A Point of No Return – Osho

Is it possible to be in a state of pure consciousness for a while and to fall out again?

No, it is not possible. But something like it happens: you have a glimpse of pure consciousness; you have not entered. It is just as if you look from hundreds of miles’ distance toward the Himalayan peaks. You have not reached them, but you can look from a vast distance. You can look at the peaks; you can have a feeling. You can open a window and look at the moon far away, and the rays will touch you and you will be illumined, you will have a certain experience, but from this window-experience you will fall again and again.

When pure consciousness is achieved — not a glimpse from a distance, but you have entered into it — then you cannot lose it again. Once achieved it is achieved forever. You cannot fall out of it. Why? Because the moment you enter it you disappear. Who can fall out of it? To fall out at least you have to remain as yourself. But to enter pure consciousness, the ego disappears completely, the self disappears completely. Then who will come back?

In a glimpse you have not disappeared; you are there. You can have a glimpse and close the eyes. You can have a glimpse and close the window. It will become a memory; it will haunt you; it will become a nostalgia. It will come in your dreams. Sometimes, suddenly, you will feel again a deep urge to have that glimpse, but it cannot be a phenomenon forever and forever. Glimpses are only glimpses. Good, beautiful, but don’t cling to them because they are not permanent. You will fall out of them again and again — because you are still there.

When there is a glimpse, move toward the peaks, move toward the moon . . . become one with the moon. Unless you disappear completely you will fall. You will have to come back to the world because that ego will feel suffocated with the glimpse. The ego will feel deathlike panic. It will say, “Close the window! Enough you have looked at the moon. Now don’t be foolish. Don’t be a lunatic.” The word “lunatic” means moonstruck. The word comes from “lunar” — of the moon. All mad people are called lunatics, moonstruck — thinking of distant dreams.

The mind, the ego, will say, “Don’t be a lunatic. It is okay to have, sometimes, the window open and look at the moon, but don’t be obsessed. The world is waiting for you. You have responsibilities to fulfill in the world.” And the ego will bring you and persuade you, seduce you, toward the world — because the ego can exist only in the world. Whenever something of the other world penetrates into your mind, the ego becomes afraid, panicky, scared. It looks like death.

If that glimpse is to become a permanent lifestyle, your very being, then you have to bridge the distance, bridge the gap. You have to move. When you become pure consciousness then there is no falling out again. It is a point of no return. One only goes in; one never comes out. It has no exit, only one door . . . the entrance.

-Osho

From Essence of Yoga, Discourse #6, Q6; Yoga: Science of the Soul, V.6 (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.6).

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.

A Course in Witnessing Blossoms

Covid changed the entire landscape. Out of the garden of our in-person meditation gatherings, A Course in Witnessing grew. We did not have any intention to create it. But covid changed everything.

We had been holding almost weekly meditation meetings wherever we happened to be living. They had started in Prescott, AZ, moved to Gainesville, FL, and on to the Atlanta area.

But covid created the need to reimagine the meditation meetings. And then we heard about Zoom. We began to experiment with holding our meditation meetings on Zoom on a weekly basis.

Several years before, I had begun to explore Osho’s books chronologically: from the earliest talks, through the meditation camps, the Bombay discourses, the talks in Pune 1, the discourses in Rajneeshpuram, the talks held around the globe on Osho’s world tour and his talks on his return to Pune 2. All the while, I was collecting pieces where Osho spoke on his teaching of witnessing. I discovered that witnessing was the common thread through all the discourses from the very beginning all the way to the last Zen series where Osho led us into witnessing in the no-mind, let-go guided meditations.

For our meditation meetings, we had created recorded Osho/music satsangs, so that we could just put on a CD and join in the meditation ourselves. In addition to the satsangs created, we also put together some of Osho’s talks on Shiva’s meditation techniques from The Book of Secrets in order to be able to work with, and practice them, in our meditation meetings.

The blog site Sat Sangha Salon had been created many years before and was the repository of the collected works.

When we moved our meditation meetings to Zoom, a whole new world opened up. First of all, friends could join us from anywhere, and secondly, it allowed the possibility of having two-hour meditations rather than the one-hour meetings that we had restricted ourselves to previously.

Soon, all those posts of Osho discourse excerpts and The Book of Secrets meditations were forming the basis of what I began to see as modules, all part of one whole, which we would call A Course in Witnessing. I must state here that much credit for the creation of A Course in Witnessing has to be given to all the friends who joined us in our online meditations, because this became the laboratory in which the course emerged.

Before we knew it, we had created 144 two-hour meditation programs collected in seven modules. I say, “before we knew it,” but the complete course blossomed 14 years after the first satsang recording was created.

So, what exactly are the meditation programs? They are in two parts: first the Listening Meditation and then the Satsang Meditation.

The Listening Meditation is an approximately one-hour discourse excerpt. We call it Listening Meditation because we encourage the participants to bring a meditative quality to the space of listening. That means listening without either agreeing or disagreeing, listening without judging, and listening without analyzing. Osho has called this right listening, or total listening. It is the kind of listening we would bring to our time sitting in front of Osho during discourse. In the discourse excerpts in A Course in Witnessing, we are listening to Osho describe in great detail the whole journey of witnessing, sometimes through the teachings of the Upanishads, sometimes through the meditation techniques of Yoga or Tantra, sometimes through Zen stories, and sometimes through answering questions from his sannyasins.

Throughout all of these discourses is a common thread and that is Osho’s teaching of witnessing.

The second part of the meditation program is Satsang Meditation. These meditations are made up of alternating periods of silence, music and spoken word (highlights from the discourse). This is an opportunity to experiment with, explore more fully in our own light, that which has been heard in the listenings, maybe one of the techniques that has been introduced or maybe Osho’s guidance through the flow of watching, being and witnessing.

Currently we are holding weekly Zoom meditation meetings based on A Course in Witnessing. If you would like to be put on our mailing list to receive announcements for the meditation meetings, send an email with name and email address to info@o-meditation.com.

Whether in our meditation meetings or in your own time, we invite you to explore A Course in Witnessing:

Osho Sakshi and the Science of Awakening (16 programs)

Osho Transcendence from the Many to the One (16 programs)

Osho Alchemy and the Fire of Awareness (16 programs)

Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation (20 programs)

Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation (20 programs)

Osho Zen and the Mystery of No-Mind (20 programs)

Osho Dhamma and the Flowers of Awarefulness (36 programs)

The modules can be done independently, consecutively or randomly. They are arranged chronologically, however, in the order that Osho spoke them. The individual meditation programs within the modules can also be done randomly or in chronological order. There is, however, much benefit in doing them chronologically, especially the first six modules because the discourses that make up these meditation programs have a natural progression.

If you choose to do the programs randomly, you may want to print out the Map of Programs, so that you can check off the ones completed in order not to repeat.

I have also created a syllabus for the course, which, of course, is only a suggestion, a possibility: A Syllabus for A Course in Witnessing.

The Listening Meditations in the modules Osho Sakshi and Osho Transcendence are from discourses that Osho gave at meditation camps in different locations around India, mostly on various Upanishads. Osho Alchemy and Osho Tantra are from discourses that Osho gave at his apartment in Mumbai on the Atma Pooja Upanishad (The Ultimate Alchemy) and Vigyan Bhairav Tantra (The Book of Secrets). The discourses in Osho Yoga on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali were given in Mumbai and then continued in Pune after his move there. Osho Zen includes discourses that Osho gave on Zen both from Pune 1 and Pune 2. The last eight programs of Osho Zen include Osho guiding us into no-mind meditation. The module Osho Dhamma is made up of discourses arranged mostly chronologically that Osho gave in Pune 1, Rajneeshpuram, on his world tour, and finally, back in Pune 2.

We have also gathered all of the discourses from the listening meditations and compiled them into PDF books based on the seven modules, A Course in Witnessing Module Books.

Osho spent his whole life working to awaken as many individuals as possible through the practice of meditation. In addition to teaching the 112 ancient meditation techniques of the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, Osho also devised new “active” meditation techniques designed specifically to overcome the complexities and busyness of the modern mind. Osho, however, also says that the very core of meditation is witnessing.

“Real meditation is not a technique. Real meditation is just relaxing, sitting silently, letting it happen, whatsoever it is. Allowing the whole anxiety to come up, to surface. And watching it, watching it. And doing nothing to change it. Witnessing it is real meditation.

“In that witnessing your Buddhahood will become more and more powerful. Witnessing is the nourishment for your Buddhahood. And the more powerful your Buddhahood is, the less anxiety there is. The day your Buddhahood is complete, all anxiety is gone.”

-Osho

From The Perfect Master, V.1, Discourse #8

Enjoy!

Purushottama and Amido

Om Shantih Shantih Shantih – Osho

I am always intrigued by Eastern scriptures that begin with Om Shantih Shantih Shantih and end with Om Shanth Shantih Shantih.

Would you please talk about this?

Maneesha, the East has approached reality in an almost diametrically opposite way to the West. First, the simple meaning of the word should be understood, and then, all the implications. All Eastern scriptures begin with Om Shantih Shantih Shantih and they also end with the same.

Om is the symbol of the universal heartbeat; it is not a word. And as you come closer and closer to the universal heartbeat, the by-product is a deepening silence. Shantih means silence and it is always repeated three times because by the time you reach to the fourth, you are no more – just the silence has remained. You have disappeared as an entity separate from the universe.

The West has not been able to begin even a single scripture with this intention. It is understandable. They never went into the deeper communion between your heart and the bigger heart of the universe. They have taken a wrong route, that of fighting, that of conquering, that of being victorious. They have chosen to be extroverts.

Their world is true, but they don’t know anything about themselves.

The outside is true, and the inside has not been explored. […]

The Eastern meditators found as they entered into their inner being, they are first surrounded with a tremendously beautiful and musical sound. It is not the sound of any music being played, it is simply the heartbeat of the universe. And once they come in tune with the heartbeat of the universe, silence descends. They would like to dance and declare to the world about silence, but they can only say three times, “Silence, silence, silence” – and they are melting and merging.

Rather than their declaration of silence becoming louder, it is becoming more and more like a whisper, and finally, they are not – but they have witnessed the end. Now, it is a logical conclusion that the end and the beginning cannot be different.

The seed grows into a tree, blossoms, brings fruits and again seeds. In existence everything moves in a circle, the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the faraway millions of stars . . . all move in a circle that meets at a point.

The end and the beginning are the same.

That’s why the Eastern scriptures begin with the declaration, Om – the sound of the soundless, the very music of the heart of the universe. And as they go deeper, silence becomes the only reality. They want to declare silence to the world, but nobody has been able to go beyond the third because each time they say silence, it becomes more of a whisper. […]

The beginning we cannot know, we are already here; the beginning has happened. But the end we can know – the disappearance into absolute silence. But if we know the end, we can conclude with absolute certainty that this is how the beginning must have started: from silence, not from words.

Silence is the beginning and silence is the end, and if you are a meditator, silence is the middle.

Silence is the whole fabric of existence.

Maneesha, this is not a hypothesis, nor is it a philosophical idea. It is the experience of thousands of mystics who have entered into their own being. First, they have heard Om, and as the Om becomes overwhelming, silence follows. We are made of sound and silence.

Sound is our mind; silence is our being.

Sound is our trouble; silence is our liberation.

It has been discovered by some unknown explorer of the inner, it has been followed by thousands of people – but you are not to repeat it. That’s where the masses have got lost. They think that by repeating “Om Shantih Shantih Shantih” they are doing some spiritual meditative act. […]

These things may be beautiful, creative, but they are not in any way religious. Every Hindu temple is resounding with the sound, everybody is praying, but they have misunderstood the whole thing. It is not your repeating Om that is going to lead you to the reality; it is your becoming utterly quiet, and from your very being arises the sound Om.

You are just a witness; you are not a doer.

And as the sound settles, you feel silence, silence, silence . . . then everything disappears, there remains only a universal reality of which you are just a part. Just as a dewdrop disappears in the ocean, you disappear in the ocean of existence.

The East has found this to be the only spiritual experience, not God, not your holy scriptures, not your prophets; they are all creating fictions. Not even your prayers because they are nothing but your desires. The only thing that is really significant is to be quiet, centered, grounded, in the very life source, in your very being. This sutra of Om Shantih Shantih Shantih is heard when you are at your very center. It is not by your repeating it that you will reach to it. It is not exactly the same either. We have invented it . . . approximately, just to communicate what has happened: something similar but far deeper; something similar but far more delicate; something similar but not the same.

The mystics’ writings start exactly the way the universe has started, and they end exactly as the universe finally goes to rest. There is a statement relevant to this sutra by Gautam Buddha. It is very significant. He says that it is absolutely foolish to think the way all the theologians of the world think about the beginning – how the world began.

I can see the significance of a statement that you can never come to a conclusion about how the world began – because you were not there. How can you be before the world began? – you are part of the world. So all that you say about the beginning is just imagination, hypothesis, guesswork.

Buddha says that the mystic is not interested in how the world began, his interest is in how it ends, because in that very ending you will find the beginning too. But without finding the ending, you can only guess and argue and fight about the beginning – and it is all futile. The philosopher’s work is absolute nonsense. The mystic is very earthbound, very pragmatic, very realistic. Buddha says, “First find how it ends” – and it is to be found within you.

You cannot wait for the whole world to end. That way it never ends. It is always there – beginningless, endless. But within you, how did the world begin? And within you, how does the world end?

Those who remain clinging with the world are the materialists. Others start looking inside and try to find how everything ends, and still you are – but just a pure consciousness, just a pure awareness.

The flower disappears.

Only fragrance remains.

I agree with Gautam Buddha that if you have found the fragrance within you, you know the whole secret of existence because every individual is a miniature universe. What is happening on a vast scale in the universe is happening on a very small scale within you.

If you have tasted a simple dewdrop, you have tasted all the rivers and all the oceans and all possibilities of water anywhere. And you are the dewdrop . . . Rather than running here and there, just taste yourself. […]

This sutra contains the whole – the beginning and the end. But it starts from the end and reaches to the beginning. The statement of Gautam Buddha was: “Ignorance has no beginning and enlightenment has no end, and both make a circle.” You know you have been utterly ignorant of yourself because now you are so alert, so full of joy, so much is dancing in your every cell, every fiber. This is an experience; it is not a hypothesis, and it has never been argued.

There have been Hindu mystics, there have been Buddhist mystics, there have been Jaina mystics . . . but as far as this sutra is concerned, they have never quarreled about it, they have never argued. This is simply accepted because it is the experience; it is not theoretical guesswork. It is not philosophy. It is philosia, it is darshan.

They have seen it within, in their own being, and there is no way not to agree with others who have also seen it. But by repeating it one is simply being stupid.

One has to come to an inner space where it explodes on its own and you are just a witness. Then it transforms your being, gives it beauty and grace, gives it sincerity and truth.

-Osho

From Om Shantih Shantih Shantih, Discourse #1, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

Version 1.0.0

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.

Be Attentively Inattentive – Osho

This is what tantra says: the royal way – behave like a king, not like a soldier. There is nobody on top of you to force you and order you; there should not be really a style of life. That is the royal way. You should live moment to moment, enjoying moment to moment – spontaneity should be the way. And why bother about tomorrow? – This moment is enough. Live it! Live it in totality. Respond, but don’t react. “No habits” should be the formula.

I am not saying live in a chaos, but don’t live through habits. Maybe, just living spontaneously, a way of life evolves in you – but that is not forced. If you enjoy the morning every day, and through enjoyment you get up early in the morning, not as a habit, and you get up every day… and you may get up for your whole life, but that is not a habit. You are not forcing yourself to get up – it happens.

It is beautiful; you enjoy it, you love it.

If it happens out of love, it is not a style, it is not a habit, not a conditioning, not a cultivated, dead thing. Less habits – you will be more alive. No habits – you will be perfectly alive. Habits surround you with a dead crust and you become enclosed in them, you become encapsulated. Like a seed a cell surrounds you, hard. Be flexible.

Yoga teaches you to cultivate the opposite of all that is bad. Fight with evil and attend to good. There is violence – kill the violence within you and become nonviolent, cultivate nonviolence. Always do the opposite and force the opposite to become your pattern. This is the soldier’s way – a small teaching. Tantra is the great teaching – the supreme. What does tantra say? Tantra says: don’t create any conflict within yourself. Accept both, and through the acceptance of both, a transcendence happens, not victory but transcendence. In yoga there are victories, in tantra there are none. In tantra . . . simply transcendence. Not that you become nonviolent against violence, you simply go beyond both, you simply become a third phenomenon – a witness.

I was sitting once in a butcher’s shop. He was a very good man and I used to go to visit him. It was evening and he was just going to close the shop when a man came and asked for a hen. And I knew because just a few minutes before he had told me that everything was sold today – only one hen was left. So he was very happy; he went in, brought the hen out, threw it on the scale and said, “That will be five rupees.”

The man said, “It is good, but I am going to give a party and many friends are coming and this hen seems to be too small. I would like to have a little bigger one.”

Now I knew that he had no hen left, this was the only one. The butcher brooded a little, took the hen back inside the room, stayed there a little, came back again, threw the hen on the scale – the same one – and said, “This will be seven rupees.”

The man said, “Tell you what, I will take both of them.”

Then the butcher was really in a fix.

And tantra puts the whole existence itself in a fix. Tantra says, “I will take both of them.”

There are not two. Hate is nothing but another aspect of love. Anger is nothing but another aspect of compassion, and violence is nothing but another face of nonviolence. Tantra says, “Tell you what, I will take both of them. I accept both.” And suddenly through this acceptance there is a transcendence, because there are not two. Violence and nonviolence are not two. Anger and compassion are not two. Love and hate are not two.

That’s why you know, you observe, but you are so unconscious that you don’t recognize the fact. Your love changes into hate within a second. How is it possible if they are two? Not even a second is needed: this moment you love, and next moment you hate the same person. In the morning you love the same person, by the afternoon you hate, in the evening you love again. This game of love and hate goes on. In fact, love and hate is not the right word: love-hate, anger-compassion – they are one phenomenon, they are not two. That’s why love can become hate, hate can become love, anger can become compassion, compassion can become anger.

Tantra says the division is brought by your mind and then you start fighting. You create the division first; you condemn one aspect and you appreciate another. You create the division first, then you create the conflict and then you are in trouble. And you will be in trouble. A yogi is constantly in trouble because whatsoever he will do the victory cannot be final, at the most temporary.

You can push down anger and act compassion, but you know well that you have pushed it down into the unconscious and it is there – and any moment, a little unawareness and it will bubble up, it will surface. So one has to constantly push it down. And this is such an ugly phenomenon if one has to constantly push down negative things – then the whole life is wasted. When will you enjoy the divine? You have no space, no time. You are fighting with the anger and greed and sex and jealousy and a thousand things. And those thousand enemies are there; you have to be constantly on watch, you can never relax. How can you be loose and natural? You will always be tense, strained, always ready to fight, always afraid.

Yogis become afraid even of sleep, because in sleep they cannot be on watch. In sleep all that they have forced down surfaces. They may have attained to celibacy while they are awake, but in dreams it becomes impossible – beautiful women keep on floating inside, and the yogi cannot do anything. Those beautiful women are not coming from some heaven as it is written in Hindu stories, that God sent them. Why should God be interested in you? A poor yogi, not doing anybody any harm, simply sitting in the Himalayas with closed eyes, fighting with his own problems – why should God be interested in him? And why should he send apsaras, beautiful women, to distract him from his path? Why? Nobody is there. There is no need for anybody to send anybody. The yogi is creating his own dreams.

Whatsoever you suppress surfaces in the dreams. Those dreams are the part the yogi has denied. And your waking hours are as much yours as your dreams are yours. So whether you love a woman in your waking hours, or you love a woman in dream, there is no difference – there cannot be, because it is not a question of a woman there or not, it is a question of you. Whether you love a picture, a dream picture, or you love a real woman, there is in fact no difference – there cannot be, because a real woman is also a picture inside. You never know the real woman; you only know the picture.

I am here. How do you know that I am really here? Maybe it is just a dream – you are dreaming m here. What will be the difference if you dream me here and you see me actually here? – and how will you make the difference? What is the criterion? … Because whether I am here or not makes no difference – you see me inside your mind. In both the cases – dream or real – your eyes take the rays in and your mind interprets that somebody is there. You have never seen any actual person, you cannot see.

That’s why Hindus say this is a maya, this is an illusory world. Tilopa says, “Transient, ghostlike, phantomlike, dreamlike is this world.” Why? – because in dream and actuality there is no difference.

In both the cases you are confined in your mind. You only see pictures, you have never seen any reality – you cannot see, because the reality can only be seen when you become real. You are a ghostlike phenomenon, a shadow – how can you see the real? The shadow can see only the shadow. You can see reality only when the mind is dropped. Through the mind everything becomes unreal. The mind projects, creates, colors, interprets – everything becomes false. Hence the emphasis, continuous emphasis on how to be no-minds.

Tantra says don’t fight. If you fight you may continue your fight for many lives and nothing will happen out of it, because in the first place you have missed – where you have seen two was only one. And if the first step has been missed, you cannot reach the goal. Your whole journey is going to be continuously a missing. The first step has to be taken absolutely rightly, otherwise you will never reach the goal.

And what is the absolutely right thing? Tantra says it is to see the one in two, to see the one in many.

Once you can see one in duality, already the transcendence has started. This is the royal path.

Now we will try to understand the sutra.

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

To transcend, not to win – to transcend. This word is very beautiful. What does it mean, to “transcend”?

It is just as if a small child is playing with his toys. You tell him to put them away and he becomes angry. Even when he goes to sleep he goes with his toys, and the mother has to remove them when he has fallen asleep. In the morning the first thing that he demands to know is where his toys are and who has taken them away. Even in the dream he dreams about the toys. Then suddenly one day he forgets about the toys. For a few days they remain in the corner of his room, and then they are removed or thrown away; never again does he ask for them. What has happened? He has transcended, he has become mature. It is not a fight and a victory; it is not that he was fighting against the desire to have toys. No, suddenly one day he sees this is childish and he is no more a child; suddenly one day he realizes that toys are toys, they are not real life and he is ready for the real life. His back is turned towards the toys. Never again in dreams will they come; never again will he think about them. And if he sees some other child playing with toys, he will laugh; he will laugh knowingly… a knowing laugh, a wise laugh. He will say, ”He’s a child, still childish, playing with toys.” He has transcended.

Transcendence is a very spontaneous phenomenon. It is not to be cultivated. You simply become more mature. You simply see the whole absurdity of a certain thing . . . and you transcend. One young man came to me and he was very much worried. He has a beautiful wife, but her nose is a little too long. So he was worried and he said, “What to do?” Even plastic surgery was done – the nose became a little more ugly; because there was nothing wrong, and when you try to improve something where nothing is wrong, it becomes more ugly, it makes more of a mess. Now he was more troubled and he asked me what to do.

I talked to him about the toys and I told him, “One day you will have to transcend. This is just childish – why are you obsessed so much with her nose? The nose is just a tiny part, and your wife is so beautiful and such a beautiful person – and why are you making her so sad because of her nose?” – because she has also become touchy about her nose, her nose has become as if it was the whole problem of life. And all problems are like this! Don’t think that your problem is something greater – all problems are like this. All problems are out of childishness, juvenile, they are born out of immaturity.

He was concerned so much with the nose that he would not even look at his wife’s face, because whenever he saw the nose he was troubled – but you cannot escape things so easily. If you are NOT looking at the face because of the nose, still you are reminded of the nose. Even if you are trying to evade the issue, the issue is there. You are obsessed. So I told him to meditate on the wife’s nose.

He said, “What? I cannot even look.”

I told him, “This is going to help – you simply meditate on the nose. People used in the ancient days, to meditate on the tip of their own nose, so what is wrong in meditating on the tip of your wife’s nose? Beautiful! You try.”

He said, “But what will happen out of it?”

“You just try,” I told him, “and after a few months you tell me what happens. Every day, let her sit before you and you meditate on her nose.” One day he came running to me and he said, “What nonsense I have been doing! Suddenly, I have transcended. The whole foolishness of it has become apparent – now it is no more a problem.”

He has not become victorious because, in fact, there is no enemy there so that you can win, there is no enemy to you – this is what tantra says. The whole life is in deep love with you. There is nobody who is to be destroyed, nobody who is to be won, nobody who is an enemy, a foe to you. The whole life loves you. From everywhere the love is flowing.

And within you also, there are no enemies – they have been created by priests. They have made a battleground; they have made you a battleground. They say, “Fight this – this is bad! Fight that – that is bad!” They have created so many enemies that you are surrounded by enemies and you have lost contact with the whole beauty of life.

I say to you: anger is not your enemy, greed is not your enemy; neither is compassion your friend, nor is nonviolence your friend – because friend or foe, you remain with the duality. Just look at the whole of your being and you will find they are one. When the foe becomes the friend and the friend becomes the foe, all duality is lost. Suddenly there is a transcendence, suddenly an awakening. And I tell you, it is sudden, because when you fight you have to fight inch by inch. This is not a fight at all. This is the way of the kings – the royal path.

Says Tilopa,

To transcend duality is the kingly view.

Transcend duality! Just watch and you will see there is no duality.

Bodhidharma, one of the rarest jewels ever born, went to China. The king came to see him, and the king said, “Sometimes I am very much disturbed. Sometimes there is much tension and anguish within me.”

Bodhidharma looked at him and said, “You come early tomorrow morning at four o’clock, and bring all your anguish, anxieties, disturbances with you. Remember, don’t come alone – bring all of them!”

The king looked at this Bodhidharma – he was a very weird-looking fellow; he could have scared anybody to death – and the king said, “What are you saying? What do you mean?”

Bodhidharma said, “If you don’t bring those things, then how can I set you right? Bring all of them and I will set everything right.”

The king thought, “It is better not to go. Four o’clock in the morning – it will be dark, and this man looks a little mad. With a big staff in his hand, he can even hit. And what does he mean that he will put everything right?”

He couldn’t sleep the whole night because Bodhidharma haunted him. By the morning he felt that it would be good to go, “because who knows? – maybe he can do something.”

So he came, grudgingly, hesitatingly, but he reached. And the first thing Bodhidharma asked – he was sitting there before the temple with his staff, was looking even more dangerous in the dark, and he said, “So you have come! Where are the other fellows that you were talking about?”

The king said, “You talk in puzzles, because they are not things that I can bring – they are inside.”

Bodhidharma said, “Okay. Inside, outside, things are things. You sit down, close your eyes and try to find them inside. Catch hold of them and immediately tell me and look at my staff. I am going to set them right!”

The king closed his eyes – there was nothing else to do – he closed his eyes, afraid a little, looked inside here and there, watched, and suddenly he became aware the more he looked in, that there was nothing – no anxiety, no anguish, no disturbance. He fell into a deep meditation. Hours passed, the sun started rising, and on his face there was tremendous silence.

Then Bodhidharma told him, “Now open your eyes. Enough is enough! Where are those fellows? Could you get hold of them?”

The king laughed, bowed down, touched the feet of Bodhidharma, and he said, “Really, you have set them right, because I could not find them – and now I know what is the matter. They are not there in the first place. They were there because I never entered within myself and looked for them. They were there because I was not present inside. Now I know – you have done the miracle.”

And this is what happened. This is transcendence: not solving a problem but seeing whether really there is a problem in the first place. First you create the problem and then you start asking for the solution. First you create the question and then you roam around the world asking for the answer. This has been my experience also, that if you watch the question, the question will disappear; there is no need for any answer. If you watch the question, the question disappears – and this is transcendence. It is not a solution because there was no question at all to solve. You don’t have a disease. Just watch inside and you will not find the disease; then what is the need of a solution?

Every man is as he should be. Every man is a born king. Nothing is lacking, you need not be improved upon. And people who try to improve you, they destroy you; they are the real mischief makers. And there are many who are just watching like cats for mice: you come near them and they pounce upon you and they start improving you immediately. There are many improvers – that’s why the world is in such a chaos – there are too many people trying to improve on you. Don’t allow anybody to improve upon you. You are already the last word. You are not only the alpha; you are the omega also. You are complete, perfect.

Even if you feel imperfection, tantra says that imperfection is perfect. You need not worry about it. It will look very strange to say that your imperfection is also perfect, nothing is lacking in it. In fact, you appear imperfect not because you are imperfect but because you are a growing perfection. This looks absurd, illogical, because we think perfection cannot grow, because we mean by perfection that which has come to its last growth – but that perfection will be dead. If it cannot grow then that perfection will be dead.

God goes on growing. God is not perfect in that way, that he has no growth. He is perfect because he lacks nothing, but he goes from one perfection to another, the growth continues. God is evolution; not from imperfection to perfection but from perfection to more perfection, to still more perfection.

When perfection is without any future, it is dead. When perfection has a future to it, still an opening, a growth, still a movement, then it looks like imperfection. And I would like to tell you: be imperfect and growing, because that is what life is. And don’t try to be perfect, otherwise you will stop growing. Then you will be like a Buddha statue, stone, but dead.

Because of this phenomenon – that perfection goes on growing – you feel it is imperfect. Let it be as it is. Allow it to be as it is. This is the royal way.

 To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

Distractions are there, when you will lose your consciousness again and again. You meditate, you sit for meditation, a thought comes – and immediately you have forgotten yourself; you follow the thought, you have got involved in it. Tantra says only one thing has to be conquered, and that is distractions.

What will you do? Only one thing: when a thought comes, remain a witness. Look at it, observe it, allow it to pass your being, but don’t get attached to it in any way, for or against. It may be a bad thought, a thought to kill somebody – don’t push it, don’t say, “This is a bad thought.” The moment you say something about the thought, you have become attached, you are distracted. Now this thought will lead you to many things, from one thought to another. A good thought comes, a compassionate thought: don’t say, “Aha, so beautiful! I am a great saint. Such beautiful thoughts are coming to me that I would like to give salvation to the whole world. I would like to liberate everybody.” Don’t say that. Good or bad, you remain a witness.

Still, in the beginning, many times you will be distracted. Then what to do? If you are distracted, be distracted. Don’t be worried too much about it, otherwise that worry will become an obsession. Be distracted! For a few minutes you will be distracted, then suddenly you will remember, “I am distracted.” Then it is okay, come back. Don’t feel depressed. Don’t say, “It was bad that I was distracted” – again you are creating a dualism: bad and good. Distracted, okay – accept it, come back. Even with distraction you don’t create a conflict.

That’s what Krishnamurti goes on saying. He uses a very paradoxical concept for it. He says if you are inattentive, be attentively inattentive. That’s okay! Suddenly you find you have been inattentive, give attention to it and come back home. Krishnamurti has not been understood and the reason is that he follows the royal path. If he had been a yogi he would have been understood very easily. That’s why he goes on saying there is no method – on the royal path there is no method. He goes on saying that there is no technique – on the royal path there is none. He goes on saying no scripture will help you – on the royal path there is no scripture.

Distracted? – The moment you remember, the moment this attention comes to you that “I have been distracted,” come back. That’s all! Don’t create any conflict. Don’t say, “This was bad”; don’t feel depressed, frustrated that you have been again distracted. Nothing is wrong in distraction – enjoy it also.

If you can enjoy the distraction, less and less it will happen to you. And a day comes when there is no distraction – but this is not a victory. You have not pushed the distracting trends of your mind deep into the unconscious. No. You allowed it also. It too is good.

This is the mind of tantra, that everything is good and holy. Even if there is distraction, somehow it is needed. You may not be aware why it is needed; somehow it is needed. If you can feel good about everything that happens, then only are you following the royal path. If you start fighting with anything whatsoever, you have fallen from the royal path and you have become an ordinary soldier, a warrior.

To transcend duality is the kingly view. To conquer distractions is the royal practice.

-Osho

From Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, Discourse #7

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Meditation is Mind Relaxed – Osho

Meditation, understanding, awareness, love and enlightenment, and now transcendence of enlightenment, seem to be inalienable parts of your teaching. And they also seem to be organically interconnected.

Would you please explain to us the whole thing once again?

It is so obvious, so simple. It needs no explanation.

It needs only description.

Meditation is nothing but your mind in a silent state. Just as a lake is silent, not even ripples on it . . . thoughts are ripples. Meditation is mind relaxed – don’t make things very complex – mind in a state of not doing anything, just at ease.

And the moment you are relaxed, silent, peaceful, there is great insight and understanding of things that you have never understood before. Nobody is explaining anything to you. Just your clarity of vision makes things clear.

It is the same rose, but now you know its beauty in its multi-dimensional way. You had seen it many times – it was just an ordinary rose. But today it is no more ordinary; today it has become extraordinary because you have a clarity. All the dust is removed from your insight and the rose has an aura that you were not aware of before.

Everything around you, inside you, outside you, becomes crystal clear. And as understanding reaches to the ultimate point, there is an explosion of light.

Clarity, in its ultimate stage, becomes an explosion of light we have called “enlightenment.”

Just don’t use big words; that makes things difficult.

It is simply in the intensity of clarity that darkness disappears. It is because you can see so clearly that darkness is no more there. You know perfectly well that there are animals who can see in darkness; their eyes are more clear, more penetrating. Your insight becomes so penetrating that all darkness is dispelled. In other words, you have an explosion of light. Call it enlightenment, liberation, realization. But you are still beyond it: it is your experience, and you are the experiencer. This is an objective experience; you are a subjectivity. You know all this is happening; hence the transcendence, hence going beyond enlightenment. At that peak, at that Everest . . . only witnessing, just pure awareness; not aware of anything, not witnessing anything – just a pure mirror, not mirroring anything at all. They are all organically related.

And don’t bother about the whole thing.

Move step by step; the other step will follow automatically.

-Osho

From The Osho Upanishad, Discourse #12, 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.

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Watchfulness is a Simple Step – Osho

I am a first-grade student in the subject of witnessing. Whenever I am listening to you talking about watching, witnessing, something in me feels so thrilled, excited, joyful, and a big “Ah!” comes up.

Recently I have heard you talk about watching the witness. Yet I’m already happy and grateful for the few moments a day when I remember my hands, my body, having a little distance from my thoughts and emotions.

Could you please start with ABC on this subject?

The phenomenon of witnessing has no ABC or XYZ.

It is a simple phenomenon; it is a single step.

It is one process.

You can watch the body; the watching is the same. You can watch the mind – the object has changed, but the watching is the same. You can watch the emotions – again objects have changed, but the process of watching is the same. You can watch the watcher – a tremendous quantum leap, but still the subject is the same; only the object has changed.

Now watchfulness itself is being used as an object. And you have stepped behind watchfulness; you can watch it. And you cannot go beyond this watchfulness. You have come to the very end of your inner core.

So you are going perfectly right. Enjoy it, rejoice in it. More and more silence and peace will be coming your way, more and more blissfulness and benediction. There is no end as far as rewards are concerned because they are all along the way. From the beginning to the very end, each step brings a new space – but it is the same step.

The journey of one thousand miles is done by the simple step, one step. You cannot take two steps at one time. Step after step, just a single step can be stretched to ten thousand miles or to infinity.

Watchfulness is a simple step. There is no alphabet in it. There are no beginners in it; there are no amateurs in it and no experts in it. Everybody is in the middle, always in the middle.

You are moving perfectly right. Just go on.

-Osho

From The Osho Upanishad, Discourse #11, Q2

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Unimagined Ecstasy, Unimagined Pain – Osho

Beloved Master, unimagined ecstasy, unimagined pain.

Yoga Sudha, it is natural. Ecstasy and great pain happen together because it is a new birth: the joy of being born, the joy of entering into the unknown, the great adventure into God. But pain is also there, great pain: the pain of leaving the old, the familiar, the known; the pain of leaving the secure, the safe; the pain of dying — dying as the ego. If the ecstasy is true, it is bound to happen that there will be great pain. This is one of the criteria by which to judge whether the ecstasy is true or not.

It is like uprooting a tree from its known soil and transplanting it into a new climate, into a new country. The tree will have to learn to live again from ABC; it is hard to unlearn and it is hard to learn again. There is bound to be pain. Great pain and agony precede great ecstasy. It can continue for months, for years too — it all depends on you.

Now, don’t look back. That which is gone is gone, and gone forever, never to return again. Whatsoever you do, you cannot bring it back.

The child cannot enter into the womb again, howsoever pleasant it was, comfortable, convenient, secure, safe. The child may have great nostalgia for the womb, for those beautiful, eternal nine months. Yes, I say eternal because the child feels them as eternity, not as nine months. He has no idea of calculating time — those long, long nine months of such warmth, of such protection, of such unworried existence, of such tremendous rest and relaxation. The nostalgia hangs around. The child would like to go back to the womb, but it is not possible.

Going back is not possible at all; it is not in the nature of things. One always has to go forward. And when you look forward everything is so unfamiliar that great fear arises. One never knows where one is. One loses one’s identity, one passes through a great crisis of identity. The known is no longer there to cling to, and the unknown seems to be ungraspable.

But don’t look back; that which can’t happen, can’t happen. Look forward! And don’t interpret the new and the unknown as unsafe. Interpret it in terms of adventure, exploration. Interpret it as great freedom. Buddha talks again and again about freedom. It is freedom from the past, freedom from the mother, freedom from the parents, freedom from the society, freedom from the church, the state.

What I am giving to you is absolute freedom. Yes, fear can arise, but fear arises because of your interpretation. Deep down somewhere in the unconscious you still would like to go back, to close your eyes to the new sunrise. You would like to go back even though there was nothing very valuable, nothing significant, but at least one was safe. The territory was familiar; one lived surrounded by walls. We call it a prison, but you used to call it your home; and I have taken you out of your home because it was not your real home, it was only make-believe. This freedom, this ecstasy that is arising, is your real home.

Now, if you cling to the past, which is no longer possible, and you don’t allow the future to happen smoothly, the pain can continue, the agony can continue, for months, for years. And you will be split: a part of you clinging to the no-more and a part of you longing for the not-yet.

Now be courageous. Take the quantum leap! Just as the snake slips out of the old skin, slip out of the old. It has fulfilled its function; it has brought you to the new. Gratefully say goodbye to it and plunge into this exploration that is becoming valuable to you. Plunge into this insecurity, into this danger, because life is where insecurity is; life is where danger is. There is no way to live totally unless you learn to live dangerously — more danger, more aliveness; less danger, less aliveness.

And I am making peaks upon peaks available to you. This is an unending chain. You will reach one peak thinking that this is the end and now you can rest, but by the time you have rested a little bit you will become aware of a higher peak challenging you, calling you forth. A new pilgrimage starts. And this goes on and on.

Life is an eternal pilgrimage. There is no goal to it, it is a pure journey. Hence the joy of it. If there was a goal to it, that would mean a full stop to your life. Then what are you going to do? After the full stop there is nothing, nothing more. Life knows nothing of full stops. Life is a continuum, a song that never ends, a story that goes on unfolding. Each moment something new is ready to happen if you are available.

Your observation is true. You say, “Unimagined ecstasy, unimagined pain.”

That’s how it has always been. I don’t talk much about the pain because that will make you so afraid that you will not take the jump. I talk about ecstasy to persuade you, to seduce you into taking the jump. Once you have taken the jump you will know that there is great pain too, but that pain is a blessing in disguise. That pain is the pain the gold passes through when it goes through the fire: it purifies, it makes you more and more integrated, it gives you centering, it creates a soul in you. Without this pain there is no soul, and without this pain no ecstasy is possible. You would like to bypass the pain and reach the ecstasy, but that cannot be done.

Aes dhammo sanantano: this is the law, and the law has to be followed; you can’t go against the law. But once you have known the ecstasy, it is worth going through all the pain. You can sacrifice everything for the ecstasy because ecstasy is another name for God approaching closer to you. Your melting into God is what ecstasy is all about.

The word “ecstasy” is beautiful; it simply means “standing out.” Out of what? Standing out of your ego, your personality, your mind; getting out of the whole structure in which you have lived — not only lived but with which you have become identified.

Standing out of all this, just a pure witness, a watcher on the hills — and everything is left deep down in the valley.

Drop the nostalgia. Drop this dreaming about the valley. You have lived in the valley long enough, and what have you gained? For many, many lives you have lived in the valley, in all those chains, thinking that they were ornaments. Maybe they were made of silver and gold, maybe they were studded with diamonds and emeralds; but whether a chain is made of iron or gold, it makes no difference. In fact, a golden chain is far more difficult to break because you become more attached to it.

You have lived in the valley so long, for so many lives — now try to live on the peaks. And be totally with the peaks. Forget all about the valleys because that will be a disturbance. That disturbance is creating pain. You are looking back again and again: there is still some desire, some longing, some hope that you may get back to your old structures again.

But let me make it absolutely clear to you: there is no going back. Now you have crossed that point from where a person can still go back, so it is an exercise in futility to feel pain for something which is no more. But it will keep you occupied and you will miss the joys of the peak, the fresh air of the peak, the unpolluted atmosphere of the peak, the closeness of the sun and the clouds. Now is the time to whisper with the clouds and with the sun and the stars! It is a beautiful moment.

Decide in favor of ecstasy, and whatever pain happens through that decision, accept it with joy, with thankfulness. The more gratefully you accept it as part of growth, the sooner it will disappear — and it will not leave even a trace on you; you will be unscratched by it. If you cling to it too long, it will leave wounds. Even if they heal, the marks will remain.

In these moments, when one passes from one stage of being to another stage of being, one is very vulnerable. In these moments one is very soft, impressionable. Don’t give much attention to pain.

And that’s what you have been doing for a few months. I have been watching silently. Many times, I have to be just a silent watcher because I hate to interfere. Even though I know you are in need, still I respect your freedom so much that, unless you ask, I will keep quiet, I will not say a word. I will feel great compassion for you — I am perfectly aware of your tears and the anguish that you are passing through — but I have been keeping myself aloof deliberately because this is the only way to give the disciple a chance to grow.

If I go on interfering at every stage, helping, supporting, you will start depending on me too much. Then you will never be able to walk on your own feet; you will always need crutches. And I don’t want to give you crutches, I don’t want you to be dependent on me. The only gift that I can give to you is that of total freedom, of independence.

Hence, I have been silent, waiting for the day when you would ask the question. Today you have asked the question. Now I can speak, I can share my understanding with you, but still the decision always remains with you. You can go on crying and weeping over spilled milk, or you can gather yourself and take a plunge into the new world that I have made available to you.

Don’t waste time. Time is really precious, far more precious than money, far more precious than anything in the world, because it is through time that you can contact eternity. And these moments are rare: if you miss them once, you never know when they will come back again. Maybe after lives you will come across a buddha again . . . and there is every possibility you will repeat the same mistakes because mind wants to repeat. Mind is repetition — even after lives it repeats the same mistakes.

It happened once: a young prince asked Buddha to initiate him as a bhikkhu, as a sannyasin. Buddha was a little reluctant. This was very rare — buddhas are never reluctant, or very rarely; they are always happy if somebody is asking for initiation.

Ananda, Buddha’s chief disciple, immediately became aware that Buddha was a little hesitant. He said, “Bhagwan, why are you hesitating? I have never seen you hesitate. You persuade people, you help people, you do everything possible to bring them to the way — and this man himself is asking! And not an ordinary man — a great prince, with great potential. If he becomes a disciple, many more will follow. Why are you hesitating?”

Buddha said to Ananda, “Because this young man has been initiated in the past by other buddhas at least seven times, and he has committed the same mistake again and again. And mind is repetitive. I know I can give him initiation, but he is bound to repeat the same mistake. But if you say so, I will initiate him. Now watch what happens.”

The young man was initiated . . . and of course this whole dialogue with Ananda had happened in front of him, so he was very conscious not to repeat anything. But he did not remember anything of his past lives, and when you don’t remember, how can you avoid repetition? If you remember, you can avoid.

He asked Buddha many times, “Please tell me, what is my mistake that I have been repeating again and again? And you say I have lived with seven other buddhas? I don’t want to miss this opportunity.”

Buddha said, “That won’t help very much because you have asked the sixth buddha the same question and the fifth also, and they answered. I am not going to do it. I will tell you only when the time arrives.”

And the time arrived within a few days. They traveled to another city; they were staying in a small caravanserai — ten thousand sannyasins — there was no space. It must have been as overcrowded as it is here! Now when I look at you, I completely forget whether you are sannyasins or sardines. I have to go on reminding myself, “No, these are my sannyasins.”

The older sannyasins of Buddha were given a little better space, a little more space — they were old, senior. This young man was the latest addition to the Buddha’s sangha — his order; he got the place at the outermost circumference, just in the porch where people used to put their shoes. He had to sleep there. A prince, sleeping in a porch where people keep their shoes? He was very hurt.

In the night he could not sleep, for the same reasons that you suffer — mosquitoes! They are the ancient-most enemies of meditators. If you are not meditating, they will not take any notice of you; once you start meditating, they suddenly become interested in you. The blood of a meditator has a certain sweetness.

And there were mosquitoes, and he was unable to sleep; and the serai was so overcrowded, and people were coming and going the whole night — somebody was coming, somebody was leaving. How can you sleep in a porch? In the middle of the night he said, “This is stupid, this is just nonsense! I have not become a sannyasin for all this. I had a beautiful palace, every facility. Tomorrow morning, I will say goodbye to Buddha.”

In fact, he wanted to leave at that very moment, but that would not be right. At least he had to say to Buddha, “I am finished.”

But before morning, Buddha came to him and said, “Now the time has come. I can answer your question. This has happened to you again and again: you have been initiated seven times, but just for small things you always became so much disturbed that you went away. You can go — this is your old habit. Because of this habit I was hesitant.”

He had brought Ananda with him and he said, “Look! What do you say now? This man wants to leave tomorrow morning.”

The young man had not said a single word. He fell at Buddha’s feet. He said, “How did you come to know in the middle of the night?”

Buddha said, “That is not your business. That’s what makes me a master. In the morning you want to go; you can go but go with this awareness: that this is how you have been losing the track again and again.”

The young man never left. It was difficult — Buddha gave him many, many uncomfortable situations — but he was a man of integrity; he belonged to a very famous family, ancient, noble; he belonged to the warrior race. It was against his whole upbringing to leave the Buddha. And now that Buddha had told him what the cause had been in the past . . . and as meditation deepened, he started remembering his past associations with other buddhas. Slowly, slowly he became aware that yes, for small things he had left buddhas; for such small things he had lost the way many times.

Yes, Sudha, the pain is there, and it is not only for you; others will also pass through the pain. Many have passed through it; many will have to pass through it. Pass through it joyously. Keep your eye on the ecstasy. Don’t focus yourself on the pain — that is the wrong approach. Focus yourself on the ecstasy and think that the pain is the price we pay for the ecstasy. Soon the pain will disappear. And the energy released from the pain will bring you to even higher realms of ecstasy, will bring you to greater altitudes of ecstasy.

Be watchful . . .

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.6 #6, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

This discourse is one of the listening meditations from Osho Dhamma and the Flowers of Awarefulness.

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

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Let the Mind have its Speed – Osho

During the meditations, my mind still goes five hundred miles per hour. I never experience silence, and whatever witnessing happens is very short, like flashes. Am I wasting my time?

Your mind is mighty slow. Five hundred miles per hour, only?! And do you think this is speed? Mighty slow you are. Mind knows no speed it goes so fast. It is faster than light. Light travels 186,000 miles is one second. Mind is faster than that. But nothing to be worried – that is the beauty of the mind, that is a great quality! Rather than taking it negatively, rather than fighting with it, befriend the mind.

You say: “During the meditations, my mind still goes five hundred miles per hour” – let it go! Let it go faster. You be a watcher. You watch the mind going around so fast, with such speed. Enjoy this! Enjoy this play of the mind.

In Sanskrit we have a special term for it; we call it chidvilas – the play of consciousness. Enjoy it! This play of mind rushing towards stars, moving so fast from here and there, jumping all over existence. What is wrong in it? Let it be a beautiful dance. Accept it.

My feeling is that what you are doing is you are trying to stop it – you cannot do that. Nobody can stop the mind! Yes, mind stops one day, but nobody can stop it. Mind stops, but that is not out of your effort. Mind stops out of your understanding.

You just watch and try to see what is happening, why this mind is rushing. It is not rushing without any reason. You must be ambitious. Try to see why this mind is rushing, where it is rushing – you must be ambitious. If it thinks about money, then try to understand. Mind is not the question. You start dreaming about money, that you have won a lottery or this and that, and then you even start planning how to spend it, what to purchase and what not. Or, the mind thinks you have become a president, a prime minister, and then you start thinking what to do now, how to run the country, or the world. Just watch the mind! What mind is going toward. There must be a deep seed in you. You cannot stop the mind unless that seed disappears.

The mind is simply following the order of your innermost seed. Somebody is thinking about sex; then somewhere there is repressed sexuality. Watch where mind is rushing. Look deep into yourself, find where the seeds are.

I have heard:

The parson was very much worried. “Listen,” he said to his verger, “somebody has stolen my bicycle.”

“Where have you been on it, Rector?” inquired that worthy.

“Only round the parish on my calls.”

The verger suggested that the best plan would be for the rector to direct his Sunday sermon to the ten commandments. “When you get to ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ you and I will watch the faces – we will soon see.”

Sunday came, the rector started in fine flow about the commandments, then lost his thread, changed his subject, and trailed off lamely.

“Sir,” said the verger, “I thought you were going to . . .”

“I know, Giles, I know. But you see, when I got to ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ I suddenly remembered where I had left my bicycle.”

Just see where you have left your bicycle. The mind is rushing for certain reasons. The mind needs understanding, awareness. Don’t try to stop it. If you try to stop it, in the first place you cannot succeed; in the second place, if you can succeed – one can succeed if one makes perseverant effort for years – if you can succeed, you will become dull. No satori will happen out of it.

In the first place, you cannot succeed; and it is good that you cannot succeed. If you can succeed, if you manage to succeed, that will be very unfortunate – you will become dull, you will lose intelligence. With that speed there is intelligence, with that speed there is continuous sharpening of the sword of thinking, logic, intellect. Please don’t try to stop it. I am not in favor of dullards, and I am not here to help anybody to become stupid.

In the name of religion, many people have become stupid, they have almost become idiots – just trying to stop the mind without any understanding about why it is going with such speed . . . why in the first place? The mind cannot go without any reason. Without going into the reason, in the layers, deep layers of the unconscious, they just try to stop. They can stop, but they will have to pay a price, and the price will be that their intelligence will be lost.

You can go around India, you can find thousands of sannyasins, mahatmas; look into their eyes – yes, they are good people, nice, but stupid. If you look in their eyes, there is no intelligence, you will not see any lightning. They are uncreative people; they have not created anything. They just sit there. They are vegetating, they are not alive people. They have not helped the world in any way. They have not even produced a painting or a poem or a song because even to produce a poem you will need intelligence; you will need certain qualities of the mind.

I would not suggest that you stop the mind; rather, that you understand. With understanding there happens a miracle. The miracle is that with understanding, by and by, when you understand the causes and those causes are looked into deeply, and through that looking deeply into those causes, those causes disappear, mind slows down. But intelligence is not lost because mind is not forced.

What are you doing if you don’t remove the causes by understanding? You are driving a car, for example, and you go on pressing the accelerator and at the same time you try to press the brake. You will destroy the whole mechanism of the car. And there is every possibility you will have some accident. This cannot be done together. If you are pushing the brake, then leave the accelerator; don’t push it anymore. If you are pushing the accelerator, then don’t push the brake. Don’t do both the things together, otherwise you will destroy the whole mechanism; you are doing two contradictory things. Ambition you carry on – and you try to stop the mind? Ambition creates the speed, so you are accelerating the speed – and putting a brake on the mind. You will destroy the whole subtle mechanism of the mind, and mind is a very delicate phenomenon, the most delicate in the whole of existence. So don’t be foolish about it.

There is no need to stop it. You say: “I never experience silence, and whatever witnessing happens is very short, like flashes.” Feel happy! Even that is something of tremendous value. Those flashes, they are not ordinary flashes. Don’t just take them for granted! There are millions of people for whom even those small glimpses have not happened. They will live and die and they will never know what witnessing is – even for a single moment. You are happy, you are fortunate. But you are not feeling grateful. If you don’t feel grateful, those flashes will disappear. Feel grateful – they will grow. With gratitude, everything grows. Feel happy that you are blessed – they will grow. With that positivity, things will grow.

“And whatever witnessing happens is very short.”

Let it be very short! If it can happen for a single split moment, it is happening; you will have the taste of it. And with the taste, by and by, you will create more and more situations in which it happens more and more. “Am I wasting my time?” You cannot waste time, because you don’t possess time. You can waste something that you possess. Time you don’t possess. Time will be wasted anyway whether you meditate or not – time will be wasted. Time is rushing by. Whatsoever you do, do anything, or don’t do anything, time is going. You cannot save time so how can you waste time? You can waste only something which you can save.

You don’t possess time. Forget about it!

And the best use you can have of time is to have these small glimpses – because finally you will come to see only those moments have been saved which were moments of witnessing, and all else has gone down the drain. The money that you earned, the prestige that you earned, the respectability that you earned, is all gone down the drain. Only those few moments that you had some flashes of witnessing, only those moments are saved. Only those moments will go with you when you leave this life – only those moments can go because those moments belong to eternity, they don’t belong to time.

But feel happy it is happening. It always happens slowly, slowly. But one drop by one drop a great ocean can become full. It happens in drops. But in the drops the ocean is coming. You just receive it with gratitude, with celebration, with thankfulness. And don’t try to stop the mind. Let the mind have its speed – you watch.

-Osho

From The Tantra Experience, Discourse #8, Q4 (previously titled Tantra Vision, V.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.

Witnessing is a Revolution – Osho

You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the nonexistence of our problems.

Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system – are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist, can be dropped immediately – now?

What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?

This is a very significant question – it is from Jayananda. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man.

The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain – this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backwards. It finds out from where the problem has arisen – maybe fifty years before, when you were a child, the problem arose in your relationship with your mother, then psychoanalysis will go back.

Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then, it doesn’t help much – because there are millions of problems. It is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems, you will need millions of lives. Let me repeat it: to solve one life’s problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is most impractical. This cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems . . . and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems. This is absurd!

Now, the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: Rolfing, bioenergetics, and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again, you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both the approaches – which are on the same logical pattern – that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.

Man’s mind has always been trying to do two impossible things. One is: to reform the past – which cannot be done. The past has happened. You cannot really go into the past. When you think of going into the past, at the most you go into the memory of it; it is not the real past, it is just the memory. The past is no more there, so you cannot reform it. This is one of the impossible goals of humanity; man has suffered very much because of it. You want to undo the past – how can you undo it? The past is absolute. The past means: all potentiality of it is finished; it has become actual. Now there is no longer any potentiality to reform it, to undo it, to redo it. You cannot do any thing with the past.

And the second impossible idea that has always dominated the human mind is: to establish the future – which again cannot be done. Future means that which is not yet; you cannot establish it. Future remains unestablished. Future remains open. Future is pure potentiality! Unless it happens, you cannot be certain about it.

Past is pure actuality – it has happened. Now nothing can be done about it.

Between these two, man stands in the present always thinking of the impossibles. He wants to make everything certain about the future, about tomorrow – which can not be done. Let it sink as deeply in your heart as possible: it cannot be done. Don’t waste your present moment for making the future certain. The future is uncertainty; that is the very quality of the future. And don’t waste your time looking back. The past has happened, it is a dead phenomenon. Nothing can be done about it. What, at the most, you can do is you can reinterpret it. That’s all. That’s what psychoanalysis is doing: reinterpreting it. Reinterpretation can be done – but the past remains the same.

Psychoanalysis and astrology: astrology tries somehow to make the future certain, and psychoanalysis tries to redo the past. Neither is a science. Both things are impossible, but both have millions of followers – because man likes it that way. He wants to be certain about the future, so he goes to the astrologer, he consults the I Ching, he goes to a Tarot reader, and there are a thousand and one ways to fool oneself, to deceive oneself.

And then there are people who say they can change the past – he consults them also.

Once these two things are dropped, you become free of all sorts of foolishnesses. Then you don’t go to the psychoanalyst and you don’t go to the astrologer. Then you know the past is finished . . . you also be finished with it. And the future has not happened; whenever it happens, we will see – nothing can be done about it right now. You can only destroy the present moment, which is the only moment available, real.

The West has been continuously looking into the problems, how to solve them. The West takes the problems very seriously. And when you are going in a certain logic, given the premises, that logic looks perfect.

I was just reading one anecdote:

A great philosopher, and world-renowned mathematician, is aboard an airplane. He is sitting in his seat and thinking great mathematical problems, when suddenly an announcement comes from the captain: “I am sorry, there will be a slight delay. Engine number one has cut out and we are now flying on three engines.”

About ten minutes later another announcement: “I am afraid there will be further delay – engines two and three have cut out and there is only number four left.”

So the philosopher turns to the fellow sitting next to him and says, “Good golly! If the other one cuts out, we will be up here all night!”

When you are thinking in a certain line, the very direction of it makes certain things possible, absurd things also possible. Once you have taken human problems very seriously, once you start thinking about man as a problem, you have accepted some premise, you have taken the first step wrongly. Now you can go into the direction, and you can go on and on. Now such great literature has come up in this century about mind phenomena, psychoanalysis; millions of papers are written and treatises and books. Once Freud opened the doors of a certain logic, it dominated the whole century.

The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it – that is the real thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.

For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, “Go into the past . . . how did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely.”

If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, “You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger – that is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, you just be a watcher, you just be a witness. You don’t get identified with the anger. Don’t say, ‘I am anger.’ Don’t say, ‘I am angry.’ Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else.”

You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you, just watch it, and remain alert so that you don’t get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learnt it . . . and then there is no question of “so many problems” – because the key, the same key will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex: it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.

The East says: just remain unidentified. Remember – that’s what Gurdjieff means when he says “self-remembering.” Remember that you are a witness! Be mindful! – that’s what Buddha says. Be alert that a cloud is passing by! Maybe the cloud comes from the past, but that is meaningless. It must have a certain past; it cannot come just out of the blue; it must be coming from a certain sequence of events – but that is irrelevant. Why be bothered about it? Right now, this very moment, you can become detached from it, you can cut yourself away from it. The bridge can be broken right now – and it can be broken only in the now.

Going into the past won’t help. Thirty years before, the anger arose, and you got identified with it that day. Now you cannot get unidentified from that past; it is no more there. But you can get unidentified this moment, this very moment. And then the whole series of angers of your past is no more part of you.

The question is relevant. Jayananda has asked: “You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family . . .”

You can, right now, become a non-Catholic. “Now!” I say. You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now, again, it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it, just as a snake slips out of the old skin.

“Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system – are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist . . .?”

No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don’t exist in your consciousness because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness remains free! Freedom is its innermost quality; freedom is its nature. In fact, even asking it, you are showing that freedom.

When you say “twenty-one years in a crazy educational system”; when you say “having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family” – in this moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic; otherwise, who will be aware? If you had really become Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.

If you can say “twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system,” one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed; it didn’t work. Jayananda, you are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad. Only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of a crazy system have failed; all that repressive conditioning has failed. It cannot really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof . . . it is there, I am not saying it is not there: but it is no more part of your consciousness.

This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything. There is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman – understanding the nonsense of nationalism, a second later you are no longer an Englishman. I am not saying that your white skin will change; it will remain white – but you are no more identified with the whiteness; you are no more against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no more an Englishman you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now, the Englishman is dead in the valley, and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched.

The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. And the whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.

Analysis is a vicious circle. If you really go into analysis, you will be simply puzzled – how is it possible? If, for example, you try to go into the past, where will you end? Where exactly? If you go into the past, where did your sexuality start? When you were fourteen years of age? But then it came out of the blue? It must have been getting ready in the body. So when? When you were born? But then when you were in the mother’s womb wasn’t it getting ready? Then when? The moment you were conceived? But before that? Half of your sexuality was mature in your mother’s egg and half of the sexuality was maturing in your father’s sperm. Now go on. Where will you end? You will have to go to Adam and Eve. And even then, it does not end: you will have to go to Father God Himself. Why in the first place did He create Adam? . . .

Analysis will always remain half, so analysis never helps anybody really. It cannot help. It makes you a little more adjusted to your reality, that’s all. It is a sort of adjustment. It helps you to attain a little bit of understanding about your problems, their genesis, how they have arisen. And that little intellectual understanding helps you to adjust to the society better, but you remain the same person. There is no transformation through it, there is no radical change through it.

Witnessing is a revolution. It is a radical change – from the very roots! It brings a totally new man into existence because it takes your consciousness out of all the conditionings. Conditionings are there in the body and in the mind, but consciousness remains unconditioned. It is pure, always pure. It is virgin. Its virginity cannot be violated.

The Eastern approach is to make you mindful of this virgin consciousness, of this purity, of this innocence. That’s what Saraha is saying to the king again and again. Our emphasis is on the sky and the Western emphasis is on the clouds. Clouds have a genesis; if you find out from where they come, you will have to go to the ocean, then to the sunrays and the evaporation of the water and the clouds forming . . . and you can go on, but it will be moving in a circle. The clouds form, then again, they come, fall in love with the trees, start pouring again into the earth, become rivers, go to the ocean, start evaporating, rising again on sunrays, become clouds, again fall on the earth . . . It goes on and on, round and round and round. It is a wheel. From where will you be out? One thing will lead to another, and you will be in the wheel.

The sky has no genesis. The sky is uncreated; it is not produced by anything. In fact, for anything to be, a sky is needed as a must, a priori; it has to exist before anything else can exist. You can ask the Christian theologian – he says, “God created the world.” Ask him whether before He created the world there was any sky or not. If there was no sky, where did God used to exist? He must have needed space. If there was no space, where did He create the world? Where did He put the world? Space is a must . . . even for God to exist. You cannot say, “God created space.” That would be absurd because then He would not have any space to exist. Space must precede God.

Sky has always been there. The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds, and helps you a little, but it doesn’t make you aware of your innermost core. Circumference – yes, you become a little more aware of the circumference but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone. You have to find the center of the cyclone. And that happens only through witnessing.

Witnessing will not change your conditioning. Witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists – not for you.

And now it is up to you. The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning – now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the mind-body and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don’t want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the body-mind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.

That’s how a buddha functions. You also use memory; a buddha also uses memory – but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism. For example, I am using language. When I have to use language, I use the mind and all the imprints, but continuously I am not the mind – that awareness is there. So I remain the boss, the mind remains a servant. When the mind is called, it comes; its utility is there – but it cannot dominate.

So, your question is right: problems will exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and not be a Catholic? No. Those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. No – but you can slip out of it. Now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.

“What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?”

They will be there but as a seed: potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without misery, you can have them. They will remain always available, but there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them. It will be your choice.

The future humanity will have to decide whether it has to go on the path of analysis or it has to change to the path of witnessing. I use both methods. I use analysis, particularly for seekers who come from the West – I put them in the groups. Those groups are analytical, those groups are by-products of psychoanalysis. They have grown: Freud will not be able to recognize encounter if he comes; or primal therapy will be difficult for him to recognize – what is happening? Have all these people gone mad? But they are offshoots of his work; he was the pioneer; without him there would be no primal therapy. He started the whole game.

When Western people come to me, I put them into the groups. That is good for them. They should start with what is easier for them. Then by and by, slowly I change. First, they go into cathartic groups like encounter, primal therapy, and then I start putting them into intensive enlightenment, then vipassana. Vipassana is a witnessing. From encounter to vipassana there is a great synthesis. When you move from encounter to vipassana, you are moving from West to East.

-Osho

– From The Tantra Experience, Discourse #6, Q2 (previously titled Tantra Vision, V.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.

Freedom is Responsibility – Osho

On the one hand you are giving ultimate freedom to do whatsoever we want to do, and on the other hand you are giving responsibility. With responsibility, I cannot use the word “freedom” as I want, hence I have to wait for the right meaning of freedom. The moment I get it, I get it with responsibility. Osho, when I understand, I feel “thank you.” Otherwise, I would like to use, and I have already used it, as a license.

It is one of the perennial questions of humanity: the question of freedom and responsibility. If you are free, you interpret it as if now there is no responsibility. Just a hundred years ago Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead, and man is free.” And the next sentence he wrote is, “Now you can do whatsoever you want to do. There is no responsibility. God is dead, man is free, and there is no responsibility.” There he was absolutely wrong; when there is no God, there is tremendous responsibility on your shoulders. If there is a God, he can share your responsibility. You can throw your responsibility on Him: you can say, “It is you who has made the world; it is you who has made me in this way; it is you who is finally, ultimately, responsible, not me. How can I be ultimately responsible? I am just a creature, and you are the creator. Why have you put seeds of corruption in me and seeds of sin in me from the beginning? You are responsible. I am free.” In fact, if there is no God, then man is absolutely responsible for his acts, because there is no way to throw responsibility on anybody else.

When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are responsible. You cannot throw responsibility on anybody else; you are alone. And whatsoever you do, it is your doing. You cannot say that somebody else forced you to do it — because you are free; nobody can force you! Because you are free, it is your decision to do something or not to do something. With freedom comes responsibility. Freedom is responsibility. But the mind is very cunning, the mind interprets in its own way: it always goes on listening to that which it wants to listen to. It goes on interpreting things in its own way. The mind never tries to understand what really is the truth. It has taken that decision already.

I have heard . . .

“I am a respectable man, doctor, but lately life has become intolerable because of my feelings of guilt and self-recrimination.” The patient gulped miserably before continuing.

“You see, I have recently fallen victim to an uncontrollable urge to pinch and fondle girls in the underground.”

“Dearie me,” tutted the psychiatrist consolingly, “we must certainly help you to rid yourself of this unfortunate urge. I can quite see how distressing . . .”

The patient broke in anxiously, “It is not so much the urge I wanted you get rid of for me, doctor, it is the guilt.”

People go on talking about freedom, but they don’t want freedom exactly, they want irresponsibility. They ask for freedom, but deep down, unconsciously, they ask for irresponsibility, license.

Freedom is maturity; license is very childish. Freedom is possible only when you are so integrated that you can take the responsibility of being free. The world is not free because people are not mature. Revolutionaries have been doing many things down through the centuries, but everything fails. Utopians have been continuously thinking of how to make man free, but nobody bothers — because man cannot be free unless he is integrated. Only a Buddha can be free, a Mahavira can be free, a Christ, a Mohammed can be free, a Zarathustra can be free, because freedom means the man is now aware. If you are not aware then the state is needed, the government is needed, the police are needed, the court is needed. Then freedom has to be cut from everywhere. Then freedom exists only in name; in fact, it doesn’t exist. How can freedom exist when governments exist? — it is impossible. But what to do?

If governments disappear, there will simply be anarchy. Freedom will not come in if governments disappear, there will simply be anarchy. It will be a worse state than it is now. It will be sheer madness. The police are needed because you are not alert. Otherwise, what is the point of having a policeman standing on the crossroad? If people are alert, the policeman can be removed, will have to be removed, because it is unnecessary. But people are not conscious.

So when I say “freedom,” I mean be responsible. The more responsible you become, the more free you become; or the more free you become, the more responsibility comes on you. Then you have to be very alert to what you are doing, what you are saying. Even about your small unconscious gestures, you have to be very alert — because there is nobody else to control you, it is only you. When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are a God. It is not license; it is tremendous discipline.

-Osho

From The Beloved, V.2 #10, Q5

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.