say that the guru, the master, is like death, he will kill you.

Only when you are dead will the grace become possible to you. […] Dead men flow. They are spontaneous because they have no will of their own. After the third stage you should be like dead men. Then these stages follow:

On the attainment of the fifth stage – the fourth is advaita, the feeling of nonduality – the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains.

The fourth is advaita, nonduality, when you can see that only oneness exists, clouds start disappearing, only the sky remains. Clouds are there because you divide, because duality is there. Your mind is clouded, many clouds float there, because you cannot see the one sky hidden behind the clouds. You are too obsessed with the clouds, with the contents. […]

We see the clouds, not the sky. The background is always missed, and that background is the real, the big, the wide and the vital and the vast. Whenever you look in the sky you see a small cloud floating there, you never see the sky! […]

When you can see the sky clouds disappear. When you can see the consciousness thoughts disappear.

On the attainment of the fifth stage the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains.

The sky is the truth, the vagabond clouds are not true. They are not eternal, they are momentary phenomena, they come and go. Remember, this is the definition of the Upanishads, the definition of truth: that which remains always. The real is not true if the real moves and changes. Upanishads have a particular definition of truth: truth is that which always remains, and untruth is that which comes and goes.

The untruth can exist, but it is momentary, it is dreamlike. Why do you call dreams untrue? They exist, they have their existence, their reality; in the dream you believe in them, but in the morning when you have awakened you say they were dreams, untrue, unreal. Why? They were there, so why do you call them unreal? You must be following unknowingly the definition of the Upanishads – because they are no more. They were but are no more. There was a moment when they were not, then there was a moment when they were, now there is again a moment when they are not, and between two non-existences how is existence possible? That existence which exists between two non-existences must be unreal, dreamlike.

One day you were not here on this earth, in this body. If your name is Ram, then Ram didn’t exist before your birth. Then, after your death, Ram will not exist again. So two non-existences on two poles, and between is your existence, the Ram. It is dreamlike. If there is something which existed before your birth and will exist after your death, the Upanishads call that the truth.

They say, “Find the eternal, the nonchanging. Unless you come to that which has always been, will always be, consider all else dreaming.” They say, “Clouds are dreams.” Not that they are unreal – they are real, they are there, you can see them, but they are dreams, because they were not and they will not be again. And when they were not the sky was, when they are the sky is, when they will not be again the sky will be. So the sky remains, the space remains, and everything appears in it and disappears.

This world of appearance and disappearance is called maya – the illusion, the dream. The background which remains always constant, continuous, eternally there, which never changes – which cannot change – that is the truth.

Your life is also divided by the Upanishads into two parts: one that changes and one that remains permanent, eternal – eternally permanent. That which changes is your body, that which changes is your mind, and that which never changes is your soul. Your body and mind are like clouds, your soul is like the sky. At the attainment of the fifth stage clouds disappear; your body, your mind, clouds in the sky . . . and all that is impermanent disappears, and the permanent is revealed . . . And only truth remains.

In this state, worldly desires do not arise at all.

. . . Because worldly desires can arise only for the clouds, for the objects, for the impermanent; you cannot desire that which is always. There is no need to desire it, it is always there. You can desire only that which will not be there. The more impermanent the more you are attracted towards it. The sooner it flies into non-existence the more your obsession with it.

All beauty appeals, because it is the most impermanent thing in existence. A flower has an appeal, not the rock just lying down there beside the flower. You will never see the rock, you will see the flower, because the flower is impermanent. In the morning it is there, by the afternoon it will be no more – or at the most by the evening it will disperse, fall down, dissolve. The flower attracts you, not the rock.

You may have heard about Zen gardens, which are called rock gardens. They don’t make flower gardens in Zen monasteries; they make rock gardens. They say, “Flowers disappear, they are not true; rocks remain.” That is just symbolic. So Zen gardens are really unique in the world; nowhere else do such gardens exist. In their gardens only sand and rock is allowed, no flowers. Vast grounds with sand and rocks, and a Zen disciple has to sit there just to meditate on rocks, not on flowers. It is just symbolic.

You never see the rocks, you always see the flower, because your mind is concerned with the impermanent. And you become more concerned because it is going to dissolve soon; before it dissolves, possess it. Possession arises in the mind. Beauty disperses, is impermanent; possess it before it disperses. That’s why there is so much possessiveness in human relationship and so much misery in it – because you are aware that this is something which is not going to last forever. It is moving: the young woman is becoming old, the young man is becoming old; every moment death is coming in and you are afraid, the fear is there. You want to possess and indulge more and more so that you have tasted it before death appears.

At the fifth stage only truth remains. Worldly desires do not arise at all – because they arise only for the impermanent. The world means the impermanent: power, prestige, beauty, wealth, fame – all are impermanent. You may be a president today and next day a beggar on the street and no one looking at you. Have you observed? – this is happening every moment. […] Fame is flowerlike; power, prestige, flowerlike. […]

I was reading Voltaire’s life. He was so famous, so loved by people, by the masses, that it was impossible for him to go to Paris, because whenever he would go such a great crowd would gather to receive him that he was almost crushed many times by the crowd. A big police force had to be maintained whenever he came. And there was a superstition in those days in France that if you could get a piece of the clothing of a famous man like Voltaire, it was worth preserving, it helped you. So whenever he would go to Paris he would reach his home almost naked because people would snatch his clothes. His body would be scratched.

Then suddenly the fame disappeared, people forgot him completely; he would go to the station and there would be no one even to receive him. And when he died only four persons followed him to the cemetery – three men and one dog. But these things attract the mind, and the more impermanent the more the attraction – because if you are not in a hurry you may lose.

At the fifth stage worldly desires do not arise at all – because now your focus has changed, your emphasis changed. Your gestalt has moved from the foreground to the background, your gestalt has changed from the content to the container. Now you don’t look at the clouds, you look at the sky. And the sky is so vast, so infinite, that your clouds don’t mean anything now. Whether they are there or not, they are not – they have no significance.

During this state all thoughts of division in the seeker are stilled, and he remains rooted in nonduality. On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.

The Upanishads say there are four stages or four steps of human consciousness. First, the waking state of consciousness. Just now you are in the waking state of consciousness. The second, the dreaming state of consciousness, when you dream in the night. The third, the sleeping state of consciousness, when you don’t dream, simply sleep, deep sleep. These three are known to you.

Then the fourth, when all these three have disappeared and you have transcended them. This fourth is simply called turiya; turiya means the fourth.

The first three, which need your will and effort, belong to the waking consciousness. The fourth and fifth belong to your sleeping consciousness, to your dreaming consciousness. The sixth belongs to your sleeping consciousness. And the seventh will belong to the turiya, the transcendental state of consciousness.

On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as sushuptapad, draws the enlightened seeker into its nature.

In deep sleep mind disappears, because there is not even dreaming, no content. In deep sleep you have fallen back again into your nature. That’s why deep sleep refreshes you. In the morning you feel alive again, rejuvenated, young, vital, because in deep sleep you had fallen again to your original nature. You were no more an ego, you were no more a mind – you were just part of nature. While you are deep asleep you are just like a tree or a rock, you are no more an individual. You have become part of the ocean, of course unknowingly, unconsciously.

If this can happen knowingly, consciously, sushupti, deep sleep, becomes samadhi, becomes ecstasy. In sushupti, deep sleep, you touch the same point which Buddha touches, which Ramakrishna, Ramana, Eckhart or Jesus touch. But they go to that point conscious, you go to that point unconscious. You move into your nature but you are not aware of what is happening. They also move to the same nature, but they are aware. That is the only difference between sleep and samadhi; otherwise they are the same.

Alert, conscious, aware, you move into yourself, you are enlightened. Unconscious you move every night, but that doesn’t make you enlightened. You give yourself to nature. Tired of your ego, tired of your day-to-day activities, the routine, tired of your personality, you fall into a sleep. Nature reabsorbs you, recreates you, gives you back your vitality in the morning.

So if a person is ill, very ill, the physicians will try first to give him deep sleep, because nothing will help, no medicine can help if you are not falling back to your nature. If an ill person can go into deep sleep, even without medicine he will become healthy. So the first effort of the physician is to help you to fall into deep sleep, because nature spontaneously rejuvenates.

On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted – in this stage, the seeker will remain perpetually introverted – and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.

If you go to Sufi monasteries, you will see there many persons very sleepy, as if someone has hypnotized them. They will look like zombies – as if they are walking in sleep, working in sleep, following orders in sleep. And monasteries were created because of such things.

A person who is in the fifth stage will have many difficulties in the world because he will move sleepily. He is constantly deep in his nature, as if fast asleep. He will have to make effort to be awake. He will be introverted; he will not be interested in the outside world. He would like more and more time to move inwards. You will be able to see from his eyes also; they will be droopy, tired. He doesn’t want to look out, he wants to look in. His face will show the same state as that of a hypnotized medium. The face will be relaxed, as if he can fall any moment into sleep. He will become just like a child again.

The child in the mother’s womb sleeps twenty-four hours a day for nine months; never awakens, just sleeps, goes on sleeping for nine months. Those nine months are needed, because if a child awakens then the growth will be hindered. In those nine months of deep sleep his whole body is created. Nature is working. The waking consciousness will create disturbance in nature, so the child sleeps completely.

Then the child is born and after his birth he sleeps less and less. Twenty-four hours he was sleeping in the womb; out of the womb he will sleep twenty-three hours, then twenty-two hours, then twenty hours, then eighteen hours. His sleep will come to eight hours only when he has become sexually mature – that is at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, somewhere around there. Then his sleep will remain fixed because now the body has grown up completely, biologically. He can reproduce, he can now himself give birth to a child, he is sexually mature. Now there is no work left to do in the body; the body has stopped working; no new creation is going on. Eight hours sleep will do.

Then as he becomes old, after fifty, there is less and less sleep. Old men cannot sleep; four hours, three hours, then two hours, then even one hour will be too much, they will not be able to sleep. If you can understand this then when you get old you will not be worried. There is no need now for more sleep. And if you can understand this then you will not force small children to be awake when they feel sleepy.

Every family tortures children, because you want them to behave like you. If you get up early in the morning, at five, you would like your children also to get up in brahmamuhurt. You are foolish. That is destructive to children, they need more sleep. You can drag them and they cannot do anything because they are helpless. Sleepy they will get up. You can force them to sit and read. Sleepy they will somehow do it. You force small children, and then when you become old and when they become old, they will think that if they cannot sleep for eight hours then something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. An old man doesn’t need . . . there is no new work in the body. Sleep will be less and less.

When this fifth stage happens the seeker will become again like a small child. He will feel sleepy, he will need more sleep, he will be more introverted. His eyes will like to be closed more than open, because he is not interested in looking outside, and a new work has started in his being again. Now he is again a child. Something new, phenomenal, is happening now; alchemically a new being is created again. He himself has become the womb now. He will feel more sleepy.

Monasteries were needed for such people, because in the world people will not tolerate you in this stage. They will say, “You have become lazy! Go to the doctor, take some activizers. This is not good.” You will look dead and dull; your shining face will become dull. People will think you are ill or that somebody has hypnotized you. You will look like a zombie. Monasteries were needed for the fifth stage, really. The first three can be done in the world, but after the fourth you will need . . . And in the fifth you will certainly need a monastery where people understand you. […]

People who understand will not disturb anybody’s sleep, one must come out of it gradually. But this is for ordinary sleep. When the person is in the fifth state then it is a very deep sleep – you don’t know about it. It is falling to the original nature so deeply that it is very difficult to be pulled out. Nobody should disturb. That’s why monasteries were made deep in the hills, forests, where nobody would come. Nobody would disturb anybody unnecessarily, and only a few people would be there who knew.

Sometimes a seeker will remain for months at a time in sleep, and then very loving care is needed, no disturbance. He is being created again. And this can happen continuously even for nine months, just as it happens in the womb. And when the seeker comes out of it he will be totally new. A new child is born, the old man is no more. He will be completely, totally fresh. You look into his eyes and they will have a depth, an abysslike depth. You cannot find the bottom. You can go in and in and in and there is no end to it.

This is what Jesus says: “Unless you become like children again, you will not enter into the kingdom of my God.” The fifth stage will make you again a child.

He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.

He can continue but he will look like a robot. He will go to the bath, take his bath; he will go to the kitchen, eat his food. He will do, but you can see that he is doing as if walking in sleep, somnambulistic.

On the accomplishment of this stage, the desire-free seeker enters the sixth one.

All desires disappear in the fifth. He becomes totally introverted: no extroversion, no outgoing energy. Desire-free, then the seeker enters the sixth one.

Both truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness, and all sorts of mentations cease to exist in this state, and rooted in pure nonduality, the seeker is free from fear.

Remember, in the fifth untruth disappears, truth remains. In the sixth even truth disappears. In the fifth clouds disappear, the sky remains. In the sixth the sky also disappears – because you cannot continue to remember the sky without the clouds. And when there is no untruth how can you remember the truth? The duality is needed. When there is no black how can you remember the white?

Think, if the whole earth was populated by white men and there were no colored people, nobody would have been called white. Because of black people, colored people, a few people are white. Or think, if the whole earth was populated by Negroes, Negroid people, black, nobody would have been black. The contrast is needed. Only in contrast can the thing continue to be remembered. When untruth has disappeared how can you carry truth any more? How can you remember that it is truth? It has to be dropped, it will drop automatically. But first untruth drops, then truth is forgotten, it ceases. And when truth also drops you have reached something, not before it.

The sixth is the door, the real door, to the infinity. The sixth is the door, the real door, to the ultimate. Lao Tzu says – and whatsoever he says belongs to the sixth and seventh – he says, “If you are good you are still bad. If you feel that you are a saint you are still a sinner. If you look in the mirror and feel you are beautiful you have ugliness in you” . . . because when a person is really beautiful he cannot remember that he is beautiful, only ugliness can remember. When a person is really good he cannot feel he is good, because first the bad disappears, then the good also. No divisions.

In the sixth . . . truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness, and all sorts of mentations cease.

Ego disappears in the fifth, because ego is a cloud, it is part of the world of the clouds. It is just like a rainbow in the clouds – false, dreamlike. When you become aware of the soul you are not an egoist; you become egoless, you become humble. But Lao Tzu says that if you are still humble the ego exists somewhere; otherwise, how can you feel that you are a humble person? Go to somebody who is humble, watch him, and you will feel that his ego is very subtle, that’s all.

He goes on saying, “I am a humble person.” He insists that he is humble. His humbleness has now become his ego and pride, and if you say, “No, you are not,” he will be angry. If you say, “I have seen a more humble person in your town,” he will say, “This is impossible. I am the most humble, the humblest.” But “I am” remains. Now the ‘I’ claims humbleness, before it was claiming something else. […] So even nobodiness can become part of the ego.

In the sixth stage ego disappears, egolessness also. Then there will be problems. If egolessness disappears then you will have difficulty in interpreting. A real sage is without the ego and without humility. If humility is there the sage is not real, not yet real. He has not reached the sixth stage; he has not reached the door.

But then you will be in a difficulty, because you always think that humility is the quality. If you go to a buddha you will not see any humility in him. You will not see any ego either, but you will not see any humility also. And this disappearance of humility may make it seem to you that he is not humble. Buddha says, “The Vedas are of no use, scriptures are to be thrown.” If you go to him it will look as if he is not humble. He is saying that scriptures are of no use, the Vedas are to be thrown – he looks very egoistic. He is not, but he is not humble either. So whatsoever he is saying is neither related to ego nor related to egolessness. That will be the problem.

Look at Jesus, he was not a humble person at all. He was not an egoist, but not humble either. That created the problem, that led him to the cross. He was not humble at all. And now many psychologists say that he was neurotic, and they have a point. Many psychologists say that he was an egomaniac; they have a point. If psychologists study Buddha and Mahavira they will conclude the same things – but they have not studied them. They should have been studied very minutely.

So they say he was an egomaniac. Why? You can find reasons – because he was not humble. He used to say, “I am God,” or “I am the son of God. I and my father in heaven are one.” To the egoist mind this will appear like ego. And nobody can say that this man is humble who claims that he and God are one, or who claims that he is the son of God. It looks like a claim to us; to Jesus this was a simple fact.

And he was not claiming that you are not the son of God: claiming that he is the son of God, he claimed for you all. It is Christianity which claimed the wrong thing; Christianity started to claim that he is the only son of God. That is absurd, that is egomania. But Jesus was saying a simple fact: if the whole creation is out of God, the whole creation is the son, God is the father. He was saying a simple fact with no ego in it, but this disturbed people. They thought a sage must be humble. He used to say, “I am the king of the Jews.” This has been said many times, but to people who were more wise than Jews. Jews were offended that this man who was just a beggar on the street, no more – just a vagabond, just an old hippie – that this man claimed, “I am the king of the Jews.” But he was not claiming anything, he was in a state of mind where there is no ego. Kingship comes into being, but that is not ego. And that kingship doesn’t belong to any worldly affairs, it is not a claim to rule anybody. That kingship is just felt as an inner nature.

Ram Teerth, an Indian mystic of this century, used to call himself Emperor Ram. He was a beggar, but nobody took offense in India because we have known so many beggars saying that, and we know that that happens: a moment comes when a person becomes an emperor without any kingdom. Really, a person becomes an emperor only when there is no kingdom.

He went to America, and the American president invited him to visit. The American president felt uncomfortable because Ram Teerth always used to say “Emperor Ram.” Even while talking he would say, “Emperor Ram says this.” So the president humbly asked, “I cannot understand this. You don’t seem to have any kingdom, why do you claim that you are an emperor?”

Ram Teerth said, “That’s why I claim – because I have nothing to lose, nobody can defeat me. My kingdom is of the eternal, you cannot take it from me. Your kingdom can be taken, your presidency can be destroyed. Nobody can destroy me, I have nothing to lose. I am an emperor because I have no desires.”

If you have desires you are a beggar. So there are two types of beggars, poor beggars and rich beggars. When Jesus said, “I am the king of the Jews,” he was saying this. But people got offended. They said, “This is too much. This man cannot be tolerated – he must be crucified, he must be killed.” But Jesus was a humble man, humble in this sense, that even humbleness was not there – egoless, egolessness was not there – truly humble. But then one starts saying facts. And you live in a world of ego, you interpret because of your egos. So people thought, “This man is claiming something – that he is the son of God, he is the king of the Jews – and he is nothing, just a beggar, a vagabond!”

In India nobody would have taken any offense. India has seen so many Jesuses, nobody would have taken offense. In India every sannyasin is called swami; swami means the master, the king. We call a man swami; swami means the lord. When he leaves everything, when he doesn’t claim anything, when he has nothing, then he becomes swami, then he becomes the lord. Jesus was claiming something Indian in a country which was not India; that became the problem.

. . . And all sorts of mentations cease in this state, and rooted in pure nonduality, the seeker is free from fear.

Fear can exist only if the other is there. If you are alone, there can be no fear – the other creates the fear. You are sitting in a room alone, then somebody looks in through the window. Fear has come in. If you know the person well then less fear; if the person is absolutely a stranger then more fear, because then he is more other. If the person speaks your language then less fear, because he is somehow related. But if the person doesn’t speak your language then more fear. If the person is a Christian and you are also a Christian then less fear. But if the person is a pagan then more fear. If the person is totally other – doesn’t belong to your country, doesn’t belong to your language group, doesn’t belong to your religion, doesn’t belong to your race – more fear is created. The more the other is other, the more you become afraid. But whatsoever the other may be, howsoever near, the fear continues. The husband is afraid of the wife, the wife is afraid of the husband. They are close but the fear remains. Sartre says that the other is hell . . . […]

Your life is a suffering because the other is everywhere. […]

So what is the way to get out of this hell that the other creates? The Upanishads say, “You disappear!” When you are no more, the other is no more. You create the other by being yourself. The more the ego, the more the other will be there. The other is a creation, a by-product of the ego. And then, when you are no more and the whole has become one, the other and ‘I’ are not divided, there is no fear. The seeker is free from fear. And you cannot be free from fear in any other way. […]

As the entanglements of his heart dissolve, so all his doubts drop. […]

This Upanishad says that only at the stage – this stage, the sixth – when all the entanglements of the heart, all the confusions of the mind, the mentation itself drops, then all doubts drop, never before. Only at the sixth stage a man becomes doubtless, never before. You can trust before it, but you have to trust with doubts; the doubts remain by the side. They will always remain unless you reach the sixth. All that you can do is push them aside, don’t pay much attention to them. Nothing can be done. They cannot be answered, you cannot be satisfied. And you cannot drop them before the sixth.

Then what should be done? You can just put them aside in the corner. Let them be there but don’t pay much attention to them, be indifferent to them. Buddha has said, “Be indifferent to your doubts and wait, and go on doing whatsoever is possible.” A state of mind comes when doubts disappear, when suddenly at the sixth stage you look – the doubts are not there in your consciousness, they have gone. They go with the change of your consciousness, not with answers.

This is the moment when he is completely emptied of all thought. Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state, and becomes free while yet dwelling in the body. This state is that of the motionless flame of a lamp. And then comes the seventh stage.

Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state. The sixth state is not nirvana. He is still in the body; the mind has disappeared but the body is there. He has still to live, he has still to fulfill his karmas, he has to pay his debts, he has to finish all the accounts, close all the accounts that he has opened in many lives – but his mind has gone. The body will go when the time is ripe, when all the accounts are closed – then he will reach nirvana. But he is in a nirvana -like state, it is just close to nirvana.

You are not exactly in the garden but just sitting by the side of it. You can feel the coolness, the cool air comes to you. You can smell the scent coming from the flowers. You can feel, it is showering on you, but you are standing outside. Soon you will enter. You are just at the gate but still not in it.

That’s why the sixth state is called nirvana-like, but not nirvana.

This state is like that of the motionless flame of a lamp.

No movement, no wavering, all mentation has ceased, all thoughts stopped. You are unwavering, the consciousness is nishkam, without any wavering, like a flame with no wind. In a closed room where no breeze is coming, the flame of a lamp or a candle will become static, there will be no movement. Your consciousness in the sixth becomes a motionless flame.

And then comes the seventh stage . . .

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #14

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Only Knowing Remains – Osho

The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart, as if nectar has issued forth from the heart of the Earth. At the inception of this stage the innermost recess becomes a field for the coming of the other stages. Afterwards the seeker attains the second and third stages. Of the three, the third is the highest, because on its attainment all the modifications of will come to an end.

One who practices the three stages finds his ignorance dead, and on entering the fourth stage he sees everything, everywhere, equally. At that moment he is so strongly embedded in the experience of nonduality – advaita – that the experience itself disappears.

Thus, on attaining the fourth stage the seeker finds the world as illusory as a dream. So while the first three stages are called waking ones, the fourth is dreaming.

-Akshi Upanishad

The fourth stage. The first is that of the oceanic feeling that Brahman exists everywhere – oneness. The one alone exists; the many are just its forms. They are not really divided; they only appear divided; deep down they are one.

The second stage is that of vichar – thought, contemplation and meditation – where mind has to be disciplined to become one-pointed, because it can disappear only when it has become one-pointed, when the flux has stopped; that is, when you can remain with one thought as long as you wish. You have become the master then, and unless you are the master of the mind, the mind cannot disappear, it cannot cease to be; you cannot order it out of existence.

If you cannot order thoughts to stop, how can you order the whole mind to go out of existence? So in the second stage one has to drop thoughts by and by and retain only one thought. When you have become capable of dropping thoughts, one day you can drop the mind itself, the whole thought process. When the thought process is dropped, you cannot exist as an ego. You exist as consciousness but not as mind; you are there but not as an I. We say “I am.” When mind drops, the I drops; you remain a pure amness. Existence is there, rather, more abundant, more rich, more beautiful, but without the ego. There is no one who can say I, only amness exists.

In the third stage, vairagya, non-attachment, you have to become alert – first of the objects of desire, the body, the world – and continuously practice and discipline yourself to become a witness. You are not the doer. Your karmas may be the doers, God may be the doer, fate, or anything, but you are not the doer. You have to remain a witness, just a seer, an onlooker. And then this has also to be dropped. The idea that “I am the witness” is also a sort of doing. Then non-attachment becomes complete, perfect. The third stage, this Upanishad says, is the highest of the three. Now we will discuss the fourth.

The fourth is the state of advaita, nonduality. This word advaita has to be understood before we enter the sutra. This word is very meaningful. Advaita means literally nonduality, not two. They could have said one, but the Upanishads never use the word one; they say nonduality, not two. And this is very significant, because if you say one the two is implied, it becomes a positive statement. If you say there is only one you are asserting something positive.

How can the one exist without the other? One cannot exist without the other. You cannot conceive of the figure one without other figures – two, three, four, five. Many mathematicians have worked it out, particularly Leibniz in the West. He has tried to drop the nine digits, figures. Instead of nine he uses only two: one and two. In his calculations, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine are dropped, because he said it is just superstition to continue using ten figures. Why continue using ten figures?

You may not have observed: ten figures exist in mathematics not by any planning, but just because we have ten fingers. The primitives used to count on the fingers, so ten became the basic figure and it has been taken all over the world. These ten figures, this basis of all arithmetic, was produced in India. That’s why even today in all languages the words that denote these ten figures are basically Sanskrit: two is dwi, three is tri, four is chaturth, five is panch, six is shashta, seven is sapta, eight is ashta, nine is nava. These are basic roots.

These ten counting figures, these ten digits, Leibniz says are useless. And science must try to work with the minimum, so he tried to minimize the digits. But he could not minimize more than two, he had to stop at two. […] The moment you say one the two is implied, because one can exist only by the side of two. So the Upanishads never say that the Brahman is one, the truth is one; rather they use a negative term, they say he is not two. So one is implied but not directly asserted.

Secondly, about the total we cannot assert anything positive, we cannot say what it is. At the most we can say what it is not, we can negate. We cannot say directly, because once we say anything directly it becomes defining, it becomes a limitation. If you say one, then you have limited; then a boundary has been drawn, then it cannot be infinite. When you simply say it is not two there is no boundary – the implication is infinite.

The Upanishads say that the divine can be defined only by negatives, so they go on negating. They say, “This is not Brahman, that is not Brahman.” And they never say directly, they never assert directly. You cannot point to the Brahman with a finger because your finger will become a limitation. Then Brahman will be where your finger is pointing and nowhere else. You can point to the Brahman only with a closed fist so you are not pointing anywhere – or, everywhere.

This negativity created many confusions, particularly in the West, because when for the first time the West came upon the Upanishads in the last century and they were translated – first in German, then in English, and then French and other languages – it was a very baffling thought, because the Bible defines God positively. Jews, Christians, Mohammedans define God very positively, they say what he is. Hinduism defines God totally negatively; they say what he is not.

In the West this looked not very religious, because you cannot worship a negativity. You can worship only something positive; you can love only something positive, you can devote yourself only to something positive. How can you devote yourself to something which is simply a denial, a negativity, a neti neti, neither this nor that? You cannot make an idol of a negative Brahman. How can you make an idol of a negative Brahman?

That’s why Hindus conceived their highest conception of Brahman as Shivalinga. And people go on thinking that Shivalinga is just a phallic symbol. It is not just a phallic symbol, that is just one of its implications. Shivalinga is a symbol of zero, shunya, the negative. Shivalinga doesn’t define any image. There is no image on it – no face, no eyes, nothing; just a zero, not even one. And the zero can be infinite. Zero has no boundaries; it begins nowhere, it ends nowhere.

How can you worship a zero? How can you pray to a zero? But Hindus have totally a different conception. They say prayer is not really an address to God, because you cannot address anything to him. Where will you address him? – he is nowhere or everywhere. So prayer is not really some address; rather, on the contrary, prayer is your inner mutation. Hindus say you cannot pray, but you can be in a prayerful mood. So prayer is not something you can do, prayer is something you can only be.

And prayer is not for God, prayer is for you. You pray and through prayer you change. Nobody is listening to your prayer and nobody is going to help you, nobody is going to follow your prayer but just by praying your heart changes. Through prayer, if authentic, you become different – your assertion changes you.

In the south there is one old temple. If you go in the temple there is no deity; the place for the deity is vacant, empty. If you ask the priest, “Where is the deity? Whom to worship? And this is a temple – to whom does this temple belong? Who is the deity of this temple?” the priest will tell you, “This is the tradition of this temple – that we don’t have any deity. The whole temple is the deity. You cannot look for the deity in a particular direction. He is everywhere – that’s why the place is vacant.”

The whole universe is Brahman. And this is such a vast phenomenon that positive terms will only make it finite; hence negativity – it is one of the highest conceptions possible. And this negativity reached its most logical extreme in Buddha. He would not even negate. He said, “Even if you negate, indirectly you assert, and every assertion is blasphemy.”

Jews could have understood this. They have no name for God. Yahweh is not a name, it is just a symbol; or it means “the nameless.” And in the old Jewish world before Jesus, the name was not to be asserted by everybody. Only the chief priest in the temple of Solomon was allowed once a year to assert the name. So once a year all the Jews would gather together at the great temple of Solomon, and the highest priest would assert the name, Yahweh. And it is not a name, the very word means the nameless.

Nobody was allowed to assert the name, because how can the finite assert the infinite? And whatsoever you say will be wrong because you are wrong. Whatsoever you say belongs to you, it comes through you, you are present in it. So unless you had become so empty that you were no more, you were not allowed to assert the name. The highest priest was the man who had become just an emptiness, and to assert the name, for the whole year he would remain silent. He would prepare, he would become totally empty, no thought was allowed in the mind. For one year he would wait, prepare, become empty, become a nonentity, a nobody. When the right moment came he would stand just like an emptiness. The man was not there, there was nobody. The mind was not there. And then he would assert, Yahweh.

This tradition stopped because it became more and more difficult to find persons who could become nonentities, who could become nothingness, who could become anatta, nonbeing – who could destroy themselves so completely that God could assert through them, who could become just like a passage, just like a flute, empty, so that God could sing through it. […]

The Upanishads are negative about the Brahman. That’s why they say “the nondual,” that which is not two. Now we will enter the sutra:

The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart.

As I said to you, the first is the feeling, the first is the heart. The first stage belongs to the heart and only the heart can know contentment and bliss. If you are in contact with your heart you will know contentment and bliss, just like sweet springs flowing towards you, filling you, overflooding you. But we don’t have the contact with the heart. The heart is beating, but we don’t have the contact.

You will have to understand it, because just by having a heart, don’t go on thinking that you are in contact with it. You are not in contact with many things in your body, you are just carrying your body. Contact means a deep sensitivity. You may not even feel your body. It happens that only when you are ill do you feel your body. There is a headache, then you feel the head; without the headache there is no contact with the head. There is pain in the leg, you become aware of the leg. You become aware only when something goes wrong.

If everything is okay you remain completely unaware, and really, that is the moment when contact can be made – when everything is okay – because when something goes wrong then that contact is made with illness, with something that has gone wrong, and the well-being is no more there. You have the head right now, then the headache comes, and you make the contact. The contact is made not with the head but with the headache. With the head contact is possible only when there is no headache, and the head is filled with a well-being. But we have almost lost the capacity. We don’t have any contact when we are okay. So our contact is just an emergency measure. There is a headache: some repair is needed, some medicine is needed, something has to be done, so you make the contact and do something.

Try to make contact with your body when everything is good. Just lie down on the grass, close the eyes, and feel the sensation that is going on within, the well-being that is bubbling. Lie down in a river. The water is touching the body and every cell is being cooled. Feel inside how that coolness enters cell by cell, goes deep into the body. The body is a great phenomenon, one of the miracles of nature.

Sit in the sun. Let the sunrays penetrate the body. Feel the warmth as it moves within, as it goes deeper, as it touches your blood cells and reaches to the very bones. And sun is life, the very source. So with closed eyes just feel what is happening. Remain alert, watch and enjoy. By and by you will become aware of a very subtle harmony, a very beautiful music continuously going on inside. Then you have the contact with the body; otherwise you carry a dead body.

It is just like this: a person who loves his car has a different type of contact and relationship with the car than a person who doesn’t. A person who doesn’t love his car goes on driving it and he treats it as a mechanism, but a person who loves his car will become aware of even the smallest change in the mood of the car, the finest change of sound. Something is changing in the car and suddenly he will become aware of it. No one else has heard it; the passengers are sitting there; they have not heard it. But a slight change in the sound of the engine, any clicking, any change, and the person who loves his car will become aware of it. He has a deep contact. He is not only driving, the car is not just a mechanism; rather he has spread himself into the car and he has allowed the car to enter him.

Your body can be used as a mechanism, then you need not be very sensitive about it. And the body goes on saying many things you never hear because you don’t have any contact […] You cannot detect it, and you are there living in the body. There is no contact. […]

So first try to be more and more sensitive about your body. Listen to it; it goes on saying many things, and you are so head-oriented you never listen to it. Whenever there is a conflict between your mind and body, your body is almost always going to be right more than your mind, because the body is natural, your mind is societal; the body belongs to this vast nature, and your mind belongs to your society, your particular society, age, time. Body has deep roots in existence, mind is just wavering on the surface. But you always listen to the mind, you never listen to the body. Because of this long habit contact is lost.

You have the heart, and heart is the root, but you don’t have any contact. First start having contact with the body. Soon you will become aware that the whole body vibrates around the center of the heart just as the whole solar system moves around the sun. Hindus have called the heart the sun of the body. The whole body is a solar system and moves around the heart. You became alive when the heart started beating, you will die when the heart stops beating. The heart remains the solar center of your body. Become alert to it. But you can become alert, by and by, only if you become alert to the whole body.

While hungry, why not meditate a little? – there is no hurry. While hungry just close your eyes and meditate on the hunger, on how the body is feeling. You may have lost contact, because our hunger is less bodily, more mental. You eat every day at one o’clock. You look at the watch; it is one – so then you feel hunger. And the clock may not be right. If somebody says, “That clock has stopped at midnight. It is not functioning. It is only eleven o’clock,” the hunger disappears. This hunger is false, this hunger is just habitual, because the mind creates it, not the body. Mind says, “One o’clock – you are hungry.” You have to be hungry. You have always been hungry at one o’clock, so you are hungry.

Our hunger is almost ninety-nine percent habitual. Go on a fast for a few days to feel real hunger, and you will be surprised. For the first three or four days you will feel very hungry. On the fourth or fifth day you will not feel so hungry. This is illogical, because as the fast grows you should feel more and more hungry. But after the third day you will feel less hungry, and after the seventh day you may completely forget hunger. After the eleventh day almost everybody forgets hunger completely and the body feels absolutely okay. Why? And if you continue the fast . . . Those who have done much work on fasting say that only after the twenty-first day will real hunger happen again.

So it means that for three days your mind was insisting that you were hungry because you had not taken food, but it was not hunger. Within three days the mind gets fed up with telling you; you are not listening; you are so indifferent. On the fourth day the mind doesn’t say anything, the body doesn’t feel hunger. For three weeks you will not feel hunger, because you have accumulated so much fat – that fat will do. You will feel hunger only after the third week. And this is for normal bodies. If you have too much fat accumulated you may not feel hungry even after the third week. And there is a possibility to accumulate enough fat to live on for three months, ninety days. When the body is finished with the accumulated fat, then for the first time real hunger will be felt. But it will be difficult. You can try with thirst, that will be easy. For one day don’t take water, and wait. Don’t drink out of habit, just wait and see what thirst means, what thirst would mean if you were in a desert.

Lawrence of Arabia has written in his memoirs: “For the first time in my life, when I was once lost in the desert, I became aware of what thirst is – because before that there was no need. Whenever my mind said, ‘Now you are thirsty,’ I took water. In the desert, lost, no water with me and no way to find an oasis, for the first time I became thirsty. And that thirst was something wonderful – the whole of the body, every cell, asking for water. It became a phenomenon.” If you take water in that type of thirst, it will give you a contentment that you cannot know just by drinking through habit. […]

First one has to become deeply aware of this phenomenon of the body. A revival of the body, a resurrection, is needed – you are carrying a dead body. Then only will you feel, by and by, that the whole body with all its desires, thirsts and hungers, is revolving around the heart. Then the beating heart is not only a mechanism, it is the beating life, it is the very pulsation of life. That pulsation gives contentment and bliss.

Contentment and bliss impart sweetness.

Your whole being becomes sweet, a sweetness surrounds you, it becomes your aura. Whenever a person is in contact with his heart you will immediately fall in love with him. Immediately, the moment you see him, you will fall in love with him. you don’t know why. He has a sweetness around him. That sweetness your mind may not be able to detect, but your heart detects it immediately. He has an aura. The moment you come into his aura you are intoxicated. You feel a longing for him, you feel an attraction, a magnetic force working. You may not be consciously aware of what is happening; you may simply say, “I don’t know why I am attracted,” but this is the reason. A person who lives in his heart has a milieu around him of sweetness – sweetness flows around him. You are flooded with it whenever you are in contact with that person.

Buddha, Jesus, attracted millions of people, and the reason is that they lived in the heart; otherwise it was impossible. What Buddha demanded was impossible. Thousands of people left their homes, became beggars with him, moved with him in all types of sufferings, austerities, and enjoyed it. This is a miracle. And those who left their homes were rich, affluent people, because India knew the golden age in the time of Buddha. It was at its highest peak of richness. Just as America is today, India was at that moment. At that moment the West was just wild; no civilization existed really. The West was totally uncivilized at the time of Buddha, and India was at its golden peak.

Buddha attracted millions of people who were rich, living in comfort, and they moved and became beggars. What filled them, what attracted them, what was the cause? Even they couldn’t explain what the cause was. This is the cause: whenever a person of heart is there, a person who lives in his heart, he imparts around him vibrations of sweetness. Just being in his presence, being near him, you feel a sudden joy for no visible cause. He is not giving you anything, he is not giving you any physical comfort. On the contrary, he may lead you into physical discomfort; through him you may have to pass through many sufferings – but you will enjoy those sufferings.

Buddha was dying, and Ananda, his disciple, was weeping. So Buddha said, “Why are you weeping?”

Ananda said, “With you I can move on this earth, millions of times I can be reborn and it will not be a suffering. I can suffer everything. Just if you are there, then this sansar, which you call dukkha, suffering, is no more suffering – but without you even nirvana will not be blissful.”

Such a sweetness surrounded Buddha, such a sweetness surrounded Jesus, such a sweetness surrounded Saint Francis, such a sweetness surrounds all those who have lived through the heart. Their charisma is that they live in their heart.

Jesus was not a very learned man; he was just a villager; he remained a carpenter’s son. He was talking in people’s ways, ordinary parables. If someone gives you Jesus’ parables, his statements, without saying that these belong to Jesus, you will throw the book, you will never read it again. But he influenced people, impressed so much, that Christianity became the greatest religion of the world. Half the earth belongs now to Christianity, to a carpenter’s son who was not educated, not cultured. What is this mystery? How did it happen? […]

The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart, as if nectar has issued forth from the heart of the Earth. At the inception of this stage the innermost recess becomes a field for the coming of the other stages. Afterwards the seeker attains the second and third stages. Of the three, the third is the highest, because on its attainment all the modifications of will come to an end.

All the modifications of will come to an end. The third is the highest. And the reason? Let it penetrate deep in your heart. The third is the highest. Why? – because all the modifications of will come to an end. Your will is the cause of your ego. You think you can do something; you think you will do something; you think you have got willpower, you think that there is a possibility for you to struggle with existence and win. Will means the attitude to fight, the attitude to conquer, the attitude to struggle. Will is the force of violence in you. […]

Will is your impotence. Because of will you are defeated, because you are doing something absolutely absurd, something which cannot happen. When you leave will, only then will you be powerful. When there is no will you have become potent. Omnipotent also you can become when there is no will, because then you are one with the universe, then the whole universe is your power.

With the will you are a fragment fighting with the whole existence, with such a small quantity of energy. And that energy is also given by the universe. The universe is so playful that it even allows you to fight with it, it gives you the energy. The universe gives you the breath, the universe gives you the life, and enjoys your fighting. It is just as a father enjoys fighting with a child and challenges the child to fight. The child starts fighting and the father falls down and helps the child to win. This is a game for the father. The child may be serious, may get mad; he will think, “I have conquered.”

In the West this childishness has become the source of many miseries: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the two world wars, were because of this will. Science should not be any more the conquest of nature. Science must now become the way towards nature – surrender to nature, not conquest of nature. And unless science becomes Taoist – surrender to nature – science is going to eliminate the whole of humanity from this earth. This planet will be destroyed by science. And science can destroy only because science has become associated with this absurd notion of conquest.

Man has willpower. Every will is against nature, your will is against nature. When you can say totally, “Not mine, but your will should be done” – “your” means the divine, the totality, the wholeness – for the first time you become powerful. But this power doesn’t belong to you, you are just a passage. This power belongs to the cosmos.

The third is the highest, because all the modifications of will come to an end. Not only the will but the modifications – because will can get modified. We saw that the Upanishad divides desirelessness, non-attachment, in two parts. First, when you make effort to be nonattached – that too is a modification of the will. You struggle, you control, you detach yourself, you make all the efforts to remain a witness. Those efforts to remain a witness belong to your will, so really that is not real non-attachment, just a rehearsal; not real, just a training ground.

Non-attachment will become real only in the second stage, when even this struggle to be a witness has dropped; when even the idea that “I am a witness” has dropped, when there is no more conflict between you and existence. No more any conflict, you simply flow with it.

Lao Tzu is reported to have said, “I struggled hard but I was defeated again and again, fortunately.” He says, “Fortunately I was defeated again and again. No effort succeeded, and then I realized – against whom am I fighting? Against myself I am fighting, against the greater part of my own being I am fighting. It is as if my hand is fighting against my body, and the hand belongs to the body. It can fight, but the hand has the energy through the body.” Lao Tzu says, “When I realized that I am part of this cosmos, that I am not separate – the cosmos breathes in me, lives in me, and I am fighting it – then the fight dropped. Then I became like a dead leaf.”

Why like a dead leaf? – because the dead leaf has no will of her own. The wind comes, takes the dead leaf; the dead leaf goes with the wind. The wind is going north, the dead leaf doesn’t say, “I want to go to the south.” The dead leaf goes to the north. Then the wind changes its course, starts flowing towards the south. The dead leaf doesn’t say, “You are contradictory. First you were going to the north, now you are going to the south. Now I want to go to the north.” No, that leaf doesn’t say anything. She moves to south, she moves to north, and if the wind stops she falls down on the ground and rests. She doesn’t say, “This was not the right time for me to rest.” When the wind raises her into the sky the dead leaf doesn’t say, “I am the peak of existence.” When she falls to the ground she is not frustrated. A dead leaf simply has no will of her own. “Thy will be done.” She moves with the wind, wheresoever it leads. She has got no goal, she has no purpose of her own.

Lao Tzu says, “When I became like a dead leaf, then everything was achieved. Then there was nothing to be achieved any more. Then all bliss became mine.”

All the modifications of will come to an end. One who practices the three stages finds his ignorance dead, and on entering the fourth stage he sees everything, everywhere, equally.

Two things: One who practices these three stages finds his ignorance dead. Your ignorance cannot become dead by accumulating knowledge. You can accumulate all the knowledge available in the world, you can become an Encyclopedia Britannica, but that won’t help. You can become a walking encyclopedia, but your ignorance will not be dead through that. Rather, on the contrary, your ignorance will become hidden, secret; it will move to the deep recesses of the heart. So on the surface you will be knowledgeable and deep down you will remain ignorant. This is what has happened, and all the universities go on helping this.

Your ignorance is never dead; it is alive, working. And just on the surface you are decorated, you are a painted being. Your knowledge is painted just on the surface and deep down you remain ignorant. The knowledge, real knowledge, can happen only when the ignorance is dead. Before that, knowledge will remain information – borrowed, not yours, not authentic – it has not happened to you. It is not a lived experience, but only words, verbal, scriptural.

And ignorance can become dead only when you practice these first three stages, because ignorance is a mode of life, not a question of information. It is a way of life, a wrong way of life, that creates ignorance. It is not just a question of memory, of how much you know, or how much you don’t know – that is not the point. […] Jesus became enlightened and Pontius Pilate remained ignorant. He was more cultured than Jesus, more educated; he had all the education that was possible. He was the governor general, the viceroy, he knew whatsoever could be known through books. And in the last moment before Jesus was sent to the cross, he asked him a very philosophical question.

Nietzsche wrote about Pontius Pilate, because Nietzsche was always against Jesus. When he became mad in the end – and he was bound to become mad because his whole way of life, the whole style was madness – he started signing his signature as “Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche.” He would never sign his signature without writing before it “Anti-Christ.” He was absolutely against Jesus. He says that only Pontius Pilate was the man who knew, and Jesus was simply an ignorant carpenter’s son. And the reason that he proposes is that in the last moment before Jesus went to the cross, Pontius Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” This is one of the most significant philosophical questions which has always been asked, and philosophers enjoy answering it – but nobody has answered yet. To Nietzsche Jesus looks foolish. He writes that when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” he was asking precisely the peak question, the sole question, the ultimate question, the base of all philosophy, the base of all inquiry – and Jesus remained silent.

Nietzsche says that was because in the first place Jesus would not have understood what Pontius Pilate meant, and secondly, he could not answer because he didn’t know what truth is. He was ignorant, that’s why he remained silent. And I say to you, he remained silent because he knew, and he knew well that this question can never be answered verbally.

Pontius Pilate was foolish – educated, well-educated, but foolish – because this question cannot be asked in such a way, and it cannot be answered when a person is going to be hanged. For the answer to this question Pontius Pilate would have had to live with Jesus for years, because the whole life has to be transformed, only then can the answer be given. Or the transformed life itself becomes the answer, there is no need to give it.

Jesus remained silent, that shows he was a wise man. Had he given any answer, to me he would have proved that he was ignorant. Even Jesus’ followers became a little uncomfortable, because they thought that had he answered Pontius Pilate, and had Pilate been convinced that his answer was true, there would have been no crucifixion. But crucifixion is better than answering a foolish question with a foolish answer. Crucifixion is always better than that. And Jesus chose crucifixion rather than answering this foolish question . . . because such questions need a mutation in life; you have to work upon yourself.

Truth is not something which can be handed over to you. You will have to raise your consciousness; you will have to come to the climax of your being. Only from there the glimpse becomes possible. And when you die completely to your ego, truth is revealed, never before. It is not a philosophical inquiry, it is a religious transformation.

This is a very subtle and delicate point. Let it go deep in your heart. He is so embedded in the fourth stage . . . After the three stages the fourth follows automatically. The three have to be practiced, the three have to be deeply rooted in your being through your effort – the fourth happens. Suddenly you become aware that there is nonduality, only one exists – one being, one existence.

He is so strongly embedded in the experience of advaita – nonduality – that the experience itself disappears.

. . . Because for experience to exist, duality is needed. So the Upanishads say you cannot experience God. If you experience God, then the God remains separate and you remain separate, because only the other can be experienced. Experience divides. This is the deepest message of all the Upanishads: experience divides . . . because whenever you say experience it means there are three things: the experiencer, the experienced, and the relationship between the two, the experience.

The Upanishads say that God cannot be known, because knowledge divides the knower, the known and the knowledge. If really you have become one, how can you experience? So even the experience disappears. The Upanishads say a person who claims he has experienced the divine is false, his claim proves that he is false. A knower cannot claim, one who has really experienced the divine cannot claim, because the very experience disappears. Buddha says again and again, “Don’t ask me what I have experienced. If I say anything then I am not true. Rather come near me, and you also go through the experience.” […]

Buddha says, “Experience – and you cannot even claim that you have experienced.” . . . Because who will experience? There is no other. Who will experience whom? Even the experience itself disappears. There is nothing like God-experience; it is only in the minds of the ignorant. The knowers know that God disappears and the I disappears, the duality disappears. Knowing is there, but the knower is not and the known is not.

Because of this Mahavira has used a beautiful word. He calls it kaivalya gyan; he calls it, “Only knowing remains” – only knowing, neither the known nor the knower. You disappear, the God you were seeking disappears, because really the God you were seeking was created by you. It was your ignorance that was seeking. Your God was part of your ignorance. It is bound to be. How can you seek the real God? You don’t know it.

You project your God through your ignorance, you seek it. All your heavens are part of your ignorance. All your truths are part of your ignorance. You seek them and then your ignorance disappears. When your ignorance disappears where will those gods remain who were created by your ignorance? They will also disappear.

It happened: when Rinzai became enlightened, he asked for a cup of tea. His disciples said, “This seems to be profane.”

And he said, “The whole thing was foolishness: the seeking, the seeker, the sought. The whole thing was foolishness. You just give me a cup of tea! None existed. The seeker was false, the sought was false, so of course the seeking was false. It was a cosmic joke.”

That’s why I say there is no purpose – God is joking with you. The moment you can understand the joke you are enlightened. Then the whole thing becomes a play, even the experience disappears.

Thus, on attaining the fourth stage the seeker finds the world as illusory as a dream. So while the first three stages are called waking ones, the fourth is dreaming.

When the fourth stage is attained, when even God disappears, when the God-seeker, the worshipper disappears, this whole world becomes like a dream. Not that it is not there – it is there, but like a dream; it has no substantiality in it. It is a mental phenomenon; it is a thought process. You enjoy it, you live in it, but you know that this is all a dream.

This is the Hindu concept of the world; they say it is a dream in the mind of God. It is just as when you dream in the night; when you dream you can create a reality in the dream, and you never suspect that this is a dream and you are the creator. The beauty is this – that you are the creator, you are the projector, and you cannot suspect that it is just a dream. Hindus say that as there are private dreams, individual dreams, this is the collective dream – God dreaming the world. You are a dream object in the God’s dream. We take dreams to be real, and Hindus say the reality is a dream.

I will tell you one anecdote.

Once it happened, Mulla Nasruddin was fast asleep with his wife in bed. The wife started dreaming; she had a very beautiful dream. One charming young man was making love to her, and she was enjoying it very much. She was old, ugly, and he was a very charming young prince, and she was enjoying it.

Suddenly in the dream, when she was enjoying the lovemaking, Mulla Nasruddin entered from the roof – in the dream. She became afraid. She became so afraid and disturbed that she said loudly, “My God, my husband!” She said it so loudly that Mulla heard it and jumped out of the window. He thought he was sleeping with some other woman.

Our dreams are realities for us. For the Upanishads, our reality is just a dream.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #12

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Sublime is the Spontaneous – Osho

There are two kinds of non-attachment: the ordinary and the sublime. That attitude of non-attachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary non-attachment. He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.

Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing. Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity. Every union leads inevitably to separation. The ignorant suffer maladies of mental anxiety.

All material things are perishable, because time is constantly devouring them. Through the understanding of scriptural precepts, one’s faith in material things is uprooted and one’s mind freed of them. This is called ordinary non-attachment.

When thoughts like: “I am not the doer, my past deeds are the doers, or God himself is the doer,” cease to worry the seeker, a state of silence, equilibrium, and peace is attained. This is called sublime non-attachment.

-Akshi Upanishad

On the path, in the search, every step has two sides: the beginning of the step, and the conclusion. The beginning will always be with conscious effort, it is bound to be so. A struggle will be there, constant need to be alert will be there. Sometimes you will fall, sometimes you will fall asleep, sometimes you will forget, sometimes you will go astray. Again and again, you will have to remember, come back to the path. Again and again, you will have to make more intense effort to be conscious.

So the beginning of every step will be struggle. There will be ups and there will be downs. Sometimes you will feel very miserable, frustrated; whenever the contact with the method is lost, whenever you have gone astray, frustration will happen, you will feel depressed, sad, lost. There will be moments of intense happiness also. Whenever you regain the control again, whenever even for moments you become the master, whenever even for small glimpses you become capable, you will feel intense joy spreading all over your being.

Peaks and valleys will be there. They will disappear only when the conscious effort has disappeared, when the method is no more a method, when the method has become your very consciousness, when you need not remember it, when you can completely forget it and it still grows, continuous, flows, when you need not maintain it, when you need not even think of it – and then it becomes spontaneous, sahaj. This is the end aspect of every step. Remember this: through constant practice a moment comes when you can drop the practice completely, and unless you can drop the practice you have not attained.

Taoist masters have used many dimensions: poetry, painting, and many other crafts have been used as training grounds. Painting has been used for centuries in China and Japan. Taoist painting has a principle, and that principle is that first one should become proficient in painting, in the technique of painting – it takes many years – and then for a few years one has to drop painting completely. One has to forget that one is a painter; throw the brushes, colors, inks, and just drop from the mind that one has learned something. For a few years one has to be completely away from painting. When the thought has dropped, then again, the master says, “Now you start.” Now this man is not a technician. He knows the technique but he is not a technician, because there is no need to be aware of the technique. Now he can paint like a small child. The effort has ceased, to paint has become effortless. Only then master-teachers are born.

I remember one story I would like to tell you. It happened once in Burma that a great temple was to be built, and the main door had to be something unique on the earth. So many painters, Zen masters, Taoist masters, were asked, and the one who was the greatest was invited to design the door. That great master had a habit that whenever he would paint something, design something, his chief disciple would sit by his side, and whenever he would complete the design, he would ask the chief disciple whether it was okay. If the disciple said no he would throw the design and he would again work on it. Unless the disciple said, “Right, this is the thing,” he would go on. Designing this main gate of the temple became a problem, because the chief disciple continued to say no. The master painted at least one hundred designs. Many months passed. He would work for weeks, and when the design was complete, he would look at the disciple who was sitting beside him. The disciple would shake his head and he would say, “No,” and the master would put aside the design and start again. He was also worried, “What is going to happen? When will this design be complete?” – and he had been doing hard work such as he had never done in his life.

Then one day it happened. The ink with which he was painting was almost finished, so he told the disciple to go out of the house and prepare more ink. The disciple went out to prepare the ink, and when he came back he started dancing in ecstasy and he said, “Now this is the thing! But why couldn’t you paint it before?”

The master said, “Now I know. I was also worried, what was happening? Now I know, your presence was the disturbance. In your presence I remained the technician. I was aware that I was doing something, effort was there; I was conscious of the effort, and I was thinking, expecting, that this time you would say yes. That was the disturbance. I could not be spontaneous. When you went out I could forget you, and when I could forget you I could forget myself also.” . . . Because the self is the reaction to the other. If the other is in your consciousness you will remain the ego. They both drop simultaneously; when the other has disappeared, the ego has disappeared.

“And when I was not,” the master said, “the painting flowed by itself. This design I have not done. All those hundred designs you rejected were my doings. This design is through Tao, through nature; it has dropped from the cosmos itself. I was just a vehicle. I could forget and become a vehicle.”

When you can forget the method, the effort, the self, the other, when everything has been dropped and you have become simply a flow of energy, spontaneous, then really something is attained – not before. And look at the difference in the Eastern and Western attitudes about painting, and about everything else also. In the West you have to make conscious effort and bring the effort to a peak. You become a technician and the other part is missing. In the East you have to become a technician, and then drop that whole technicality and become again innocent, simple, as if you were never trained.

Once somebody asked Winston Churchill, one of the greatest orators the West has produced, “Don’t you get afraid of the audience? Thousands of people staring at you – don’t you get afraid, scared? Don’t you get a little fear inside?”

Churchill said, “This has been my constant practice: that whenever I stand to speak, I look at the audience and I think, ‘So many fools!’ The moment this thought comes to my mind I am okay, then I don’t worry.”

Somebody asked the same question of a Zen master, Rinzai: “You speak to thousands, don’t you ever get worried about it? Don’t you ever get scared? Don’t you ever get an inner trembling? – because so many persons are present, judging, observing, looking at you.”

Rinzai said, “Whenever I look at people I say, ‘I am sitting there also. Only I am in this hall.’ Then there is no problem. I am alone, these people are also me.”

This is the Eastern and Western difference. Churchill represents the West: if others are fools, then you are okay, then the ego is strengthened. You don’t worry about them, because who are they? – nobodies. And Rinzai says: The other is not. They are just me, my forms. I am alone. I am the speaker and I am also the audience. Then what is the fear?”

In your bathroom when you are alone you can be a good singer – everybody is, almost everybody. And bring the same man out of the bathroom, let him stand here, and the moment he sees you he is no more capable of singing – even humming becomes impossible. The fear grips the throat; he is not alone, the others are there, they will judge. The moment the other is there fear has entered. But the same man was humming beautifully, singing beautifully in the bathroom – nobody was there.

The same happens when you can see in the other your own self. Then the whole earth is your bathroom; you can sing, you can dance. The other is no more there, there is nobody to judge. Through these eyes you are looking, and through others’ eyes also you are looking. Then it becomes a cosmic play of one energy in many forms. But the ultimate of any method is to become methodless, the ultimate of every technique is to become nontechnical, innocent. All effort is only to attain an effortless spontaneity.

There are two kinds of non-attachment: the ordinary and the sublime.

The ordinary is the first aspect of vairagya, non-attachment. The sublime is the spontaneous, the end; the other aspect of the same when things have become spontaneous.

That attitude of non-attachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary non-attachment.

The emphasis is on the word knows. He has to maintain that; he has to remember it: “I am not the doer. I am just a witness. Whatsoever happens I am not involved. I am an outsider, just a spectator.” But this has to be remembered, this has to be maintained. This point must not be lost. And it is very difficult to remember it constantly. To remember even for a few minutes is difficult, because for many many lives you have been the doer, constantly you have been the enjoyer.

When you are eating you are the eater, when you are walking you are the walker, when you are listening you are the listener. You have never made any effort to remember that while doing anything you are not the doer but the witness. While eating, try it. The food is going into the body, not into you. It cannot go into you, there is no way, because you are the consciousness and the food cannot enter consciousness. It will go into the body, it will become the blood and the bone, whatsoever the body needs, but you remain a witness.

So while sitting at your table eating your food, don’t be the eater. You have never been the eater; this is just an old habit, an old conditioning. Look at the eater, the body, and the eaten, the food, and you be the third. You just witness, you just hover above, you just look from a distance. Stand aloof and see your body eating, the food being eaten, and don’t get involved in it. But you can maintain it only for a few seconds – again you will become the eater. It has been such a long, long conditioning; it will take time to break it.

You are walking on the street. Don’t be the walker, just watch the body walking. For a few seconds you may remember; again you will forget and you will enter in the body and become the walker. But even if for a few seconds you can maintain it, you can remember that you are not the walker, then those few seconds will become satori-like, those few seconds will be weightless, those few seconds will be of a joy such as you have never known. And if this can happen for a few seconds, why not for ever?

Somebody is insulting you – it will be more difficult than with walking or eating to remember that you are the witness. One Indian mystic, Ram Teerth, went to America in the beginning of this century. He never used the word ‘I’, he would always use the name Ram. If he was hungry, he would say, “Ram is hungry.” It looked unfamiliar and strange. If there was a headache he would say, “Ram has a headache.”

One day it happened that a few people insulted him. He came back laughing and his disciples asked, “Why are you laughing?”

So he said, “Ram was insulted very much, and I enjoyed. I was standing out of Ram and looking. Ram was in much difficulty; much inconvenience, discomfort, was there in Ram.”

You become an object of your own consciousness. This is coming out of the body, out of the ego, out of the mind. This is difficult not because it is unnatural, this is difficult only because of a long conditioning. You may have observed that small babies in the beginning never say ‘I’; they say, “Baby is hungry.” They seem to be witnessing the phenomenon. But we train them to use the ‘I’ because it’s not good to say, “Baby is hungry,” or “Baby wants to play.” We train them to use the ‘I’.

‘I’ is not existential, ‘I’ is a social entity; it has to be created. It is just like language: it is needed because if people go on speaking like babies or like Ram Teerth, if like Ram Teerth people go on saying their names, it will be very difficult to say whether they are talking about themselves or about somebody else. It will create confusion. If you say, “I am hungry,” immediately it is meant that you are hungry. If you say, “Ram is hungry,” if people know that you are Ram then it’s okay; otherwise they will think somebody else is hungry, not you. And if everybody uses it, it will create confusion.

It is a social convenience to use the ‘I’; but this social convenience becomes truth, it becomes the center of your being, a false thing. The ‘I’ never existed, can never exist. But just because of social utility the child is trained, the consciousness becomes fixed around a center which is just utilitarian, not existential – and then you live in an illusion. And the whole life of a person who has not come to know that there is no ego will be false, because it is based on a false foundation.

To be a witness means to drop the ‘I’. The moment you can drop the ‘I’, immediately you become the witness. Then there is nothing else to do, you can only be the witness. This ‘I’ creates the problem. Hence the emphasis of all religions to become egoless, to be egoless, to be humble, not to be proud, not to be conceited about it. Even if you have to use it, use it as a symbol. You have to use it but use it knowingly – knowing that this is just a social convenience.

When you become capable of remembering that you are the witness, this is the first stage of nonattachment.

He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.

Try to see that whatsoever action is there, it is not arising out of you but rather arising out of the chain of actions you have done in the past. Try to understand this distinction clearly. Whenever you do something – if somebody insults you, you think that the reaction is arising from you. That is wrong. It is arising not from you but from the chain of your mind which has come from the past. You have been trained in the past that this is an insulting word. […]

You have a mind trained through many lives. Things come out of that, not out of you. You have a long chain of actions; whenever a new act is born in you it comes out of that chain. It is a new link in that chain; it is born out of that chain, not out of you. When somebody insults you, you get angry. That anger comes from your past angers, not from you.

This difference has to be noted, because it will help you to become a witness. And that is what is meant by living moment-to-moment – that is the moment. Don’t allow the chain of the past to react. Put aside the chain and let your consciousness function directly. Don’t be influenced by the past, respond here and now, directly. The whole life will be different if you can act out of the present moment. But all your actions are almost always out of the past, never out of the present. And action that is born out of the present is nonbinding, an action that is born out of the past chain is a new link in your bondage. But first one has to become aware.

When you get angry just look: from where is that anger coming? from you or just from your past memories? You have been insulted before; you have been angry before – that memory is there waiting, that memory works like a wound. Again something happens and that memory starts functioning, that memory creates the same reaction again. If you watch and observe for twenty-four hours you will see that you are just a mechanical robot, you are functioning out of memories, out of the past. The past is dead, and the dead is so weighty on you that your life is crushed under it. Look at the chain. This sutra says:

He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.

Not only that his reactions come from his past memories, but others’ actions in connection with him are also part of his past actions.

It happened, Buddha became enlightened and one of his cousins, Devadatta, tried to poison him, tried to kill him, in many ways tried to murder him. He was always a failure, fortunately. Somebody asked Buddha, “Why don’t you do something about it? This man is constantly trying in many ways to kill you.”

Once he brought a mad elephant and left the elephant near Buddha. The elephant was mad, in a rage. The elephant came running, but suddenly just near Buddha it stopped, bowed down and closed its eyes as if it was meditating. So somebody asked, “Why don’t you do something about this man? And why is he doing such things?”

Buddha said, “Because of my past actions. I must have hurt him in the past. He is simply reacting out of that chain. It is not his doing; I must have done some wrong to him in the past. And I must have done something good to this elephant in the past, otherwise there was no possibility . . . And I should remain now a witness. If I do something again in connection with Devadatta, then again, a chain will be created. So let him be finished with my past deeds – but I am not going to create a new karma for the future.”

When someone insults you, the attitude of a witness, of a person who is practicing nonattachment, is this: “I must have insulted him before in some past life somewhere, because nothing is born without a cause. The cause must be there, this is only the effect. So I must wait and take it, accept it as part of my destiny and be finished with it, because if I do something again a new future is created and the chain continues.”

Someone insults you. If you answer in any way then the account is not closed, it remains open. If you don’t respond then the account is closed. And this is the difference between the Eastern attitude and Christianity. Even very beautiful things sometimes can be basically wrong. Jesus says, “If someone hits you on one cheek, give him the other.” This is a beautiful saying, and one of the most beautiful sayings ever uttered in the world. But ask an Eastern buddha. He will say, “Don’t do even that. When someone hits you, remain as you were before he hit you. Don’t change, don’t do anything, because even giving him the other cheek is a response – a good response, a beautiful response, but a response – and you are creating karma again.”

Nietzsche somewhere criticizes Jesus for this. He says, “If I hit Jesus on one cheek and he gives me the other, I will hit even harder on the other, because this man is insulting me, he is treating me like an insect. He is not giving me the same status as him.” Nietzsche says, “It would be better if Jesus hits me back, because then he is behaving with me on equal terms. If he gives me the other cheek he is trying to play the god and he is insulting me.”

That’s possible. You can insult a person just by becoming superior – not that Jesus means it, but you can do it. And just trying to become superior will be more insulting, and the other person will feel more hurt than if you had given him a good slap. The Eastern attitude is to not do anything in any way, to remain as if nothing has happened. Somebody hits you; you remain as if nothing has happened. And this hit has come not from this person but from your past deed. So accept it – it is your own doing, he has not done anything – and remain as if nothing has happened. Don’t hit him back and don’t give him the other cheek, because both will create a new chain. Be finished with it, so the account is closed with this man at least. And this way you close the accounts with all.

When all the accounts are closed you need not be reborn. This is the philosophy of going beyond life and death. Then you need not be reborn again; you simply disappear from this phenomenal world, from this bodily, physical world. Then you exist as cosmos, not as individuals. Jesus’ saying is beautiful, very moral. But Buddha’s attitude is spiritual, not only moral: not to do anything, because whatsoever you do creates future, and one has to stop creating future.

He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life. Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing.

If you think you can do something you can never become a witness; if you think you can do something you will remain a doer. This has to be very deeply realized – that nothing can be done. Only then can the witness arise.

Life has to be observed, and if you observe life you will come to feel that nothing can be done. Everything is happening. You are born – what have you done about it? It has not been any choice; you have not chosen to be born. You are black or white – you have not chosen to be black or white, it has happened. You are man or woman, intelligent or stupid – it has happened, you have not done anything about it. You will die, you will disappear from this body, you will be born in another. Look at all this as a happening, not as a doing on your part. If you feel that you are doing something you can never become a witness.

The modern mind finds it very difficult to become a witness, because the modern mind thinks he can do something, the modern mind thinks he has willpower, the modern mind thinks that it is in its hands to change things and destiny. The modern mind goes on insisting to children, “You are the master of your destiny.” This is foolish. You cannot do anything, and whenever you feel that you are doing something you are under a wrong impression.

It happened once, under a tree many stones were piled. A building was soon going to be constructed and those stones were piled there for that building, to fill in the foundations. One small boy was passing, and as small boys do, he took a stone and threw it in the sky. The stone was rising upwards . . . It is very difficult for stones even to imagine that they can go upwards, they always go downwards. Just because of gravitation stones always go downwards, they cannot go upwards. But every stone must be dreaming somehow or other to go upwards. In their dreams stones must be flying, because dreams are fulfillments of those things which we cannot do. They are substitutes.

So all those stones must have dreamed somewhere, sometime, about flying. And this stone must have dreamed that someday he would fly, he would become a bird – and suddenly it happened. He was thrown, but he thought, “I am rising.” He looked downwards. Other stones, his brothers and sisters, were lying down, so he said, “Look! What are you doing there? Can’t you fly? I have done a miracle! I am flying, and I am going to the sky to see moons and stars!”

The other stones felt very jealous, but they couldn’t do anything so they thought, “This stone must be unique, an avatar, a reincarnated superior being. We cannot fly. This stone must be a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ. He has miraculous power; he is flying” – and this is the greatest miracle for a stone.

They felt jealous, they wept over their destiny, they were sad, but they couldn’t do anything. Then they started feeling – because this is how mind goes on consoling – “Okay, you are one of us. You belong to us, to this pile, to this nation, to this race. We are happy that one of our brothers is flying.”

But then the moment came when the momentum of that small boy’s throw was lost, the energy finished and the stone started falling back. For a moment he felt dizzy, for a moment he felt, “What is happening?” and he couldn’t control it. But suddenly, as everybody rationalizes, he rationalized, “It is enough for the first day. I have gone too far, and I must go back now to my home.” Then he thought, “I am feeling homesick. It is better now to go back, to rest a little. I am tired. I must go back to my brothers and sisters, to my community, and tell them what beautiful phenomena I have seen – the sky, infinite sky, and such vast space, stars, moons – so near. This has been a cosmic event, an historical event; it should be written for the generations to come, for them to remember that one of us had flown once into the sky, had become just like a bird. The dreams are fulfilled.”

He started falling back. When he came just near the pile he said, “I am coming back. Don’t look so sad. I will not leave you; I will never leave you. The world is beautiful, but nothing is like home.” And he fell down.

And this is the story of your whole life. You are thrown, existence throws you. Then for certain moments you enjoy – life, flying, beauty, love, youth – but this is happening. It is happening just like breath coming in and going out. You are not doing anything; everything is a happening. Once you understand this, ego disappears, because ego exists only with the idea that you can do. To realize that nothing can be done is the highest point for the spiritual seeker to begin with, the climax of understanding. After that is transformation.

And if you cannot do anything, then when someone insults you, you can remain a witness – because what can be done? You can look at what is happening, you can be detached. A pain comes, a suffering happens – what can you do? You can be a witness. Pleasure comes, you are happy – what can you do? It has happened. It is happening just like night and day, morning and evening.

Watch your mind. There are moments of sadness, and immediately after them moments of pleasure, then again moments of sadness. When you are sad you are just on the brink of being happy, when you are happy you are just on the brink of being sad. This goes on revolving. And you have not done anything really, you are just like that stone. He takes a happening for a doing – that is fallacious. When you fall in love what have you done? Can you do anything to fall in love? Can you fall in love consciously? Try it and then you will see the impossibility; you cannot do anything. And if you have fallen in love, you cannot stop that falling.

There are foolishnesses which belong to youth and there are foolishnesses which belong to old age. This is the foolishness of the youth: he thinks, “I am doing something when I am in love.” So he thinks, “This is something of my doing.” It is a happening. And this is the foolishness of old age: old people go on saying, “Don’t fall in love. Stop yourself, control yourself” – as if love can be controlled. But the whole society exists around the ego – control, doing, not happening. If you can look at life as a happening, witnessing comes easily.

Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing. Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity.

This is not condemnation; this is just giving you a hint that the opposite is hidden. When you are in pleasure, pain is there hidden, will come soon.

Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity.

It is not a condemnation; this is simply the fact. But you go on forgetting. When you are happy you forget that you were ever sad before, you forget that sadness will follow again. When you are sad you forget that you were ever happy before, and you forget that happiness will follow again. You are in a moving circle, in a moving wheel. That’s why in the East life is called a wheel, just a wheel – moving. Every spoke will come up and every spoke will go down and will again come up. You may not be able to connect – that’s your misery. If you can connect you can see.

Go into loneliness for at least twenty-one days and then watch. There is nobody who can make you happy or unhappy, there is nobody who can make you angry, pleased, or anything. You are alone there. Have a diary and watch and note down every mood that comes to you. Then for the first time you will become aware that there is no need for anybody to make you angry – you become angry by yourself. There is no need for anybody to make you sad – there are moments when you suddenly feel sad. And there is no need for anybody to make you happy – there are sudden glimpses when you are happy.

And if you can watch for twenty-one days and go on noting down, you will see a wheel emerging. And this wheel is so subtle, that’s why you are not aware and you never connect it. If you watch deeply you can even say that one mood is passing and you can say what will follow, which spoke is going to come. If you have observed basically, deeply, you can predict your moods. Then you can say, “On Monday morning I will be angry.”

Much research is going on in Soviet Russia about moods, and they say a calendar can be made for every person. On Mondays he will be angry; on Saturdays, in the morning, he will be happy; on Tuesdays, in the evening, he will feel sexual. If you observe yourself, you can also approximately fix a routine, a wheel of your life. And then many things become possible. Russian psychologists have suggested that if this can be done – and this can be done – then family life will become more easy, because you can look at your wife’s calendar and your wife can look at your calendar. Then there is no need to get angry about anything, this is how things are going to happen.

You know that on Tuesdays the wife is going to be terrible, so you accept it. You know from the very beginning that it is going to be on that day, so from the morning you can remain a witness, you need not get involved in it; it is your wife’s inner work. Two beings moving side by side need not get concerned with the other’s spokes. And when she is unhappy, sad, it is just foolish to get angry about it, because you create more sadness through it. The day when your wife is unhappy it is better to help her in every way, because she is ill. It is just like menses, a periodical thing. […]

This calendar can be maintained. You can observe your life for two or three months impartially, and then you can know that you are moving in a wheel and others are only excuses; you impose upon them. You get sad when you are alone also, but if you are with someone you think the other is making you sad. And man and woman are not different, cannot be. They are not two different species, they are one species, and everything has a positive-negative relationship. […]

Everyone is bisexual; no one belongs to one sex, and cannot belong to one sex. Half of you is man and half of you is woman. So the difference is only of which part is visible. You may be man only because the male part is visible on the surface and the female part is hidden behind; you are a woman if the female part is visible on the surface and the male part is hidden behind.

That’s why if a woman gets ferocious, she will be more ferocious than a man, because then she simply comes out of her surface, and what is hidden is the man. Ordinarily when a woman is angry, she is not so angry as a man, not so aggressive as man, but if she is really angry then a man is nothing compared to her. A man can be more loving than a woman. He is not ordinarily so, but if he is then no woman can be compared with him, because then the hidden part comes out. And man has not used the hidden part; it is fresh, alive – more alive than woman. So if a man is really in love he is more loving than any woman, because then his hidden woman which is fresh, unused, comes out. And when a woman is angry, filled with hatred, no man can be compared, because the hidden, fresh aggression comes out. […]

And this happens in life: as people grow old, men become more effeminate and women become more manly. That’s why old women are very dangerous; the stories about mother-in-laws are not just inventions. They are dangerous.

This is not to condemn.

Every union leads inevitably to separation.

Every union leads to separation, every marriage is a preparation for divorce.

The ignorant suffer the maladies of mental anxiety.

The ignorant suffer because of ignorance – because they cannot see this polarity. If they can see that every union is going to become a separation, they will neither be happy about the union nor unhappy about the separation. And if you are not happy about the marriage and not happy about the divorce you have transcended both. Then a relationship grows which cannot be called marriage and cannot be called divorce. That relationship can be eternal.

But marriage implies divorce, union implies separation, birth implies death. So be aware of the opposite, that will help you to become a witness. It will lessen your happiness, it will lessen your misery also. And a moment will come when happiness and misery will become the same. When they become the same you have transcended.

And this is the way they can become the same: when happiness comes, search for the hidden unhappiness somewhere in it. You will find it. When unhappiness comes, search for the happiness hiding somewhere – you will find it. And then you know that happiness and unhappiness are not two things but two aspects of the same coin. And don’t believe too much in the aspect that is visible, because the invisible will become visible, it is only a question of time.

This is through effort, understanding. With mind you can achieve this ordinary non-attachment. But this is not the goal, this is just the beginning.

When thoughts like: “I am not the doer, my past deeds are the doers, or God himself is the doer . . .”

Even such thoughts drop. These were the base of the first, these thoughts were the base of the ordinary nonattachment. When even they:

. . . cease to worry the seeker, a stage of silence, equilibrium, and peace is attained. This is called sublime non-attachment.

. . . Because to constantly think, “I am not the doer,” shows that you believe you are the doer; otherwise why go on constantly saying “I am not the doer”?

Once it happened, one Hindu sannyasin, a traditional monk, stayed with me for a few days. Every day in the morning, in the brahmamuhurt, just before the sunrise, he would sit and repeat constantly, “I am not the body, I am the soul supreme. I am not the body . . .”

So I heard him doing it, saying that for many days, and then I said, “If you really know that you are not the body, why repeat it? If you really know you are the supreme self, then who are you convincing every morning? That shows you don’t know. You are just trying to convince yourself that you are not the body, but you know you are the body; that’s why the need to convince.”

Remember this: the mind works in this way. Whenever you try to convince yourself of something the contrary is the case. If a person tries too much to say, “I love you,” know well that something is wrong. If a person tries to say too much about anything, that shows that the contrary exists within; he is trying to convince himself, not you. Whenever a husband feels guilty that he has looked at another woman, or has been friendly, or was attracted, then he comes home and that day he will be more loving to the wife. He will bring ice cream or something. So whenever the husband brings ice cream beware – because now he is not trying to convince you, he is trying to convince himself that he loves his wife more than anybody else.

Whenever mind becomes aware that something has gone wrong, that wrong has to be put right. The first effort for non-attachment is such effort. You go on insisting to yourself, “I am not the body, I am not the doer,” but you know well that you are the doer, you are the body. But this will help. One day you will become aware of both these polarities: that you are insisting that you are not, and still, you believe that you are the body. Then both drop, you simply remain silent, you don’t say anything. Neither do you say, “I am the doer,” nor do you say, “I am the witness.” You simply drop this whole nonsense. You allow things as they are. You don’t say anything, you don’t make any statement. Then silence, equilibrium, and peace are attained – when you don’t make any statement.

Somebody asked Buddha, “Are you the body or are you the soul?” Buddha remained silent. The man insisted, and Buddha said, “Don’t force me, because whatsoever statement I make will be wrong. If I say I am the body, it is wrong, because I am not. If I say I am not the body, that too shows that somehow, I am attached to the body, otherwise why this denial? Why this botheration to say that I am not the body? So I will not make any statement. If you can understand, look at me, at what I am.”

When you simply are – without any statement, without any idea, without any theory, without any concept . . . when you simply are, when you have become a tree, a rock, you exist, that’s all. And you allow existence to flow from you, within you. You don’t create any resistance, you don’t say, “I am this,” because every statement will be a definition, and every statement will make you finite.

But this will not happen immediately and directly, remember. You cannot drop unless you have made the first effort. So first try, “I am the witness.” And bring it to such intensity that in that intensity you become aware that even this is futile. Then drop it and be yourself.

It happened once, Mulla Nasruddin went to England. His English was not very good, just like me – that is not much. He had a very beautiful dog, but very ferocious. So he put a plaque on the door, and instead of writing “Beware of the dog,” he wrote, “Be aware of the dog.” That is wrong English – but wrongly he did a right thing, because the whole emphasis is changed. When you say “Beware of the dog,” emphasis is on the dog. When you say “Be aware of the dog,” the emphasis is on you. And this English word beware is beautiful. Make it two, be plus aware.

Be plus aware is the first step. In the second step, awareness also has disappeared. Simply be. Don’t be even aware, because that will create an effort. Simply be. When you are in that state of being – not doing anything, not even witnessing, because that too is a subtle doing . . .

A state of silence, equilibrium, and peace is attained. This is called sublime non-attachment.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #10

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 Means is the End – Osho

Is vairagya, non-attachment, a method, a means, an intermediate stage, or an end in itself?

It is all – because means and ends are not two things. The way and the goal are not two things. The way is just the beginning of the goal, and the goal is just the ending of the way. So please, don’t divide, and don’t think in terms of the means being different from the end. Means are the end. Once you can conceive of this, the quality of your effort will change immediately.

Ordinarily mind is always concerned with the end; means are used, exploited, to reach the end. If you could avoid the means you would like to avoid them; if you could achieve the end directly without any means, if you could reach the goal without the way, without the path, you would like to do so. You would like to reach the goal immediately. The mind divides ends and means; end is meaningful, means are just necessary, they have to be suffered.

This is how the ordinary mind functions, and because of this whatsoever you do becomes a suffering – because you have to pass through the path, you have to use means, methods, and therein is all suffering. Happiness is in the goal, somewhere in the future, not here and now. Here and now will be means and the end will be somewhere else, somewhere in the future, tomorrow – so today will always be a suffering.

And remember, if your today is a suffering your tomorrow cannot be a happiness, because it is born of today, it comes out of this moment. The future comes out of the present, so whatsoever the present the same will remain in the future. If you are suffering now, you will suffer then also. If you are suffering here, you will find the hell there also – because who will find that heaven which you think is there? You? Your whole attitude creates the suffering.

So those who are on the spiritual path must be aware of this tendency of the mind. Forget the end and look at the means as if they are the end and enjoy them as if they are the goal. Then the very path becomes blissful, the very journey itself becomes blissful. Every step becomes blissful, because you are not waiting for the bliss, for the next step. And out of this blissful step the next is going to be born – it will be more blissful. The tomorrow will be more blissful if today is blissful, and the bliss will grow.

We are doing meditations. These meditations are means, but they are goals also; so don’t try to exploit them, otherwise you will be in a hurry, you will constantly think of how to be finished with them and reach the goal. Then you will never be able to be finished with them and the goal will always remain illusory, always like the horizon, always distant. And the more you move ahead, the goal will also move ahead in the same proportion.

Ends and means are not two things. Don’t divide. The end is just the flowering of the means, the end is just the realization of the means. The end is hidden in the means, just like the tree is hidden in the seed. The seed is the tree. Don’t look at the seed as if the seed has some secondary importance and the tree is meaningful and significant, and you can avoid the seed. If you avoid the seed the tree will never be there. Take care of the seed, love the seed, give soil to it, prepare the ground, and help the seed to grow. It will become the tree. It is already the tree unmanifest.

So let me say it in this way: means are the unmanifest end, and end is the manifest means. Means are seeds, and ends will be the trees, the flowering – so love the means as the end.

Vairagya is all, nonattachment is all. It is the beginning, it is the middle, it is the end. It is a method, it is an intermediate stage, it is the goal. Desirelessness is the end – but the end must be there in the beginning, only then can it grow. So desirelessness is both the first step and the last also. Of course, the quality will differ. In the first step the desirelessness will be with effort, in the intermediate stage desirelessness will have become unconscious effort. In the beginning it will be conscious effort, you will have to do it; in the middle it will start happening, it will have become unconscious effort. Effort will be there, but indirect, unconscious. In the end it will be spontaneous, effort will have completely disappeared. But desirelessness is the same. Desirelessness in the beginning is with conscious effort, in the middle is with unconscious effort, in the end is effortless.

Avoid this tendency to divide, to cut things, and see that every phenomenon is a continuity, everything is joined together. Even those things which look opposite are also joined together, they are also polarities. Develop this way of looking at things – that will be very helpful. For those who are really sincerely interested in traveling this inner path, this approach of nondividing is a must.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #9, Q1

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 Unwavering Mind – Osho

After this the seeker enters the third stage of yoga which is known as non-attachment. He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words.

He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities. He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures and sleeps on a rocky bed. Thus it is that he lives his life. Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursion into the forest. He remains detached, however, from the objects of desires.

Through the ritual of meritorious deeds and the cultivation of right scriptures, he attains that clarity of vision which sees reality. On completing this stage, the seeker experiences a glimpse of enlightenment.

-Akshi Upanishad

The second stage is that of thought – purity of thought, intensity of thought, contemplation, meditation. Thought is energy; it can move through desires to the objects of the world, it can become a bondage. If thought is associated with desire, it becomes bondage; if thought is not associated with desire, freed from desire, thought can be used as a vehicle to reach the ultimate liberation.

The way is the same, only the direction changes. When thought moves to objects, to the world, it creates entanglements, it creates slavery, it creates imprisonment. When thought is not moving to objects but starts moving within, the same energy becomes liberation. The second stage is of thought – to make it pure, to become a witness of it.

The third stage is of vairagya – non-attachment. Non-attachment is very significant, the concept is very basic to all those who are in search of the truth. Mind has the capacity to get attached to anything, and once the mind gets attached to something the mind itself becomes that thing. When your mind is moving towards a sexual object and you get attached, mind becomes sex; when the mind is moving towards power and you get attached to it, mind becomes power, mind becomes politics.

Mind is just like a mirror: whatsoever you get attached to becomes fixed in the mirror, and then mind behaves like a film of a camera. Then mind is not just a mirror, it has become a film. Then whatsoever comes to it, the mind clings to it. These are the two possibilities, or two aspects of the same possibility. Mind has the capacity to get attached, identified, with anything whatsoever. […]

Whatsoever the attachment, your life follows that. In this world, the Upanishads say, we are behaving as if we are hypnotized; we are in a deep hypnosis. Nobody else has done that, we have hypnotized ourselves. For millions of lives we have been attached to certain objects of desire; they have become fixed. So whenever you see a woman, immediately your body starts working in a sexual way. […]

Attachment creates the life; a life is created around whatsoever you are attached to. So the Upanishads say it is basic, the third step of sadhana, that the mind should get nonattached; only then this illusory world that you have created around you will disappear. Otherwise, you will remain in a dream.

The world is not a dream, remember. This has been very much misunderstood. In the West it has been very much misunderstood; they think that these Indian mystics have called the world illusory. They have not called the world illusory; they call the world you have created around you illusory. And everybody has created a world around himself that is not the real world, that is just your projection. You have got attached to certain things, then you project your dreams onto the reality. By nonattachment, reality is not going to be destroyed; only your dreams will be destroyed, and reality will be revealed to you as it is. So nonattachment becomes a basic step, very foundational.

Now we will enter the sutra:

After this the seeker enters the third stage of yoga which is known as nonattachment.

He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words. He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities. He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures and sleeps on a rocky bed.

Everything has to be understood. These are old symbols; they have to be penetrated deeply; they are not literal, they are symbolic.

He fixes his mind unwaveringly . . .

This is the first thing in nonattachment, because a wavering mind cannot get non-attached. Only a nonwavering mind, nishkam, a nonwavering mind, can get nonattached. Why? Look at your mind, observe it: every moment it is wavering. It cannot remain with one object for a single moment, every moment a flux is passing; one thought comes, then another, then another – there is a procession.

You cannot remain with one thought even for a single moment, and if you cannot remain for a single moment with one thought, how can you penetrate it? How can you become aware of its full reality? How can you see the illusion that it creates? You are moving so fast that you cannot observe – observation is impossible. It is just as if you come running into this hall. As soon as you enter from one door you go out from the other. You have just a glimpse, and you cannot know later on whether this hall was real or a dream. You had no time here to know, to penetrate, to analyze, to observe, to be aware.

So fixation of the mind on one content is one of the essential requirements for any seeker – that he should remain with one thought for long periods. Once you can remain with one thought for long periods, you yourself will see that this thought is creating attachment, this thought is creating a world around it, this thought is the basic seed of all illusion. And if you can retain a thought for long periods, you have become the master. Now the mind is not the master, and you are not the slave.

And if you can remain with one thought for long periods you can drop it also. You can say to the mind, “Stop!” and the mind stops; you can say to the mind, “Move!” and the mind moves. Now it is not so; you want to stop the process but the mind continues, the mind never listens to you. The mind is the master and you are just following the mind like a shadow. The instrument – mind is just an instrument – has become the soul, and the soul has become the servant. This is the perversion and this is the misery of human beings.

Try to fix your mind on one thing, anything will do. Sit on the ground outside and look at a tree and try to remain with the tree. Whatsoever happens, remain with the tree. The mind will try many waverings, the mind will give you many alternatives to move. The mind will say, “Look! What type of tree is this? What is the name?” Don’t listen to it, because even if you have moved to the name you have moved away from the tree. If you start thinking about the tree you have gone away from the tree. Don’t think about it, remain with the fact that the tree is.

It will be difficult in the beginning because you are not so alert. You are so sleepy that you will forget completely that you were looking at the tree. A dog will start barking and you will look at the dog; a cloud will come in the sky and you have moved; somebody passes and you have forgotten the tree.

But go on, again and again. When you remember again that you have forgotten and fallen asleep, move again to the tree. Do it.

If you go on working, after three or four weeks you will be capable of retaining one content in the mind at least for one minute. And that’s a big capacity! That’s a big phenomenon! – because you don’t know, you think one minute is not much. One minute is too much for the mind, because mind moves within seconds. For not even a full second is your mind on one thing. It is wavering – wavering is mind’s nature; it goes on creating waves. And that is the way the attachment is retained.

You love a woman. Even if you love a woman, you cannot retain the idea of the woman in your mind. If you look at the woman you will start thinking about her – and you have moved away. You may think about her clothes, you may think about her eyes, you may think about her face and figure, but you have moved away from the woman. Just let the fact remain, don’t think about it, because thinking means wavering. To retain a single content means: don’t think, just look. Thinking means moving, wavering. Just look – looking means nonwavering.

That is the meaning of concentration, and all the religions of the world have used it in this way or that. Their methods may look different but the essential is this: that the mind has to be trained to retain one thing for longer periods. What will happen? Once you get this capacity nothing is to be done. You can penetrate, anything becomes transparent. The very look, and in that look your energy moving, goes deep.

There are two ways for the mind. One is linear, from one thought to another – A, B, C, D – the mind moves in a line. Mind has energy. When it moves from A to B it dissipates energy, when it moves from B to C again energy is dissipated, when it moves from C to D energy has been dissipated. If you retain only A in the mind and don’t allow it to move to B, C, D and so forth and so on, what will happen? The energy that was going to be dissipated in movement will go on hammering on the fact A, and then a new process will start – you will move deeper in the A. Not moving from A to B, but moving from A1 to A2, A3, A4. Now the energy is moving directly, intensely, in one fact. Your eyes will become penetrating. […]

We have become completely unacquainted with the penetrating eye. We know only superficial, moving eyes from A to B, from B to C – just touching and moving, touching and moving. If somebody looks at you, stares at you deeply, and he is not moving from A to B, B to C, you will become scared – but that is the real look. And you will become scared because his eyes are going deep within you; he is not moving on the surface, he is moving deep, in the depth. You will become scared because you have become unacquainted with it.

Fixation of the mind will give you a penetrating eye. That eye has been known in the occult world as the third eye. When you start moving on a point, not in a line, you gain a force, and that force works. All over the world mesmerists, hypnotists, and other workers in the psychic field have been aware of it for centuries. You can try it. Somebody, a stranger, is walking on the road. You just go behind him and look at the back of his neck. Stare. Immediately he will look back towards you, the energy hits there immediately if you stare.

There is a center at the back of the neck which is very sensitive. Just stare at the center and the person is bound to look back because he will become uneasy, something is entering there. Your eyes are not simply windows to look through, they are energy centers. You are not only absorbing impressions through the eyes, you are throwing energy – but you are not aware. You are not aware because your energy is being dissipated in movement, is waving, wavering from one to two, two to three, three to four – you go on, and every gap takes your energy.

He fixes his mind unwaveringly . . .

First one has to try to fix this mind unwaveringly on objects, and then on the meaning of the scriptural words.

This is a totally different science. You read a book. Reading is linear: from one word you move to another, from another to another – you go on moving in lines. You may not have observed that different countries have different ways of writing. English is written from the left towards the right, because English is a technical language, not very poetic, a male language, not feminine. Urdu, Arabic, are written from the right to the left. They are more poetic, because the left side is poetry and the right side is mathematics – right is male, left is female.

Chinese is written downwards; neither from left to right, nor from right to left, just from up downwards, because Chinese was developed through Confucian ideology, and Confucius says, “The middle is the goal, the middle is golden – the golden mean.” So they don’t move from left to right, or from right to left; they move from up to down. This is the middle, the mean, neither male nor female.

English is male, Urdu is female – that’s why Urdu is so poetic. No language in the world is as poetic as Urdu. In any language of the world, you will need hundreds of lines, and then too you will not be able to express a poetic thing. In Urdu just two lines will do and they will stop the heart. It moves from right to left, from male to female – female is the end.

All over the world God has always been conceived of as the father. Only in the East are there a few religions which conceive of God as the mother – but Sufis, Mohammedans, are the only ones who conceive of God as the beloved: not mother, beloved. The feminine is the end. From the male they move to the female, to the feminine, but movement is there.

Chinese moves from up to down, into the depth, so Chinese symbols can express things no other language can express – because every language is linear, and Chinese is in the depth. So if you have read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching in translation, you know that every translation differs. If you read ten translations then all the translations will be different; you cannot say who is wrong and who is right, because Chinese carries so much meaning and depth that ten, or even one hundred meanings are possible. In depth more and more meanings are revealed.

In India it is said that a scripture like the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Gita, is not to be read in a linear way. You have to concentrate on each word. Read a word, then don’t move; look at the word, close your eyes, and wait for the meaning to be revealed. This is a totally different concept of studying a thing, so Westerners sometimes cannot understand that a person goes on reading the Gita every day for his whole life. This looks absurd. If you have read it once it is finished! Why do you go on reading the Gita every day? Once you have read it, what is the meaning in reading it again?

But Hindus say the Gita is not a linear book. Each word has to be looked at with a fixed mind; in each word you have to penetrate deep – so deep that the word disappears and only silence remains. And the word does not have the meaning, remember – the meaning is hidden in you. The word is just a technical support to help the meaning that is within you to come up. So the word is a mantra, or a yantra, a design which will help you to bring up the meaning which is hidden in your soul.

See the difference. In the West if you read a thing, then the word has a meaning; in the East the word has got no meaning – the meaning is in the reader. The word is just a device to bring the reader to his own inner meaning, to encounter the inner meaning. The word will just provoke you inside so that your inner meaning flowers through it. The word has to be forgotten and the inner meaning has to be carried, but you will have to wait; and mind needs fixation, mind needs concentration, only then the inner meaning can be revealed. So one has to go on reading the same thing every day, but it is not the same because you have been changing.

If a boy of fifteen reads the Gita the meaning is going to be boyish, immature, juvenile. Then a man, a young man of thirty reads the Gita – the meaning is going to be different, more romantic. In that meaning sex will be involved, in that meaning love will be projected, in that meaning the youth will project his youth. And then an old man of sixty reads the Gita. He has passed through the ups and downs of life, he has seen misery and glimpses of happiness, he has lived through much. He will see something else in the Gita; in that something else death will be involved; death will be all over the Gita.

And a man of one hundred, to whom even death has become irrelevant, to whom even death has become an accepted fact, not a problem, who is not afraid of death but rather, on the contrary, is just waiting for it so that the imprisonment in the body is broken and the soul can fly – he looks in the Gita and it will be totally different. Now it will transcend life, the meaning will transcend life.

The meaning depends on the state of your mind. So the meaning of a word is not in the dictionary, the meaning of the word is in the reader, and the words are used as devices to bring that meaning up. But if you go on reading fast that will not help. In the West they go on creating more and more techniques for how to read fast, how to finish the book as fast as possible, because time is short. And there are techniques by which you can read very fast; whatsoever your speed right now it can be doubled very easily, and you can even double it again if you work a little harder. And if you are really persistent you can again double that speed.

So if you are reading sixty words per minute, you can read two hundred and forty words per minute if you work hard – but then you will be moving in a linear way. And if you move fast then your unconscious starts reading, the conscious just gives hints. Subliminal reading becomes possible, but then you cannot penetrate.

The question is not to read much, the question is to read very little but to read deep. The depth is significant, because in the depth quality is hidden. If you read fast quantity will be great, but quality will be no more there, it will be mechanical. You will not be imbibing whatsoever you are reading; you will not be changed through whatsoever you are reading; it will just be a memorization.

He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of the scriptural words.

In Sanskrit every word has multi-meanings. In the West it will be thought that this is not good; a word should mean only one thing, it should have only one meaning. Only then can there be a science of language, only then can the language become technical, scientific. So one word should have only one meaning. But Sanskrit is not a scientific language, it is a religious language. And if the people who spoke Sanskrit claimed that their language is divine it means something. Every word has multi-meanings; no word is fixed, solid, it is liquid, flowing. You can derive many meanings through it – it depends on you. It has many shades, many colors; it is not a dead stone, it is an alive flower.

If you go in the morning it looks different, if you go in the afternoon the same flower looks different, because the whole milieu has changed. When you go in the evening the same flower has a different poetry to it. In the morning it was happy, alive, dancing, filled with so many desires, hopes, dreams, was maybe thinking to conquer the whole world. By the afternoon desires have dropped, much frustration has come, the flower is not hoping so much now, it is a little depressed, a little sad. By the evening life has proved illusory, the flower is on its deathbed, shrunken, closed, no dreams, no hopes.

Sanskrit words are like flowers, they have moods; that’s why Sanskrit can be interpreted in millions of ways. The Gita has one thousand interpretations. You cannot conceive of the Bible having one thousand interpretations – impossible! You cannot conceive of the Koran having one thousand interpretations – not a single interpretation exists. The Koran has never been interpreted. There are one thousand interpretations of the Gita, and still they are not enough. Every century will add many more, and while human consciousness is on the earth interpretations will be added forever and ever. The Gita cannot be exhausted, it is impossible to exhaust it, because every word has many meanings.

Sanskrit is liquid, flowing, moody, and this is good because this gives you freedom. The reader has freedom, he is not a slave; the words are not imposed on him, he can play with those words. He can change his moods through those words, and he can change those words through his moods. The Gita is alive, and every alive thing has moods; only dead things have no moods. In that way English is a dead language. It will look paradoxical, because English scholars go on saying that Sanskrit is a dead language because no one speaks it. They are right in a way – because nobody speaks it, it is a dead language, but really modern languages are dead.

No one speaks Sanskrit now, but it is an alive language, the very quality of it is alive; every word has a life of its own and changes, moves, flows, riverlike. Much is possible through the play of Sanskrit words, and they have been arranged in such a way that if you concentrate on them, many worlds of meanings will be revealed to you.

He fixes his mind unwaveringly on the meaning of scriptural words. He lives in the monasteries . . .

First, he fixes on the Vedas, on the old scriptures. These scriptures are not just books. They are not written for any other reason than this: they have been written to reveal a certain deep secret. They are not for you to read and enjoy and throw just like novels; they are to be pondered, contemplated, meditated on. You have to go so deep in them that this going into depth becomes natural to you. And they were not written by persons who were writers, persons not knowing anything but just through their egoistic feeling writing things.

Gurdjieff divides all scriptures into two divisions: one he calls subjective, the other he calls objective. These scriptures – the Vedas, the Upanishads, are objective, not subjective. The whole literature that we are creating is subjective, the writer is throwing his own subjectivity into it. A poet, a modern poet, or a painter, a modern Picasso, or a novelist, a story-writer – they are writing their own minds there. They are not concerned with the person who is going to read, remember, they are more concerned with themselves. This is a catharsis for them. They are mad inside, burdened – they want to express. […]

A poet may have dreamed, may have taken hashish. And scientists say that poets have some difference, some chemical difference from ordinary persons – they have some hashish in their blood, really, so they can imagine more, they can dream more, they can go on dream trips more than others. So they write, but their writing is imaginative, it is not objective. It may help them as a catharsis, that they are unburdened.

But there is another type of literature, totally different, which is objective. These Upanishads were not written for the joy of the writer, they were written for those who were going to read them – they are objective. What they will do to you if you contemplate on them has been planned; every single word has been put there, every single sound has been used. If someone contemplates on it, then the state of the writer will be revealed to him; the same will happen to him if he contemplates. These scriptures are called holy; that’s why.

A totally different body of literature exists in the East, a totally different body – not meant to be enjoyed but meant to be transforming. And when one has penetrated deep into the meaning of the scriptures . . . And these scriptures belong to those who have known. It was thought to be a great sin to write something which you have not known. That’s why very few books were written in the past. […]

These writings are from those who have known, who have become enlightened, and they have put in these writings their own mind – the mind is hidden there. If you penetrate, the mind will be revealed to you. And only after that . . .

He lives in the monasteries, ashrams, of saints well established in austerities.

The ashram is an Eastern concept, there is no word to express it in English. “Monastery” is not a good word; ashram is totally different. You have to understand the concept. A monastery is where monks live. There are Christian monasteries – there is no need for an enlightened person to be there; abbots are there, administrators are there. The monastery is like a training school. The abbot need not be enlightened, but he will train you, because they have a curriculum, a course. Christian priests are prepared that way. […]

A monastery is a training school; an ashram is not a school; an ashram is a family. And an ashram doesn’t exist as an institution, cannot exist as an institution. The ashram exists around an enlightened person, that is a basic must. If the enlightened person is not there the ashram disappears; it is the person around whom the ashram can come into being. When the person is dead the ashram has to disappear. If you continue the ashram, it becomes a monastery.

For example, Aurobindo is dead and now the Mother is dead – now Pondicherry is a monastery, not an ashram. It will persist as a dead thing, an institute. When Aurobindo was there it was totally different. The person is important, not the institute – institutions are dead. So remember this: a live phenomenon, a master, just by his presence creates a milieu – that milieu is the ashram. And when you move in that milieu you are moving in a family, not in an institute. The master will take care of you in every way, and you will be there in intimate, close proximity.

Eastern ashrams are disappearing, they are becoming monasteries, institutes. The Western mind is so obsessed with institutes that everything is turned into an institute. I was just reading a book on marriage. It begins by saying that marriage is the greatest institute, the greatest institution – but who wants to live in an institute? The ashram is more intimate, more personal.

So every ashram will differ from others, every ashram is going to be unique, because it will depend on the person around whom it has been created. All monasteries will be similar but no two ashrams can be similar, because every ashram has to be individual, unique; it depends on the personality of the master. If you go to a Sufi ashram it will be totally different – much dancing and singing will be there; if you go to a Buddhist ashram, no dancing, no singing, much sitting silently will be there. And both are doing the same, they are leading towards the same goal.

The first thing to remember: an ashram exists with a master; it is his personal influence, his person, the atmosphere, the milieu that he creates through his being. An ashram is his being, and when you enter into an ashram you are not entering into an institution, you are entering a live person, you are becoming part of the soul of the master. Now you will exist as part of the master, he will exist through you. So no forced discipline, but spontaneous happenings will be there.

He lives in the ashrams of saints well established in austerities.

In the third state it is good to move to someone who has known, to live with him. The first two will make you capable, patra; the first two will make you worthy of having a master look at you, of a master allowing you to be in intimacy with him. Without the first two no master will look at you; you will not be allowed, he will avoid you, he will create situations so that you will have to leave his ashram. Only after these two states, when you enter the third, will you be allowed, because a master is not going to waste. . . . He cannot work with you unless you are ready, and unless you show readiness.

One sannyasin goes on writing letters to me. He is here, he has again written a letter to me, a very long letter, saying, “Give me the method so that I can move into my past lives.” And he is not capable at all even to live in this life! He will go mad if I give him a method to move into the past lives. Why do you think nature prohibits it? Why does nature create a barrier so that you cannot remember the past lives?

Nature is more wise than you. Nature creates the barrier because even one life is too much; it is a burden. You have to forget many things, and if you continuously remember the past life you will be confused, you will be nowhere, you will not be able to decide what is what. Everything will become vague, cloudy, and the past life will remain on your mind like a burden and it will not allow you to live here and now.

Just think, you are in love with a woman and you remember that in the past life she was your mother! So now what will you do? If you go on making love to her you are making love to your mother, and that will create guilt. Or if you think that she is your mother so you should leave her, that will again create guilt because you love her so much. The whole thing will become very difficult and arduous to carry on. And this is how it is happening: your wife may have been your mother, your husband may have been your son, your friend may have been your enemy, your enemy may have been your friend. You have moved in so many lives, it is very complex. Nature creates a barrier: when you die a curtain falls and you cannot remember.

This man goes on writing to me, “Give me a method.” And now he has threatened, “If you don’t give me a method, I am going to leave sannyas.” If you leave sannyas, what is it to me? And if I give you a method and you go mad, then who will be responsible? And you will go mad – you are already mad, just on the brink; any step further, a little more burden on the mind and you will explode.

The ashram, or the master, will accept you only when you are ready, and he will start working only when a certain thing can be done to you, you have come to a certain state; nothing can be done before it. And this should be the attitude of the disciple – that he should not ask. The master knows what is to be done and you have to wait. If you cannot wait you have to leave, because nothing can be done when you are not ripe for it.

The first two stages make you ripe to be accepted by a master.

He occupies himself with the discussion of the scriptures, and sleeps on a rocky bed.

This is actual and symbolic both. In the old ashrams everybody had to sleep on a rocky bed – actually, also because it helps. In yoga, your spine, your backbone, is very important, and not only in yoga but in biology also. Now biologists say man could become man because he started standing erect, his backbone erect. Animals’ backbones are parallel to the earth, only man has a backbone which is not parallel to the earth but makes an angle of ninety degrees. This changed the whole being of man, this angle of ninety degrees with the gravitation created the possibility for the mind to develop. Now biologists say that just by standing on two feet the animal became human – because it changes the whole thing. Less blood flows in the head, so the head and the nervous system there can become more delicate and refined. When more blood flows in the head the subtle tissues are broken, they cannot grow.

So don’t do too much shirshasana. Unless a master suggests it to you don’t do shirshasana, because I have never seen a person who has been doing shirshasana who is not stupid. You will become stupid. You will become more healthy of course, because animals are more healthy; so if you are just after health, shirshasana is good, do it forever. You will become healthy like a bull but at the same time stupid also, because when more blood moves into the head delicate tissues are destroyed, and those delicate tissues are needed for intelligence. When man stood erect, the possibility developed for more delicate tissues in the head.

You see primitives sleep without pillows, and they will remain primitives if they continue to sleep without pillows, because more blood flows in the night. A more intelligent person will need more pillows. He may not be healthier, but intelligence needs a certain mechanism in the mind, a very delicate mechanism. And mind is very complex; seventy million cells are there, and so delicate, bound to be so delicate, when in such a small head there are seventy million. They are very delicate, very small particles, and when blood flows fast, in great quantity, they are destroyed, they are killed. So biologically, and scientifically also, the spine is the most important thing in man. Your head is nothing but a pole to your spine: you exist as a spine – on one pole is sex, on the other is your mind, and your spine is the bridge.

Yoga worked very much on the spine, because yogis became aware of its significance – that the spine is your life. The angle of ninety degrees will be more exact if your spine is straight, so yogis say that when you sit, sit with a straight spine. They worked out many postures, asanas; all their asanas are based on an erect spine, straight. The straighter it is, the more is the possibility to grow in intelligence, awareness.

You may not have observed: if you are listening to me and you are interested your spine will be straight, if you are not interested then you can relax. If you are looking at a movie in a cinema, whenever something interesting comes you will sit straight immediately, because more mind is called for. When the interesting scene has gone you can relax again into your chair.

In the day the spine has to be erect for yogic postures, and in the night also it has to be trained to be more straight. On a rocky bed it is more straight than on a Dunlop mattress. On a rocky bed it is bound to be straight, because the rocky bed is not going to give way for it. If the spine is erect the whole night it will become conditioned to being erect, so in the day also, while walking, sitting, it will remain erect. This is good. So this is physiologically, biologically, and in the eyes of yogis, very helpful. But this is only one part of it, the other part is symbolic.

Whenever a person goes through suffering, we say he is lying on a rocky bed. And the ashram is going to be a long suffering, because many old habits are to be broken and they are hard; many old patterns are to be broken and they are very fixed. Really you have to be destroyed and created again, and in between there is going to be suffering and chaos. That is the rocky bed.

With a master you will have to move through much suffering. You have got many blocks in the body and the mind; they have to be destroyed, and to destroy a block is painful. Unless those blocks are destroyed you cannot flow, you cannot become spontaneous, your energy cannot rise high, it cannot move from the sex center to the sahasrar, it cannot move to the ultimate center of your being. So many things have to be destroyed and every habit has a big pattern, its own system – it takes time.

If you are ready and you trust your master it will not take so much time, because trusting him you can pass through suffering. If you don’t trust, then every suffering becomes a problem, and the mind says, “What are you doing here? Why are you suffering here? Leave this man, go away! You were happy before.” You were never happy before, but when suffering starts you will feel that you were happy before.

For the real happiness to happen you will have to throw all suffering, you will have to pass through it – it is part of growth. And when all suffering has been passed through, only then you become capable of bliss; for the first time you can become happy. And there is no other way.

Thus, it is that he lives his life. Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursions into the forest.

This is something very significant. In an ashram, under the guidance of a master, you will have to pass through many sufferings. But you are not to create those sufferings, you are not to be masochistic. Many pleasures will also come. Remember, this is the type of our mind – that either we are attached to pleasure and then we demand pleasure, or we can even become attached to suffering and then we say we don’t want any pleasure. We start having pleasure through suffering, and that is dangerous. That’s the masochistic attitude – you can torture yourself and you can enjoy it.

This is a very deep phenomenon in the human psyche, and it has happened because of some association. Every pleasure is with some pain, so if pleasure becomes intense you will feel pain, and the reverse is also true: every pain has its own small pleasure, and if the pain becomes intense you will feel pleasure. Pain and pleasure are not really two things, the difference is only of degree. […]

But in every pleasure some torture, some pain, is involved. You can move to the other extreme, you can start giving pain to yourself and can enjoy it. Go to Benares, you will see the monks lying on a bed of thorns. They are enjoying it; it is a sexual pleasure. They have left the pleasure part and retained the pain part.

So in the ashrams you are not to make yourself suffer, not to be a sadist, not to torture yourself. You have to be hard just to break the old habits, but there is no need to seek pain, and if pleasures come by automatically you are allowed to enjoy them. An ashram is not a torture house; if pleasures come by themselves you are allowed to enjoy them. They are good. You have to be thankful for them.

Because he has attained peace of mind, the man of good conduct spends his time in the enjoyment of pleasures that come naturally to him from his excursion into the forest. He remains detached, however, from the objects of desires.

He remains detached. Pleasures come, moments of enjoyment come; he enjoys them and forgets them. He will not demand them again, he will not say, “Now I cannot live without these pleasures.” Whatsoever God gives, one has to be thankful but never demanding. He remains unattached to desire.

Just a glimpse – not enlightenment. This glimpse is known in Japan as satori. Satori is not samadhi, satori is just a glimpse. You have not reached enlightenment, you have not reached the peak of the hill, but standing in the valley when there are no clouds, when the sky is clear, you can look at the peak with snow caps – but it is very far away still. You cannot see when the sky is clouded, you cannot see when it is night, you cannot see if you are standing at such a point from where it cannot be looked at.

These three steps will bring you to such a viewpoint from where the peak can be glimpsed. These three stages will make your mind clear. The clouds will disappear and the peak will be revealed – but this is a faraway glimpse, this is not enlightenment. At the third stage a glimpse comes, but remember well, don’t think that this is enlightenment. And this can happen even through chemical help also. Through LSD, marijuana, or other drugs also this is possible, because drugs can create such a chemical situation within you, they can force such a chemical situation where, for a moment, clouds disappear; suddenly you are thrown to a point from where the peak can be glimpsed. But this is no attainment, because chemistry cannot become meditation and chemistry cannot give you enlightenment. When you come back from the trip you are the same again. You may remember it, and that memory may disturb you, and that memory may make you an addict. Then you have to take LSD again and again, and the more you take the less will be the possibility of even the glimpse, because the body gets accustomed and then a greater quantity is needed. Then you are on a path which will lead to insanity and nowhere else.

So don’t try chemical things. If you have tried them, thank God, and don’t try them again. Once you become addicted to chemical help sadhana becomes impossible, because chemicals seem so easy and sadhana seems so difficult. Only sadhana, only spiritual discipline, will help you grow, will give you growth to the point from where the glimpse is not forced but becomes natural. And it is not lost then – any moment you can look, you know from where to look, and the peak will be there. Occupied in your day-to-day activities, any moment you can close your eyes and see the peak and that will become a constant happiness within you, a joy, a continuous joy. Whatsoever you are doing, whatsoever is happening outside, even if you are in misery – for you have built so many jails – you can close your eyes and the peak is there.

After the third stage the glimpse is always available. But the glimpse is not the end – that is only the beginning.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #8

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Meditation Moving Nowhere – Osho

Now follow the traits of seekers of the second stage, called the stage of thought.

He lives in the care of learned men who explain best what listening, remembering, right conduct, contemplation – dharana – and meditation are. Having acquired knowledge of such scriptures as are worth listening to, he efficiently discriminates between what is duty and what is not, and he knows well the division between a word and the thing it symbolizes.

His mind does not suffer from an excess of conceit, pride, greed and attachment, although externally they are apparent to some extent. He gives up his external impurities as a snake casts off its slough.

Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all these things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages.

-Akshi Upanishad

The first stage for the seeker is to create a milieu around himself of the feeling that the ocean is real and waves are just superficial surface phenomena. To live in that oceanic feeling is the first stage. This becomes the soil. Unless this milieu is there, there is no possibility of any growth into the higher realms of being. So remember this: you must be aware more and more of the center, less and less of the surface; more and more aware of the depth, and less and less aware of the circumference. The focus must change from the periphery to the innermost core.

If you continue being involved with the surface you cannot penetrate to the ultimate being, because the ultimate being, Brahman – or you may call it the truth or God or whatsoever you like – the ultimate being is the center of existence. And we exist on the periphery.

This is natural in a way, because whenever you come in contact with something, you come in contact with the periphery, the outermost. This is natural. But don’t remain there – move ahead, move further. Leave the periphery behind and go deep. With everything – with a rock, with a man, with a tree, with whatsoever – always remember that the surface is the outermost body, and this is not the whole. The whole illusion consists of thinking of the surface as the whole.

The surface belongs to the whole, there is nothing wrong in it; but when you get this impression, this identity that the surface is the whole, then there is no possibility of inner growth because then you have to stay with the surface – the surface has become the whole. Don’t allow the surface to become the whole. This is not something which is going against the surface; this is simply going with the truth, with the reality.

The surface will be there. When you have conceived the whole, the surface will be there, but in its right place. Nothing is to be eliminated, only a greater perspective is needed. And when your perspective has become total, everything will be there. This world will be there; whatsoever you have will be there, but in a new harmony, in a new gestalt.

This is something to be understood very deeply, because it happens to persons who are on a religious search that either they get identified with the surface, or they become against it. Then they start thinking that this world is to be negated, the world of the waves has to be denied. Either they think that waves are the ocean, or they move to the opposite pole: they start saying that the waves are illusory, that they are not, that they have to be denied. Both standpoints are wrong. From one wrong polarity, if you jump to the other, the other is bound to be wrong. The truth is somewhere in between, in the middle.

Don’t jump from the waves to the ocean, but rather from the waves and the ocean to just in the middle from where you can see both – the ocean and the waves also. Then your life becomes a synthesis, and when your life is a synthesis the music of the divine is created.

The Upanishads are not against the world. They are for Brahman, but they are not against the world. Their Brahman includes everything, the Brahman is inclusive. This is the first state.

Now follow the traits of seekers of the second stage, called the stage of thought.

The first stage is the stage of feeling, feeling that Brahman surrounds you, everywhere is Brahman. And remember, the seeker has to start from the feeling, from the heart, because only the heart can be the base. The heart is the base of your body, and the heart is going to be the base of your divine body also.

If you go to the physiologist he will say, “Yes, there is a heart, but that heart is only physiological, just a pumping system; nothing more is there – no love, no feeling,” because he dissects the body and he comes only to know the body and the bodily. But everybody, even that physiologist, when in love will put his hand on his heart. If he is frustrated in his love, then he will feel a deep ache in his heart. He cannot explain it. As a physiologist he will say, “This is illusory,” but as a man he also feels the same. And remember, a physiologist is just a specialization, a fragment; man is the whole.

So don’t listen to the physiologist, listen to his totality. When he is in love he feels his heart is filled, something has poured into it, he has become heart-full. We don’t have such a thing, not even such a word – heartful. We say that a man is healthy, healthful; we say a man is mannerly, mannerful – but we never say a man is heartful, or loveful. These words must be created, because these are existential facts. When you are in love, you are heartful, loveful, overflooded, and of that overflooded feeling the heart is the center.

When you are in love, close your eyes and feel where your feeling has its center. It can never be in the head; it is impossible. It can never be anywhere else – it will be just in the heart. The heart is the base of your body, and it is going to be the base of your higher body also. That’s why the Upanishads say that the first stage is of feeling. Thought is not denied, thought has to take its own place – but that is the second stage.

When feeling is there, then thought cannot go wrong. If feeling is not there, thought is bound to go wrong. If you follow thought without feeling, you will become destructive. That’s what happened with Hitler, with Mussolini, with Tojo; that’s what is happening every day with Mao, with all the dictators – the thought is leading them. The heart has been silenced, or as if cut off from their being; there is only thought, and then thought can be destructive. […]

But that doesn’t mean that the Upanishads deny thinking. They don’t deny; they say thought has much to do, but it must follow feeling. The mind must follow heart, only then can it be good. Then it cannot go wrong because the heart will always guide in the right direction. The heart becomes the compass – and the heart has the center of love, and love cannot lead you wrongly.

It happened once, a man came to Saint Augustine and he said, “What should I do? And tell me in short, because I am an illiterate person and I cannot understand great theological things. So just in short, simply, so that I can understand and remember it, just tell me the essence of religion.”

Saint Augustine is reported to have said, “Love, and then all else will follow. And don’t bother about anything else.”

If you love you cannot do wrong. The more you love the more it becomes impossible to do wrong – love cannot go wrong. But your love goes wrong. That simply means that your love is not love. Your love even creates hell, misery; you even become destructive to your lover. Move into any family and you will feel the destruction that love has brought: wife and husband continuously fighting, quarreling, trying to dominate each other, trying to possess each other – really trying to destroy the other.

The wife wants the husband just to be a thing, not a person. The husband wants the wife just to be a thing to be possessed; a beautiful thing of course, but a thing, not a person – because a person needs freedom to be, only a thing can be made totally a slave. A person can never be made a slave, and the more you make a slave of him the less he is a person. And this is happening through love! And Augustine says, Buddha says, Jesus says, “Love, and everything will be right. Love, and you will be on the right path.” Your love is not love.

The more I try to understand people who are in love, the more I see that their love is just a form of hate. They disguise it, they think it is love, but their thinking cannot be believed, because the results show something else. And a tree is known by its fruits, not by the declaration. The tree may declare, there may be a big sign on the tree, a signboard saying “This is an apple tree,” but it is to be known by the fruits. If apples never come the signboard is not worth anything, it is lying. If love gives one the direction towards divineness, then your love cannot be called love because it leads into misery. […]

What is the problem? The problem is that love has to be learned. Love is a creative art; one is not born with the capacity to love, no one is born with the capacity to love. Love is a growth, an achievement, and the finest achievement possible. It is just like music: no one is born playing an instrument, you have to learn it. And the more complex the instrument, the longer it will take. Someone asked Godowsky, “Now you have become a great master of music, a maestro, do you still practice?”

He said, “Yes, if I don’t practice for a single day, I notice things are going wrong. If I don’t practice for two days, then experts in my audience notice something is going wrong. And if I don’t practice for three days, everybody becomes aware that something is going wrong.” Eight hours per day he was practicing when he was a world famous maestro.

And love is the greatest music, and you have to play it upon the most complex instrument – the lover or the beloved. You think you are born with the capacity, so you destroy the instrument. You fall in love with a woman, but you don’t know that that woman is the most complex instrument in the world. You are going to destroy, and when the woman is destroyed she becomes chaotic, she becomes chaos – anger and hatred are bound to be there.

Love has to be learned as an art, the greatest art, the art of life. That’s why we go on talking about love, but love is the most scarce thing on this earth. It happens only once; millions of people are in love and it happens only once – one in a million becomes capable of love. There are reasons. When a child is born, the child has only self-love. And this is natural: he does not know anybody else, he knows only himself. The child is the most selfish being, the most selfish, self-centered being. He exists for himself, and he imagines that the whole world exists to serve him. And because he is so helpless everybody has to serve him, so he is justified. Whenever he cries the mother runs to give him food, milk, help, warmth, love, and he becomes dictatorial.

Every child becomes dictatorial and he knows that everybody follows. Whatsoever his desire it has to be fulfilled immediately, otherwise he goes mad. He is so helpless, and nothing can be done – we have to serve him. His ego becomes strengthened. The mother, the father, the family, everybody around him helps him, serves him, and he feels that he is the center of the world. And almost always it happens that you never grow out of this childhood nonsense. You remain the center, and you think everybody has to serve you.

How can you love? – because love means the other has become the center. Love is a very great jump: you are not the center, the other has become the center. You have become the shadow. Now the other has the meaning, and just to serve him or her is happiness. But this never happens. The husband is juvenile, the wife is juvenile, and they remain with their childhood concept that I am the center and the other has to serve me. This creates chaos, this creates misery and hell. Love has to be learned; it is a growth. When you can throw your ego, only then can you love.

The Upanishads are not against thought, but they have a preference list – love must be first. And we have done quite the opposite. There is not a single school, college or university where love is taught. Only thought is taught everywhere: schools, colleges, universities – they all exist to train you how to think. Nobody trains you how to feel, how to be more loving. And it is simple: if nobody teaches you mathematics, you are not going to learn it; if nobody teaches you language, you are not going to learn it; and nobody teaches you love, so you have not learned it. But you believe that you are a lover, and in search of the right person who can love you. […]

You think you are perfect; you are waiting just for the other perfect person and then everything will be good. This is not going to help; this is impossible. You have learned to think, and that has become the base. That’s why your whole personality is upside down.

The second stage is of thought, the first of feeling. What is this stage of thought?

He lives in the care of learned men who explain best what listening, remembering, right conduct, contemplation and meditation are.

Not only logic . . . . Our schools teach only logic. In many ways they make you argumentative, that’s all. The Upanishads say, the first thing: He lives in the care of learned men.

In the days of the Upanishads teaching was a very intimate phenomenon, a very personal phenomenon; it was really just like a love affair. So students would move all over the country in search of a master with whom they could feel closeness, intimacy, from whom they could feel care – somebody who cared, who loved, in whose presence they could flower. Sometimes thousands of miles would be traveled to find a master with whom to live. That was the first requirement. Teaching was not so important; the teacher was more important. […]

In India in the days of the Upanishads the teacher was the center, and the real thing was not what he was teaching; the real thing was what he was. Just his presence was a deep phenomenon; it helped the person to grow. He cared, he loved, and teaching was secondary, teaching followed. That was also not very important. The important thing was to be near a person who was grownup, who was really an adult. So the way, the method that was followed was really one of the most intricate systems ever developed in the world.

The system was this: that for twenty-five years everybody was to remain celibate, a brahmachari – for twenty-five years, for the first stage of life. Every boy, every girl, was expected to remain celibate for twenty-five years. Not that they were against sex – no, really they were the persons who knew the beauty of sex, and they created a phenomenon where sex could be lived to its utmost, where sex was transformed into samadhi – but they knew the way. Twenty-five years of celibacy would create the energy; you would accumulate energy, enough energy so that sex would become a very deep and penetrating phenomenon.

Now in the West sex has become superficial. It is not more than sneezing – just something to be thrown out of the body, just a type of relief. And it is so: if you don’t have enough energy gathered then sex will become superficial, just like sneezing – a relief, not a transforming phenomenon, not an alchemy.

When you had so much energy, when you had waited twenty-five years and your every cell was filled with energy, then they allowed you to move into marriage and love. Then this experience of love was going to be very, very deep, intense. The intensity depends on energy. This is the law: intensity depends on energy. If there is no energy there will be no intensity; the more energy, the more intense the phenomenon. And if you had waited for twenty-five years, you would have become a tremendous energy, and even in one sexual experience you could attain to the very highest that is possible through bioenergy.

Then they allowed the man to move into family life. For twenty-five years he was to live an ordinary life: to feel every desire, every thirst, every hunger; to fulfill every desire – at least to try for twenty-five years, with intense force. When the person was fifty, then his children would be coming back from the gurukul, from the house of the master. His children would be coming back, and they would then be about twenty-five.

And this was the rule: when a person had reached fifty, about fifty, and his children were back and were going into marriage, he should again become celibate – because it was thought absurd that a father should be making love in the house when the son was making love. This was thought absurd, this seemed childish, because then the father had not grown beyond it. And how could a son respect a father when he felt that the father was just the same as him? If the son was playing with sex and the father also was playing with sex, how could he think that he had grown up? The moment the son was married the father was ready to move beyond sex. So this stage of twenty-five years was called vanaprastha – looking towards the forest. He had not yet gone to the forest, but was now ready to leave, packing.

When the son had reached fifty and was ready to pack to go to the forest, the father would be seventy-five and he would have renounced life. Now he was an old, wise man; he had lived life. And this man would become the teacher. At the age of seventy-five he would move to the forest, he would create a small school around him, he would become the teacher. And this was the thought: that only an old man can be the teacher, because how can one who has not lived life be a teacher? How can one who has not known all – the good and the bad both; one who has not moved through all the ways that life gives you, the right and the wrong both – how can he be a teacher? Only one who has been through desires, who has known the intensity of desires and the foolishness also, who has been into sex and who has gone beyond sex – only such a man can be a teacher, only such a man can teach life.

It was inconceivable that a young man could become a teacher. It was inconceivable. How can he become a teacher? He has not been through life; he is not yet seasoned. One must be with old, wise men, in their care, just near them; such men who can explain what right listening is, right remembering is, right conduct is, right contemplation is, right meditation is. And you cannot explain these things just by reading and studying; only a lived experience can make you capable of teaching.

What is right listening? Shravan, right listening, is the base . . . because when a disciple comes to a master or a student to a teacher, the first thing is to be taught how to listen. Nowadays nobody is teaching how to listen. You go to any school, even in the kindergarten, and they have started lecturing, but no one has ever taught how to listen. Unless you know how to listen, how can you be taught? Sometimes the training for how to listen takes years. Your mind has to be completely silent; only then can you listen. So a master will try to quiet your inner talk, the inner chattering, the constant chattering which is there.

If you are chattering inside, you cannot listen. I am talking here. If you are talking within yourself, how can you listen? Then your mind is just like a radio, and the arrow by which you tune into a station is wavering, or you have caught two stations simultaneously and so everything is a confusion. I am talking here and you are talking within yourself, so there are two stations simultaneously. Everything is in confusion. You cannot learn and you cannot understand – you can only misunderstand. How to listen was the first thing – in ordinary teaching and in spiritual teaching also. How to listen? The first rule is: the inner talk must cease.

It happened, there was one famous Zen monk, Nansen. He lived in a deep forest away from the capital of Japan, Tokyo. One day a professor of the university of Tokyo, a professor of philosophy, came to visit Nansen. He came into the hut and said, “Tell me something about spirituality. Tell me something about the inner self.”

Nansen said, “You look tired after traveling so long, there is perspiration on your head, so rest a little, relax a little, and I will prepare tea for you.”

So the old Nansen prepared tea, and the professor rested. But the rest was just superficial; inside he couldn’t rest. How can a professor rest? Impossible! He goes on talking inside. […]

He rested only bodily; the inner talk continued. But you cannot escape a person like Nansen; he looks inside. So he brought tea, put a cup in the hand of the professor, poured tea, continued pouring, and the tea started flowing into the saucer also. Then the professor became afraid because he was continuing; soon it would start going onto the floor. So he said, “Now stop! Are you mad? Now my cup cannot have any more tea, not a single drop.”

Nansen started laughing and he said, “You are so careful about the tea and the cup, and you know well that when the cup is full not a single drop more can be held in it. And you ask me about spirituality, meditation. You are so full inside, not a single drop can enter. So first go out, empty your cup, and then come back. Unless you are empty, I am not going to waste my energy pouring into you.”

The first thing for right learning, right listening, is to be empty; that was taught. Now education is doing completely the reverse. The first thing is how to fill your mind, and the more your mind is filled the more you are appreciated. Your mind must be clean, pure; inner talk must cease. Only then you can be attentive.

Then right remembering. Remember that only remembering is not enough; you need the opposite capacity of forgetting also. If you go on remembering everything you will go mad. And that is what has happened – you cannot forget. Forgetting is as much needed as remembering. The useless must be thrown out of the mind and forgotten, and only the essential should be remembered.

Right remembering means continuously throwing rubbish out; choosing only the essential, the true, the real, and throwing all that is rubbish. Much rubbish is there. The newspapers are filled with it, the books are filled with it, and everybody goes on pouring his rubbish into you. The first thing for right remembering is: throw the rubbish out, don’t fill the mind with rubbish – unnecessary, nonessential.

Shankara has said that if you cannot make the distinction between what is essential and what is nonessential, your mind will become just a wastepaper basket; useless things will be there – and they are. Right remembering means also right forgetting. Be alert, because every single moment millions of facts are being thrown into your mind. Your mind is taking much information from everywhere. That’s why you cannot sleep: there is so much excitement in the mind, so many things going on. You cannot remember, because you remember so much that the whole capacity, the whole energy, is lost.

When Alexander came to India he was surprised; he could not believe the capacity of Hindu brahmins for memorizing things. He couldn’t believe it; it was almost impossible. It happened that wise men in Greece had told him, “When you come back from India, bring the Vedas, the four scriptures, the supreme-most Indian scriptures. Bring them with you.” Only at the last moment when he was returning, he remembered, so in a village of Punjab he inquired, “Who has got the Vedas?”

They said, “A brahmin family – but it is impossible, they will not give them to you.”

Alexander said, “Don’t you worry about that. I will force them; I will kill them – they will have to give.”

The brahmins’ house was surrounded by the military, and Alexander went to the head of the family, the old man, and said, “I want the four scriptures, the four Vedas, and I will burn the whole house if you say no. You and your four Vedas all will be burned.”

The old man said, “There is no need. I will give them to you, but in the morning. And let your military be there, don’t be suspicious. I will give them in the morning.”

Alexander said, “Why not now?”

He said, “Before giving them I will have to go through a ritual of departure. My family had them for thousands of years, they have become part of our heart, so the whole night we will pray, go through a particular ritual, and in the morning, we will present them.”

Alexander believed the old man. The military was there and there was no possibility that he could escape. But in the morning when he came a fire was burning and the old man was sitting there reading from the last page of the four books. Alexander waited. The old man read the last page and threw it in the fire. Alexander said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “The four Vedas have gone into the fire, but these are my four sons. They have listened the whole night and they remember. You take them.”

Just one listening! Alexander could not believe it. He called other brahmins to check. How could they remember such big books? And they had heard them only once! They repeated verbatim from the first word to the last. Alexander told his wise men, “We don’t know anything about what right remembering is. These Hindus have done miracles. How can they remember?”

The secret is that if you are capable of forgetting nonsense, you have so much energy to remember that anything can be remembered – the energy is the same. For example, if you have one hundred percent energy, ninety-nine percent is involved in nonsense. In the old days, a brahmin had one hundred percent of energy available; then he could remember the Vedas. Whatsoever you remember is always more than the four Vedas, so the capacity is there but you have devoted it to nonsense. Right remembering was taught: how to forget the useless, how to choose the essential, and only remember the essential.

Right conduct: how to behave rightly, a right discipline of behavior – because everything helps you grow. When you behave wrongly you are not doing something wrong to others, you are doing wrong to yourself. When you behave wrongly your energy moves into wrong directions. Outwardly, right conduct may seem like something imposed; it is not.

For example, Gurdjieff used to say – in his institute in Paris, he had written it on the walls in big letters – one motto: “A person is good who respects his father and mother.” In the West particularly this seems absurd. And just this is the definition of a good man, “A person is good who respects his father and mother”?

What was he saying? Remember that life is such that you are bound to hate your father and mother; every boy, every girl, has to hate. This is how it happens naturally, because the father has to say no to many things, the father has to discipline you, the father has even sometimes to be angry with you. He cannot allow you absolute freedom because that would be destructive to you. He has to force discipline, and the ego of the child is hurt; he starts hating.

Every man hates his father unless right conduct is taught from the very beginning; every girl hates her mother unless a right conduct is taught from the very beginning. And if you cannot respect your father, you cannot respect anybody – then the whole possibility of respect is lost. The father is the first point from where respect grows.

If you can respect your father, you will respect many people. If you hate your father, then all father figures will be hated. If you hate your father, you will hate your teacher, because he is also a father figure. If you hate your father, you will hate anybody who is powerful. You cannot love God, because he is the father figure for the whole cosmos.

In the West, first the respect for the father disappeared, and then God was dead. It is not accidental that every religion says, “God, my father, the father of all.” It is not accidental, it is meaningful – but it has to grow from your own father. If you respect your father then all father-figures will be respected, and ultimately you can respect the divine.

If you hate your mother then hatred will become the very base of your life, because the first love has to be learned through the mother. You cannot love a wife if you have hated your mother, because the wife is a woman, and one who hates his mother hates women. And the mother will follow you like a dangerous shadow – every time you look at a woman, the mother will be present there. Really, every woman is a mother, essentially a mother. You cannot love a woman if you hate your mother. Really, you cannot love at all.

Gurdjieff was right; this is the definition of a good man – that he respects his father and mother. This is impossible. Remember, this is not easy. It is one of the most impossible things to respect the father and mother; to respect one’s parents is one of the impossible things in this world. False respect is not meant, just hypocrisy is not meant, but a real respect. That was taught; that was called right conduct.

Respect and love were taught, many other things were taught. Right conduct means to be always happy, blissful in your behavior, to be refined, gentle, to not hurt anybody in any way – because this then becomes the pattern. Right conduct helps you grow, and it helps you avoid unnecessary problems, unnecessary crises. You create many problems unnecessarily, and in those problems and in solving them you waste energy, time – you waste everything. A small problem can become destructive to your whole life. Right conduct means moving in this world in such a way that there is no conflict with others, no conflict arises; moving in this world in such a way that you don’t create unnecessary enemies – the very way you behave creates friendship. This is good for you.

Right contemplation and right meditation . . .

This will look a little paradoxical, because we think meditation is always right, contemplation is always right. That is not the case; you can contemplate on wrong things. For example, when you are angry you contemplate; really, when you are angry you contemplate more. You become obsessed with one thing and you go on thinking around and around it, near it. Try to think about God; contemplate for one single moment and you have moved away to something else. But think about sex and the contemplation is easy; you can contemplate.

There are people who go on doing that. If you give them a picture or a statue of God they will say, “What will this do? This is just a picture.” But give them a pornographic magazine, give them a picture of a nude woman, and they will hide it under the pillow, and when there is no one around they will contemplate. Pornography is contemplation; the mind starts moving around and around a center.

Contemplation means mind moving around a center: not moving in a line, not going from one subject to another, but just sticking to one subject, and the whole energy moving in a circle. When mind moves in a circle around a subject, that subject becomes deep-rooted; whatsoever you contemplate, ultimately you become. Right contemplation means contemplation which will help you to grow beyond desire, which will help you to transcend desire. You contemplate, but wrongly.

This happens with meditation also. You have moments of meditation sometimes. If you are angry and you hit a person, in that moment of hitting all thought stops. You have just become anger; the whole energy is transformed into anger. You are one-pointed, deep in meditation, not a single thought in the mind, no cloud in the mind, the whole mind and energy and body moving in one direction – but that is wrong meditation. Mind has stopped thinking but has become anger – it should become love; it should become compassion.

In sex, meditation happens. A moment comes when you are reaching the climax, a moment comes just before ejaculation or orgasm when mind stops. You become pure energy, bioenergy, just a stream of energy, no-mind. No-mind is meditation. But if you become stuck just in sexual meditation you will not grow. Nothing is wrong in it, but you have to grow beyond it because this sexual meditation depends on the other and anything that depends on the other cannot make you ultimately free; you will remain dependent.

Right meditation means a moment where mind ceases, you have become one energy – but not moving towards the other, not moving in any direction, but simply remaining in yourself. That will become samadhi. Meditation moving towards the other becomes a sexual act; meditation moving nowhere, remaining inside, becomes samadhi. These things are for the second stage.

Having acquired knowledge of such scriptures as are worth listening to, he efficiently discriminates between what is duty and what is not.

This is called vivek: discrimination between duty, what is duty, and what is not. In the second stage you have to be continuously alert of what to do and what not to do. If you are not alert, you will be in a mess. What to do and what not to do? You have a certain amount of energy. You can waste it in things which are not worth doing, and you can create complexities through doing them.

You talk to someone and then a discussion arises, then the discussion becomes an angry fight – you are wasting energy. And this will create a pattern; the man will try to take revenge in some other circumstances. You have created a karma, a pattern; now it will follow you. But why move into a discussion unnecessarily? Why create an argument? […]

This is how mind functions. A small trigger and it goes on and on – it may go on for eternity if you don’t become aware. Discriminate as to what is to be done, and then you will feel there is a very, very small number of duties. You can do them very well. Discriminate as to what is not to be done, and ninety percent of your acts will drop. They are unnecessary, you could have avoided them. Why get entangled? Remain more and more aloof and do only that which is absolutely necessary. And remember, do it only when it is going to help somebody, otherwise don’t do it.

. . . And he discriminates also between what is the symbol – pada – and what is the thing symbolized – padarth.

This is something to be understood very deeply. Krishnamurti goes on saying that the word god is not God – this is the meaning of this statement. What is a symbol, and what is symbolized? The word god is not God – you can mistake the very word for God – just like the word water is not water. When you are thirsty, I can write in big letters on a paper water and give it to you. You cannot drink it. Even if I do it very scientifically and write H2O, it is useless. You will throw it away, you will say, “Keep your science to yourself. I need water, not H2O.”

The word water and water are two different things, and one who is in search of truth must remember it constantly, because there is every possibility you may become obsessed with words and symbols and may lose contact with reality.

His mind does not suffer from an excess of conceit, pride, greed and attachment, although externally they are apparent to some extent.

The second stage is not the end. There is bound to be some greed, some pride, some attachment, some anger, but one has to be aware and start dropping them from inside. Outside it may not be possible to drop them immediately, because sometimes they are needed also.

In ordinary life, if you cannot become angry you will lose many things. Sometimes just a show of anger will be helpful, but drop it from inside! It has to be dropped from outside also – but later on, when you don’t bother, when nothing makes any difference, when even if you lose something, it makes no difference. But remaining in the world, trying for growth, be aware and alert. Don’t suffer from these things. These are sufferings.

If you have very deep-rooted pride, conceit, jealousy, you will suffer. No one else is going to suffer for it. You continue it in the mind, you suffer for it. Somebody is laughing and you think he is laughing at you – then you suffer. You are conceited, and you are always in search of something to hurt you. You are like a wound, waiting for somebody to touch you and then you will be hurt.

Whenever you feel hurt, remember that you have a wound. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other. Just remember that you have a wound and that man has unknowingly touched your wound. Try to heal this wound and then nobody can hurt you, there is no possibility; nobody can laugh at you. That doesn’t mean that nobody will laugh at you – they may laugh, the whole world may laugh, but you can also join in, you can also laugh with them.

He gives up his external impurities as a snake casts off its slough. Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all these things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages.

Continuously you have to throw your old skin just like a snake. Every moment it becomes old, and every moment you have to come out of it; then only can you remain alive. Otherwise, it always happens that you are almost dead before you die – many years before you die. […]

Before you die you will have died many years before. Everybody dies a posthumous death. You can prevent this happening only if you die every moment, if you leave the past completely, jump out of it. Dust gathers, memories gather, every moment you become old. Cast off this old skin just like a snake. Come out of it. Be fresh, young again, and live in the moment. Only then will you be able to know what eternal life is. A dead man cannot know it; only a man who is alive to his full capacity can know it.

Such a seeker acquires the actual knowledge of all things with the grace of the scriptures, the guru, and the sages.

Whatsoever you do will need much visible and invisible help. Sometimes you may not be even aware, but many currents of help are around you, helping you; many sources are just pouring down upon you. You will become aware only in the end when you have achieved. Then you will see that you have to thank the whole universe.

Just think: if Buddha was not there, if he had not happened, if Jesus was not there, if he had not happened, if the Upanishads were never written, if Lao Tzu had not accepted to write down the Tao Te Ching, if there was no Bible, no Koran, no Vedas, where would you have been? You would have been just in the trees; you would have been monkeys. The whole universe has been helping you to grow – known, unknown sources.

You may not be aware, but invisible vibrations are in the atmosphere. Once Buddha is there, the human consciousness can never be the same again. We may forget him completely, we may not even know his name – because many buddhas have been there and we don’t know their names, they were never recorded – but they are there, invisible sources helping you. And when you grow to your totality, then you will become aware that thousands and thousands of hands have been helping you.

That’s why Hindus depict their God with a thousand hands. And you are such a problem that two hands cannot do – thousands even are not of much help. With the grace of the scriptures, with the grace of the master, the guru, with the grace of all the sages, you will achieve. At the second stage this has to become a deep seed within you – the gratitude to all and everything. Even those who have wronged you have also helped you.

Gratitude at the second stage will help you much. And if you become aware, fully alert about this gratitude, then more help will become available. The more you feel the grace and feel thankful, the more grace becomes available to you.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #6

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The Supreme Knowledge – Osho

The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god:
O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.
The sun god said:

I shall now explain to you this most rare knowledge, upon the attainment of which you will become free while dwelling in this body. See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious; so seeing live in peace and bliss. Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga. Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.

The mind of one who is thus rooted in yoga gradually withdraws from all desires, and the seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts. He has no interest whatsoever in the contrary efforts of the ignorant. He never betrays the secrets of one to another, and he occupies himself solely with lofty deeds.

He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others. He fears sin and does not crave any self-indulgence. He utters loving and affectionate words. He lives in the company of saints and studies the scriptures. With complete unity of mind, speech and action, he follows them. Seeking to cross the ocean that is the world, he cultivates the above-mentioned ideas. And he is called a beginner, one performing his preliminaries. This is called the first stage.

The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god:
O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.

-Akshi Upanishad

The Upanishads know only the supreme knowledge. What is this supreme knowledge? And why is it called supreme? The Upanishads call that knowledge supreme which is not gathered from without, which is not gathered at all. You cannot be educated in it, it cannot be taught; it happens within, it flowers in you.

The first distinction to be made is that there is knowledge which can be taught. The Upanishads call that knowledge lower knowledge. Precisely, they call it avidya – ignorance with information – because that which can be taught to you remains in the mind, it never reaches exactly to you. You remain untouched, your center remains untouched, your being is not in any way changed, transformed. Only the mind collects it, only the brain cells collect it, so it is the same as when we feed a computer – in the same way your mind is fed.

From the very childhood you have been taught many things. They have not reached you, and they will never reach you. The mind gathers them, the mind becomes filled with them. And the mind is so complex that in a single mind all the libraries of the world can be fed; a single head can contain all the knowledge that exists in this world – but the Upanishads say you will not become knowing through that. It is mechanical, consciousness is not needed for it. If even a computer can do it, then it is not worth it.

What the computer cannot do is supreme knowledge. The computer cannot become self-knowing, there is no possibility for the computer to become self-conscious. That which has not been fed into the computer cannot happen to it, and if the same is the case with man, then there is no soul, then you are also a natural biocomputer. If everything that comes out of you has been fed into you, if exactly the same amount comes out that has been fed in, if nothing new happens within, then you have no soul; then you are a very complex mechanism, that’s all.

So the whole religion depends on the phenomenon of supreme knowledge. Is it possible that something can happen within, absolutely new, which has never been taught to you, which has not been cultivated in you? If something so original happens to you, only that can prove that you have a soul; otherwise, you are simply a brain, a complex mechanism but still a mechanism, and then there is no possibility of any transformation.

The Upanishads call that knowledge supreme which happens within. That’s why religion cannot be taught. You can teach science, you can teach many other things, but you cannot teach religion. And if you teach religion, religion becomes false. That’s what missionaries of all the religions have done to this earth. They have been teaching religion on just the same lines as science is taught, so they fill your mind with certain knowledge and you start repeating that knowledge. You may even start living that knowledge, but you will remain a computer, a robot.

The Upanishads say there is a possibility and there is a way to attain the supreme knowledge. So what will the master do if it cannot be taught? That’s why I say a master is not a teacher. The master is not going to teach you; he is going to create a situation around you, only the situation. He will create devices around you, he will create only the soil – the seed you have already got within you.

The situation can be provided and the seed will start sprouting, the dead seed will become alive. The seed will die, but a plant will come in its place. And this seed, this seedling, this growing plant, will become a tree. But this is something which happens within you. You can be helped, but you cannot be taught.

A master can create a situation around you – just a situation, remember. And whatsoever he teaches is not knowledge, he teaches only how to create the situation. He teaches you methods; he cannot give you the conclusion – he can only help indirectly. That’s why it is such a delicate phenomenon. And only one who has got it within him, one who has passed through all the stages, one who has become a big tree, flowering – only he can create the situation around you. So a person who has not become enlightened himself cannot help you; on the contrary, he may hinder you.

If it was just a teaching, then even scriptures would be helpful: the Bible would do, the Koran, the Vedas, the Upanishads would do. But you can read the Bible, you can memorize it, you can become an expert, you can become a scholar – but you will not become a religious man. Just by memorizing the Bible, Christ is not going to happen to you. The Christ can happen to you only when the situation is created around you, and your own inner seed grows. Religion is not a teaching; it is a growth. And what is supreme knowledge? – when you grow, when you know, when for the first time you have your own eyes to see into reality.

So the first thing: supreme knowledge is that knowledge which happens to you but cannot be taught. The second thing: all knowledge is about something other than you – supreme knowledge is absolutely about you. Or, it may even be wrong to say that it is about you. It is not about you, because whatsoever it is about is about something other than you. It will be better to say that it is you, not about you . . . because many things can be taught about you. It can be asked, “Who are you?” Someone can say, “You are Brahman, you are the divine, you are the absolute, the soul, atman.” But this is about you; this is not supreme knowledge – somebody else is teaching it to you.

When you become knowledge, when you become the knowing center, when your very consciousness becomes the door, then supreme knowledge has happened to you. Mathematics is about something, physics is about something else, chemistry about something else, psychology is about the mind – supreme knowledge is you. No university, no school is of any help. Directly, nothing can be done about it, only an indirect help is possible.

The sage Sankriti then said to the sun god: O Lord, please teach me the supreme knowledge.

He is asking an absurd question: Please teach me the supreme knowledge. It cannot be taught – but that’s how a disciple has to reach the master. The disciple cannot know that there is something which cannot be taught; every disciple has to come to the master and ask to be taught. It is absurd for the master, because he knows it cannot be taught, but every seeker thinks that everything can be taught – even the supreme knowledge can be taught. […]

The supreme knowledge is that which cannot be taught. But the sage Sankriti asked: Teach me the supreme knowledge.

The sun god said:

I shall now explain to you this most rare knowledge, upon the attainment of which you will become free while dwelling in this body. See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious; so seeing live in peace and bliss. Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga. Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.

The first thing he said was: See in all beings the Brahman. This too is to create a situation, remember. This is not a teaching; this is giving a device. What do you see? You see trees, you see rocks, you see men, you see dogs, you see cows – you see many things, but not one. You go on counting waves but you don’t see the hidden ocean.

The sun god said to Sankriti that the first thing is to see the one. Apparently, there are many, but behind the many the one is hidden. So whenever you see the many, remember this is the surface, not the soul. Penetrate deep; forget the surface and try to know the center, the depth. The depth is one.

Go to the sea, there are millions of waves. You never see the sea, you always see the waves, because they are on the surface. But every wave is nothing but a waving of the sea, the sea is waving through all the waves. Remember the ocean and forget the waves – because waves don’t really exist, only the ocean exists.

The ocean can exist without the waves but the waves cannot exist without the ocean. If there is no ocean there can be no waves – or can there be? Then what will wave in them? They cannot be, but the ocean can be. There is no need for the waves, the ocean can be silent. If there is no wind blowing the ocean will be there, silent.

The ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the ocean. So waves are just the surface, and waves are accidental – through the action of the winds they have come into existence. They have come into existence from without, some accident has created them. If the wind is not blowing the ocean will be silent and non-waving. So waves are accidents created from without, on the surface; the ocean is something totally different.

And the same is the case with all beings. The tree is also a wave, and the man is also a wave, and the rock is also a wave. And behind the rock and the tree and the man the same ocean is hidden. That ocean is called by the Upanishads the Brahman. The Brahman, the ultimate soul, the absolute soul, is just the ocean. So look at a man but don’t cling to the surface, immediately move to the depth and see the Brahman hidden there.

You can do this. Just try it in this camp. Whenever you have time, sit with your friend, your beloved, your wife, your husband, or anybody – a stranger will do – just sit and look into each other’s eyes without thinking, and try to penetrate the eyes without thinking. Just look deeper and deeper into each other’s eyes. Soon you will become aware that the waves have been crossed and an ocean has opened unto you.

Look into each other’s eyes deeply, because eyes are just the doors. And if you don’t think, if you just stare into the eyes, soon the waves will disappear and the ocean will be revealed. Do it first with a human being, because you are closer to that type of wave. Then move to animals – a little more distant; then move to trees – still more distant waves; then move to the rocks.

If you can look deep down into the eyes, you will feel that the man has disappeared, the person has disappeared. Some oceanic phenomenon is hidden behind and this person was just a waving of a depth, a wave of something unknown, hidden. Try this; it will be something worth knowing. That’s what the sun god said to Sankriti: See in all beings the Brahman, who is one . . . not many.

So wherever you feel any distinction, know that you are on the surface. All distinctions are on the surface; “many” belongs to the surface. In English we have a word, “universe,” that is almost parallel to Brahman. “Uni” means one, but whatsoever you see around you is not “universe.” You may call it a universe, but it is not, it is a multiverse. Many you see, not one; names you see, not the nameless; waves you see, but not the ocean.

This is to create a situation. Look deep and don’t be deceived by the surface, and soon you will become aware of an ocean all around. Then you will see that you are also just a wave, your ego is just a wave – behind that ego, the nameless, the one, is hidden.

See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn . . .

. . . Because only waves are born, the ocean remains the same. The many are born, the one remains the same. You are born and you will have to die; hence the fear of death, so much fear of death, but the Brahman in you is unborn and undying. Everyone is afraid of death. Why this fear? And nothing can be done about it; only one thing is certain in life, and that is death. [. . .]

Once born, death is certain; everything else is uncertain. Why is death so certain? Nothing can be done about it. Science may help to prolong life, but death cannot be destroyed, because it is implied in the very phenomenon of birth; it has happened already. Death is one pole of the same phenomenon of which birth is the beginning, the other pole.

It is just like a magnet: on a magnet you have two poles – the positive and the negative. You can cut off the negative pole, you can cut the magnet in half, but immediately the negative pole will appear on the place where you have cut. Now there are two magnets, and each magnet will have two poles. Before there was one magnet and it had two poles, negative and positive. Now you have cut it into two pieces. The one which has the positive pole will immediately create the negative, and the one which has the negative pole will immediately create the positive. You can go on cutting the magnet, but howsoever many fragments you cut, each fragment will have two poles – because a magnet cannot exist with one pole, it is impossible.

Life has two poles: birth is the positive pole; death is the negative. You cannot destroy, you can at the most prolong. You can at the most make a bigger magnet, but the other pole will be there. You can cut it and make a small magnet, but the other pole will be there. This polarity is absolute. So whatsoever science thinks or imagines, it can never happen. Death cannot be destroyed; through science, remember, it is impossible to destroy death.

Once born you have to die. But right now, behind this ego, the unborn is flowing. If you can look and see and feel the unborn, the fear of death disappears – and there is no other way to destroy the fear.

Death is there and you are going to die, you cannot be immortal as an ego. But if you look deep, and if you can find the depth of your ego where ego is no more, if you can see the ocean beyond the wave, you are already immortal. But that one which is hidden behind was never born and it will never die. Unless you come to know something which is not born, you cannot become deathless.

See in all beings the Brahman, who is one, unborn, still, imperishable, infinite, immutable and conscious, so seeing live in peace and bliss.

Once you can see that, bliss is just the by-product, peace simply happens. And it cannot happen before. Death is there – how can you be at peace? Death is there – how can you be at home? Death is there – how can you rest? Death will create tensions, anguish, worries. Death is there constantly hammering on your head – how can you be silent? And how can you love this existence? And how can you feel grateful to the divine? Impossible! Death is there. You can forget it for moments, but it is hidden; it is always there behind the mind. And whatsoever you do, knowingly or unknowingly, the phenomenon of death influences you. It is always there just like a shadow; it darkens your life.

People come to me and they say, “We are sad, depressed, and we don’t know what the cause is. There is no visible cause for our being sad and depressed. We have everything that life can give, still we are sad and depressed.”

They will remain sad and depressed. They may not know what the cause is; the cause is there – the death always around you, around the corner, waiting for you. And wherever you are moving, you are moving to the death; whatsoever you do, every act, leads you to the death. […]

Whatsoever you do, and wherever you escape, you cannot escape death; wherever you reach, death will be waiting for you there. […]

Fear is there around the heart; the heart is in the grip of the fear of death. And it spoils everything. You cannot really love. When you are in love, death is there. And love is so deathlike that lovers always become conscious of death. If you have loved anyone you will be aware of it. You may not have noticed, but whenever you love someone, the lover is bound to ask, “Will you love me forever?” – the fear of death. “Will you always be with me?” – the fear of death. When you are deep in love you become more aware, because deep in love you are near the heart, and near the heart is the shadow of death. Every beat of the heart is aware that the next heartbeat may not come. Wherever you move, you cannot feel blissful.

Look at a beautiful flower. The beauty of it grips you, for a moment the mind stops; but suddenly you become aware that the flower is going to die by the evening, and just after the beauty of the flower comes the sadness of death. It is everywhere. You will find it moving with you, moment to moment. How can you be at ease? How can you be at peace? How can you live in bliss? Impossible!

The sun god said, “But if you become aware of the one behind the many, if you become aware of the one in the many . . .” If this multiverse disappears and the universe appears, you will be at peace – because then you cannot die. The ocean cannot die, the life energy that is waving in you cannot die. The wave will disappear, but the energy will continue in other waves. That’s what reincarnation means.

All the religions which have penetrated very deep – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, three religions which have penetrated very deep into the soul of man – they all believe in reincarnation. Mohammedanism, Christianity and Judaism don’t believe in reincarnation, but they never worked very hard; they never penetrated the heart of man very deeply. They remained social phenomena, they were more sociopolitical, less religious. The whole history of Islam is sociopolitical, and whenever anybody in the fold of Islam tried to penetrate deeply, he was immediately destroyed and killed.

For example, al-Hillaj Mansoor: he was a man of the same caliber as Buddha, a man who penetrated deeply. When he came to feel that he is Brahman, he is God, he declared it. He said, “Ana’l haq – I am Brahman.”

But this appeared blasphemy to Mohammedans, and they immediately killed him. They said, “This is impossible. At the most you can be a worshipper, but you cannot become God. This is too much; this cannot be tolerated – a human being declaring that he is God!”

They killed Mansoor, they killed many Sufis. In Islam only Sufis penetrated deeply. Sufism is the central core of Islam, the essential Islam – but Islam killed them. So just to survive Sufis disappeared. They became a secret society and they compromised. As far as their outward behavior was concerned, they compromised with Islam, deep down they remained a very revolutionary sect. But they were not accepted by the society at large; Islam remained a sociopolitical phenomenon.

Christianity also remained a sociopolitical phenomenon. It created kingdoms. Even the pope himself became a king, and he still rules a small kingdom, the Vatican. Eckhart, Boehme and Blake were never accepted, the main current never accepted them – and many were destroyed and killed. Whosoever tried to assert the deepest phenomenon of one’s being, the absolute reality, he was never accepted in Christianity. That’s why they couldn’t penetrate to the phenomenon of reincarnation.

Millions of lives you have had, and if you don’t stop in your stupidities you are going to have millions more. If you stop then waves disappear – you become the ocean. And the ocean is at peace, the ocean is always blissful. So it is not a question of how to put your mind at ease, how to relax the mind. No, that won’t do. It is a question of how to move deep, so deep that the mind is left behind and you reach the base of your being, the very substantial base of your being, and the mind becomes the surface, the waving surface. Only then is there peace and bliss.

Said the sun god:

Do not see anything except the self and the supreme. This state is known as yoga, carry out your deeds.

This is the state of knowing that waves are on the surface and you are the ocean, not the waves; the state of knowing that waves belong to you, but you are not the waves – they are just your clothing, just your body. You are the nameless, infinite ocean. The sun god said, “This is the state of yoga” – one of the most beautiful definitions of yoga.

Knowing oneself as the ocean is yoga. You have met, the meeting has happened. You are no longer separate; you are no longer an island – you have become one with a vast continent of consciousness. This is yoga.

The word yoga means meeting, joining together. The root from which the word yoga comes is the same as for the English word yoke: yoking together, joining together, becoming one. When you feel you are the Brahman, this is the state of yoga.

Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.

Then there is no need to escape to the forest. The Upanishads were never life-negative, remember this. There is a deep misunderstanding in the West, and it has been created by one of the most sincere men of this age, Albert Schweitzer. He himself was in a misunderstanding and was very confused about Eastern mysticism. He created the idea in the West that the Upanishads are life negative, not life-affirmative. This is wrong, absolutely wrong. The Upanishads are life-affirming. They don’t say, “Move away from life”; they simply say, “Know the deepest life and then act.” They don’t say, “Stop waving”; they say, “Know that you are the ocean, then go on waving.” But then waving becomes a play.

Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.

These Upanishadic rishis were not lifelong brahmacharins, bachelors. They were not: they were married people, they had children, they had their families. They were not in any way negative; they had not renounced life, remember.

The whole thing became confused because of Buddha and Mahavira – they both renounced life. That too is a way, that too is a way to reach the divine, but because of this the whole Hinduism was misunderstood. And they were so significant, they were the most important revolutionaries in India, that even Hindus started thinking in their way. Buddha and Mahavira impressed the country so much; and they renounced life, they were negative. The negative is also a path.

There are two paths, negative and positive, and you have to choose. Either be totally positive, then you transcend; or be totally negative, then you transcend. Either trust life absolutely, then you go beyond life; or mistrust life absolutely, then also you go beyond life. These are the two paths, the two outgoing doors, the positive and negative – because these are the two poles. And remember, you can jump only from a pole, you cannot jump from the middle.

If I am to go out of this room, I will have to find a polarity. I cannot jump from the middle of this room; I cannot go out from the middle. There is no way from the middle, I have to find the periphery, and from the periphery I can go out.

These are the two poles: life and death, negative and positive. Either affirm life, then you can jump out; or negate life, then you can jump out. If you affirm life then birth becomes the pole, if you deny life then death becomes the pole. Both Buddha and Mahavira were more interested in death than in birth. But Hinduism is not negative, and the Upanishads are not negative, they are affirmative.

Schweitzer became confused because of Buddha and Mahavira. Not only Schweitzer, even Hindus have become confused, because Buddha’s and Mahavira’s impact was so deep, and they impressed the whole country so much, that even Hindus had to think about it. And Shankara, one of the greatest Hindus ever born, became almost a Buddhist in the Hindu fold.

Shankara again impressed people very much. For these one thousand years he has been the soul of Hinduism – and he was just a Buddhist. Shankara’s enemies, Ramanuja, Nimbark and Vallabh, detected him. They said, “This man is not a Hindu at all; he just appears Hindu. He is a crypto- Buddhist, a hidden Buddhist.” And they were right.

Hinduism is totally different from Jainism and Buddhism. The difference, the basic difference, is that Hinduism affirms life. The rishis were not unmarried men, they were householders. They had not renounced, they never renounced anything. You cannot conceive of it. The whole thing has become so distant now, you cannot conceive of these rishis. They were living in life, but living as the ocean, not as the waves. They accepted everything. […]

These Upanishadic rishis lived life, but from a totally different standpoint, from a totally different center. They said, “Life is good, life is a blessing, and to allow the waves is a game, a beautiful game worth playing. And if God has given you the opportunity, play it to the full – but don’t get identified.”

Remember, this is a game. Remember, the earth is nothing but a drama, a great drama, and you are nothing more than actors. Remain a witness within and go on acting. There is no need to escape from actions. Even to think in terms of escape shows that you are afraid, and fear cannot lead you anywhere, only love.

And these rishis loved life. They loved everything that life can give; they loved all the blessings – and there are millions of blessings. They never said that life is dukkha, they never said that life is misery. They said that you can make life a misery, but life is not a misery. You can also make a bliss out of it – it is you, not life.

Rooted thus in yoga, carry out your deeds.

The mind of one who is thus rooted in yoga gradually withdraws from all desires. Desires are not to be left; rather you have to be rooted in yoga, then you will withdraw by yourself and the happening will be spontaneous. There is no need to kill desires, there is no need to fight with desires; the only thing is to know your oceanic state, your Brahman state, the one, and then get rooted into it.

The more you are rooted in it, the less and less desires will be there. But you have not renounced them; rather on the contrary, they have left you, because desires become uninterested in one who is rooted in himself. Desires leave him, because now they are not welcome guests. If they come, he accepts them, if they come, he is not going to destroy them and fight with them – but he is not interested. He has higher blessings with him now, the lower don’t attract him. If they come, he accepts, if they don’t come he never thinks about them. By and by the life energy moves more and more within, withinwards; desires disappear.

Remember this distinction: in Buddhism and Jainism, desires have to be left consciously, effort has to be made to leave them and when you leave them you will be rooted in yourself. In Hinduism it is just the contrary: get rooted in yourself and desires will leave you. Buddha is negative: leave the desires and you will be rooted in yourself. Hinduism is positive: be rooted in yourself and desires will leave you.

It works both ways – it depends on you. If you are a negative type, a person to whom no comes easily, then follow the negative path. There are persons to whom no comes first, even if they want to say yes. If no is easy to you nothing is wrong in it; you are a negative type, that’s all. Follow the negative path, say no to life so that you can get rooted in yourself. But if you are a yes type, then no is not your path. Then say yes to life, move with life, get rooted in yourself, and by and by desires will disappear.

And the seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts.

Whatsoever such a person does is meritorious, it is punya, it is holy, it is sacred. Whatsoever is done by one who is rooted in himself becomes worship, it is meritorious, because now he engages in it just as a play, just as a life-game. He is aware that it is only overflowing energy that moves into acts; he is not interested in doing anything or reaching any goal. His action is not work; his action is play – then the seeker feels blissful.

Whenever you are in play you feel blissful, and if your whole life becomes a play, you cannot imagine how blissful you can become. Why do you feel blissful while you play? Even when playing cards, you become blissful, the misery disappears. Why? When playing a game – football or hockey or anything – why do you become so blissful? Why do you feel so much joy bubbling in you? What happens?

And side by side with you there may be a professional player; he is not happy. He is not happy because he is just doing work. If you are paid for your cardplaying you will not be happy, because then you are not interested in the game, you are interested in the salary, and it has become a boredom. You have to do it to get the salary. Then the end is not in it, it is only a means.

This is the difference between work and play: work means the end is not in it, and you are interested in the end. If you can reach the end without this work, you would like to leave it. You have to carry it as a burden, it is a compulsion on you. Somehow you have to finish it and reach the goal.

Play is totally different; the end is in it, it is intrinsic. There is no goal, you are not going anywhere. You are enjoying the very thing. Think about it. A professional player becomes sad. It is something to be carried out, to be finished soon – the sooner the better.

The Upanishadic rishi is just the opposite. Even in profession he is a player; even in profession, in business, in whatsoever he is doing, in whatsoever life has created for him to do, he is a player, he goes on playing. He has no business to do, that’s why he is never busy. There is nothing to be done, there is no hurry. If everything is left unfinished there is no worry because it is okay, it was just a play, it ended in the middle – really there was no end to be achieved. This is the attitude of the positive path.

The seeker feels blissful while engaging himself each day in meritorious acts . . . He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others.

When you are playing there is no need to hurt others, but when you are busy with a business you don’t care for others. Rather, you will use whatsoever means are to be used, even if the others are to be destroyed, because it is not a play, it is a serious business. Whosoever comes in your way has to be destroyed and thrown out of the way. In business you are violent, and a mind which is businesslike can never be nonviolent.

That’s why I go on saying that Gandhi cannot be nonviolent – he’s so businesslike. Even his nonviolence is a business, he is so serious about it. He is not in a play; he is deadly serious. That’s why he appealed to us so much: we are all businessmen and he was the supreme, the top. He appealed to us, he had appeal for everybody all over the earth, East or West. He appealed deeply, he appealed to the business mind. He was mathematical, calculating, serious with every penny – not in any way in a play.

He was not a Hindu; he could not be. He was ninety percent a Jaina and ten percent a Christian – negative, businesslike, serious. He was not like Krishna – playful, enjoying, nonserious. Whatsoever happens Krishna is not worried. He is not going to force anything on the course of life. Wherever life leads is the goal – wherever. If life leads to death in the middle of a stream, that is the goal – nowhere to reach.

A non-achieving mind is playful. An achieving mind, always thinking of achieving something, whether in this world or the other, is a business mind.

He performs only such gentle acts as do not disturb others.

When you are playing there is no need to disturb anybody. When you are playful you are nonviolent.

He fears sin, and does not crave any self-indulgence.

But the concept of sin in Hinduism is totally different from that of Christianity. Remember, the word pap, sin, has a different connotation. The Upanishads say that which is against the law is sin, just a natural phenomenon. Christianity says that which is disobedience to God is sin. This is absolutely different: disobedience to God.

In Christianity God is something like an aristocrat, something like a dictator; we can paint him just like Hitler or Mussolini. You disobey, and you will suffer and he will punish you. And he is very ferocious in punishment. For small sins, sometimes even when you are innocent, you will be thrown into hell. And Christianity says that it is forever and forever, the hell is eternal. That doesn’t seem to be justified. A small sin, falling in love with a woman, and you will suffer forever and forever.

And what did Adam do? – just a small disobedience; something that God prohibited. God said, “You are not to eat the fruit of this tree, the tree of knowledge. You can eat all the fruits available in this garden of Eden, but don’t come near this tree.”

And it is human to be attracted to something which is prohibited. Adam is so human and lovely; he must have become curious. If he was absolutely stupid, only then could he have followed. Even a little intelligence will say that something is there, otherwise why should God prohibit? If God had prohibited him from eating the snake, then Adam would have eaten the snake and been finished with the Devil. But he prohibited the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and then Adam was expelled from Eden because he disobeyed.

Christianity therefore is conformist; revolutionaries cannot be allowed. Adam was the first revolutionary. And why should God feel so offended for such a small thing? The Christian God cannot be playful. He is serious and ferocious, and he will take revenge. Hinduism cannot conceive of that: God taking revenge on innocent Adam who was just being curious. There was nothing else, he was just curious to know. And the Devil was able to persuade him. The Devil said, “God has prohibited you, because if you eat this fruit, you will become God-like, and he is afraid and jealous.”

This is the sin in Christianity – disobedience. In Hinduism there is no question of disobedience or obedience. It is a simple natural law; just as water flows downwards, if you follow natural laws, you will be happy. There is no one to decide it, it is a simple happening – if you follow natural laws, you will be happy. If you don’t follow natural laws, you go against them, you will be unhappy. Nobody is taking any revenge, and you are not going to be thrown into eternal hell. If you don’t follow, for the time being you will suffer. Immediately you come back to the law the suffering stops.

A simple thing: if you put your hand in the fire you will be burned. No God is deciding, “I prohibit you. Don’t put your hand in the fire, otherwise I will take revenge.” Nobody is there, it is just the way fire behaves. You have to know that if you put your hand in you will suffer. Don’t put the hand in and you don’t suffer. And then you can use fire to heat the room, to cook food, and the fire becomes your help – you can use it. Natural laws can be used if you know them well, flow with them; if you go against you suffer.

Sin is going against a natural law, not against any God. No one is giving you suffering, you are choosing it by moving wrongly. And no one is going to give you bliss, you will choose it by moving rightly. So it is not a question of good and bad, it is a question of right and wrong.

He utters loving and affectionate words. He lives in the company of saints and studies the scriptures. With complete unity of mind, speech and action he follows them. Seeking to cross the ocean that is the world, he cultivates the above-mentioned ideas. And he is called a beginner, one performing his preliminaries. This is called the first stage.

Remember, all this is just the beginning, just the first step of creating the situation. This is not the end – just the preliminary, just the first step.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #4

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The Eternal Play of Existence – Osho

He knows it who knows it not, and he knows it not who knows it. To the man of true knowledge, it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known.

Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh – pulsation of knowledge and awareness. Through the atman he obtains strength and vigor and through its knowledge, immortality.

For one who realizes it here, in this world, there is true life. For one who does not so realize it, great is the loss. Discovering the atman in every single being, the wise ones, dying to this world of sense experience, become immortal.

-Kenopanishad

Knowledge of the Brahman is impossible but knowing is possible. Knowledge and knowing are basically different. A very subtle difference has to be understood. Knowing is always in the present, knowledge is of the past. Whenever you say, “I have known,” it means that the experience has become past, it has become part of your memory. When you say, “I am in a process of knowing,” the experience is still continuing; you are still in the experience. It is not part of your memory. Your being is still involved in it.

As far as the world is concerned, the knowing stops. It becomes knowledge. That accumulated knowledge is known as science. Whatsoever man has known becomes science. Science is knowledge. Religion never becomes science because religion is an eternally continuing process of knowing. You never come to a point where you can say, “I have known.” The Brahman never becomes the past; it is always the present. The ultimate cannot be reduced to the past; it cannot be reduced to knowledge. It is always a riverlike flow of knowing.

So you cannot say you have experienced God because that means it is a past thing. It means you have transcended it – that you have already experienced and gone beyond. You cannot go beyond God, so you can never say meaningfully that you have known, that you have experienced. You cannot put him into the past; he cannot be made part of your memory. You can be in a process of experiencing but it is never experience; it is always experiencing. A lived process is never a dead memory.

It is just like this: you cannot say, “I have breathed.” You are breathing. Breathing cannot become past. If it becomes the past, you will be no more. There will be no one to say that he breathed. Breathing is always a continuous process. You are always breathing – it is in the present. You cannot say, “I have lived,” because then who are you? You are life, but you cannot say, “I have lived.” Life is a continuous process. It is always here and now in this very moment. The ultimate means the ultimate life, the ultimate breathing, the ultimate experiencing, the ultimate knowing.

So the first thing to be understood is that the Brahman cannot be reduced to knowledge. So whosoever says, “I have known,” the Upanishads say is ignorant. He is insensitive to the great mystery of life. Whosoever says that he has known has not known. He may have known through the scriptures; he may have known through others; he may have gathered information. But he has not known, because one who knows will know that God can never be reduced to knowledge. He remains a process.

God is not a thing. A thing can be known. God is a process. A thing means something which has stopped. A process means something that goes on and on and on. In the ordinary mind we always think of God as a thing. God is not a thing, it is a flow, a continuum. It goes on eternally, never stops, never can stop. Non-stopping is the very nature of it, so how can you know a process? The moment you say, “I have known,” you have stopped – and the process goes on. You have stopped in your knowledge and the process goes on: you are lost, your contact is lost. Now you are no longer in touch with the process.

You will have to move with the process. You cannot stop. Stopping is not possible with the divine. You can stop but the divine cannot stop. And when you stop and the river goes on, you have lost contact with it; you are no more in living touch.

So those who say that they have known have lost contact. Really, they have not known. They have gathered information. Intellectually they have conceived of something, but they have not lived, because one who lives will come to know this is a river, eternally going on and on. You have to flow with it. A single moment of stopping and the contact is lost. You can never say, “I have known.” You can only say, “I am knowing.”

Knowing is an open thing; knowledge is closed; knowledge has come to a full stop. Knowing is a growing thing, it grows. So knowledge is dead, it has already stopped. It is not breathing now, the blood is not flowing in it; the heart has stopped beating, it is dead. Knowledge is a corpse and if you carry knowledge, you are carrying a corpse, a dead body. That is why pundits, scholars, those who think they know, are dead men. Even sinners have entered the divine, but it is unheard of that any pundit has ever entered the divine. A sinner can enter, but a man who is knowledgeable, who thinks he knows, cannot enter.

In the eyes of the Upanishads the real sin is knowledge, because that is the only barrier. But it is very subtle, and you have to understand the meaning. Knowing is allowed; knowledge is not allowed. Move with the divine moment to moment, alive, in touch, open. Do not say, “I have known.” Simply say that I am aware, experiencing, knowing. Everything is open, and I do not know what is going to be revealed the next moment, so I cannot close, I cannot say that now it is finished, and the end has come. There is no last chapter, there is no last page. The scripture is endless. You cannot close it and every moment something new is revealed because the divine or God or Brahman is every moment new, fresh, young. Only we get old, and we get old because of knowledge.

It is not simply the body which gets old. The body will get old, but your consciousness need not get old. If it gets old, it means that you have gathered knowledge. Then the weight of knowledge makes you old. Otherwise, your eyes will remain innocent, virgin. You will be open, and that openness is virginity. You will be seeking and searching. You will be inquiring and meditating and contemplating. You will be always ready for the new to happen because it is happening every moment. God is never old. If God is old then someday, he will have to die because oldness leads to death.

The Brahman is always young, evergreen. Oldness is not known there, that is why there is no death to it. Existence is always green, alive, pulsating. With knowledge you become old. The moment you say, “I have known,” you have stopped knowing. You think that you have experienced and the experiencing stops. From that moment on you are not growing. You are a dead seed.

The Upanishads believe in knowing, not in knowledge. What is this knowing? And what is the process of knowing? With knowledge you gather the past. In knowing you disperse it – you go on dispersing it. Whatsoever is known must be thrown away so that you are open again to know anew. You must die to the past; only then can you be alive to the present.

We all live in the past – that which is no more, that which has gone, that which is dead. We live in that past; that is why we are so dead. Life is always in the present and mind is always in the past; that is why mind cannot know life. There can be no meeting ground. There is no common ground where mind can meet life. Hence, the Upanishads are against mind.

Mind is always the memory – that which you have lived, that which is past, that which is no more. Mind is just the past dust gathered upon you. Throw it away. Wash it away so that you are fresh, young, and you can meet the present, the ever young – the ever young Brahman.

In knowing, the past has to be constantly renounced. This is the basic renunciation. Die to the past so that you can be alive in the present. You cannot do both. If you are alive in the past, then you will be dead in the present. If you want to be alive in the present, be dead to the past. Each moment go on throwing the past dust. Do not allow it to gather. Go on renouncing it, go on throwing it. It is of no use. You have already used it, now it is just a dead shell. The bird has flown away from it. Do not go on collecting dead shells. They will become the imprisonment; they will hamper you. They will become so weighty that they will not allow you to move.

To me, a sannyasin, one who has renounced, means not that he has renounced wealth, not that he has renounced his house, not that he has renounced family, but one who has renounced the past – because that is the basic wealth. That is your family; you go on living with the dead.

I have heard once it happened that Jesus was passing. It was just morning and the sun was about to rise, and he saw a fisherman throwing his net on the lake. So he spoke to that fisherman. He came near him and told him, “Why are you wasting your life just catching fishes? Follow me and I will show you how to catch the kingdom of God in your net.”

The fisherman looked back. There was a different type of light in the eyes of Jesus. The man was hypnotized. He threw down his net and followed Jesus. But just as they were passing out of the village a man came running and asked the fisherman, “Where are you going? Your father has died.” His father was ill, very old. Any moment it was expected that he would die.

So the fisherman said to Jesus, “Jesus, allow me a few days so that I can go back and pay my respects to the old man who is dead and do all that is needed and expected from a son.”

Jesus said, “You need not go. The dead will bury the dead.” To Jesus the whole village was dead. So he said, “They will bury the dead; you need not worry about it.”

Why did Jesus say that the dead will bury the dead? Because all those who live in the past, they are dead. Only those who live in the present are alive. Life means the present, the here and now. It is a very fleeting moment. You can catch it only when you are totally unburdened; otherwise, you will miss. If your mind is moving toward the past, you will miss the fleeting moment of life. It is so momentary, it is so fleeting, that if you are attached to the past you will go on missing it.

And this is happening. Even when you are not thinking of the past, you are thinking of the past reflected in the future. But you are never in the present, that much is certain. Either you are in the past, which is no more, or in the future which is yet to be. Both are not, both are non-existential. One is dead and one is not yet born. And whatsoever you think of the future is just a reflected past, a projected past, because what can you think of the future? You can think of the tomorrow only in terms of the yesterday because you do not know any other language.

You loved someone yesterday, now you think to love him tomorrow. It is going to be just the past again repeated with some modification. And those modifications also come from past experience. Nothing new can be projected into the future. Only the past can be projected. So you move like a shuttle between the past and the future, and in this constant movement the fleeting present, that which is life, is missed. And only through life can you enter the Brahman.

The Upanishads say do not be attached to knowledge, do not be attached to memory, do not be attached to the past. Go on dying to it so that you are ever young, fresh, virgin. Again and again, you are open. No past becomes an imprisonment around you. You always move on and leave the dead shells to the past.

The sutra says:

He knows it who knows it not . . .

He who has not made it a knowledge – only he knows it who is still in the process of knowing, who is still searching and inquiring, who is still not closed, who is still going onward, still flowing. And this is going to be eternally so. No one ever reaches the goal; no one can reach the goal. Life really has no goal. It is just an eternal play – beginningless, endless. Man creates the goal. Why?

Man creates the goal because then he can be at ease. The goal is achieved and now you can relax. Now you can be dead; now you are not needed. Life really has no goal. It is just an eternal play – beginningless, endless. Man creates the goal. Life has no goal. It creates many goals, but those goals are just temporary. Every goal is just a means to a further goal, and ultimately there is no goal; otherwise, the Brahman would have stopped at any time, because the goal must have been reached.

Existence has been existing beginninglessly. Any time it would have happened that the goal was achieved, the goal would have stopped. It has not happened so; it will never happen. ‘Goal’ is a human creation. Life is goal-less; that is why it is eternal. If there is a goal then life cannot be eternal, because when the goal is achieved life is dead. All goals are just temporary. When you can realize this, you have realized the Brahman – the purposeless energy moving goallessly, moving everywhere but not moving to somewhere, moving toward nowhere. The movement is beautiful in itself; it is blissful in itself. The bliss is not somewhere in the goal, it is here and now, just in the movement, just in the pulsation of being alive.

When you look at a Buddha sitting under a bodhi tree, or you look at a Jesus on the cross, or you look at Mahavira standing under the skies, a question must arise in your mind about what they are doing. It cannot be conceived that Buddha would be thinking about some business – he has no business. He is not thinking about his family – there is no family. He is not thinking about the future – what can he think about the future? What is a Buddha doing under a bodhi tree? He is not doing anything. He simply is. The very happening of life, the breathing in and out, the very pulsation of being alive, is blissful. He is not doing anything else. He is simply in bliss.

But whenever you think about bliss, you always think as if bliss is something which he possesses in his hand. It is not something, it is just a way of existing – the right way of existing. There is no past and no future. Just under the bodhi tree . . . this very moment, the Buddha is simply alive. The heart is beating, the breath is coming in and out, the blood is circulating, and everything is alive, pulsating. He is not moving anywhere, he simply is. In this isness is bliss.

Hence, the emphasis continuously that when you do not desire you will be blissful. Why? – because desire leads you somewhere else. Desire does not allow you to be here. Desire says go on somewhere else; the goal is there in the future. Desire creates the future and forces you toward the future. When you are non-desiring, when there is no desire, you are here and now. You are under the bodhi tree, you have become a buddha.

A buddha means a state of consciousness – a state of consciousness which is not going anywhere to achieve any goal. Because of this realization, Buddha said, “There is no God.” Just because he was so compassionate toward you, he said there is no God, because if he says that God is then you will make a desire out of him. You will want to achieve him. You would like to reach God, you would like to know God, so you will create a desire.

So Buddha says there is no God, so drop all spiritual desire. Not that there is no God, but he says this just to help you drop all desiring and all future. Otherwise, you go on changing the future. Sometimes the desire is worldly, sometimes it becomes spiritual, but the desiring remains the same.

Buddha says there is no moksha; there is no state of total freedom somewhere in heaven. There is no moksha. Not that there is no moksha, but he says this just to help you; otherwise, you will start desiring moksha, the liberated state – and desiring is the bondage. So when you desire moksha, liberation, you are still in bondage. He says this just to help you to drop all desiring so that you can be here and now.

People go on coming to Buddha and they ask, “What will happen when we die?”

Buddha says, “Nothing will happen. You will simply die.”

They are asking him to create a future even beyond death. They are not satisfied; this much future is not enough. They want some more future beyond death so that they can project their minds more and then they can desire, and they can plan what to do after death. They go on insisting. In every village where Buddha moves, they go on insisting, “What will happen to an enlightened one, to you when you die?”

Buddha says, “Nothing will happen. I will simply die. As the flame of a lamp ceases to be, I will cease.”

They are not satisfied; they feel uneasy. They say, “But where will the flame go? Will it meet the Brahman? Will it become cosmic? What will happen to the enlightened soul?”

Buddha is hard. He says, “Nothing. Just a flame is put out. Do you ask where the flame has gone? No one asks where the flame has gone because everyone knows it has just ceased.”

The word nirvana means cessation of the flame. He never uses the word moksha, he never uses the word heaven, he never talks about paradise, he never uses any word that can create future. He simply says nirvana. Nirvana means that the flame ceases to be. Do not ask what happens, “Why? Does the flame really cease to be?” It never ceases to be but just through his compassion he is telling a lie because the truth will create a desire in you.

If he says there will be bliss – satchitananda – if he says there will be bliss, existence, and consciousness, or if he says there will be a kingdom of God, then a desire will be created. And if the desire is there, there is not going to be any kingdom of God. Cessation of desire will bring you here and now. There is no possibility to move in the future; you are thrown back to the present. And once you are thrown back to the present you are in paradise. You will be in the divine, you will become one with the Brahman.

The Upanishads say:

He knows it who knows it not.

Do not create any memory; do not help to create the past. Go on dropping it. You have used it, why go on carrying it? Do not make it a knowledge.

People come to me and they say, “Yesterday the meditation was just wonderful.” You have become non-meditative because of yesterday’s meditation. Now that man will go on looking for yesterday to be repeated today. He will wait. He will not be meditating; he will not be totally in it. Part of his mind will be looking backwards to see when that will happen again – and it will not happen. His mind was totally in the moment; now it is not. Now he is looking backwards; he has brought in a new thing. Now the situation is not the same. He is not totally in it; he is expecting a result. It will not happen and then he will come to me and say, “What has gone wrong? Yesterday it happened but today it didn’t happen and I am feeling very frustrated.”

The mechanism is simple. Yesterday it could happen because you had no past about it. Remember, you had no past about it, no expectation about it. You couldn’t project any future because you didn’t know anything. You were ignorant, so it happened. You were simple, innocent, in the moment – just doing it without having any expectation for a result because the result was unknown.

Now it is known. It has happened, it has become the past. Now it is your knowledge. Now this knowledge will become the barrier. Now you can do whatsoever you like but it is not going to happen. Knowledge becomes the barrier; the past becomes the barrier to the present. So if it happened yesterday, forget it. Drop that yesterday.

Remember one thing more: you will be frustrated if it is not happening. And you will be frustrated even if it is going to happen because it is just going to be a repetition. You will get fed up. You will get fed up even with your meditation if it goes on repeating, being the same. Drop the past because if the past is there it is not going to happen. And even if sometimes it happens, it is just going to be a repetition of the past and you will get bored. In both ways the past goes on interfering with the present.

Why do you feel it is a repetition? You feel it is a repetition because you go on comparing with the past. If you drop the past, it is always new; it is never a repetition. Repetition means you are constantly comparing it with the past experience. Drop the past completely and you will be opened to the present. Then whatsoever happens will be new and you will never get bored.

Everyone is bored because of this nonsense of bringing in the past again and again. You kissed your beloved yesterday and now you kiss again and you compare. The very beauty of the kiss is gone because it is just a repetition. Sooner or later, you will get fed up. Sooner or later, you would like to escape from your beloved. She will look like an enemy because now she has become a situation where everything looks like a repetition. Forget the past. It is killing you. It is killing your love, it is killing your life, it is killing every possibility. Drop the past. Do not make it a knowledge. Be fresh again and again. Every moment move and do not carry the past.

He knows it who knows it not and he knows it not who knows it who says that “I know.” This is the indication that he has stopped knowing. Knowledge is complete; the book is closed. This man is dead. A dead man cannot be in contact with a live force.

To the man of true knowledge it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known.

Go anywhere on the earth: there are churches, temples, gurudwaras, mosques. Everyone is worshipping there; the whole earth seems to be religious. Everyone ‘knows’ about God and life is such a misery, such a suffering. Everyone ‘knows’ about God – not only knows: everyone argues about him.

There are two types of ignorant people: one who says God is and they argue for him, and another who says God is not and they argue against. But both believe that they know. Theists, atheists, both believe that they know. In one thing they both agree – that they have knowledge. Not only this: they try to prove that they have the true knowledge.

The Upanishads say that only ignorant people can claim that they know – that the divine has become known; that the mystery is solved; that now there is no mystery but a theory, a philosophy, a scripture; that now there is no mystery, and everything is known. Only ignorant people can do this. They can kill the mystery by asserting that the ultimate is known. Those who are wise will insist that the mystery remains a mystery. Even if you come to face it, encounter it, even if you come to meet it, the mystery is not solved. On the contrary, it is deepened more. It becomes more mysterious; it goes on becoming more and more mysterious. The more you know, the more it becomes unknown.

This is the mystery of religious knowing. The more you know it, the more it becomes unknown – the more you feel how impossible it is to know, how difficult it is to know. The more you know the impossibility of this, the more you become aware of your incapacity, your helplessness, your ignorance. The more and more God becomes unknown – then the nearer you approach. And when someone really enters the divine, he comes to know that it is unknowable – not only unknown. Then he comes to realize that there is no possibility to know. What does it mean? It means there is no possibility to be finished with it. It is going to be an eternal concern. You cannot be finished with it! You cannot say, “Now I will drop this religious inquiry, I can drop this religiousness. The thing is finished.” No, it cannot be finished.

People come to me and they go on asking, “When will it happen that the search ceases, that we reach, that the ultimate happens?” They are in such a hurry! It is not going to end anywhere, remember. It is not going to end. This quest is eternal. You will go on growing. You will go on growing into deeper awareness, into deeper bliss. But still, something always remains hidden, and you go on uncovering it. But it is never uncovered completely; it cannot be so. This is how the very nature of the ultimate reality is.

But teachers go on saying, “Do not worry. Sooner or later, you will reach.” I myself go on saying it. People come to me and they say, “We have been meditating for so long. When will it happen?” I say, “Wait! Soon it will happen.” But these are all lies. If I say that it is not going to happen ever, you will simply drop the whole effort; you will feel hopeless. So I will go on saying that it is going to happen.

It is happening already but it is not going to happen in such a way that the journey ends. And one day you yourself will become aware of the beauty of this non-ending process, and you will realize what an ugly question you were asking. You were asking how to end all this. The very question is ugly and absurd. You do not know but what you are asking is against yourself – because if it ends, you end with it. If there is no search, nothing to be revealed, nothing to be loved, nothing to be known, nothing to be entered, how can you be? If you were in such a state, you would want to commit suicide.

Bertrand Russell has somewhere joked. He said, “I cannot believe in the Hindu conception of liberation – of moksha – because,” he says, “in moksha, the Hindu conception of liberation, you will be freed of everything: nothing is to be done, nothing will happen. You will be sitting and sitting and sitting under bodhi trees, and nothing will happen because everything has ceased.” So Russell says, “That will be too much. It will become a burden, and the liberation will become a new type of bondage. Everyone will get fed up, and everyone will start praying: Send us back to the earth or even to hell. Even hell will be better because there will be something there to be done, there will be some news. But in moksha there will be no news, no events, no happenings. Just think: eternally no happenings, no movement – what type of moksha will this be?”

Really, when Hindus talk about this moksha, or Jainas talk about this moksha, it does not mean that such a moksha exists or such a state exists. This is just to help you, because you cannot conceive of the eternal process. So they say, “Yes, do not be worried. Sooner or later, everything will stop and then you will not have to do anything.” But you do not know what type of misery this will be. This will be more miserable than the earth is.

Moksha is not a static thing. It is a dynamic process. And moksha is not some geographical place. It is a way of looking at things, it is an attitude. If you can be alive moment to moment, you will never ask when all this is going to finish. The very question shows that you are not alive and you are not enjoying life as it is. If you enjoy life, you will not ask when it is going to end, you will not ask when you are going to be freed of it. Then you are already free. In the very enjoyment the freedom has come. Whether it ends or not is not a concern at all. If it ends it is good. If it doesn’t end it is also good. Then you accept it totally.

The sutra says:

To the man of true knowledge it is the unknown, while to the ignorant it is the known.

This seems contradictory. It is only ignorance which can claim such a thing. And the more stupid the mind, then the more arrogant will be the claim, the more dogmatic will be the claim.

But even that dogmatic claim may impress you. There are religious fanatics all over the world who go on claiming. And their claims impress people because just by their aggression, their dogmatism, their absolute definiteness, you are overpowered. You think this man must have achieved because he is claiming so boldly. You are so uncertain about yourself that anyone, any stupid man, can claim anything with certainty and you will be impressed. But remember this: only for ignorance does such certainty exist. A man who is wise cannot be dogmatically certain. He cannot assert anything absolutely; he cannot assert anything in an imperative way.

For example, Mahavira: if you ask him anything he will look very uncertain. He is not, but he is a wise man. If you ask him, “Is there God?” he will say, “Maybe, maybe not.” This is the mind that doesn’t claim – because if he says, “He is,” it becomes a claim; and if he says, “He is not,” it still becomes a claim. He says, “Maybe, perhaps.” Syad is his word – perhaps, maybe.

You will not be impressed by him. That is why such a great man was born and there are so few followers; Jainas are not more than thirty lakhs. Twenty-five centuries have passed. Even if one Adam and Eve were converted by Mahavira they would have created such a number. Only three million people in twenty-five centuries – and they too are Jainas only by birth, because to be a Jaina means to be in the attitude of perhaps, maybe.

Why does Mahavira go on saying maybe, whatsoever you ask? Even if you ask if there is a soul, he says, “Maybe, maybe not.” Why this insistence? Because he never claims knowledge and he allows everything to remain unknown – that is why the insistence on maybe because then things remain unknown, uncertain, vague, and you can inquire. When everything is certain, inquiry ceases. If he says, “Yes – there is a God, there is soul, there is bliss,” inquiry has stopped.

Now what can you do? Either you can follow him or not follow him but he says, “Maybe.” He leaves everything open. That is the meaning of syad: everything is open. He doesn’t force anything upon you. He doesn’t say yes dogmatically, he doesn’t say no, because his aggression may impress itself upon you. Just listening to him may become fatal to you. And Mahavira is such a person that you will be impressed, you will be magnetized just listening to him. If he says, “There is,” it may become a knowledge to you. You will go on believing that there is, and that will be destructive. To create knowledge is to be destructive.

But only those who are very sensitive can understand Mahavira. Those who are insensitive, ignorant, stupid, will think, “This man doesn’t know. Our village pundit is better. At least he says, ‘Yes, God is, and I can prove it. I can give you proofs from literature – from the Vedas, the Upanishads. I can argue that God is and I can convince you.’ And this man says, ‘Maybe.’ What does it mean? Has he known or not?” People go on asking Mahavira, “If you have known, then why not say yes? Or if you have come to know that there is no God, then why not say no? Be clear!”

Why do you ask for clarity? You ask for clarity so that you can follow blindly. You ask for clarity so that nothing is left for you to work out. You are lazy, so you ask for clarity. Mahavira will not give you clarity. Really, whenever you come across such a person as Mahavira he will create more confusion in you because out of confusion inquiry is born. Out of certainty comes only ignorance.

This sutra says that it – the ultimate – is the unknown to the wise, to those who know, while to the ignorant it is the known. Don’t be too certain. Remain uncertain. Uncertainty means fluidity; uncertainty means every alternative is possible. You are not a fixed entity. The future is not going to be just a repetition of the past. Something new is possible every moment. Remain vague. Do not insist on consistencies. Even if there is apparently a contradiction, do not try to choose in haste. Wait, weigh, and even in the contradiction try to find something which joins the two opposites. That third thing will be nearer to truth than any polarity.

The whole emphasis is to remain in a state of receptivity for the unknown to happen to you. Be sensitive, fluid, impressionable, as if some guest is to come and you are waiting. The door is open. Even the breeze passing through the trees or the breeze passing through the dead leaves . . . you jump to the door. The guest may have come; you are alert.

The guest has not come yet. You are simply waiting. In this alertness, one comes to know the ultimate core of reality. The guest never comes really. He is always coming; he is always coming – coming and coming and coming. He is always nearer and nearer and nearer, closer and closer, but he never really comes. You always remain in waiting. This waiting is beautiful. It is bliss – if you can wait. But then you need a very sensitive mind. Mediocre, stupid minds won’t be of any help there. A stupid mind will say, “Now come in; otherwise, I am going to close the door and rest. I have waited long.” […]

This is the whole situation. Really, he is always coming, his chariot is always near the door. He is knocking continuously but you are closed. Be open – that is the basic message of the Upanishads. Do not be knowledgeable. Do not cling to the past, to the history, to the memory. Be open and wait for the unknown to happen. And whenever it happens do not try to make it known. Whatsoever happens, throw it away and be ready again. Something new will happen again. The Brahman remains unknown continuously.

Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh – pulsation of knowledge and awareness.

No knowledge is ultimate. Every knowledge is just a pulsation – just a pulsation, a vibration. Do not make any vibration the ultimate. In deep meditation you will come to feel a great silence: this is just a pulsation. Do not think this is Brahman. Brahman is always more. Whatsoever happens, he is always more. Do not identify any happening with the Brahman; otherwise, you will stop.

In meditation, many times a deep bliss will happen to you; you will be washed away. But do not say this is the Brahman because the moment you say this is Brahman you are closed. It is just a pulsation of bodh, just a pulsation of knowing, just a pulsation of consciousness, but just a wave. Never make any wave the ocean. Remember, when you make a wave the ocean it has become knowledge; then you are closed. Let every wave be just a wave and wait for the ocean.

And remember, the ocean never comes; it is always the waves which are coming. The ocean comes through the waves, but it is always the waves which are coming. The ocean never comes. So do not fix yourself and do not say this wave is the ocean. The moment you say it you are closed.

Many people have reached deep ecstasies and then they stop because then they say, “This is Brahman; the ultimate has been achieved.” Remember, it is never achieved. It is simply achievable but never achieved; approachable but never approached.

The journey remains and it is beautiful that the journey remains. Whatsoever knowing comes to you, the Upanishads say that it is just a pulsation of knowledge and awareness. And if you can feel this pulsation of knowledge and awareness, you will attain immortality. Why? You become mortal, you become prone to death, because you cling to the dead – the dead past. If you do not cling to the past there is no death for you, it cannot happen. The body will disappear but that is not death. It becomes a death because you have become too much obsessed with the body – because you have lived in the body in the past.

One person has lived a hundred years in his body. In that hundred years’ experience of living in the body he has become obsessed with the body. Now he thinks that he is the body. These hundred years of routine, habit, has created this false notion that he is the body. That is why he feels that death is coming.

Children are less afraid of death than old men. Why? – because they are still new to the body. It has not become their experience and knowledge. They are fresh. Children can play with snakes without any fear. They can play with poison; they can move in any danger. They are not afraid. Why? – because they are still fresh to this new abode. They are not clinging to it too much. It has not yet become a past. But sooner or later, when they have lived in it for many years, they will cling to it. Then they will be afraid. Then they will become afraid of death because in death the body will die, and they have come to feel that they are the body.

A person who lives moment to moment, who goes on dying to the past, is never attached to anything. Attachment comes from the accumulated past. If you can be unattached to the past every moment, then you are always fresh, young, just born. You pulsate with life and that pulsation gives you immortality. You are immortal, only unaware of the fact.

Indeed, he attains immortality who realizes it in and through every bodh. Through the atman he obtains strength and vigor, and through its knowledge, immortality.

The more you know life, the inner life, the atman, then the more you know that you are immortal. There is not going to be any death: you are deathless.

For one who realizes it here, in this world, there is true life.

So do not hanker after any other life; do not hanker for something to happen after death. If it cannot happen here, it will not happen ever. If it can happen it can happen here and now. This earth, this life is the present. Do not condemn it for another life. There is no other life. Life is always here; life is always in this moment. Do not postpone it because through postponing you may miss the opportunity.

For one who realizes it here there is true life. For one who does not so realize it, great is the loss. Discovering the atman in every single being, the wise ones, dying to this world of sense experience, become immortal.

Go on dying to the past, and you will not have any world around you with which you are attached, obsessed. Dying to the past, you die to this world. Remember, this world is created through your experience; it is your experience. Dying to experience, you are so young that you do not create any world around you. The real world is not the problem – the world around your mind is the problem.

I have heard: once it happened that a house was on fire. The master of the house was weeping, crying, and beating his chest. His whole life was destroyed. Then suddenly a man came and said, “Why are you weeping? Don’t you know? Your son has settled yesterday; the house has been sold.”

The tears disappeared and the man even started smiling. He said, “Is it so?” The house was still burning but now his inner house was not burning. This house was not the problem, but an inner attachment.

Then the son came and said, “Yes, we were just going to settle but it is not settled yet.”

The man’s tears started flowing. He was weeping and beating his chest but the house was completely unaware of what was happening to this man. Within minutes everything changes – the inner world changes. If the house were not his, then he would not have any problem. The problem was not the house but that “the house is mine.” That ‘mine’ creates the inner world.

If you go on throwing the past away, then nothing is yours. Then nothing is your possession; you always remain without any possession. That is what sannyas is. Not that you will not use a house, not that you will not use clothes, not that you will not live in this world – but nothing will be your possession. The world of the inner mind disappears. Then the real world is beautiful. All ugliness is projected by your mind, by the dead past; then life becomes ugly.

With the living present, life is just beautiful and blissful.

-Osho

From The Supreme Doctrine, Discourse #10

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.

This Witnessing Consciousness – Osho

When the self as consciousness, which is truth, knowledge, infinity, and bliss, devoid of all its attributes, shines like pure gold freed from all its forms such as a bangle and a crown, it is called twam or thou, The brahman is truth, infinity and knowledge. That which is destructible is truth. And that which does not perish even after the destruction of space, time, et cetera is called the avinashi, the imperishable.

-Sarvasar Upanishad

There is a dialogue, a deep dialogue between my existence and existence itself, a constant dialogue, a continuity every moment: the incoming breath, the outgoing breath. I am constantly linked with the universe, with existence.

If we take two points, between these two points the dialogue continues. One point is “I,” and the other point – the total – is “thou.”

A non-religious mind, a material mind, will say that the dialogue is not between “I” and “thou,” the dialogue is between “I” and “that,” because the world is just a thing; it is not a person. And really, if the world is just a thing and it is not a person, then there can be no dialogue, there can be no intimacy. But if the whole world is just a thing, then myself – I myself cannot be a person; this “I” is also a thing. This is what is meant by a materialist conception of the world.

Of course there are relations – stimulus-response relations – but no dialogue, no intimacy. You cannot address existence as “thou,” because there then is no poetry, and then there is no religion. Among things only science can exist; among persons religion grows.

The religious attitude towards existence is a personal attitude: the whole universe is taken as a person. The you can talk, then you can love, then you can be angry with the total; and your life becomes deeply rich, because life and richness develop only through deeper dialogues with the reality.

But still, even if a religious person thinks that the world is not just material, the world is personal, and existence has a personality – then too, “I” continues to be the center; “thou” is just the periphery, just the circumference. I remain at the center of the universe, and the whole universe just belongs to me as a periphery.

In this sutra, the rishi says that when the pure consciousness is known, when the witnessing consciousness is known, there is a mutation, a total change of emphasis. “Thou” becomes the center and “I” becomes the periphery. “Thou” becomes the center, and “I” just the periphery. This pure consciousness therefore is known as “thou – twama, tu. It is not known as “I” because now I exists only as a periphery. It is really non-existential because periphery, in fact, is non-existential. It is just a line, a demarcation line and nothing else. It belongs to the center; it is just a projection of the center, an extension of the center.

When pure consciousness is known, pure consciousness is known as “thou.” This has many implications. One, the moment we conceive pure consciousness as “thou,” the whole universe, the whole of existence becomes a very different thing than we know it now. If you address the tree as “thou,” the tree is not the same; it has become a person, and a new dimension opens – a new dimension. And when the tree has become thou, you also cannot remain the same, because with a new relationship, with a new dimension, you are also different.

But as we are, even a living person, even a human person, is not “thou” for us. We use the word, but not meaningfully. We behave with persons as if they are not persons. For example, you love someone and then you begin to possess him or possess her. A person can never be possessed; only a thing can be possessed. How can a person be possessed? And how can love be possessive? If love becomes possessive it means that you are transforming a person into a thing.

That’s why a beloved may be a person, but a wife becomes just a thing, just a thing to be used. Why this possession? Because we just go on saying “thou,” but we never mean it – we never mean it. If you are really saying “thou” to someone, it means you accept the other as a person and you cannot possess him. A person means a freedom; a person means: now you cannot be the master. So we turn even persons into things. But with this pure consciousness developing inside, things turn into persons, and the whole universe by and by takes a shape of “thou,” of a great “thou” – everything becomes a person.

We live among things, mm? Even if we are living among persons, we live among things. And the more you live among things, the more you will be a thing yourself – that’s bound to happen. So a person who tries to possess someone becomes himself a possession. The phenomenon is reciprocal – if I try to possess someone as my property, I am bound to become myself a thing, a property. So it is not that the husband possesses the wife; the wife also possesses the husband. They both are possessors and both are things.

The moment you begin to feel someone as a thing, you begin to expect. With a person there can be no expectation, because person means a freedom. You have loved me this evening, you have been loving towards me; if I expect that tomorrow also you must give me love, it means I am thinking of you as a thing. And if tomorrow you are not going to love me, then I will be angry, I will be frustrated, and I will take revenge. I will begin to feel that my possession is being lost. Why?

With a thing you can expect that it will behave the same tomorrow also – but not with a person. A person is a constant flux, the freedom to move. He may be something else tomorrow, who knows? He may be not love me at all. If I take you as a person, then I will never be frustrated with you, because the frustration comes when I take you as a thing.

But this pure consciousness begins to feel the whole universe as a “thou”; therefore this consciousness is never frustrated. Never! There is no reason to be frustrated at all. Whatsoever happens, happens. It is never against expectation, because there has been no expectation at all. If tomorrow the tree moves from my garden to somewhere else, even that will not frustrate me. I will just say, “Oh, so thou hast gone. So thou hast moved.”

The truth, the infinite truth, the eternal consciousness, the formless is known as “thou,” never as “I.” Then you begin to live in a world of freedom, of non-possession. And when you behave in a non-possessive way, the whole world begins to behave non-possessively towards you. The whole universe becomes non-possessive of you.

This is what is meant by freedom: if you give freedom to the whole universe, you become free. But this freedom happens only when “I” is not at the center, but “thou.” Really even “thou” is not exactly what the case is; even “thou” is a bit less than true, because “thou” cannot exist without a subtle feeling of “I.” I cannot address someone as “thou” without myself being there, even indirectly, even in a very absent ways – even unconsciously. But the “I” must be there to address someone as “thou.”

So this is just to express something in language which cannot be expressed. Really, when you are not in the center, not even the “thou” is the center. “I and thou” both dissolve into oneness. But that oneness is inexpressible, and still, the rishi tries to say something about it to the disciple, to the enquirer. So what to say? He says at least one thing is certain; it cannot be called “I,” it is called “thou.” And when the disciple is ready, the inexpressible can also be indicated. But in the beginning, it is more than enough. “I” is not in the center, that consciousness is impure. And “I” is in the center, so consciousness IS impure. That happens only when you know the formless. And if it is not happening and “I” is in the center, that means you are in the form, obsessed with the form, obsessed with the superficial. You have not gone deep; you have not gone to the innermost core of your being. You have just lived outside your house; you have not know it from the inside.

“I” in the center is symbolic, indicative that we have not known what we are. We have known only identities with the for. The body is form, the mind is form, thought is form – all that we know about ourselves is form. And these forms happen upon the ocean of the formless. With that formless coming into your awareness, the “I” becomes the periphery and “thou,” the center.

Now the definition of truth. What is truth? Everyone is seeking, and everyone is trying to find it out, but what is it? How to define it? The materialist mind defines truth as the fact; whatsoever is objectively true, objectively factual, is truth. And personal experience which cannot be objectified will not be considered as truth. So if Jesus says, “I see my father in heaven,” either he is a dreamer or just psychotic, neurotic, just mad – because no one else can see the father in heaven. So either he is just a poet, just an imaginary dreamer, or just mad, insane, abnormal . . . seeing things which are not.

This definition of truth as fact is dangerous in many ways. It is useful, it is utilitarian, it helps – particularly it helps the scientific research – but it is dangerous. Because even if there is no objective proof, even if all cannot see a particular thing, the thing can be. It is not necessarily that because all others are not seeing it, it is not there.

For example: there are colorblind people; out of ten one is colorblind. By being colorblind it is meant that he cannot see a particular color. For example, George Bernard Shaw was blind to yellow; he couldn’t make any distinction between yellow and green. But for sixty years continuously he was not aware of it, because how could he be aware? It was just an accident that he became aware.

On one of his birthdays, someone presented a suit of a green color, but he forgot to send a green tie with it. So Bernard Shaw went to purchase a green tie, but he purchased a yellow one, because there was no distinction for him between yellow and green. His secretary said, “What are you doing? This will look very funny. This is yellow and the suit is green.” For the first time after sixty years’ living in this colorful world, he became aware that he was colorblind. He could not see any distinction between yellow and green – both were the same.

If ten persons are colorblind just like Bernard Shaw, and you can see yellow and ten cannot see yellow, what will be the truth? You will be either neurotic or just a dreamer.

There are personal faculties which may not have developed as a communal thing – the community may be lacking. There are personal faculties . . . But this definition of truth as fact will deny them. So sometimes even very intelligent people, very logical rational people, go on being superstitious in denying things which are, but which cannot be shown objectively. The whole psychic phenomenon has suffered only because of this. There are people who have faculties, but only individuals. So either they are deceivers – either they are playing tricks, deceiving others – or they are just claiming things which are not real.

There is one man, Peter Herkos. He can see things from very, very far off. Three hundred miles distance makes no difference to him. From here he can see three hundred miles away, a village on fire. No one would believe him, no one; but by and by, people became aware that yes, he was seeing things, and things proved objectively true. There was a fire and someone died. He said from just here that someone had died in that village, and that very moment someone had died; but still scientists tried to disprove it. They thought somehow that he was maneuvering things – someone might have telephoned, some signal, something… something was there which they did not know about. But many, many experiments were carried out, and still no deception was found. And the thing became more amazing because Herkos himself was a skeptic; he himself did not believe that such things could happen. How could they happen? So he said, “If this would have been the case with someone else, I myself would say that he is deceiving. But how can I say it now? I am not deceiving at all – I go on seeing things.” But they are personal . . .

A buddha experiencing what he called nirvana – it is a personal experience. It is not a fact, but it is a truth. So it is not necessarily that truth should be a fact, and not vice versa also that a fact is bound to be a truth.

The rishi defines truth more deeply, more absolutely. He says truth means that which is always unchanging, which is always. If a fact changes, it is also not a truth. And if a dream remains continuously, eternally, it is true; it is truth. So by truth, the Upanishads mean: the absolutely eternal.

What is absolutely eternal in this world of movement and change? Only change seems to be eternal and nothing else. Everything changes except change. And change cannot be called the eternal truth, because the very definition is “the unchanging one,” and change means “changing one.” Where is the eternal? – we never see it, we never feel it, we never know it – nowhere; everywhere is form and movement and change, and everything is impermanence itself.

Buddha says, “Everything is impermanent, everything – even you yourself – just impermanent. Nothing is permanent here.” So is there any truth, or not? Only one thing seems to be deeply eternal: the see-er, and nothing else – the witnessing soul, nothing else. Buddha says, “Nothing is permanent.” But who has seen this? This “nothing is permanent” – who has seen this? Someone must have seen this impermanency. Someone must have felt this constant flux, change. And to feel the change, this constant change, to be aware of it, at least the awareness must be eternal. So that’s why truth and the inner consciousness become synonymous.

For a philosophically minded person the enquiry into truth becomes a logical enquiry – metaphysical, philosophical. He goes on finding what is truth, logically, rationally. He may create a philosophy but he is not going to find the truth. For a religious mind, the enquiry begins to be a search for the eternal. And when a religious man says, “I am seeking the truth,” he means “I am seeking that which is always, that which is eternal – the eternity itself.” Time ceases, space ceases, everything is dissolved, but that which is remains still.

This witnessing consciousness . . . You are ill, then you are healthy; you are rich, then you are poor; you are respected, and then you are condemned; you are in hell, and you are in heaven – everything is changing. Only one who goes on knowing, “Now I am in hell, now I am in heaven; now they are respecting me, now they are condemning me; now I am ill, now I am healthy; now I am this, now I am that” – only one, and all else goes on moving, moving, moving. But this movement is known, and the knower is immovable, because only an unmoving knower can know movements. Only an immovable knower can know movements. Only the eternal one can know change. If the inner one is also changing, then change cannot be felt. You know that once you were a child, now you are not. If the inner consciousness itself has changed, who will remember that you were a child? If you have completely changed, then there will be no continuity. Who will remember that once you were a child and now you are not? Something behind all change remains the same. That something remembers, “I was once a child, now I am young, now I am going to be old, now I am going to die.”

This continuity, this consciousness, for the rishi of the Upanishads, is the truth. This truth is eternal, infinite, and the nature of it is just knowing, pure knowing. It is not love, it is not bliss; it is pure knowing, because even love has to be known, even bliss has to be known. So ultimately, love and bliss and all else become objects of knowledge. This remains to be always the knower, always the transcending knower, the transcendental one.

-Osho

From That Art Thou, Discourse #11

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

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

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