Category: Osho

A Rhythm of One – Osho

First try to understand the word ‘suchness’. Buddha depends on that word very much. In Buddha’s own language it is tathata – suchness. The whole Buddhist meditation consists of living in this word, living with this word, so deeply that the word disappears and you become the suchness. For example, you are ill. The attitude of suchness is: accept it – and say to yourself, “Such is the way of the body,” or “Such are things.” Don’t create a fight, don’t start struggling. You have a headache – accept it. Such is the nature of things. Suddenly there is a change, because when this attitude comes in a change follows just like a shadow. If you can accept your headache, the headache disappears.

You try it. If you accept an illness, it starts dispersing. Why does it happen? It happens because whenever you are fighting, your energy is divided: half the energy moving into illness, the headache, and half the energy fighting the headache – a rift, a gap and the fight. Really this fight is a deeper headache.

Once you accept, once you don’t complain, once you don’t fight, the energy has become one within. The rift is bridged. And so much energy is released because now there is no conflict – the release of energy itself becomes a healing force. Healing doesn’t come from outside. All that medicines can do is to help the body to bring its own healing force into action. All that a doctor can do is just to help you to find your own healing power. Health cannot be forced from outside; it is your energy flowering.

This word ‘suchness’ can work so deeply that with physical illness, with mental illness and finally with spiritual illness – this is a secret method – they all dissolve. But start from the body, because that is the lowest layer. If you succeed there, then higher levels can be tried. If you fail there, then it will be difficult for you to move higher.

Something is wrong in the body: relax and accept it and simply say inside – not only in words but feel it deeply – that such is the nature of things. A body is a compound, so many things combined in it. The body is born, it is prone to death. And it is a mechanism, and complex; there is every possibility of something or other going wrong.

Accept it, and don’t be identified. When you accept you remain above, you remain beyond. When you fight you come to the same level. Acceptance is transcendence. When you accept, you are on a hill, the body is left behind. You say, “Yes, such is the nature. Things born will have to die. And if things born have to die they will be ill sometimes. Nothing to be worried about too much” – as if it is not happening to you, just happening in the world of the things.

This is the beauty: that when you are not fighting, you transcend. You are no more on the same level. And this transcendence becomes a healing force. Suddenly the body starts changing. And the same happens to mental worries, tensions, anxieties, anguish. You are worried about a certain thing. What is the worry? You cannot accept the fact, that’s the worry. You would like it in some way different from how it is happening. You are worried because you have some ideas to enforce on nature.

For example, you are getting old. You are worried. You would like to remain young forever – this is the worry. You love a wife, you depend on her and she is thinking to leave, or of moving with another man, and you are worried – worried because what will happen to you? You depend on her so much, you feel so much security with her. When she is gone there will be no security.

She has not only been a wife to you, she has been also a mother, a shelter; you can come and hide against the whole world. You can rely on her; she will be there. Even if the whole world is against you, she will not be against you, she is a consolation. Now she is leaving, what will happen to you? Suddenly you are in a panic, worried.

What are you saying? What are you saying by your worry? You are saying you cannot accept this happening; this should not be so. You expected it just the otherwise, just the contrary; you wanted this wife to be yours forever and ever, and now she is leaving. But what can you do? When love disappears what can you do? There is no way; you cannot force love, you cannot force this wife to remain with you. Yes, you can force – that’s what everybody is doing – you can force.

The dead body will be there, but the living spirit will have left. Then that will be a tension on you.

Against nature nothing can be done. Love was a flowering, now the flower has faded. The breeze has come into your house, now it has moved into another. Such is the way of things; they go on moving and changing. The world of things is a flux; nothing is permanent there. Don’t expect! If you expect permanency in the world where everything is impermanent, you will create worry. You would like this love to be forever. Nothing can be forever in this world – all that belongs to this world is momentary. This is the nature of things, suchness, tathata.

So you know now the love has disappeared. It gives you sadness – okay, accept sadness. You feel trembling – accept trembling, don’t suppress it. You feel like crying, cry. Accept it! Don’t force it, don’t make a face, don’t pretend that you are not worried, because that won’t help. If you are worried you are worried; if the wife is leaving, she is leaving; if the love is no more it is no more. You cannot fight the facticity; you have to accept it.

And if you accept it gradually, then you will be continuously in pain and suffering. If you accept it without any complaint, not in helplessness but in understanding, it becomes suchness. Then you are no more worried, then there is no problem – because the problem was arising not because of the fact, but because you couldn’t accept it the way it was happening. You wanted it to follow you.

Remember, life is not going to follow you, you have to follow life. Grudgingly, happily – that’s your choice. If you follow grudgingly, you will be in suffering. If you follow happily you become a Buddha, your life becomes an ecstasy. Buddha has also to die – things won’t change – but he dies in a different way. He dies so happily, as if there is no death. He simply disappears, because he says a thing which is born is going to die.

Birth implies death, so it is okay, nothing can be done about it.

You can be miserable and die. Then you miss the point, the beauty that death can give to you, the grace that happens in the last moment, the illumination that happens when body and soul part. You will miss that because you are so much worried, and you are so much clinging to the past and to the body that your eyes ate closed. You cannot see what is happening because you cannot accept it, so you close your eyes, you close your whole being. You die – you will die many times, and you will go on missing the point of it.

Death is beautiful if you can accept, if you can open the door with a welcoming heart, a warm reception: “yes, because if I am born, I am to die. So the day has come, the circle becomes complete.” You receive death as a guest, a welcome guest, and the quality of the phenomenon changes immediately.

Suddenly you are deathless: the body is dying; you are not dying. You can see now: only the clothes are dropping, not you; only the cover, the container, not the content. The consciousness remains in its illumination – more so because in life many were the covers on it, in death it is naked. And when consciousness is in total nakedness it has a splendor of its own; it is the most beautiful thing in the world. But for that an attitude of suchness has to be imbibed. When I say imbibed, I mean imbibed – not just a mental thought, not the philosophy of suchness, but your whole way of life becomes suchness.

You even don’t think about it; it simply becomes natural. You eat in suchness, you sleep in suchness, you breathe in suchness, you love in suchness, you weep in suchness. It becomes your very style; you need not bother about it, you need not think about it, it is the way you are. That is what I mean by the word ‘imbibe’. You imbibe it, you digest it, it flows in your blood, it goes deep in your bones, it reaches to the very beat of your heart. You accept.

Remember, the word ‘accept’ is not very good. It is loaded – because of you, not because of the word – because you accept only when you feel helpless. You accept grudgingly, you accept halfheartedly. You accept only when you cannot do anything, but deep down you still wish; you would have been happy if it had been otherwise. You accept like a beggar, not like a king – and the difference is great.

If the wife leaves or the husband leaves, finally you come to accept it. What can be done? You weep and cry and many nights you brood and worry, and many nightmares around you and suffering . . . and then what to do? Time heals, not understanding. Time – and remember, time is needed only because you are not understanding, otherwise instant healing happens.

Time is needed because you are not understanding. So by and by – six months, eight months, a year – things become dim, in the memory they are lost, covered with much dust. And a gap comes of one year; by and by you forget.

Still, sometimes the wound hurts. Sometimes a woman passes on the road and suddenly you remember. Some similarity, the way she walks, and the wife is remembered – and the wound. Then you fall in love with someone, then more dust gathers, then you remember less. But even with a new woman, sometimes the way she looks . . . and your wife. The way she sings in the bathroom . . . and the memory. And the wound is there, green.

It hurts because you carry the past. You carry everything, that’s why you are so much burdened. You carry everything! You were a child; the child is still there; you are carrying it. You were a young man; the young man is still there with all his wounds, experiences, stupidities – he is there. You carry your whole past, layers upon layers – everything is there. That’s why you sometimes regress. If something happens and you feel helpless, you start crying like a child. You have regressed in time; the child has taken over. The child is more efficient in weeping than you, so the child comes in and takes over, you start crying and weeping. You can even start kicking, just like a child in a tantrum. But everything is there.

Why is so much load carried? Because you never really accepted anything. Listen: if you

accept anything it simply never becomes a load, then the wound is not carried. You accept the phenomenon; there is nothing to carry from it, you are out of it. Through acceptance you are out of it. Through half – helpless acceptance it is carried.

Remember one thing: anything incomplete is carried by the mind forever and forever, anything complete, it is dropped. Because mind has a tendency to carry the incomplete things just in a hope that someday there may be an opportunity to complete them. You are still waiting for the wife to come, or for the husband, or for the days that have gone you are still waiting. You have not transcended the past.

And because of a too much loaded past, you cannot live in the present. Your present is a mess because of the past, and your future is also going to be the same – because the past will become more and more heavy. Every day it is becoming heavier and heavier.

When you really accept, in that attitude of suchness there is no grudge, you are not helpless. Simply you understand that this is the nature of things. For example, if I want to go out of this room I will go out through the door, not through the wall, because to enter the wall will be just hitting my head against it, it is simply foolish. This is the nature of the wall, to hinder, so you don’t try to pass through it! This is the nature of the door, that you pass through it – because the door is empty you can pass through it.

When a Buddha accepts, he accepts things like wall and door. He passes through the door; he says that is the only way. First you try to pass through the wall, and you wound yourself in many millions of ways. And when you cannot get out – crushed, defeated, depressed, fallen – then you crawl towards the door. You could have gone through the door in the first place. Why did you try and start fighting with the wall?

If you can look at things with a clarity, you simply don’t do things like this, trying to make a door out of a wall. If love disappears, it has disappeared! Now there is a wall – don’t try to go through it. Now the door is no more there, the heart is no more there, the heart has opened to somebody else. And you are not alone here; there are others also.

The door is no more for you, it has become a wall. Don’t try, and don’t knock your head on it. You will be wounded unnecessarily. And wounded, defeated, even the door will not be such a beautiful thing to pass through.

Simply look at things. If something is natural, don’t try to force any unnatural thing on it. Choose the door – be out of it. You are doing every day the foolishness of passing through the wall. Then you become tense, and then you feel continuous confusion. Anguish becomes your very life, the core of it – and then you ask for a meditation.

But why in the first place? Why not look at the facts as they are? Why can’t you look at the facts? Because your wishes are too much there. You go on hoping against all hope. That’s why you have become so hopeless a case.

Just look: whenever there is a situation, don’t desire anything, because desire will lead you astray. Don’t wish and don’t imagine. Simply look at the fact with your total consciousness available and suddenly a door opens and you never move through the wall, you move through the door, unscratched. Then you remain unloaded.

Remember, suchness is an understanding, not a helpless fate. So that’s the difference. People are there who believe in fate, destiny. They say, “What can you do? God has willed it such a way. My young child has died, so it is God’s will and this is my fate. It was written; it was going to happen.” But deep down there is rejection. These are just tricks to polish the rejection. Do you know God? Do you know fate? Do you know it was written? No, these are rationalizations – how you console yourself.

The attitude of suchness is not a fatalist attitude. It does not bring in a God, or a fate, or a destiny – nothing. It says simply look at things. Simply look at the facticity of things, understand, and there is a door, there is always a door. You transcend.

Suchness means acceptance with a total welcoming heart, not in helplessness.

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than self.

And once you merge – you are merged into a suchness, in tathata, in understanding – there is no one as you and there is no one as other-than-you, no self, no other-self. In a suchness, in a deep understanding of the nature of things, boundaries disappear.

Mulla Nasruddin was ill. The doctor examined him and said, “Fine, Nasruddin, very fine. You are improving, you are doing well, everything is almost okay. Just a little thing has remained; your floating kidney is not yet right. But I don’t worry a bit about it.”

Nasruddin looked at the doctor and said, “Do you think if your floating kidney was not all right I would worry about it?”

The mind always divides: the other and I. And the moment you divide I and the other, the other becomes the enemy, the other cannot be a friend. This is one of the basic things to be deeply understood, you need a penetration into it. The other cannot be the friend, the other is the enemy. In his very being the other, he is your enemy.

Some are more inimical, some less, but the other remains the enemy. Who is a friend? The least of the enemies, really, nothing else. The friend is one who is least inimical towards you and the enemy is one who is least friendly towards you, but they stand in a queue. The friend stands nearer, the enemy further away, but they all are enemies. The other cannot be a friend. It is impossible, because with the other there is bound to be competition, jealousy, struggle.

You are fighting with friends also – of course, fighting in a friendly way. You are competing with friends also, because your ambitions are the same as theirs. You want to attain prestige, power; they also want to attain prestige and power. You would like to have a big empire around you, they also. You are fighting for the same, and only a few can have it.

It is impossible to have friends in the world. Buddha has friends, you have enemies. Buddha cannot have an enemy, you cannot have a friend. Why does Buddha have friends? Because the other has disappeared, now there is nobody who is other than him. And when this other disappears the I also has to disappear, because they are two poles of one phenomenon. Here inside exists the ego, and there outside exists the other – two poles of one phenomenon. If one pole disappears, if ‘you’ disappears, ‘I’ disappears with it; if ‘I’ disappears, ‘you’ disappears.

You cannot make the other disappear, you can only make yourself disappear. If you disappear there is no other; when the I is dropped there is no thou. That’s the only way. But we try, we try just the opposite – we try to kill the ‘you’. The ‘you’ cannot be killed, the ‘you’ cannot be possessed, dominated. The ‘you’ will remain a rebellion, because the ’you’ is in an effort to kill you. You are both fighting for the same ego – he for his, you for yours. The whole politics of the world is how to kill the ‘you’ so that only ‘I’ is left and everything is at peace. Because when there is nobody else, you alone are there, everything will be at peace. But this has never happened and will never happen. How can you kill the other? How can you destroy the other? The other is vast, the whole universe is the other.

Religion works through a different dimension: it tries to drop the I. And once the I is dropped there is no other, the other disappears. That’s why you cling to your complaints and grudges – because they help the I to be there. If the shoe pinches, then the I can exist more easily. If the shoe is not pinching, the foot is forgotten – then the I disappears.

People cling to their diseases, they cling to their complaints, they cling to all that pinches. And they go on saying that “These are wounds and we would like them to be healed.” But deep down they go on making the wounds, because if all the wounds are healed, they will not be there.

Just watch people – they cling to their illness. They talk about it as if it is something worth talking about. People talk about illness, about their negative moods, more than about anything else. Listen to them, and you will see that they are enjoying talking about it.

Every evening I have to listen, for many years I have been listening. Look at their faces, they are enjoying it! They are martyrs . . . their illness, their anger, their hatred, their this problem and that, their greed, ambition. And just look, the whole thing is simply crazy – because they are asking to get rid of those things, but look at their faces, they are enjoying it. And if they are really gone, what will they enjoy then? If all their illnesses disappear and they are completely whole and healthy, there will be nothing for them to talk about.

People go to psychiatrists and then they go on talking about it, that they have visited this psychiatrist and that, they have been to this Master and that. Really, they enjoy saying that “All, everybody, has failed with me. I am still the same, nobody has been able to change me.” They enjoy this, as if they are succeeding because they are proving every psychiatrist a failure. All ‘pathies’ have become failures.

I have heard about one man who was a hypochondriac, continuously talking about his illnesses. And nobody believed him, because he was checked and examined in every possible way and nothing was wrong. But every day he would run to the doctor – he was in serious difficulty.

Then by and by the doctor became aware that “Whatsoever he hears – if on the TV there is an advertisement about some medicine and talk about some illness – immediately that illness comes to him. If he reads about any illness in a magazine, immediately, the next day, he is there at the doctor’s office – ill, completely ill. And he imitates all the symptoms.”

So the doctor said once to him, “Don’t bother me too much, because I read the same magazines you read and I listen to the same TV program you listen to. And just the next day you are here with the disease.”

Said the man, “What do you think? Are you the only doctor in town?”

He stopped coming to this doctor, but he would not stop his madness about illness.

Then he died, as everybody has to die. Before his death he told his wife to write a few words on a marble stone on his grave. They are still written there. In big letters on his gravestone it is written: “Now do you believe that I was right?”

People feel so happy about their misery. I also feel sometimes that if all their misery disappears, what will they do? They will be so unoccupied they will simply commit suicide. And this has been my observation: you help them come out of one, the next day they are present there with something else. You help them to come out of that, they are again ready . . . as if there is a deep clinging to misery. They are getting something out of it, it is an investment – and it is paying.

What is the investment? The investment is that when the shoe is not fitting, you feel more that you are. When the shoe fits completely, you simply relax. If the shoe fits completely, not only is the foot forgotten, the I disappears. There cannot be any I with a blissful consciousness – impossible!

Only with a miserable mind can the I exist; the I is nothing but a combination of all your miseries. So if you are really ready to drop the I, only then will your miseries disappear. Otherwise, you will go on creating new miseries. Nobody can help you, because you are on a path which is self-destructive, self-defeating.

So whenever next time you come to me with any problem, just first inquire inside whether you would like it to be solved, because be aware – I can give it. Are you really interested in solving it or just talking about it? You feel good talking about it.

Go inwards and inquire, and you will feel: all your miseries exist because you support them. Without your support nothing can exist. Because you give it energy, then it exists; if you don’t give it energy it cannot exist. And who is forcing you to give it energy? Even when you are sad, energy is needed, because without energy you cannot be sad.

To make the phenomenon of sadness happen, you have to give energy. That’s why after sadness you feel so dissipated, drained. What happened? – because in depression you were not doing anything, you were simply sad. So why do you feel so much dissipated and drained? Out of sadness you must have come full of energy – but no.

Remember, all negative emotions need energy, they drain you. And all positive emotions and positive attitudes are dynamos of energy; they create more energy, they never drain you. If you are happy, suddenly the whole world flows towards you with energy, the whole world laughs with you. And people are right in their proverbs if they say: “When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you. When you weep, you weep alone.” It is true, it is absolutely true.

When you are positive the whole existence goes on giving you more, because when you are happy the whole existence is happy with you. You are not a burden, you are a flower; you are not a rock, you are a bird. The whole existence feels happy about you.

When you are like a rock, sitting dead with your sadness, nursing your sadness, nobody is with you.

Nobody can be with you. There simply comes a gap between you and the life. Then whatsoever you are doing, you have to depend on your energy source. It will be dissipated, you are wasting your energy, you are being drained by your own nonsense.

But one thing is there, that when you are sad and negative you will feel more ego. When you are happy, blissful, ecstatic, you will not feel the ego. When you are happy and ecstatic there is no I, and the other disappears. You are bridged with existence, not broken apart – you are together.

When you are sad, angry, greedy, moving just within yourself and enjoying your wounds and seeing them again and again, playing with your wounds, trying to be a martyr, there is a gap between you and existence. You are left alone, and there you will feel I. And when you feel I, the whole existence becomes inimical to you. Not that it becomes inimical because of your I – it appears to be inimical.

And if you see that everybody is the enemy, you will behave in such a way that everybody has to be the enemy.

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other-than self.

When you accept nature and dissolve into it, you move with it. You don’t have any steps of your own, you don’t have any dance of your own, you don’t have even a small song to sing of our own – the whole’s song is your song, the whole’s dance is your dance. You are no more apart.

You don’t feel that “I am”; you simply feel, “The whole is. I am just a wave, coming and going, arrival and departure, being and non-being. I come and go, the whole remains. And I exist because of the whole, the whole exists through me.”

Sometimes it takes forms, sometimes it becomes formless – both are beautiful. Sometimes it arises in a body, sometimes it disappears from the body. It has to be so, because life is a rhythm. Sometimes you have to be in the form, then you have to rest from the form. Sometimes you have to be active and moving, a wave, and sometimes you go to the depth and rest, unmoving. Life is a rhythm.

Death is not the enemy. It is just a change of the rhythm, moving to the other. Soon you will be born – alive, younger, fresher. Death is a necessity. YOU are not dying in death; only all the dust that has gathered around you has to be washed. That is the only way to be rejuvenated. Not only Jesus is resurrected, everything is resurrected in existence.

Just now the almond tree outside has dropped all his old leaves, now new leaves have replaced them. This is the way! If the tree clings to the old leaves then it will never be new, and then it will get rotten. Why create a conflict? The old disappears just for the new to come. It gives place, it makes space, room, for the new to come. And new will always be coming and old will always be going.

You don’t die. Only the old leaf drops, just to make room for the new. Here you die, there you are born; here you disappear, there you appear. From the form to the formless, from the formless to the form; from the body to the no-body, from the no-body to the body; movement, rest; rest, movement – this is the rhythm. If you look at the rhythm you are not worried about anything, you trust.

In the world of suchness, in the world of trust, there is neither self nor other-than self.

Then you are not there, neither is there any thou. Both have disappeared, both have become a rhythm of one. That one exists, that one is the reality, the truth.

-Osho

From Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing, Discourse #9

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

That Area is Meditation – Osho

Maneesha, Ryusui is pointing to a very fundamental question which Gautam Buddha raised for the first time in human history.

The question is, is enlightenment something to be achieved, desired, longed for? If so, then there must be practices, disciplines, rituals, and the whole paraphernalia. And millions of people have gone astray in search of enlightenment. Buddha is the first human being who has said that everything is absolutely arbitrary because you need not go anywhere. Enlightenment is your very nature.

It is consciousness that you are built with; this house, this body is not you. And this mind also is not you. And there is not much problem to stand aside and watch the mind and its functioning, to stand aside and watch the gestures of the body. This watcher is your reality, your truth. It is already here, so don’t go in search somewhere else. Whenever, wherever you find it, you will always find it here and now. Now is the time and here is the space. If you can be now here, you are a Gautam Buddha.

I have heard a small story about a man who was a great atheist. The whole day he was arguing against religion, against all kinds of superstitions. He had written in his sitting room in big letters: God is nowhere.

Then a small child was born to him.

One day the small child was looking at the writing. He was just learning to write, learning the alphabet, so he could not manage to read God is nowhere; on the contrary, he read: God is nowhere – nowhere can be divided into two.

The father heard it and was amazed. He had never thought about it, that ‘nowhere’ consists of ‘now’ and ‘here’.

The small child changed the man’s whole approach; he started thinking about now and here. And he was puzzled . . . because he has never been now; his mind has been wandering in the past or in the future, but never now, never in the present.

Meditation means no mind – no past, no future, no present . . . just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.

The father had defeated many philosophers, but this small child changed his whole life because he started to be here, and to be now, and he found a new area opening within himself.

That area is meditation.

Meditation means no mind – no past, no future, no present . . . just eternity, a pure mirror which reflects the whole and is not scratched by anything. Just as the sky is not scratched by the clouds moving, or the sun rising, or the full-moon night, the sky remains unscratched.

You have heard the Zen haiku about the shadows of the bamboos . . . sweeping the temple steps, but they don’t make any noise.

The moon in the sky is reflected in the smallest pond but it does not disturb the pond. It does not create even a single ripple. And the miracle is, neither does the pond want the moon to reflect nor does the moon want to be reflected. But existence manages spontaneously a beautiful phenomenon – a single moon being reflected all over the earth.

In rivers, in oceans, in ponds, in lakes, in streams . . . even in a single dewdrop on a lotus leaf, the full moon is reflected as fully as in the biggest ocean.

But everything is happening so silently on its own accord.

In existence there is no effort, there is no intention. Everything is very relaxed and at ease.

Gautam Buddha was the first man to say that anybody who is searching for himself is a fool. The very search is preventing you from finding. Don’t search! Don’t go anywhere, just sit down and close your eyes and be within. Forget all about past and future, forget the body and the mind – you are the host. This is only a house, a temporary caravanserai; by the morning you will have to go on. The caravan continues from one serai to another serai, so don’t get attached to the caravanserai where you happen to be right now, in this moment.

Detached, aloof, just watching . . . and the mind disappears.

Mind is your attachment with the body and through the body with the world and all its greed, anger, love, hate, jealousy. The whole world is a projection of your mind, in which you live in suffering and misery – or once in a while a little joy, a little pleasure, but very superficial, not even skin deep. But behind all this scene is hiding your buddha, your awareness, your pure consciousness – unclouded, unscratched, from eternity to eternity.

To realize this is the greatest experience in the world.

But all the religions have been driving people astray, searching for gods which don’t exist, praying before gods they have never met. No prayer has been responded to, but all the religions are combined in a conspiracy to take you away from yourself. These are the ways . . . God is far away; self-realization is going to be through arduous practices, disciplines. Everybody cannot afford it. Nobody has that much time, nobody has that much capacity for self-torture. Nobody is so much a masochist that he can become a saint.

Naturally, the ultimate outcome is the present-day humanity: everybody has lost his way to himself. And it is a single step – just turning in. It is not a finding, it is not a discovery, it is not an invention. It is simply a remembrance.

You can forget it, you can remember it. These are the only two things you can do about your nature, about your intrinsic consciousness.

But between the two there is not much difference; the difference between sleep and waking is the only difference. And one who is awake today was asleep yesterday; one who is asleep today may become awake tomorrow, so it is only a question of timing. It is only a question of your decision, when to recognize. As far as buddhahood is concerned, it is waiting there since eternity to eternity. Whether you recognize it or not, it does not matter.

If you recognize it, all your actions will change. Your world view will change. Mind will not be any more a master to you but will be a very good and very efficient servant, a good bio-computer. But first the master has to be recognized, then the mind and the body function according to the wisdom of the master.

-Osho

From Turning In, Discourse #1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Meditation through Biofeedback – Osho

Research over the past few years has suggested that certain states of consciousness brought about by meditation techniques appear to evoke specific brainwave patterns. These states are now being created by electronic and auditory stimulation of the brain, and they can be learned through biofeedback.

The traditional ‘meditative state’ – sitting silently )or at least quietly alert) is composed of bilateral, synchronous alpha waves. Deeper meditation also has bilateral theta waves. A state called ‘lucid awareness has the bilateral synchronous alpha and theta waves of deep meditation, plus the beta waves of normal thought processes. ‘Lucid awareness’ can be learned through biofeedback, using the most modern equipment.

Are these kinds of stimulation and biofeedback useful tools for the meditator? What is the relationship of these technological techniques to the meditation beyond technique? Is this an example of bringing science together with meditation?

I would like to experiment with these new technologies – both personally in my own meditation, and professionally in work as a physician. Do I have your blessings?

It is a very complex question. You will have to understand one of the most fundamental things about meditation – that no technique leads to meditation. The old so-called techniques and the new scientific biofeedback techniques are the same as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a byproduct of any technique.

Meditation happens beyond mind. No technique can go beyond mind.

But there is going to be a great misunderstanding in scientific circles, and it has a certain basis. The basis of all misunderstanding is: When the being of a person is in a state of meditation, it creates certain waves in the mind. These waves can be created from the outside by technical means. But those waves will not create meditation — this is the misunderstanding.

Meditation creates those waves; it is the mind reflecting the inner world. You cannot see what is happening inside. But you can see what is happening in the mind. Now there are sensitive instruments . . . we can judge what kind of waves are there when a person is asleep, what kinds of waves are there when a person is dreaming, what kinds of waves are there when a person is in meditation. But by creating the waves, you cannot create the situation — because those waves are only symptoms, indicators. It is perfectly good, you can study them. But remember that there is no shortcut to meditation, and no mechanical device can be of any help. In fact, meditation needs no technique — scientific or otherwise. Meditation is simply an understanding.

It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.

Mind is only a mechanism, but when that awareness arises, it is bound to create a certain energy pattern around it. That energy pattern is noted by the mind. Mind is a very subtle mechanism. And you are studying from the outside, so at the most you can study the mind. Seeing that whenever a person is silent, serene, peaceful, a certain wave pattern always, inevitably appears in the mind, the scientific thinking will say: if we can create this wave pattern in the mind, through some biofeedback technology, then the being inside will reach the heights of awareness.

This is not going to happen. It is not a question of cause and effect. These waves in the mind are not the cause of meditation; they are, on the contrary, the effect. But from the effect you cannot move towards the cause. It is possible that by biofeedback you can create certain patterns in the mind and they will give a feeling of peace, silence and serenity to the person. Because the person himself does not know what meditation is and has no way of comparing, he may be misled into believing that this is meditation — but it is not. Because the moment the biofeedback mechanism stops, the waves disappear, and the silence and the peace and the serenity also disappear.

And you may go on practicing with those scientific instruments for years; it will not change your character, it will not change your morality, it will not change your individuality. You will remain the same.

Meditation transforms. It takes you to higher levels of consciousness and changes your whole lifestyle. It changes your reactions into responses to such an extent that it is unbelievable that the person who would have reacted in the same situation in anger is now acting in deep compassion, with love — in the same situation.

Meditation is a state of being, arrived at through understanding. It needs intelligence, it does not need techniques. There is no technique that can give you intelligence. Otherwise, we would have changed all the idiots into geniuses; all the mediocre people would have become Albert Einsteins, Bertrand Russells, Jean-Paul Sartres. There is no way to change your intelligence from the outside, to sharpen it, to make it more penetrating, to give it more insight. It is simply a question of understanding, and nobody else can do it for you — no machine, no man.

For centuries the so-called gurus have been cheating humanity. Now, in the future instead of gurus, these guru machines will cheat humanity. The gurus were cheating people, saying that “We will give you a mantra. You repeat the mantra.” Certainly by repeating a mantra continuously, you create the energy field of a certain wave length; but the man remains the same, because it is only on the surface. Just as if you have thrown a pebble into the silent lake and ripples arise and move all over the lake from one corner to the other corner — but it does not touch the depths of the lake at all. The depths are completely unaware of what is happening on the surface. And what you see on the surface is also illusory. You think that ripples are moving — that’s not true. Nothing is moving.

When you throw a pebble into the lake, it is not that ripples start moving. You can check it by putting a small flower on the water. You will be surprised: the flower remains in the same place. If the waves were moving and going towards the shore, they would have taken the flower with them. The flower remains there. The waves are not moving, it is just the water going up and down in the same place, creating the illusion of movement. The depths of the lake will not know anything about it. And there is going to be no change in the character, in the beauty of the lake by creating those waves.

The mind is between the world and you. Whatever happens in the world, the mind is affected by it; and you can understand through the mind what is happening outside. For example, you are seeing me — you cannot see me; it is your mind that is affected by certain rays and creates a picture in the mind. You are inside, and from inside you see the picture. You don’t see me; you can’t see me. The mind is the mediator. Just as when it is affected by the outside, the inner consciousness can read it — what is happening outside — what the scientists are trying to do is just the same: they are studying meditators and reading their wave lengths, the energy fields created by meditation. And naturally, the scientific approach is that if these certain patterns appear without any exception when a person is in meditation, then we have got the key; if we can create these patterns in the mind, then meditation is bound to appear inside. That’s where the fallacy is.

You can create the pattern in the mind, and if the person does not know about meditation, he may feel a silence, a serenity – for the moment, as long as those waves remain. But you cannot deceive a meditator because the meditator will see that those patterns are appearing in the mind . . . Mind is a lower reality, and the lower reality cannot change the higher reality. The mind is the servant; it cannot change the master. But you can experiment. Just remain aware that whether it is a biofeedback machine or a chanting of OM, it does not matter; it only creates a mental peace, and a mental peace is not meditation. Meditation is the flight beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with mental peace.

One of America’s great thinkers, Joshua Liebman, has written a very famous book, Peace of Mind. I wrote him a letter many years ago when I came across the book, saying that “If you are sincere and honest, you should withdraw the book from the market because there is no such thing as peace of mind. Mind is the problem. When there is no mind then there is peace, so how can there be peace of mind? And any peace of mind is only fallacious; it simply means the noise has slowed down to such a point that you think it is silence. And you don’t have anything to compare it with.”

A man who knows what meditation is, cannot be deceived by any techniques, because no technique can give you understanding of the workings of the mind. For example, you feel anger, you feel jealousy, you feel hatred, you feel lust. Is there any technique that can help you to get rid of anger? of jealousy? of hatred? of sexual lust? And if these things continue to remain, your lifestyle is going to remain the same as before.

There is only one way — there has never been a second. There is one, and only one, way to understand that to be angry is to be stupid: watch anger in all its phases, be alert to it so it does not catch you unawares; remain watchful, seeing every step of the anger. And you will be surprised: that as awareness about the ways of anger grows, the anger starts evaporating. And when the anger disappears, then there is a peace. Peace is not a positive achievement. When the hatred disappears, there is love. Love is not a positive achievement. When jealousy disappears, there is a deep friendliness towards all.

Try to understand. . . .

But all the religions have corrupted your minds because they have not taught you how to watch, how to understand; instead, they have given you conclusions — that anger is bad. And the moment you condemn something, you have already taken a certain position of judgment. You have judged. Now you cannot be aware. Awareness needs a state of no-judgment. And all the religions have been teaching people judgments: this is good, this is bad, this is sin, this is virtue — this is the whole crap that for centuries man’s mind has been loaded with. So, with everything — the moment you see it — there is immediately a judgment about it within you. You cannot simply see it, you cannot be just a mirror without saying anything.

Understanding arises by becoming a mirror, a mirror of all that goes on in the mind. […] In every situation where mind starts any kind of desire, greed, lust, ambition, possessiveness, the meditator has to be just a mirror. And what is that going to do?

To be just a mirror means you are simply aware. In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in a profound silence – the peace that passeth understanding.

Naturally that peace, that silence, that joy, that blissfulness will affect the mind. It will create ripples in the mind, it will change the wave lengths in the mind, and the scientist will be reading those waves, those wave patterns and he will be thinking, “If these wave patterns can be created in someone by mechanical devices, then we will be able to create the profoundness of a Gautam Buddha.” Don’t be stupid.

All your technical devices can be good, can be helpful. They are not going to do any harm; they will be giving some taste of peace, of silence — although very superficial, still it is something for those who have never known anything of peace. For the thirsty, even dirty water does not look dirty. For the thirsty, even dirty water is a great blessing.

So you can start your experiments with all my blessings, but remember it is not meditation that you are giving to people — you don’t know meditation yourself. You may be giving them a little rest, a little relaxation — and there is nothing wrong in it. But if you give them the idea that this is meditation then you are certainly being harmful — because these people will stop at the technical things, with the superficial silence, thinking that this is all and they have gained it.

You can be helpful to people. Tell them that “This is just a mechanical way of putting your mind at peace, and mind at peace is not the real peace — real peace is when mind is absent. And that is not possible from the outside, but only from the inside. And inside you have the intelligence, the understanding to do the miracle.”

It is good for people who cannot relax, who cannot find a few moments of peace, whose minds are continuously chattering — your technical devices are good, your biofeedback mechanisms are good. But make it clear to them that this is not meditation, this is just a mechanical device to help you relax, to give you a superficial feeling of silence. If this silence creates an urge in you to find the real, the inner, the authentic source of peace, then those technical devices have been friends, and the technicians who have been using them have not been barriers but have been bridges. Become a bridge.

Give people the little taste that is possible through machines, but don’t give them the false idea that this is what meditation is. Tell them that this is only a faraway echo of the real; if you want the real, you will have to go through a deep inner search, a profound understanding of your mind, an awareness of all the cunning ways of the mind so that the mind can be put aside. Then the mind is no longer between you and existence, and the doors are open.

Meditation is the ultimate experience of blissfulness. It cannot be produced by drugs, it cannot be produced by machines, it cannot be produced from the outside.

-Osho

From Beyond Enlightenment #29, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Surrender vs Be a Light unto Oneself – Osho

Can I truly surrender and still be a light unto myself?

That is the only way to be a light unto yourself to surrender. Life is paradoxical: day/night, birth/death, summer/winter, love/hate, and so on ad infinitum.

If a person thoroughly understands this, he will agree and not worry. In other words, he knows when he loves that soon he will hate; therefore, he will laugh when he is going uphill, and weep when he is going downhill. He will realize the paradox of life, that he cannot be perfect and he cannot be consistent either. Our idea is to be consistent and to have absolutely clear situations, but it is impossible – it is too one-sided, and we are not one-sided. We are infinite; we contain both the poles in our being, and both the poles have to be lived.

Hence, if you surrender you become a light unto yourself. If you become a light unto yourself, you become capable of surrendering.

It was constantly a question before Buddha – constantly, because he used to say to his people: Be a light unto yourself. That is his statement: Appo dipo bhava – be a light unto yourself. That was his constant teaching, the undercurrent of all his teachings. And still he was teaching people surrender.

When people came to be initiated they would have to declare a triple surrender: buddham sharnam gachchhami – I come, I surrender myself to Buddha’s feet; sangham sharnam gachchhami – I surrender to the commune of the sannyasins; dhammam sharnam gachchhami – I surrender to the fundamental law of life, logos, tao, dhamma.

These three surrenders would make a person a disciple – and Buddha’s whole teaching was: Be a light unto yourself. So he was asked again and again, “There is a contradiction! On the one hand people surrender to you, on the other hand you go on saying to them: Be a light unto yourself.” And yet there is no contradiction – they are complementaries.

This is how life works. Life is so vast that it contains contradictions, and yet those contradictions are not enemies, not opposites. They are complementaries and they help each other. In fact, without the one the other will not be possible.

Surrender will help freedom, and freedom will make you capable of surrender. Don’t choose one, otherwise you will remain half. Never choose one pole, otherwise you will always remain half – and to remain half is to remain split.

You have to be a whole; you have to be one piece. Always remember to choose the whole paradox, and then you will be at ease. Then great silence and great bliss will arise out of your totality. The total is musical, it is a symphony.

-Osho

From Philosophia Perennis, V.2, Discourse #9, Q4

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

Listening Intellectually is Not Listening at All – Osho

When I sit in front of you and listen to you speak, I feel as if a process of osmosis is happening. I find I don’t intellectually listen. Is this the right way or am I missing something?

This is the right way.

If you listen to me intellectually you miss, not something, but all. Intellectual listening is a kind of deafness.

When I say something, you can listen to the word. You have a mind, a library in the mind of all your prejudices, philosophies, ideologies. The word has to go through all those preconceived patterns, and by the time it reaches to you it is no longer the same.

It has changed so many times, passing through the whole process of intellectual listening, that when it comes out it is absolutely something else. And yet it appears to be rationally the right thing; it fits with your mind. The process of listening has managed to cut it here and there, change it here and there; to color it here and there, to make it what you want it to be, not what it is. And you will agree with it; it is your own idea; it has nothing to do with me.

Listening intellectually is not listening at all. It is a way of avoiding. The right way is that you don’t bring your mind in and you let me go into your innermost being without being hindered. Then there will be an understanding. Then there will be a communion, a real listening, because in the very process of listening, you have changed.

Now the agreement that arises in your being is not agreeing with your mind, it is agreeing with something new, which your mind knows nothing of. The mind is always old, and the truth is always new; they never meet, they never coexist.

You are fortunate that you can listen the right way — putting the mind aside, just allowing me to sink deeper and deeper within you. Then even though words have been used, silence has been conveyed. Even though words have been used, that which cannot be said has been said — at least has been heard. And saying is not important, hearing is important.

Right listening means you will never ask how to do it. For example, if I am talking about silence and you are listening the right way, you will never ask how to be silent, because in the very listening you would have tasted it. In the very listening you will have experienced it — the window has opened. The people who listen intellectually are bound to ask later on how to do it. Their question about how to do it signifies that they have missed what was conveyed to them.

It is not only words that I am saying to you — I am conveying my very heart. The words are only vehicles. Through the intellect the vehicles will reach, but I will be left behind. When you are listening without the mind, the vehicle becomes unimportant; its only use is that it helps me to reach to you. It is my outstretched hand, so that I can touch your heart.

-Osho

From Beyond Psychology, Discourse #21, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Transcendence is True Therapy – Osho

You speak on the psychology of the buddhas, the psychology of transcendence, as the essence of transcendence, as the essence of the work happening here in the buddhafield. What is the uniqueness of this third psychology? Is there a psychology of transcendence?

Amitabh, Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalysis into the world. It is rooted in analyzing the mind. It is confined to the mind. It does not step out of the mind, not even an inch. On the contrary, it goes deeper into the mind, into the hidden layers of the mind, into the unconscious, to find out ways and means so that the mind of man can at least be normal. The goal of Freudian psychoanalysis is not very great.

The goal is to keep people normal. But normality is not enough. Just to be normal is not of any significance. It means the normal routine of life and your capacity to cope with it. It does not give you meaning, it does not give you significance. It does not give you insight into the reality of things. It does not take you beyond time, beyond death. It is at the most a helpful device for those who have gone so abnormal that they have become incapable of coping with their daily life — they cannot live with people, they cannot work, they have become shattered. Psychotherapy provides them a certain togetherness — not integrity, mind you, but only a certain togetherness. It binds them into a bundle. They remain still fragmentary. Nothing becomes crystallized in them; no soul is born. They don’t become blissful, they are only less unhappy, less miserable.

Psychology helps them to accept the misery. It helps them to accept that this is all that life can give to you, so don’t ask for more. In a way, it is dangerous to their inner growth, because the inner growth happens only when there is a divine discontent. When you are absolutely unsatisfied with things as they are, only then do you go in the search, only then do you start rising higher, only then do you make efforts to pull yourself out of the mud.

Jung went a little further into the unconscious. He went into the collective unconscious. This is getting more and more into muddy water, and this is not going to help.

Assagioli moved to the other extreme. Seeing the failure of psychoanalysis he invented psychosynthesis. But it is rooted in the same idea. Instead of analysis he emphasizes synthesis.

The psychology of the buddhas is neither analysis nor synthesis; it is transcendence, it is going beyond the mind. It is not work within the mind; it is work that takes you outside the mind. That’s exactly the meaning of the English word ‘ecstasy’ — to stand out.

When you are capable of standing out of your own mind, when you are capable of creating a distance between your mind and your being, then you have taken the first step of the psychology of the buddhas. And a miracle happens: when you are standing out of the mind all the problems of the mind disappear, because mind itself disappears; it loses its grip over you.

Psychoanalysis is like pruning leaves of the tree, but new leaves will be coming up. It is not cutting off the roots. And psychosynthesis is sticking the fallen leaves back onto the tree again — gluing them back to the tree. That is not going to give them life either. They will look simply ugly; they will not be alive, they will not be green, they will not be part of the tree — but glued, somehow.

The psychology of the buddhas cuts the very roots of the tree which create all kinds of neuroses, psychoses, which create the fragmentary man, the mechanical man, the robot-like man. And the way is simple . . .

Psychoanalysis takes years, and still the man remains the same. It is renovating the old structure, patching up here and there, whitewashing the old house. But it is the same house, nothing has radically changed. It has not transformed the consciousness of the man.

The psychology of the buddhas does not work within the mind. It has no interest in analyzing or synthesizing. It simply helps you to get out of the mind so that you can have a look from the outside. And that very look is a transformation. The moment you can look at your mind as an object you become detached from it, you become dis-identified from it; a distance is created, and roots are cut.

Why are roots cut in this way? — Because it is you who goes on feeding the mind. If you are identified, you feed the mind; if you are not identified you stop feeding it. It drops dead on its own accord.

There is a beautiful story. I love it very much . . .

One day Buddha is passing by a forest. It is a hot summer day and he is feeling very thirsty. He says to Ananda, his chief disciple, “Ananda, you go back. Just three, four miles back we passed a small stream of water. You bring a little water — take my begging bowl. I am feeling very thirsty and tired.” He had become old.

Ananda goes back, but by the time he reaches the stream, a few bullock carts have just passed through the stream, and they have made the whole stream muddy. Dead leaves which had settled into the bed have risen up; it is no longer possible to drink this water — it is too dirty. He comes back empty-handed, and he says, “You will have to wait a little. I will go ahead. I have heard that just two, three miles ahead there is a big river. I will bring water from there.”

But Buddha insists. He says, “You go back and bring water from the same stream.”

Ananda could not understand the insistence, but if the master says so, the disciple has to follow. Seeing the absurdity of it — that again he will have to walk three, four miles, and he knows that water is not worth drinking — he goes.

When he is going, Buddha says, “And don’t come back if the water is still dirty. If it is dirty, you simply sit on the bank silently. Don’t do anything, don’t get into the stream. Sit on the bank silently and watch. Sooner or later the water will be clear again, and then you fill the bowl and come back.”

Ananda goes there. Buddha is right: the water is almost clear, the leaves have moved, the dust has settled. But it is not absolutely clear yet, so he sits on the bank just watching the river flow by. Slowly, slowly, it becomes crystal-clear. Then he comes dancing. Then he understands why Buddha was so insistent. There was a certain message in it for him, and he understood the message. He gave the water to Buddha, and he thanked Buddha, touched his feet.

Buddha says, “What are you doing? I should thank you that you have brought water for me.”

Ananda says, “Now I can understand. First, I was angry; I didn’t show it, but I was angry because it was absurd to go back. But now I understand the message. This is what I actually needed in this moment. The same is the case with my mind — sitting on the bank of that small stream; I became aware that the same is the case with my mind. If I jump into the stream, I will make it dirty again. If I jump into the mind more noise is created, more problems start coming up, surfacing. Sitting by the side I learned the technique.

“Now I will be sitting by the side of my mind too, watching it with all its dirtiness and problems and old leaves and hurts and wounds, memories, desires. Unconcerned I will sit on the bank and wait for the moment when everything is clear.”

And it happens on its own accord, because the moment you sit on the bank of your mind you are no longer giving energy to it. This is real meditation. Meditation is the art of transcendence.

Freud talks about analysis, Assagioli about synthesis. Buddhas have always talked about meditation, awareness.

You ask me, Amitabh, “What is the uniqueness of this third psychology?”

Meditation, awareness, watchfulness, witnessing — that is the uniqueness. No psychoanalyst is needed. You can do it on your own; in fact, you have to do it on your own. No guidelines are needed, it is such a simple process — simple if you do it; if you don’t do it, it looks very complicated. Even the word ‘meditation’ scares many people. They think it something very difficult, arduous. Yes, if you don’t do it, it is difficult and arduous. It is like swimming. It is very difficult if you don’t know how to swim, but if you know, you know it is so simple a process. Nothing can be more simple than swimming. It is not an art at all; it is so spontaneous and so natural.

Be more aware of your mind. And in being aware of your mind you will become aware of the fact that you are not the mind, and that is the beginning of the revolution. You have started flowing higher and higher. You are no longer tethered to the mind. Mind functions like a rock and keeps you. It keeps you within the field of gravitation. The moment you are no longer attached to the mind, you enter the buddhafield. When gravitation loses its power over you, you enter into the buddhafield. Entering the buddhafield means entering into the world of levitation. You start floating upwards. Mind goes on dragging you downwards.

So it is not a question of analyzing or synthesizing. It is simply a question of becoming aware. That’s why in the East we have not developed any psychotherapy like Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian — and there are so many in the market now. We have not developed a single psychotherapy because we know psychotherapies can’t heal. They may help you to accept your wounds, but they can’t heal. Healing comes when you are no longer attached to the mind. When you are disconnected from the mind, unidentified, absolutely untethered, when the bondage is finished, then healing happens.

Transcendence is true therapy, and it is not only psychotherapy. It is not only a phenomenon limited to your psychology; it is far more than that. It is spiritual. It heals you in your very being. Mind is only your circumference, not your center.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.10, Discourse #4

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Body: The First Step for a Seeker – Osho

In this first meeting of the meditation camp, I would like to talk about the first step for a meditator, a seeker. What is the first step? A thinker or a lover follows certain paths, but a seeker has to travel on a totally different journey. For a seeker, what is the first step on the journey?

The body is the first step for a seeker – but no attention or thought has been given to it. Not only at certain times, but for thousands of years, the body has been neglected. The neglect is of two kinds. Firstly, there are the indulgent people who have neglected the body. They have no experience of life other than eating, drinking and wearing clothes. They have neglected the body, misused it, foolishly wasted it – they have ruined their instrument, their veena.

If a musical instrument – for example, a veena – is ruined, music cannot arise out of it. Music is an altogether different thing from the veena – music is one thing, the veena is another, but without the veena music cannot arise.

Those people who have misused the body through indulgence are one type and the other type of people are those who have neglected the body through yoga and renunciation. They have tortured the body, they have suppressed it and they have been hostile towards it. And neither the people who have indulged the body nor the ascetics who have tortured the body have understood its importance.

So there have been two kinds of neglect and torture of the veena of the body: one by the indulgers and another by the ascetics. Both have done harm to the body. In the West, the body has been harmed in one way and in the East, in another way, but we all are equal participants in harming it. The people going to the whorehouses or to the pubs harm the body in one way, and the people standing naked in the sun or rushing into the forests harm the body in another way.

Only through the veena of the body can the music of life arise. The music of life is an altogether different thing from the body – it is totally different, something else – but only through the veena of the body is there a possibility of attaining it. No proper attention has yet been given to this fact.

The first step is the body and the proper attention of the meditator towards the body. In this first meeting I want to talk to you about this point.

A few things need to be understood.

The first thing: the soul has a connection with the body at some centers – our life energy comes from these connections. The soul is closely related to these centers; from them our life energy flows into the body.

The seeker who is not aware of these centers will never be able to attain to the soul. If I ask you which is the most important center, which is the most important place in your body, you will probably point to your head.

Man’s very wrong education has made the head the most important part of the human body. The head or brain is not the most important center of life-energy in man. It is like going to a plant and asking it what its most important and vital part is. Because the flowers can be seen at the top of the plant, the plant and everybody else will say that the flowers are the most important part. So although the flowers seem to be the most important they are not, the most important part are the roots, which are not visible.

The brain is the flower on the plant of man, it is not the root. Roots come first; flowers come last. If the roots are ignored the flowers will wither away because they have no separate life of their own. If the roots are taken care of, the flowers get taken care of automatically; no special effort is needed to care for them. But looking at a plant it seems that the flowers are the most important part and in the same way it seems that, in man, the brain is most important. The brain is the final development in man’s body; it is not the root. […]

The life of a plant is in a place that is not at all apparent to anyone. It is in the roots which are hidden beneath the ground. If one does not take care of those roots, the flowers and the leaves cannot be taken care of; howsoever much they may be kissed, howsoever much they may be loved, howsoever much the dust on them may be cleaned, the plant will wither away. But if one does not bother about the flowers at all and takes care of the roots, the flowers will take care of themselves. The flowers come out of the roots, not the other way round.

If we ask somebody which is the most important part in a human body then unknowingly his hand will point towards the head and he will say that the head is the most important. Or, if it is a woman, then maybe she will point towards her heart and say that the heart is the most important.

Neither the head nor the heart is the most important. Men have emphasized their heads and women have emphasized their hearts. But by emphasizing these two parts the society so formed is continuously being ruined every day, because neither of these parts are the most important part in a human body. Both are very late developments. Man’s roots are not in them.

What do I mean by the roots of man? Just as the plants have roots in the earth from which they draw their life-energy and life juices and live, similarly, in the human body, there are roots at some point which draw life-energy from the soul. Because of this the body remains alive. The day those roots become feeble; the body begins to die.

The roots of plants are in the earth; the roots of the human body are in the soul. But neither the head nor the heart is the place from where man is connected to his life-energy – and if we do not know anything about those roots then we can never enter the world of a meditator.

Then where are the roots of man? Perhaps you are not aware of the place. If even simple and common things are not given any attention for thousands of years, they are forgotten. A child is born in the womb of a mother and grows there. Through which part is the child connected to its mother?

Through the head or through the heart? No, it is connected through the navel. The life-energy is available to it through the navel – the heart and the brain develop later on. The life-energy of the mother becomes available to the child through the navel. The child is connected to his mother’s body through his navel. From there the roots spread out into the mother’s body and also, in the opposite direction, into his own body as well.

The most important point in the human body is the navel. After that the heart develops and after that the brain. These are all branches which develop later. It is on them that the flowers blossom.

Flowers of knowledge blossom in the brain; flowers of love blossom in the heart. It is these flowers which allure us, and then we think that they are everything. But the roots of man’s body and his life-energy are in the navel. No flowers blossom there. The roots are absolutely invisible, they are not even seen. But the degeneration that has happened to human life in the past five thousand years is because we have placed all our emphasis either on the brain or on the heart. Even on the heart we have placed very little emphasis; most of the emphasis has gone to the brain.

From early childhood, all education is an education of the brain; there is no education of the navel anywhere in the world. All education is of the brain so the brain goes on growing larger and larger and our roots go on becoming smaller and smaller. We take care of the brain because the flowers blossom there, so it becomes larger – and our roots go on disappearing. Then the life-energy flows more and more feebly and our contact with the soul becomes weak.

Slowly, slowly we have even come to a point where man is saying, “Where is the soul? Who says there is a soul? Who says there is a God? We do not find anything.” We will not find anything. One cannot find anything. If somebody searches all over the body of the tree and says, “Where are the roots? I cannot find anything,” then what he is saying is right. There are no roots anywhere on the tree. And we have no access to the place where the roots are; of that place we have no awareness.

From early childhood, all training, all education is of the brain, of the mind, so our whole attention gets entangled and ends up focused on the brain. Then for our whole life we wander around the brain. Our awareness does not ever go below it.

The journey of a meditator is downwards – towards the roots. One has to descend from the brain to the heart, and from the heart to the navel. Only from the navel can anybody enter into the soul; before that, one can never enter it.

Normally the movement of our life is from the navel towards the brain. The movement of a seeker is exactly opposite. He has to descend from the brain to the navel.

In these three days I will be talking to you and showing you, step by step, how to descend from the brain to the heart and from the heart to the navel – and then how to enter the soul from the navel.

Today it is necessary to say a few things about the body.

The first thing to understand is that the center of man’s life-energy is the navel. Only from there does the child acquire life; only from there do the branches and sub-branches of his life start spreading; only from there does he get energy; only from there does he get vitality. But our attention is never focused on that energy center – not even for a minute! Our focus is not on the system through which we get to know that energy center, that center of vitality; instead our whole attention and our whole education is focused on the system that helps to forget it! That is why our whole education has gone wrong.

Our whole education is taking man slowly, slowly towards madness.

The brain alone will only take man towards madness.

Do you know that the more a country becomes educated the more the number of mad people increases there? America has the highest number of mad people today. It is a matter of pride. It is proof that America is the most educated, the most civilized country. American psychologists say that if the same system continues for another hundred years, it will be difficult to find a sane man in America. Even today the minds of three out of four people are in a shaky condition.

In America alone, three million people are consulting psychoanalysts every day! Slowly, slowly in America the number of physicians is becoming less and psychoanalysts are increasing. The physicians also say that eighty percent of man’s diseases are of the mind, not of the body. And as the understanding grows this percentage increases. First, they used to say forty percent, then they started saying fifty percent, now they say that eighty percent of diseases are of the mind, not of the body. And I assure you that after twenty to twenty-five years they will say that ninety-nine percent of diseases are of the mind, not of the body. They will have to say so because our whole emphasis is being given to man’s brain. The brain has become insane.

You have no idea that the brain is a very delicate, a very fragile, a very subtle thing. Man’s brain is the most delicate machine in the world. So much stress is being imposed on this machine that it is a wonder that it does not completely break down and become mad! The whole burden of life is on the brain, and we have no idea how delicate a thing it is. We have hardly any idea of how fine and delicate the nerves in the head are which have to carry all the burden, all the anxiety, all the suffering, all the knowledge, all the education . . . the whole weight of life.

Perhaps you may not know that in this small head there are about seventy million nerves. Just by their number you can tell how tiny they are. There is no machine or plant more delicate than this. The fact that there are seventy million nerves in the small head of man shows how delicate it is. There are so many nerves in a single man’s head that if they were spread out one after the other, they would encircle the whole earth.

In this small head there is such a subtle mechanism, such a delicate mechanism. In the past five thousand years all the stress of life has been placed on this delicate brain alone. The result was inevitable. The result is that the nerves have started breaking down, becoming insane, going mad.

The burden of thoughts cannot take man anywhere else other than into madness. Our whole life energy has started moving around the brain. A meditator has to bring this life-energy deeper, more downwards, more towards the center; he has to turn it back. How can it be turned back? To understand this, we must understand something about the body – the ‘first sutra’.

The first thing: the body is not seen as a temple nor as a path for the spiritual journey nor as a passage for discovering the center of life-energy. The body is looked at either from the point of view of indulgence or from the point of view of renunciation. Both of these approaches are wrong.

The path to whatsoever is great in life and whatsoever is worth attaining, is within the body and goes through the body.

The body should be accepted as a temple, as a spiritual path – and as long as this is not our attitude, we are either indulgers or we are renouncers. In both cases our attitude towards the body is neither right nor balanced.

A young prince was initiated by Buddha. He had seen all kinds of pleasures in his life, he had lived only for pleasure. Then he became a bhikshu, a monk. All the other bhikshus were very much surprised. They said, “This person is becoming a bhikshu! He has never gone out of his palace; he has never walked without his chariot; the paths he used to walk on would be covered with velvety carpets! Now he wants to become a beggar! What kind of madness is he thinking of doing?”

Buddha said that man’s mind always moves between extremes – from one extreme to the other. Man’s mind never stops in the middle. Just as a pendulum of a clock moves from one end to the other but never stays in the middle, in the same way the mind of man goes from one extreme to the other. Up to now this man had lived at one extreme – indulgence of his body; now he wanted to live at the other extreme – renunciation of his body.

And this happened. While all the bhikshus would walk on the highways, the prince, who had never walked anywhere except on the most valuable carpets, would walk on the pathways where there were thorns! When all the bhikshus would sit under the shadow of a tree, he would stand in the sun. When all the bhikshus would eat once every day, he would fast one day and eat one day. Within six months he became a skeleton, his beautiful body turned black and his feet became wounded.

After six months Buddha went to him and said, “Shrona!” – this was his name – “I want to ask you one thing. I have heard that when you were a prince, you were very good at playing the veena. Is it true?”

The bhikshu said, “Yes. People used to say that there was no one else who could play the veena like me.”

Buddha said, “Then I have come to ask you one question – maybe you can answer. My question is that if the strings of the veena are too loose, can music arise or not?”

Shrona started laughing. He said, “What kind of question are you asking? Even children know that if the strings of a veena are too loose then music will not arise, because sound cannot be created on loose strings, one cannot pluck them. So music cannot arise out of loose strings.”

Then Buddha said, “And if the strings are too tight?”

Shrona answered, “Music does not arise out of strings which are too tight either, because strings which are too tight break the moment they are touched.”

So Buddha asked, “When does the music arise?”

Shrona said, “Music arises when the strings are in such a state that we can neither say that they are very tight nor can we say that they are very loose. There is a state of the strings when they are neither loose nor tight. There is a point in-between, a midpoint. Music arises only there. And an expert musician, before he starts playing, checks the strings to see if they are too loose or too tight.”

Buddha said, “Enough! I have received the answer! And I have come to tell you the same thing. Just as you were an expert at playing the veena, in the same way I have also become a master of playing the veena of life. And the rule which applies to the veena also applies to the veena of life. If the strings of life are too loose then music does not arise, and if the strings of life are too tight then also music does not arise. One who wants to create the music of life, first makes sure that the strings are not too tight or too loose.”

What is the veena of life?

Except for the body of man there is no other veena of life. And there are some strings in the body of man which should neither be too tight nor too loose. Only in that balance does man enter into music. To know that music is to know the soul. When a man comes to know the music within himself, he knows the soul; and when he comes to know the music hidden within the whole, he knows God, the supreme soul.

Where are the strings of this veena of man’s body? The first thing is: there are many strings in the brain which are very tight. They are so tight that music cannot arise from them. If somebody touches them, only madness arises and nothing else. And we are all living with the strings of our brains being very tight. For twenty-four hours a day we are keeping them tense, from morning till evening. And if somebody thinks that they may be relaxed at night, he is mistaken. Even during the night our brain is stressed and tense.

Previously we did not know what goes on in a man’s brain during the night but now machines have been invented – while you are sleeping the machine will go on reporting what your brain is doing inside.

At this time, in America and Russia, there are about a hundred laboratories testing what a man does in his sleep. About forty thousand people have been experimented upon while sleeping during the night. The results that have been found are very surprising. The results are that whatever a man does during the day, he does during the night. Whatsoever he does the whole day . . . If he runs a shop in the daytime then even at night he is running the shop. If the mind worries the whole day then it goes on worrying during the night. If it is angry during the day then it remains angry during the night.

The night is the reflection of the whole day, it is its echo. Whatsoever happens in the mind during the day resounds as an echo during the night. Whatsoever has been left incomplete, the mind tries to complete it during the night. If you were angry and you did not express anger totally towards some person, if the anger was left incomplete or stuck, then the mind releases it at night. By expressing total anger, the string of the veena tries to be reach its proper state. If somebody has fasted during the day, then at night he eats in his dream. Whatsoever has been left incomplete during the day tries to get completed at night. So whatsoever the mind does during the day, it does the same thing the whole night. For twenty-four hours the mind is tense; there is no rest. The strings of the mind are never relaxed. The strings of the mind are very tense . . . That is one thing.

And the second thing is: the strings of the heart are very loose. The strings of our hearts are not tight at all. Do we know something like love? We know anger, we know envy, we know jealousy, we know hatred. Do we know something like love? Perhaps we would say that we do. Sometimes we love. Perhaps we would say that we hate and we love also. But do you know . . .? Can there be a heart which hates and loves also? It is the same as saying that a person is sometimes alive and sometimes dead. We cannot believe this, because a man can either be alive or he can be dead. Both these things cannot happen simultaneously. That a man is sometimes alive and sometimes dead is not possible, it is impossible. Either the heart knows only hate or the heart knows only love. There can be no compromise between the two. In a heart which has love, hatred becomes impossible.

There was a fakir woman named Rabiya. In the holy book which she used to read, she canceled one line. She crossed out a line in it. Nobody cancels any line in the holy books because what can one improve in the holy books?

Another fakir came to stay with Rabiya. He read the book and he said, “Rabiya, somebody has destroyed your holy book! It has become unholy; one line has been canceled from it. Who has canceled it?”

Rabiya said, “I canceled it.”

The fakir was very shocked. He said, “Why did you cancel this line?” The line was, ‘Hate the devil’.

Rabiya said, “I have got into a difficulty. From the day that love for God arose in me, hate disappeared within me. Even if I want to I cannot hate. Even if the devil comes in front of me then also, I can only love him. I have no other choice, because before I can hate I need to have hate in me. Before I can hate, I must have hate in my heart. Otherwise where will I get it and how will I do it?”

The coexistence of love and hate is not possible in the same heart. These two things are as contrary as life and death; they cannot exist together in the same heart. Then what is that which we call love?

When there is less hate we call it love; when there is more hate we call it hate. They are lesser and greater proportions of hate itself. There is no love there at all. The mistake happens because of the degrees. Because of the degrees you may mistakenly think that cold and heat are two different things. They are not two different things. Heat and cold are gradations of the same thing. If the ratio of heat becomes less, then something starts feeling cold. If the ratio of heat becomes more, then the same thing starts feeling hot. Cold is another form of heat. They seem to be opposite, different, enemies of each other, but they are not. They are condensed and non-condensed forms of the same thing. We know hatred in the same way. The less condensed form of hate we understand as love and the very condensed form of hate we understand as hate – but love is in no way a form of hate. Love is a totally different thing to hate. Love has no relation to hate.

The strings of our heart are totally loose. From those loose strings the music of love does not arise – neither does the music of bliss. Have you ever known bliss in your life? Can you say about some moment that it was a moment of bliss and that you recognized and experienced bliss? It is difficult to say with authenticity that you have ever known bliss.

Have you ever known love? Have you ever known peace? About them it is also difficult to say anything.

What do we know? We know restlessness. Yes, sometimes the restlessness is in a lesser degree – which we take to be peace. Actually, we are so restless that if the restlessness becomes a little less, it gives an illusion of peace. A man is sick. When the sickness becomes a little less, he says that he has become healthy. If the sickness that is surrounding him becomes a little less, he thinks that he has become healthy. But what is the relation of health to sickness? Health is a totally different thing.

Health is a completely different thing. Very few of us are able to know health. We know more sickness, we know less sickness, but we do not know health. We know more restlessness, we know less restlessness, but we do not know peace. We know more hatred, we know less hatred. We know more anger, we know less anger . . .

You may think that anger only happens sometimes. This idea is false. You are angry for twenty-four hours. Sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less, but you are angry for twenty-four hours. With just a little opportunity the anger will start surfacing. It is in search of an opportunity. The anger is ready inside; it is only in search of an opportunity on the outside to give you an excuse to be angry. If you become angry without an excuse, then people will think you are mad. But if opportunities are not given to you, you will start becoming angry even without any reason. Perhaps you do not know this.

For example, a person can be locked in a room provided with every facility and asked to note down any changes which happen to his mind. When he notes them down, he will find that without any reason sometimes he feels good in that closed room, sometimes he feels bad; sometimes he becomes sad, sometimes he becomes happy; sometimes he feels angry, sometimes he does not feel angry. There are no excuses there, the situation in the room is constantly the same – but what is happening to him? That is why man is so afraid of aloneness – because in aloneness there are no excuses from the outside. One will have to assume all the things are within oneself. Any person kept in isolation cannot remain healthy for more than six months, he will become mad.

A fakir told an Egyptian emperor about this but the emperor did not believe him so the fakir asked him to find the most healthy person in his city and to put him in isolation for six months. The city was searched. A healthy, young man, who was happy in every way – was just married, had a child, was earning well, was very happy – was brought to the emperor. The emperor told him, “We will not give you any trouble. We are just making an experiment. Your family will be taken care of – food, clothing, and every arrangement will be made for them. It will be a better situation for them than it will be for you. You will have all comforts but for six months you will have to live alone.”

He was locked up in a big house. He was given every facility – but it was so lonely! Even the man who was guarding did not know his language so they could not speak to each other. Within only two or three days the man started becoming nervous. He had every comfort, there were no hardships whatsoever: at the right time food was available, at the right time he could go to sleep. Because it was a royal palace, every facility was available and there were no difficulties whatsoever. Sitting there he could do whatsoever he wanted to do. The only thing was that he could not talk to anybody, he could not meet anybody. Within just two or three days the uneasiness began and after eight days he started shouting, “Take me out of here! I don’t want to stay here!”

What was the problem? The problems had started coming from within. The problems that, until yesterday, he had thought were coming from the outside, he now found, in his aloneness, were coming from the inside. Within six months the man became mad. After six months, when he was taken out, he had gone completely mad. He had started talking to himself. He had started cursing himself. He had started getting angry with himself. He had started loving himself. Now the other was not present. After six months he was taken out as a mad man. It took six years for him to get cured.

Any one of you would become mad. Other people give you opportunities hence you do not become mad. You find an excuse: “This man has abused me; therefore, I am filled with anger.” Nobody gets filled with anger by someone abusing him. The anger is present within; the abuse is only an opportunity for it to come out.

A well is full of water. If we drop a bucket in the well and pull it out, water comes out of the well. If there is no water in the well then howsoever many times, we drop the bucket in, nothing can come out. The bucket in itself has no power to get water out. First there should be water in the well. If there is water in the well, then a bucket can draw water. If there is no water in the well, then the bucket cannot draw water.

If there is no anger within you, if there is no hatred within you, then no power in the world can bring anger or hatred out of you. During these moments in-between, when no one drops a bucket in the well, one can maintain an illusion that there is no water in the well. When someone does drop a bucket into it, water can be drawn; but when the well is not being used we would be mistaken if we think that now there is no water in it. In the same way, if nobody gives us the opportunity then no anger or hate or envy comes out of us. But do not think that there is no water in your well. Water is present in the well and it is waiting for someone to come with a bucket and take it out. But we think these empty, in between moments are moments of love, of peace. This is false.

Always after any war in the world, people say that now there is peace. But Gandhi said, “In my understanding it is not like that. Either there is war or there is preparation for war; peace never comes. Peace is a deception.” Just now there is no war happening in the world; the second world war has ended and we are waiting for the third world war. If we say that these are days of peace, we are wrong. These are not days of peace. These are days of preparation for the third world war. All over the world the preparations for the third world war are going on. Either there is war or there is preparation for war. As long as the world has existed it has not seen any peaceful days.

Within a man also there is either anger or there is preparation for anger – man does not know any state of non-anger. There is restlessness – either it surfaces or it prepares to surface. If we think that the moments of preparation within are moments of peace, we are mistaken.

The strings of our heart are very loose. Only anger comes out of them, only distortion and disharmony come out of them. No music can arise. If the strings of our brain are too tight then madness arises out of them, and if the strings of our heart are too loose then only anger, enmity, envy, hatred, arise out of them. The strings of our heart should be a little tighter so that love can arise out of them, and the strings of our brain should be a little looser so that an aware intelligence arises out of them, not insanity. If both these strings become balanced there is a possibility for the music of life to arise.

So we will discuss two things. One is how to relax the strings of the brain and the other is how to tighten, create a tension in the strings of the heart. The method of doing this is what I call meditation.

If these two things happen, then the third thing can happen; then it is possible to descend to the real center of our life – the navel. If music arises in both these centers it becomes possible to move within. That music itself becomes a boat to take us deeper. The more harmonious the personality, the more music arising within, the deeper we can descend. The more disharmony there is within, the more we remain shallow, the more we will remain on the surface. In the coming two days we will discuss these two points – not only discuss them but also experiment on how we can bring these strings of the veena of life into a balance.

The three points that I have just told you about have to be kept in mind so that you can connect them with the things I will now say to you.

The first thing: man’s soul is connected neither to the brain nor to the heart, man’s soul is connected to his navel. The most important point in a man’s body is the navel; it is the center. The navel is not only in the center of man’s body but also in the center of life. A child is born through it and his life ends through it. And for the people who discover truth it is the navel which becomes the door.

You may not be aware that the whole day you breathe with your chest but at night your breathing starts coming from the navel. The whole day your chest goes up and down, but at night when you are asleep your belly starts moving up and down. You must have seen a small child breathing; the chest of a small child is not moving, it is his belly that is moving up and down. Small children are still very close to the navel. As a child starts growing, he starts breathing from the chest only, and the tremors of the breath no longer reach the navel.

If you are going along a road, riding a bicycle or driving a car, and suddenly an accident happens, you will be surprised to notice that the first impact will be on the navel – not on the brain or the heart. If a man suddenly attacks you with a knife, the first tremor will be felt at the navel, not anywhere else. Even right now, if you suddenly become afraid, the first tremor will be felt at the navel. Whenever there is a danger to life, the first tremors are felt at the navel because the navel is the center of life. The tremors will not happen anywhere else. The sources of life are connected from there, and because our attention is not at all on the navel, man is left hanging in a limbo. The navel center is totally sick, there is no attention paid to it – and there are no arrangements for its development.

There should be some arrangements to develop the navel center. Just as we have created schools and colleges to develop the brain, in the same way some arrangement is absolutely necessary to develop the navel center because there are certain things by which the navel center develops and there are certain things by which it does not develop. As I said, if a situation of fear arises, then it is felt first of all at the navel center. So the more a man practices fearlessness the more his navel will become healthy; the more a man practices courage the more his navel center will develop. The more fearlessness grows the more the navel will be strong and healthy and the contacts with life deeper. That is why all the great meditators of the world have considered fearlessness to be an essential quality in a seeker – there is no other significance of fearlessness. The significance of fearlessness is that it makes the navel center totally alive; it completely facilitates the total development of the navel.

We will talk about it step by step.

It is essential to give maximum attention to the navel center, so it is necessary to shift the attention slowly, slowly from the brain center and from the heart center so that it can go downwards and enter deeper and deeper. For this we will do two meditation experiments – one in the morning and one at night. I will explain the morning experiment to you and then for fifteen minutes we will sit and do that meditation.

If consciousness has to be brought downwards from the brain it is necessary to leave the brain completely relaxed. We keep the brain tense all the time. We have forgotten that we go on keeping it tense. It is totally tense. We are not aware of it. So first it is necessary to let it relax.

Now when we sit for meditation, there are three things . . .

The first thing: the whole brain has to be relaxed, so calm and relaxed that it is not doing anything. But how will you know that it is relaxed? If we close the fist very tightly, we become aware that all the muscles are very tense. Then when we open the fist, we become aware that all the muscles have become loose and relaxed. Because our minds are tense all the time, we do not even know what it is to be tense and what it is to be relaxed. So we will do one thing. First we will make the brain as tense as we can – then we will relax it suddenly. You will realize what the difference between the brain being tense and being relaxed is.

Now, when we sit for meditation, for one minute make the brain as tense as you can, give it as much stress as you can. And then I will say, “Now let it relax” – then let it relax totally. Gradually you will come to know what it is to be tense and what it is to be relaxed. You should be able to feel it, it should become your experience, and then you will be able to relax it more and more. So the first thing is to relax the brain totally.

Along with the brain the whole body has to be relaxed. One has to sit so comfortably that there is no tension or stress anywhere on the body. There should be no weight anywhere on the body. Then what will you do? The moment you allow everything to be relaxed the birds start singing, there is the sound of the watermill, somewhere a crow may cry, somewhere there will be some other sound – you will start hearing all these sounds because the more relaxed the brain is, the more sensitive it will become. You will start hearing and feeling every little thing. You will also start hearing your own heartbeat and hearing and feeling the coming and going of your breath.

Then, sitting silently, one should experience quietly all that is happening around and do nothing else. You are hearing sounds, listen to them silently; a bird is singing, listen to it silently; the breath is moving in and out, go on watching it silently – nothing else has to be done. You do not have to do anything from your side because as soon as you do the brain will start becoming tense.

You have to just go on sitting in a state of relaxed awareness. Everything is happening on its own, you are simply listening to it quietly. And you will be amazed that as you listen silently, a deeper silence will start arising within you. The more deeply you listen, the more the silence will go on growing. Within ten minutes you will find that you have become an extraordinary center of silence, everything has become peaceful.

So we will do this as the first experiment of the morning. The first thing: you will make your brain totally tense. When I tell you to make the brain completely tense, then close your eyes and make your brain as tense as you can. Then I will tell you to let it relax – then let it relax, go on letting it relax . . . In the same way also let the body relax. The eyes will be closed, and, sitting silently, listen quietly to whatever sounds are heard. For ten minutes you have to simply listen silently – nothing else has to be done. In these ten minutes, for the first time, you will start feeling that a stream of silence has started flowing and your life-energy has started descending within. It will start sinking downwards from the brain.

You will have to sit a little farther apart from each other. Nobody should touch anybody else. Some people can come at the back on the lawn. The people who are familiar with this morning meditation, those who have attended previous meditation camps, they can sit at the back on the lawn so that those who are new can listen. That way if I want to say something to them, if I want to give any instruction to them, they can hear. Those who are acquainted should go at the back so that the new people can sit in the front. Yes, old friends can go at the back and new friends can come forward. Some friends can come up here, some friends can come behind, so that you can hear. Nobody should sit touching anybody else. Nobody should touch the other. You are still touching each other!

Move a little apart! Move a little further! Sit on the sand!

First of all close your eyes softly. Very softly close your eyes. There should be no strain on the eyes; it is not that you close them forcibly. Drop the eyelids slowly, there should be no weight on the eyes.

Close your eyes. Yes, close your eyes, close them softly.

Now allow the whole body to be relaxed and make only the brain tense. Put as much tension as you can on the brain, give it as much stress as you can, stress the whole brain! Force yourself to make the whole brain tense. Make it tense with all the strength you have. Make it tense with all your strength but let the whole body relax. Put all the energy on the brain so that the brain is totally tense – just like a closed fist with all the muscles tense. For one minute keep it tense in every way. Don’t allow it to be loose; make it totally tense. Make it as tense as possible. Make the brain within tense in every way. Keep it tense. Make it tense with your full strength, at a climax. With whatever strength you have make it totally tense so that when you let it relax, it can be totally relaxed.

Make it tense!

Tense it!

Now let it completely relax. Allow it to relax totally. Let the brain be relaxed totally! Release all the tension. A relaxation will start happening inside. You will feel inside that something has dropped, some tension has disappeared, something has become peaceful. Let it relax totally, just relax . . .

And the sounds which are all around – the wind passing through the leaves, some birds singing – sitting silently, quietly listen to all these sounds. Just listen! Keep listening to the sounds all around.

As you listen, the mind will become even more silent, even more silent… listen! Listen silently, totally relaxed. Keep listening. For ten minutes just become a listening . . . Go on listening and the mind will start becoming silent . . . Go on listening silently, just listening, the mind will become silent. A silence will start arising within you on its own. You just listen . . . go on listening, the mind is becoming silent.

The mind is becoming totally silent. The mind is becoming silent. Go on listening in silence, the mind is becoming silent . . .

Enough for today.

-Osho

From The Inner Journey, Discourse #1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

The End of Heroes – Osho

You have said that you are the new man that the world needs, and that this commune is a preparation for the arrival of the new man. Do you see that other people here are going to become, like you, the new man, or are you talking about a preparation for future generations?

I am never concerned about the future, neither about the past. My whole concern is the present. And when I say the New Man, I don’t mean a certain model, type, an ideal. By the New Man I mean a man without ideals, a man with his own individuality, not imitative, not a carbon copy of somebody else. So the New Man will not be like me or like anybody else. Everybody will be authentically himself One of the most fundamental psychological things has to be understood: equality is an illusion. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and other communist thinkers of the world have created almost a conviction in millions of people’s minds — not only those who are communist but also those who are not communist — that equality should be the goal. Only machines can be equal; man cannot be. If you want man to be equal, then you will have to destroy his humanity and make him a robot.

It is very simple: just as two faces are not the same, in the whole world even two fingerprints are not the same — and you want two beings to be the same? You don’t value the being more than the fingerprint even? A very absurd idea of equality has become widespread.

Why it became so influential can be understood very easily. Everybody feels inferior to somebody, either intellectually, financially or physically. In some way everybody carries deep down an inferiority complex, because he is continuously comparing himself with others. Naturally, somebody has more intelligence, somebody has more physical strength, somebody can run faster than you, somebody can swim better. It is impossible for anybody not to feel inferior if he starts comparing.

Even a man like Napoleon . . . you would not think that he would ever feel inferior. For what? He was one of the greatest conquerors, one of the greatest fighters and warriors in the world. But on one point he was very touchy. His height was only five feet, five inches — even his bodyguards were taller — and that hurt. That gave him pain, and he could not even say it to anybody.

One day he was trying to fix a picture on his wall, and the nail was a little high up, beyond his hand’s reach. His bodyguard said, “Sir, I can do it. I am higher than you.” Napoleon became so angry. He said, “Take your words back, otherwise I will kill you right now, here.” But he said, “What have I said?”

Napoleon said, “You are taller than me but not higher than me. I can tolerate taller; but higher? — I cannot tolerate anybody.” He had touched his wound.

Even the people who have immense power in some way or other feel inferior when they start comparing. That leaves almost the whole of humanity feeling an inferiority complex. And this is the root cause why communism is so influential.

It has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with capitalism. It simply fulfills a deep desire in every man that everybody be equal. He feels gratified even to think that everybody is equal. Then there will be no wound, no hurt feeling, there will be no question of comparison.

Nobody has looked at communism from a psychological viewpoint. People have been studying communism only as an economic theory. It is not. Basically, it is a psychological consolation to all those who are feeling inferior in any way. Hence more than half of humanity is already communist. Communism is the biggest religion right now and is growing fast and will take over the world if we cannot create a New Man who has no inferiority complex.

The New Man will not be a communist, because he does not want to be equal to others. The New Man wants to be unique in himself and wants everybody else also to be unique. A society of unique people — everybody unique in his own way — will be the richest society that has existed in the world.

Somebody is a painter, somebody is a poet, somebody is a scientist, somebody is a sculptor. They all have their own uniqueness. It does not matter what you do, all that matters is that everything you do has your fingerprint on it, and you have become a creator. There is no reason to compare. A painter is a painter and a poet is a poet. It is stupid that both start comparing. Then the painter becomes inferior because he is not a poet, and the poet becomes inferior because he is not a painter. And we have been living under this inferiority complex for thousands of years. So everybody is suffering — “Existence has not been compassionate towards me.”

Start looking at the uniqueness and drop the idea of equality, which is in every way impossible. Unless man is produced in a factory on an assembly line, there is no possibility of equality. And a man produced on an assembly line will not be a man; he will be just a machine.

The New Man will not be like me in the sense that he will not be my carbon copy. But in a way, in a very different way, he will be like me. I am independent; he will be independent. I am my own self; he will be his own self. I have never accepted anything just as a belief unless I have experienced it. Then there is no question of belief — I know it. So either I know something, or I don’t know, there is nothing in between.

The believer is in between. He does not know, yet he pretends to know. You will find all these hypocrites assembled in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, all over the world. They don’t know God and they are praying to him. They don’t know that any prayer has ever been heard, and still they are praying. They don’t know that any prayer has ever been answered, but still they are praying.

The New Man will be a seeker, not a believer. He will trust in inquiry, in doubt — and doubt is the only method that can lead you to the truth. Belief is a barrier, not a bridge. No believer has ever known the truth. His belief never allowed him to inquire. So in a very different sense, he will be like me.

I have doubted everything. I have never accepted anything because it is written in the Holy Scriptures, because the great founders of religions have said it, because great saints verify it. I have insisted my whole life that nothing else can prove it to me except my own experience. And when it comes as your own experience, it brings tremendous rejoicing, great blessings, flowering. Your being finds its home. The wandering is finished, you have arrived.

Now my wandering and your wandering will be different. The point where I started and the point where you will start will be different. I will arrive to my own innermost core; you will arrive to your innermost core. The ultimate experience of blossoming will be the same, but the path will be totally different.

Everybody has to search and seek in his own way.

The way to truth is just like the sky. The bird flies but leaves no footprints. You cannot follow. There are no footprints. The inner sky is exactly the same, and everybody has to find his own way. It will be better to say the New Man makes his way. He does not move on a ready-made way. Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, are ready-made ways, superhighways, comfortable — you need not bother — but they go nowhere. They go round and round the earth. You can go on moving on them for millions of lives and you will never reach to your own being, because that way is not connected to you. It is not yours.

The real seeker steps out from all these ready-made ways. He moves into the unknown. It is great excitement, great ecstasy. And every step that brings you closer to home also brings you peace that you have not known before, brings you love and compassion that are absolutely unknown to you. Closer and closer . . . and you start feeling a new music, a new poetry, a new song arising out of your own heart. Your every heartbeat becomes music.

These are the signs that home is coming closer. Your whole being becomes harmonious. You can feel in yourself a new coolness, freshness, aliveness — indications that the source of life is not far away. And when you are just coming, maybe a few more steps, suddenly your walk is no more a walk, it becomes a dance. Nobody has reached into his being in any other way except dancing. It is not up to you. Your feet start feeling the dance. The whole milieu around you makes you thrive, thrilled.

Yes, I am the New Man, and I am preparing the way for you to become the New Man. That’s why I go on insisting that you keep yourself intelligent, meditative, silent. Keep yourself alert, aware. Change every stone on the path into a stepping-stone. Don’t think, “Now the stone is blocking the way.” No stone blocks the way. You just have to know that every stone can be turned into a stepping-stone.

Just now you have passed through a fascist, poisonous time. Those who can make it a stepping-stone will be grateful for it. There is no need to be afraid, to be worried, to be frustrated that it happened. Rather than wasting time over why it happened, use the energy to make it a stepping-stone to go higher. As I see it, the commune looks purer. It looks fresh. People look unburdened. These are good signs. A few people look angry that they have been deceived; that is stupidity.

Now, what has happened has happened. Anger is wasting your energy; that is hitting your head against the stone. That is not going to help. A few people look as if they are lost, because they had become dependent on a fascist kind of order.

They needed the order, they needed moms, and they look like helpless children whose moms are lost.

This is a good opportunity. The moms have escaped. It is time that you become independent. Drop this childish helplessness. Take responsibility and prove that independently you can do better than under a repressive regime, that you can be more creative if you are not being humiliated, dragged, forced to do something.

But a few people are feeling helpless because unless somebody is on their neck, continuously nagging them, they cannot work. They have become addicted to nagging just as people become addicted to smoking.

I know people whose wives are nothing but a pain in the neck. They know, and they have been telling horrible stories to me about their wives, and when their wives go for a few days to their parents’ house, just within two or three days that man completely forgets all the horribleness of the woman’s nagging and everything, and he starts hankering that she should come back. I was puzzled. I have seen many friends in the same position, in the same vicious circle, and I have asked them, “What happens to you? You are left free, now enjoy! Before you were saying you could not enjoy because the wife was so horrible, it was impossible to enjoy. Now why are you looking sad?” And they will say, “We feel very much alone. Something is missing. Without the wife, the house seems to be horrible.”

I said, “This is great! With the wife it was horrible; without the wife it is horrible.

Then what do you want?”

They have become dependent. The wife was not only nagging them, she was taking care of them also. They don’t know where their shoes are, they don’t know . . . I know people who don’t know how to put on their necktie. Only the wife knows, because she has been doing it. Everything is in a mess. They have completely forgotten what pain she was giving them, and now they remember only the best part.

So there are people who have forgotten that they were not happy under a strict system where there was no question of independence, total surrender was asked.

They were unwilling to do it, but they were doing it. Now you are free, and you don’t know what to do. You will have to learn that you can work out of your own love, that there is no need for surrender. You need not become a slave; you can remain a master. But certainly, remember that the quality of the work of a master must be higher than the quality of the work of a slave. That’s the only criterion to prove whether you are a slave or a master.

The New Man will live out of his own love, creativity and joy, without depending on any father figure. He will not need a God. God is a projection of the sick minds of people who want a permanent father. These human fathers are not reliable; today they are alive, tomorrow they may die. You cannot trust them.

They need a father who is eternal. They need a father who is all-powerful. They need a father who knows everything, past, present, future. That gives them great consolation.

Now a few people are angry at me. Why did I not stop it? . . . But I am not omniscient; I didn’t know what was happening. I don’t know even what is happening in the other room. I can just hear the noise; what is cooking, I don’t know. Something must be cooking. But I don’t pretend to be an omniscient father; neither am I a peeping tom, that I should go on looking into everybody’s bathroom keyhole watching what is happening, who is doing what. I never go out of my own room.

They are angry. The reason is that they must have been unconsciously projecting the father figure on me. Please, don’t make me a curtain to project anything you want. I am nobody’s curtain. I am not a screen, that you can project any idea on me and then feel angry because I am not behaving according to you. When had I said to you that I will behave according to you? I don’t expect you to behave according to me, neither do I want you to expect me to behave according to you.

Here we are agreed only on one point, and that is the independence of everybody; there is no other agreement.

The New Man will have communes, but the agreement will be freedom. You can look into my eyes, and you can see my silence, my depth. You can feel my presence, my joy, my song. But you are not to repeat anything. I am simply indicating to you that what has happened to me can happen to you. There will be differences, there will be uniquenesses. I may be just a marigold flower, and you may be a lotus — so don’t imitate me. You may be a rose, and I am just a marigold, a very poor flower who has nothing. But whoever named it marigold must have had great insight; it is the poorest flower, but there is great merriness, great joy in it — and it is pure gold, twenty-four carat.

One never knows what is hidden in you. Something certainly is hidden — everybody is carrying a being — you have to search and bring it into light and let your fragrance take its wings into the air.

I am the New Man. You have to be the New Man. I am not ordering you; I am simply saying so loudly so you can hear. And we have to create more opportunities for the New Man for more people around the world.

The New Man will not be a politician. The New Man will have no desire for power. The New Man will not create people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. The New Man will not create heroes as in the past, because everybody will be a hero. With the New Man, history is finished. You cannot write history with a New Man. Otherwise it will be such a big job, because every man will be a unique man, and he has to have as much space as anybody else. […]

The New Man will be the end of the world of heroes. Alexander the Great will not be possible anymore. Even if he comes riding on his horse, people will be simply entertained. He will look just like Don Quixote. Nobody is going to bother about Alexander the Great.

History ends with the old man. Heroes end with the old man. The New Man will write symbolically. He will write about the New Man and his qualities in a symbolic way — not about separate persons, which brings comparison, which makes someone big, high, holy, someone a sinner, inferior, a nobody. The old man was living vertically, in a hierarchy. The New Man will live horizontally, with no hierarchy. Everybody is doing his best and doing what he wants to do and doing it not just as work but as worship.

-Osho

From The Last Testament, V.1, Talk #14

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Witnessing is the Bee’s Knees of Meditation

Months ago, we began the module Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation with the first three of Shiva’s 112 meditation techniques, Between Two Breaths, As Breath Turns from Down to Up, and Whenever In-Breath and Out-Breath Fuse, all three of these meditation techniques focused on the breath. We moved on to the third eye with Attention Between Eyebrows and self-remembering with Be Aware You Are.

With the technique Wherever Your Mind is Wandering, we began to get a glimpse of witnessing. With Consider Your Essence as Light Rays Rising, we explored the chakras. We tossed attachment for body aside with You are Everywhere and dropped thinking with Thinking No Thing.

And then we moved on to the more subtle techniques, including Contemplate Something Beyond Perception, and the sublime Put Mindstuff in Such Inexpressible Fineness. In our last Tantra program, we entered shunyam, emptiness with Suppose Your Passive Form to be an Empty Room.

In today’s program, we will come to the end of Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation with this the twentieth program. This program is based on the last of the meditation techniques from The Book of Secrets, number 112 of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra and is called Enter Space, Supportless, Eternal, Still.

Yesterday in our dialogue the topic of blending techniques and whether Osho’s Witnessing Meditation is a technique and not to be blended with the 112 techniques.

Yes, we are instructed not to blend the techniques. But Osho’s Witnessing is not a technique. What is it? It is “seeing what is, without interfering.” We watch the activities of the body (what is), we watch the activities of the mind (what is), we watch the activities of the heart (what is), all without interfering. It is simply witnessing. Witnessing is not a technique. It is Zazen Meditation. It is sitting silently, doing nothing.

Because we are already doing much, in order to come to doing nothing, something has to change. What has to change is that we have to stop the doing. How do we stop the doing, i.e., thinking, dreaming, etc.? We stop thinking by watching our thinking without interacting.

It also seems to me with almost every one of the 112 techniques witnessing comes into play.

For example:

Attention Between Eyebrows, Let Mind Be Before Thought. How do we “let mind be before thought”? By watching mind with indifference.

Eyes Closed See your Inner Being in Detail. How do we “see our inner being in detail”? By not going out and interacting with mind.

When Singing, Seeing, Tasting, Be Aware You Are. How do we become aware we are? By not being in thinking. By watching the body in singing, etc. with a double pointed arrow. The double pointed arrow means, “remember you are.”

Wherever Your Mind is Wandering. We watch our mind wandering but without grasping, rejecting, analyzing, judging.

Before Desire and Before Knowing. Ditto.

Thinking No Thing. Witnessing.

Suppose You Contemplate Something Beyond Perception. Ditto.

Perceive One Being as Knower and Known. The double pointed arrow of the witness.

Put Mindstuff in Such Inexpressible Fineness. How do we “put mindstuff in such inexpressible fineness”? By watching, by witnessing.

And all the rest even up to the last technique, Enter Space, Supportless, Eternal, Still. How to enter that space? We enter by sitting silently, doing nothing, just remaining a witness until there is nothing left to witness. Just supportless, eternal, still.

So yes, we are instructed not to blend the techniques, but witnessing is not a technique and is at the very core of each of these techniques. And it is through watching, witnessing, that we enter these techniques, and it is by watching, witnessing, that we arrive at the space which these techniques are pointing.

So, why do I refer to Osho’s Witnessing Meditation (O-Meditation) as the “bee’s knees?” Because it is the way and the goal, the first step is the last step.

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.

 

My Beloved Bodhisattvas – Osho

My beloved bodhisattvas . . . Yes, that’s how I look at you. That’s how you have to start looking at yourselves. Bodhisattva means a buddha in essence, a buddha in seed, a buddha asleep, but with all the potential to be awake. In that sense everybody is a bodhisattva, but not everybody can be called a bodhisattva — only those who have started groping for the light, who have started longing for the dawn, in whose hearts the seed is no longer a seed but has become a sprout, has started growing.

You are bodhisattvas because of your longing to be conscious, to be alert, because of your quest for the truth. The truth is not far away, but there are very few fortunate ones in the world who long for it. It is not far away but it is arduous, it is hard to achieve. It is hard to achieve, not because of its nature, but because of our investment in lies.

We have invested for lives and lives in lies. Our investment is so much that the very idea of truth makes us frightened. We want to avoid it; we want to escape from the truth. Lies are beautiful escapes — convenient, comfortable dreams. But dreams are dreams. They can enchant you for the moment; they can enslave you for the moment, but only for the moment. And each dream is followed by tremendous frustration, and each desire is followed by deep failure.

But we go on rushing into new lies; if old lies are known, we immediately invent new lies. Remember that only lies can be invented; truth cannot be invented. Truth already is! Truth has to be discovered, not invented. Lies cannot be discovered, they have to be invented.

Mind feels very good with lies because the mind becomes the inventor, the doer. And as the mind becomes the doer, ego is created. With truth, you have nothing to do . . . and because you have nothing to do, mind ceases, and with the mind the ego disappears, evaporates. That’s the risk, the ultimate risk.

You have moved towards that risk. You have taken a few steps — staggering, stumbling, groping, haltingly, with many doubts, but still you have taken a few steps; hence I call you bodhisattvas.

And The Dhammapada, the teaching of Gautama the Buddha, can only be taught to the bodhisattvas. It cannot be taught to the ordinary, mediocre humanity, because it cannot be understood by them.

These words of Buddha come from eternal silence. They can reach you only if you receive them in silence. These words of Buddha come from immense purity. Unless you become a vehicle, a receptacle, humble, egoless, alert, aware, you will not be able to understand them. Intellectually you will understand them — they are very simple words, the simplest possible. But their very simplicity is a problem, because you are not simple. To understand simplicity you need simplicity of the heart, because only the simple heart can understand the simple truth. Only the pure can understand that which has come out of purity.

I have waited long . . . now the time is ripe, you are ready. The seeds can be sown. These tremendously important words can be uttered again. For twenty-five centuries, such a gathering has not existed at all. Yes, there have been a few enlightened masters with a few disciples — half a dozen at the most — and in small gatherings The Dhammapada has been taught. But those small gatherings cannot transform such a huge humanity. It is like throwing sugar in the ocean with spoons: it cannot make it sweet — your sugar is simply wasted.

A great, unheard-of experiment has to be done, on such a large scale that at least the most substantial part of humanity is touched by it — at least the soul of humanity, the center of humanity, can be awakened by it. On the periphery, the mediocre minds will go on sleeping — let them sleep — but at the center where intelligence exists a light can be kindled.

The time is ripe, the time has come for it. My whole work here consists in creating a buddhafield, an energy field where these eternal truths can be uttered again. It is a rare opportunity. Only once in a while, after centuries, does such an opportunity exist. Don’t miss it. Be very alert, mindful. Listen to these words not only with the head but with your heart, with every fiber of your being. Let your totality be stirred by them.

And after these ten days of silence, it is exactly the right moment to bring Buddha back, to make him alive again amongst you, to let him move amongst you, to let the winds of Buddha pass through you. Yes, he can be called back again, because nobody ever disappears. Buddha is no longer an embodied person; certainly he does not exist as an individual anywhere — but his essence, his soul, is part of the cosmic soul now.

If many, many people — with deep longing, with immense longing, with prayerful hearts — desire it, passionately desire it, then the soul that has disappeared into the cosmic soul can again become manifest in millions of ways.

No true master ever dies, he cannot die. Death does not appear for the masters, does not exist for them. Hence they are masters. They have known the eternity of life. They have seen that the body disappears but that the body is not all: the body is only the periphery, the body is only the garments. The body is the house, the abode, but the guest never disappears. The guest only moves from one abode to another. One day, ultimately, the guest starts living under the sky, with no shelter . . . but the guest continues. Only bodies, houses, come and go, are born and then die. But there is an inner continuum, an inner continuity — that is eternal, timeless, deathless.

Whenever you can love a master — a master like Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu — if your passion is total, immediately you are bridged.

My talking on Buddha is not just a commentary: it is creating a bridge. Buddha is one of the most important masters who has ever existed on the earth — incomparable, unique. And if you can have a taste of his being, you will be infinitely benefited, blessed.

I am immensely glad, because after these ten days of silence I can say to you that many of you are now ready to commune with me in silence. That is the ultimate in communication. Words are inadequate; words say, but only partially. Silence communes totally.

And to use words is a dangerous game too, because the meaning will remain with me, only the word will reach you; and you will give it your own meaning, your own color. It will not contain the same truth that it was meant to contain. It will contain something else, something far poorer. It will contain your meaning, not my meaning. You can distort language — in fact it is almost impossible to avoid distortion — but you cannot distort silence. Either you understand or you don’t understand.

And for these ten days there were only two categories of people here: those who understood and those who did not. But there was not a single person who misunderstood. You cannot misunderstand silence — that’s the beauty of silence. The demarcation is absolute: either you understand or, simply, you don’t understand — there is nothing to misunderstand.

With words the case is just the opposite: it is very difficult to understand, it is very difficult to understand that you don’t understand; these two are almost impossibilities. And the third is the only possibility: misunderstanding.

These ten days have been of strange beauty and of a mysterious majesty too. I no longer really belong to this shore. My ship has been waiting for me for a long time — I should have gone. It is a miracle that I am still in the body. The whole credit goes to you: to your love, to your prayers, to your longing. You would like me to linger a little while longer on this shore, hence the impossible has become possible.

These ten days, I was not feeling together with my body. I was feeling very uprooted, dislocated. It is strange to be in the body when you don’t feel that you are in the body. And it is also strange to go on living in a place which no longer belongs to you — my home is on the other shore. And the call comes persistently. But because you need me, it is the compassion of the universe — you can call it God’s compassion — that is allowing me to be in the body a little more.

It was strange, it was beautiful, it was mysterious, it was majestic, it was magical. And many of you have felt it. Many of you have felt it in different ways. A few have felt it as a very frightening phenomenon, as if death is knocking on the door. A few have felt it as a great confusion. A few have felt shocked, utterly shocked. But everybody has been touched in some way or other.

Only the newcomers were a little at a loss — they could not comprehend what was going on. But I feel thankful to them too. Although they could not understand what was going on, they waited — they were waiting for me to speak, they were waiting for me to say something, they were hoping. Many were afraid that I might not speak ever again…that was also a possibility. I was not certain myself.

Words are becoming more and more difficult for me. They are becoming more and more of an effort. I have to say something so I go on saying something to you. But I would like you to get ready as soon as possible so that we can simply sit in silence…listening to the birds and their songs . . . or listening just to your own heartbeat…just being here, doing nothing . . .

Get ready as soon as possible, because I may stop speaking any day. And let the news be spread to all the nooks and corners of the world: those who want to understand me only through the words; they should come soon, because I may stop speaking any day. Unpredictably, any day, it may happen — it may happen even in the middle of a sentence. Then I am not going to complete the sentence! Then it will hang forever and forever . . . incomplete.

But this time you have pulled me back.

These sayings of Buddha are called The Dhammapada. This name has to be understood. Dhamma means many things. It means the ultimate law, logos. By “ultimate law” is meant that which keeps the whole universe together. Invisible it is, intangible it is — but it is certainly; otherwise the universe would fall apart. Such a vast, infinite universe, running so smoothly, so harmoniously, is enough proof that there must be an undercurrent that connects everything, that joins everything, that bridges everything — that we are not islands, that the smallest grass leaf is joined to the greatest star. Destroy a small grass leaf and you have destroyed something of immense value to the existence itself.

In existence there is no hierarchy, there is nothing small and nothing great. The greatest star and the smallest grass leaf, both exist as equals; hence the other meaning of the word ‘dhamma’. The other meaning is justice, the equality, the non-hierarchic existence. Existence is absolutely communist; it knows no classes, it is all one. Hence the other meaning of the word ‘dhamma’ — justice.

And the third meaning is righteousness, virtue. Existence is very virtuous. Even if you find something which you cannot call virtue, it must be because of your misunderstanding; otherwise the existence is absolutely virtuous. Whatsoever happens here, always happens rightly. The wrong never happens. It may appear wrong to you because you have a certain idea of what right is, but when you look without any prejudice, nothing is wrong, all is right. Birth is right, death is right. Beauty is right and ugliness is right.

But our minds are small, our comprehension is limited; we cannot see the whole, we always see only a small part. We are like a person who is hiding behind his door and looking through the keyhole into the street. He always sees things…yes, somebody is moving, a car suddenly passes by. One moment it was not there, one moment it is there, and another moment it is gone forever. That’s how we are looking at existence. We say something is in the future, then it comes into the present, and then it has gone into the past.

In fact, time is a human invention. It is always now! Existence knows no past, no future — it knows only the present.

But we are sitting behind a keyhole and looking. A person is not there, then suddenly he appears; and then as suddenly as he appears he disappears too. Now you have to create time. Before the person appeared he was in the future; he was there, but for you he was in the future. Then he appeared; now he is in the present — he is the same! And you cannot see him anymore through your small keyhole — he has become past. Nothing is past, nothing is future — all is always present. But our ways of seeing are very limited.

Hence we go on asking why there is misery in the world, why there is this and that . . . why? If we can look at the whole, all these whys disappear. And to look at the whole, you will have to come out of your room, you will have to open the door…you will have to drop this keyhole vision.

This is what mind is: a keyhole, and a very small keyhole it is. Compared to the vast universe, what are our eyes, ears, hands? What can we grasp? Nothing of much importance. And those tiny fragments of truth, we become too much attached to them.

If you see the whole, everything is as it should be — that is the meaning of “everything is right.” Wrong exists not. Only God exists; the Devil is man’s creation.

The third meaning of ‘dhamma’ can be God — but Buddha never uses the word ‘God’ because it has become wrongly associated with the idea of a person, and the law is a presence, not a person. Hence Buddha never uses the word ‘God’, but whenever he wants to convey something of God he uses the word ‘dhamma’. His mind is that of a very profound scientist. Because of this, many have thought him to be an atheist — he is not. He is the greatest theist the world has ever known or will ever know — but he never talks about God. He never uses the word, that’s all, but by ‘dhamma’ he means exactly the same. “That which is” is the meaning of the word ‘God’, and that’s exactly the meaning of ‘dhamma’. ‘Dhamma’ also means discipline — different dimensions of the word. One who wants to know the truth will have to discipline himself in many ways. Don’t forget the meaning of the word ‘discipline’ — it simply means the capacity to learn, the availability to learn, the receptivity to learn. Hence the word ‘disciple’. ‘Disciple’ means one who is ready to drop his old prejudices, to put his mind aside, and look into the matter without any prejudice, without any a priori conception.

And ‘dhamma’ also means the ultimate truth. When mind disappears, when the ego disappears, then what remains? Something certainly remains, but it cannot be called ‘something’ — hence Buddha calls it ‘nothing’. But let me remind you, otherwise you will misunderstand him: whenever he uses the word ‘nothing’ he means no-thing. Divide the word in two; don’t use it as one word — bring a hyphen between ‘no’ and ‘thing’, then you know exactly the meaning of ‘nothing’.

The ultimate law is not a thing. It is not an object that you can observe. It is your interiority, it is subjectivity.

Buddha would have agreed totally with the Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard. He says: Truth is subjectivity. That is the difference between fact and truth. A fact is an objective thing. Science goes on searching for more and more facts, and science will never arrive at truth — it cannot by the very definition of the word. Truth is the interiority of the scientist, but he never looks at it. He goes on observing other things. He never becomes aware of his own being.

That is the last meaning of ‘dhamma’: your interiority, your subjectivity, your truth.

One thing very significant — allow it to sink deep into your heart: truth is never a theory, a hypothesis; it is always an experience. Hence my truth cannot be your truth. My truth is inescapably my truth; it will remain my truth, it cannot be yours. We cannot share it. Truth is unsharable, untransferable, incommunicable, inexpressible.

I can explain to you how I have attained it, but I cannot say what it is. The “how” is explainable, but not the “why.” The discipline can be shown, but not the goal. Each one has to come to it in his own way. Each one has to come to it in his own inner being. In absolute aloneness it is revealed.

And the second word is pada. ‘Pada’ also has many meanings. One, the most fundamental meaning, is path. Religion has two dimensions: the dimension of “what” and the dimension of “how.” The “what” cannot be talked about; it is impossible. But the “how” can be talked about, the “how” is sharable. That is the meaning of ‘path’. I can indicate the path to you; I can show you how I have traveled, how I reached the sunlit peaks. I can tell you about the whole geography of it, the whole topography of it. I can give you a contour map, but I cannot say how it feels to be on the sunlit peak.

It is like you can ask Edmund Hillary or Tensing how they reached the highest peak of the Himalayas, Gourishankar. They can give you the whole map of how they reached. But if you ask them what they felt when they reached, they can only shrug their shoulders. That freedom that they must have known is unspeakable; the beauty, the benediction, the vast sky, the height, and the colorful clouds, and the sun and the unpolluted air, and the virgin snow on which nobody had ever traveled before…all that is impossible to convey. One has to reach those sunlit peaks to know it. ‘Pada’ means path, ‘pada’ also means step, foot, foundation. All these meanings are significant. You have to move from where you are. You have to become a great process, a growth. People have become stagnant pools; they have to become rivers, because only rivers reach the ocean. And it also means foundation, because it is the fundamental truth of life. Without dhamma, without relating in some way to the ultimate truth, your life has no foundation, no meaning, no significance, it cannot have any glory. It will be an exercise in utter futility. If you are not bridged with the total you cannot have any significance of your own. You will remain a driftwood — at the mercy of the winds, not knowing where you are going and not knowing who you are. The search for truth, the passionate search for truth, creates the bridge, gives you a foundation. These sutras that are compiled as The Dhammapada are to be understood not intellectually but existentially. Become like sponges: let it soak, let it sink into you. Don’t be sitting there judging; otherwise you will miss the Buddha. Don’t sit there constantly chattering in your mind about whether it is right or wrong — you will miss the point. Don’t be bothered whether it is right or wrong.

The first, the most primary thing, is to understand what it is — what Buddha is saying, what Buddha is trying to say. There is no need to judge right now. The first, basic need is to understand exactly what he means. And the beauty of it is that if you understand exactly what it means, you will be convinced of its truth, you will know its truth. Truth has its own ways of convincing people; it needs no other proofs.

Truth never argues: it is a song, not a syllogism.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.1, Discourse #1

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