Tag: awareness

How can You Feel Awareness Without Being Aware – Osho

Daily in each of your talks, you speak of awareness – total awareness, uninterrupted awareness, etcetera. You also said that it cannot be achieved by the mind, by repeating a thought – that it is to be felt. But how can one feel unless one achieves it? What is that feeling which is the precursor of achievement? How to imagine or project that which has not yet happened? Does that too happen by excluding mind? What is the whole process? How can it be made feasible?”

When I say that awareness cannot be attained by mind, I mean that you cannot attain it by thinking about it. You can go on thinking about and about, but you will be moving in a circle. When I say that it cannot be attained by the mind, I mean that it cannot be attained by thinking. You have to practice it; you have to do it. It can be attained only by doing, not by thinking; that is the first thing. So don’t go on thinking about what awareness is, how to achieve it or what will be the result. Don’t go on thinking; start doing it.

When walking on the street, walk with awareness. It is difficult and you go on forgetting, but don’t be afraid. Whenever you remember again, be alert. Take every step with full alertness, knowingly, remaining with the step, not allowing the mind to move somewhere else. While eating, eat; chew with awareness. Whatsoever you are doing, don’t do it mechanically – and that is different. And when I say that it can be felt only, the meaning is this: for example, I can raise my hand mechanically, but then I can also raise my hand with full alertness. My mind is conscious that my hand is being raised. Do it, try it – once mechanically and then with alertness. You will feel the change. The quality changes immediately.

Walk with alertness, and you walk differently; a different grace comes to your walking. You move more slowly, more beautifully. If you walk mechanically – only because you know how to walk and there is no need to be alert – then the walking is ugly, there is no grace in it. Do whatsoever you are doing with alertness and feel the difference. When I say “feel,” I mean observe. First do it mechanically and then with awareness and feel the difference. And you will be able to feel the difference.

For example, if you eat with awareness, then you cannot eat more than is needed by the body. People go on coming to me and they say, “Put us on a diet. My weight is constantly increasing, the body is constantly hoarding. Put us on a diet.”

I tell them, “Don’t think of diet, think of consciousness. By dieting nothing will happen. You cannot do it. You will do it one day and the next day it will go. You cannot continue it. Rather, eat with awareness.”

The quality changes. If you eat with awareness, you will chew more. With unconscious, mechanical habits, you simply go on pushing things into your stomach. You are not chewing at all; you are just stuffing. Then there is no pleasure, and because there is no pleasure, you need more food in order to get the pleasure. There is no taste, so you need more food.

Just be alert and see what happens. If you are alert, you will chew more, you will feel the taste more, you will feel the pleasure of eating, and much more time will be taken. If you take half an hour to eat your meal, then by taking the same quantity of a meal with full awareness you will need one and a half hours – thrice the time. In half an hour you will have eaten only one-third of the quantity, and you will feel more fulfilled; you will have enjoyed the meal more. And when the body enjoys, it tells you when to stop. When the body has not enjoyed at all, it never says when to stop, so you go on. Then the body becomes dull. You never hear what the body is saying.

You are eating without being there; that creates the problem. Be there, and every process will be slowed down. The body will itself say, “No more!” And when the body says it, that is the right moment. If you are aware, you cannot trespass the body’s order. You will stop. So allow your body to say something. The body is saying things every moment, but you are not there to hear it. Be alert and you will hear it.

And when I say, “Feel it!” I know it is difficult. How can you feel awareness without being aware? I am not saying that you can feel Buddha’s enlightenment right now, but one has to start somewhere. You may not get the whole ocean, but a drop – just a drop – will give you the taste, and the taste is the same. If even for a single moment you become aware, you have tasted buddhahood. It is momentary, a glimpse of it, but now you know more. And this will never happen to you through thinking; it will happen only through feeling.

The emphasis is on feeling because the emphasis is on a “lived” experience. Thinking is false, you can go on thinking about love and creating theories. You can even get a doctorate on the thesis of love, on what love is, and without ever being in love. You may not know what love is; you may have never felt it. You can grow in knowledge without in any way growing in being. And these are two different dimensions. You can go on growing in knowledge. Your head will go on growing bigger and bigger, but you will remain the same tiny self.

Then nothing is growing really – only accumulation. When you start feeling things, you grow, your being grows. And one has to start somewhere, so start! There will be errors, there are bound to be. You will go on forgetting, it is natural. But don’t get frustrated, don’t throw the effort away saying, “I cannot do it.” You can do it! The same possibility exists in you that existed in Jesus or Buddha. You are the seed; you are not lacking anything at all. You are just an arrangement; you are just a chaotic whole; everything is there. You can become a buddha, but a reorganization of your qualities is needed.

Right now, you are chaotic because there is no arrangement. The arrangement comes in when you start being aware. Just by your being aware things start falling in line, and this chaos that you are becomes a symphony.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #48, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Start Remembering Yourself – Osho

In which way can the practice of self-remembering transform the human mind?

Man is not centered in himself. He is born centered, but the society, the family, the education, the culture, they push him off-center, and they put him off-center in a very cunning way, knowingly or unknowingly. So everyone becomes, in a sense, “eccentric” – off the center. There are reasons, survival reasons for it.

When a child is born, he has to be forced into a certain discipline. He cannot be allowed freedom. If he is allowed total freedom, he will remain with the center – spontaneous, living with himself, living himself. He will be original as he is. He will be authentic, and then there will be no need to practice any self-remembering. There will be no need to practice any meditation because he will never go off the center. He will remain with himself – centered, rooted, grounded in his own being. But this has not yet been possible. Meditation is, therefore, medicinal. The society creates the disease, and then the disease has to be treated.

Religion is medicinal. If a human society really based in freedom can be evolved, there would be no need of religion. Because we are ill medicine is needed, and because we are off-center methods of centering are needed. If someday it becomes possible on earth to create a healthy society, healthy in the inner sense, there will be no religion. But it seems difficult to create such a society.

The child has to be disciplined. What are you doing when you are disciplining a child? You are forcing something which is not natural to him. You are asking and demanding something which he will never do spontaneously. You will punish him, you will appreciate [him], you will bribe him, you will do everything to make him social – to take him away from his natural being. You will create a new center in his mind which was never there, and this center will grow, and the natural center will go into oblivion, into the unconscious.

Your natural center has moved into the unconscious, into the dark, and your unnatural center has become your conscious. There is really no division between unconscious and conscious; the division is created. You are one consciousness. This division comes because your own center has been forced to some dark corner. Even you are not in contact with it; you are not allowed to be in contact with it. You yourself have become unconscious that you have a center. You live what the society, the culture, the family have taught you to live.

You live a false life. For this false life, a false center is needed. That center is your ego, your conscious mind. That is why, no matter what you do, you will never be blissful – because only the real center can happen, only the real center can explode, can come to the climax, the optimum, of the possibility of bliss. The false center is a shadow game. You can play with it, you can hope with it, but ultimately nothing but frustration comes out of it. With a false anxiety that is bound to be so.

In a way everything is forcing you not to be yourself, and this cannot be changed just by saying that this is wrong, because society has its own needs. A child, when born, is just like an animal – spontaneous, centered, grounded, but so independent. He cannot become part of an organization. He is disturbing. He has to be forced, cultivated and changed. In this cultivation he has to be pushed off-center.

We live on the periphery, and we live only to the extent that the society allows us. Our freedom is false because the rules of the game, of the social game, are so deeply fixed that you may feel that you are choosing this and that, but you are not choosing. The choice comes from your cultivated mind, and this goes on in a mechanical way.

I am reminded of a man who married eight women in his life. He married one woman, then divorced her, then married another – very cautiously, very carefully, very carefully, in order not to fall into the old trap again. In every way he calculated, and he was thinking that this new woman was going to be totally different than the first one. But within a few days, with the honeymoon not yet even over, the new woman started to prove herself to be just the same as the old one, the first one. Within six months the marriage was shattered again. He married a third woman and now he was still more cautious, but again the same thing happened.

He married eight women, and every time the woman turned out to be the same as the old one. What was happening? And he was choosing very cautiously now, very carefully. What was happening? The chooser was unconscious. He couldn’t change the chooser, and the chooser was always the same, so the choice was going to be the same. And the chooser works unconsciously.

You go on doing this and that, and you go on changing outward things, but you remain the same. You remain off-center. Whatsoever you do, howsoever it is apparently different, it ultimately proves to be the same. The results are always the same; the outcome is always the same; the consequence is always the same.

Whenever you feel you are choosing and you are free, then too you are not free, and you are not choosing. The choice is also a mechanical thing. Scientists say, biologists particularly, that the mind becomes imprinted, and that happens very early. The first two or three years are the years for imprinting, and things become fixed in the mind. Then you go on doing the same; you go on repeating in a mechanical way. You are moving in a vicious circle.

The child is forced to be off-center. He has to be disciplined; he has to learn obedience. That is why we give so much value to obedience. And obedience destroys everyone, because obedience means now you are not the center: the other is the center; you are just to follow him.

Education is a necessity in order to survive, but we make this necessity to survive an excuse for submitting. We force everyone to be obedient. What does it mean? Obedient to whom? Always someone else – the father, the mother, someone else is there, and you have to be obedient to him. Why so much insistence for obedience? Because your father was forced to be obedient when he was a child; your mother was forced to be obedient when she was a child. They were forced off their centers; now they are doing the same. They are doing the same with their children, and these children will do the same again. This is how the vicious circle moves on.

Freedom is killed, and with freedom you lose your center. Not that the center is destroyed; it cannot be destroyed while you are alive. It would be good if it was destroyed; you would be more at ease with yourself. If you were totally false and there was no real center hidden within you, you would be at ease. There would be no conflict, no anxiety, no struggle.

The conflict comes into existence because the real remains there. It remains in the center, and just on the periphery an unreal center is created. Between these two centers a constant struggle, a constant anxiety, tension, is created. This must be transformed, and there is only one way: the false must disappear and the real must be given its place. You must be re-grounded into your center, into your being; otherwise, you will be in anguish.

The false can disappear. The real cannot disappear unless you die. While you are alive the real will be there. The society can do only one thing: it can push it deep down and it can create a barrier so that even you become unconscious of it. Can you remember any moment in your life when you were spontaneous, when you just lived in the moment – when you were living yourself and you were not following someone else?

I was reading one memoir of a poet. His father had died, and the dead body was put in a coffin. The poet, the son, was weeping, crying, and then suddenly he kissed the forehead of his father’s dead body and said, “There, now that you are dead, I can do this. I always wanted to kiss you on your forehead, but while you were alive it was impossible. I was so afraid of you.”

You can kiss only a dead father – and even if the alive father allows you to kiss, the kiss is going to be false; it cannot be spontaneous. A young boy cannot even kiss his mother spontaneously because always the fear of sex is there; the bodies must not come too closely in contact, even with the mother. Everything becomes false. There is fear and falsity – no freedom, no spontaneousness, and the real center can function only when you are spontaneous and free.

Now you will be able to understand what my attitude towards this question is: “In which way can the practice of self-remembering transform the human mind?” It will re-ground you; it will give you again roots into your own center. By self-remembering, you are forgetting everything other than yourself: the society, the mad world around you, the family, the relationships, everything, you are forgetting. You are simply remembering that you are.

This remembrance is not given by the society to you. This self-remembrance will detach you from all that is peripheral. And if you can remember, you will fall back to your own being, to your own center. The ego will be there just on the periphery, but you will be able to see it now. Like any other object, you will be able to observe it. And once you become capable of observing your ego, your false center, you will never be false again.

You may need your false center because you have to live in a society which is false. You will be able to use it now, but you will never be identified with it. It will be instrumental now. You will live on your center, in your center. You will be able to use the false as a social convenience, a convention, but you will not be identified with it. Now you know you can be spontaneous, free. Self-remembering transforms you because it gives you the opportunity to be yourself again – and to be oneself is the ultimate and to be oneself is the absolute.

The peak of all the possibilities, of all the potentialities, is the divine – or whatsoever you want to call it. God is not somewhere in the past; he is your future. You have heard it said again and again that God is the father. More significantly, he is going to be your son, not the father, because he is going to evolve out of you. So I say, “God the son,” because the father is in the past and the son is in the future.

You can become divine, God can be born out of you; if you are authentically yourself, you have taken the basic step. You are going towards divinity, towards total freedom. As a slave you cannot move to that. As a slave, as a false person, there is no path leading towards the divine, to the ultimate possibility, the ultimate flowering of your being. First you must be centered in yourself. Self-remembering helps and only self-remembering helps; nothing else can transform you. With the false center there is no growth – only accumulation – and remember the distinction between accumulation and growth. With the false center you can accumulate: you can accumulate wealth, you can accumulate knowledge, you can accumulate anything, without any growth. Growth happens only to the real center. Growth is not an accumulation; you are not burdened by growth. Accumulation is a burden.

You can know many things without knowing anything. You can know much about love without knowing love. Then it is an accumulation. If you know love, then it is growth. You can know much about love with the false center; you can love only with the real center. Real centers can mature. The false can only get bigger and bigger without any growth, without any maturity. The false is just a cancerous growth, an accumulation, burdening you like a disease.

But you can do one thing: you can change your focus totally. From the false, you can move your eyes to the real. This is what is meant by self-remembering: whatsoever you are doing, remember yourself – that you are. Don’t forget it. The very remembering will give an authentic reality to whatsoever you are doing. If you are loving, first remember that you are; otherwise you will be loving from the false center. And from the false center you can only pretend; you cannot love. If you are praying, first remember that you are; otherwise the prayer is going to be just nonsense, just a deception. And you are not deceiving anyone else; you are deceiving yourself.

First remember that you are, and this remembering that “I am” must become so basic that it follows you like a shadow. Then even while asleep it will enter, and you will remember. If you can remember the whole day, by and by, it enters even in your dreams, even in your sleep, and you will know that “I am.”

The day you can know even in your sleep that you are, you are grounded in your center. Now the false is no more; it is not a burden to you. You can use it now, it is instrumental. You are not a slave to it, you have become the master.

Krishna says in the Gita that while everyone is asleep, the yogi is not: he is awake. It is not meant that the yogi lives without sleep, because sleep is a biological, bodily necessity. What is meant is that he remembers even in his sleep that he is – that “I am.” Sleep is just on the periphery. In the center the remembrance is there.

The yogi remembers even while he is asleep, and you are not remembering yourself even while you are awake. You are walking on the street, but you are not remembering that you are. Try, and you will feel a change of quality. Try to remember that you are. Suddenly a new lightness comes to you, the heaviness disappears; you become weightless. You are thrown off the false center to the real once again, but it is difficult and arduous because we are so much grounded in the false. It will take time, but no transformation is possible without self-remembering becoming effortless for you. You simply start remembering yourself; otherwise, no transformation is possible.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #36, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Seedless Samadhi – Osho

In the state of nirvichara samadhi, an object is experienced in its full perspective, because in this state knowledge is gained direct, without the use of the senses.

The perception gained in nirvichara samadhi transcends all normal perceptions both in extent and intensity.

When this controlling of all other controls is transcended, the seedless samadhi is attained, and with it, freedom from life and death.

-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

Knowledge is indirect, knowing is direct. Knowledge is through many mediums; it is not reliable. Knowing is immediate, without any medium. Only knowing can be reliable.

This distinction has to be remembered. Knowledge is like a messenger comes and tells something to you: the messenger may have misunderstood the message; the messenger may have added something of his own into the message; the messenger may have dropped something from the message; the messenger may have forgotten something from the message; the messenger may have added his own interpretations into it, or the messenger may be simply cunning and deceptive. And you have to rely on the messenger. You don’t have any direct approach to the source of the message – this is knowledge.

Knowledge is not reliable, and not only one messenger is involved in knowledge, but four. Man is behind many closed doors, imprisoned. First knowledge comes to the senses; then the senses carry it through the nervous system, it reaches to the brain, and then the brain delivers it to the mind, and then the mind delivers it to you, to the consciousness. It is a vast process, and you don’t have any direct approach to the source of knowledge. […]

This is how the mechanism of knowledge functions. It is very difficult in this process to check anywhere unless you can come out of yourself. Mind cannot do that because the mind cannot exist outside the body. It has to depend on the brain; it is rooted in the brain. The brain cannot do it because the brain is rooted in the whole nervous system; it cannot come out. Only at one point the possibility exists to check, and that is at consciousness.

Consciousness is not rooted in the body; the body is just an abode. As you come out of your house and go in, consciousness can come out of the house and go in. Only consciousness can come out of this whole mechanism and look at things, what is happening.

In nirvichara samadhi this happens – thoughts cease. The connection between the mind and the consciousness is cut, because thought is the connection. Without thought you don’t have any mind, and when you don’t have any mind the connection with the brain is broken. And when you don’t have any mind and the connection with the brain is broken, the connection with the nervous system is broken. Your consciousness now can float out and in; all doors are open. In nirvichara samadhi, when thoughts cease, consciousness is free to move and float. It becomes like a cloud without any roots, without any home. It becomes free of the mechanism you have lived with. It can come out; it can go in; there is no hindrance on its path.

Now direct knowledge is possible. Direct knowledge is knowing. Now you can see immediately, without any messengers between you and the source of knowledge. It is a tremendous phenomenon when your consciousness comes out and looks at a flower. You cannot imagine because it is not part of imagination; you cannot believe what happens! When the consciousness can look direct to the flower, for the first time the flower is known, and not only the flower, through the flower the whole existence. In a small pebble, the all is hidden; in a small leaf dancing in the wind, the whole dances. In a small flower by the side of the road, the whole has a smile.

When you come out of your prison of senses, nervous system, brain, mind, layers and layers of walls, suddenly individuals disappear. A vast energy in millions of forms . . . and every form indicating towards the formless, and every form melting and merging into other forms – a vast ocean of formless beauty, truth, goodness. Hindus call it sat-chit-ananda: that which is, that which is beautiful, that which is good, that which is blissful. This is direct perception, aprokshanubhuti, immediate knowing.

Otherwise, all your knowing is indirect, depends on messengers which are not very reliable – cannot be. Their very nature is unreliable. Why? Your hand touches something; now the hand is an unconscious thing. From the very beginning an unconscious part of you takes the message. Intelligence is hidden behind, and on the door an idiot is sitting, and the idiot takes the message. The idiot is the receptionist. The hand is not conscious, and the hand touches something and receives the message. Now through the nerves the message travels. Nerves are not conscious; they don’t have any intelligence – so from one idiot to another now the message is given. From the first idiot to the second much must have changed.

In the first place, the idiot cannot be a hundred percent true because he cannot understand; understanding is not there. The hand is dull, very dull. It carries the work in a mechanical way, robot-like. The message is delivered; much has changed already. The nerves take it to the brain and the brain decodes it. And the brain is also not very much intelligent, because the brain is part of the body, it is the other end of the hand.

If you know something of physiology, you must be knowing that the right hand is connected to the left hemisphere of the brain and the left hand to the right hemisphere of the brain. Your two hands are two receiving ends of the brain. They function for the brain; they are extended brain. Your right hand carries the message to the left brain, your left hand to the right brain. Brain is also not alert; brain is just like a computer – something is fed to it, it decodes, it is a mechanism. Sooner or later we will be able to make plastic brains, because they will be cheap, and they will endure more, and they will create less trouble. And they can be operated very easily, and the parts can be changed: you can even have spare parts always with you.

Brain is a mechanism, and by the discovery of computers it has become perfectly clear that brain is a mechanism; it has no intelligence in it. Then the brain accumulates the whole information, decodes it, gives the message to the mind. Your mind has a little intelligence; very little of that too . . . because your mind is not alert. Your hand is mechanical; your brain is mechanical; your nervous system mechanical, and your mind is asleep, as if drunk. So, from one idiot to another idiot then finally to a drunkard the message reaches!

Gurdjieff used to give vast, big dinners for his disciples, and the first toast was always for the idiots. These are the idiots.

And then this drunkard, half asleep, half awake, interprets it according to the past, because there is no other way. According to the past the mind interprets the present. Everything is going wrong because the present is always new and the mind is always old. But there is no other way; the mind cannot do anything else. It has accumulated much knowledge in the past through these same idiots, as unreliable as anything, and that past is brought to the present, and the present is understood through the past. Everything goes wrong. It is almost impossible to know anything through this process.

That’s why Hindus call the whole world that is known through this process maya, illusion, dreamlike; it is. You have not known the reality yet. These four messengers won’t allow you, and you don’t know how to avoid these messengers or how to come out into the open. The situation is as if you are closed in a dark cell, and just through the keyhole you are looking out, and the keyhole is not passive, the keyhole is active – it interprets, it says, “No, you are wrong; this is not so, this is like this.” Your hand interprets, your nervous system interprets, your brain interprets, and finally the drunkard interprets. And that interpretation is given to you and you live through that interpretation. This is the state of the ignorant mind, the state of the unenlightened.

In nirvichara samadhi, this whole state is shattered. You suddenly come out of this whole mechanism. You don’t rely on it; you simply drop the whole mechanism. You come directly to the source of knowledge; you look immediately to the flower.

This is possible. This is possible only in the highest state of meditation, nirvichara, when thoughts cease. Thought is the link. When thoughts cease, the whole mechanism ceases, and you are separate. Suddenly you are no more imprisoned. You are not looking through the keyhole. You have come out into the world under the sky, open. You look at things as they are, and you will see that things don’t exist; they were your interpretations. Only beings exist; there are no things in the world. Even a rock is a being, howsoever fast asleep, snoring; a rock is a being because the ultimate source is a being. All its parts are beings, souls. A tree is a being, a bird is a being, a rock is a being. Suddenly, the world of things disappears. “Thing” is the interpretation of these idiots and the drunkard mind. Because of this process everything becomes dull. Because of this process only the surface is touched. Because of this process you miss the reality; you live in a dream.

You can create a dream in this way. Just try someday: your wife is sleeping, or your husband, or your child – just rub a cube of ice on the feet of the sleeping person. Do it just a little, not too much, otherwise he will be awakened – just a little and put it away. Immediately you will see the eyes under the lids are moving fast, what psychologists call REM, rapid eye movement. When the eyes are moving rapidly, a dream has started. Because the person is seeing something, that’s why the eyes are moving so fast. Then just in the middle of the dream, you wake the person and ask what he saw. Either he would have seen that he is passing through a river which is very cold, ice cold, or he is walking on snow, or he has reached to the Gourishankar: something like this he will dream. You created a dream because you deceived the first idiot, you touched the feet [with] ice. Immediately the idiot started working, the second idiot was given the message, the third idiot decoded; the fourth, the drunkard – which is also asleep now – immediately started a dream.

You can create dreams; you create many times, unknowingly. Your both hands are on your chest and you are lying on your bed, and you feel that somebody is sitting on your chest, a monster. And when you open your eyes, nobody is there – your own hands, or a pillow.

The same is happening while you are awake. It makes no difference because the whole mechanism is the same; whether the eyes are opened or closed doesn’t make much difference, because there can be no check on the process. Even if you want to check, you will have to go through the whole process itself. How can you check unless you can come out and see what is happening?

This possibility is the whole world of spirituality: that the final consciousness can come out. Drop the whole mechanism, look at the thing directly: “things” disappear. That’s why Hindus say this world is not real, and for the real knower it disappears. Not that rocks will not be there and trees will not be there, they will be there even more so, but they will be no more trees, no more rocks; they will be beings. Your mind turns beings into things: your wife is a thing to be used; your husband is a thing to be possessed; your servant is a thing to be exploited; your boss is a thing to be deceived. The mind, because of this whole idiotic process, turns every being into a thing. When you come out of the mind and have a look under the open sky, suddenly there is nothing at all. “Thingness” disappears.

When thoughts drop, the second thing to drop is the thing. Suddenly the whole world is full of beings, beautiful beings, supreme beings, because they all participate into the ultimate being of God. Definitions disappear – you cannot separate. All separation existed because of the mechanism. Suddenly you see a tree moving out of the earth, not separate, meeting with the sky, not separate, everything joined together; everybody is a member of everybody else. The whole world becomes a net of consciousness, millions and millions of consciousnesses, luminous, kindled from within, every house lighted. Bodies disappear because bodies belong to the world of things. Forms are there but they are no more material; they are forms of moving, dynamic energy, and they go on changing. That is what is happening.

You were a child, now you are young, now you are old. What is happening? – you don’t have a fixed form. The form is continuously flowing and changing. A child is becoming a young man, the young man is becoming old, the old is moving into death.

Then you suddenly see: birth is not birth, death is not death. There are changing forms, and the formless remains the same. You can see that luminous formlessness always remaining the same, moving amidst millions of forms, changing, yet not changing; moving, yet not moving; becoming everything else and yet remaining the same. And that’s the beauty and the mystery; then life is one – a vast ocean of life. Then you don’t see alive beings and dead beings, no, because death doesn’t exist. It is because of the mechanism, a wrong interpretation.

Neither exists birth nor death. That which exists is birthless and deathless, eternal. But this is how it looks when you come out of the mind.

Now try to penetrate the sutras of Patanjali.

In the state of nirvichara samadhi, an object is experienced in its full perspective, because in this state knowledge is gained direct, without the use of the senses.

When senses are not used, when the keyhole is not used to look at the sky – because the keyhole will give its own frame to the sky and destroy everything –the sky will not be bigger than the keyhole, cannot be. How can your perspective be bigger than your eyes? How can your touch be bigger than your hands, and how can a sound be deeper than your ears? – impossible! The eyes, ears, nose are keyholes: through them you are looking at reality. And suddenly you jump out of yourself, in nirvichara; for the first time the vastness, the infinity is known. Now the full perspective is attained. The beginning is not there, the end is not there. There are no boundaries in existence. It is unbounded; there are no limitations. All limitations belong to your senses; they were given by the senses. Existence itself is infinite; in all directions you go on and on and on. There is no end to it.

When the full perspective is attained, then for the first time the subtlest ego that was still clinging to you disappears. Because the existence is so vast – how can you cling to a small puny ego? […]

Under the vast sky your ego becomes simply irrelevant. It drops on its own accord. Even to drop it looks foolish; it is not even worth that. When the perspective is full, you disappear: this is the point to be understood. You are because the perspective is narrow. The narrower the perspective, the bigger the ego; the blinder the person, the bigger the ego . . . No perspective, there exists perfect ego. When the perspective grows, ego gets smaller and smaller. When the perspective is perfect, ego simply is not found.

This is my whole effort here – to make the perspective so full that the ego disappears. That’s why from many directions I go on hitting the wall of your mind, so at least a few more keyholes in the beginning can be made. Through Buddha a new keyhole opens, through Patanjali another, through Tilopa still another. That is what I am doing. I don’t want you to become a follower of Buddha, Tilopa or Patanjali, no, because a follower can never have a bigger perspective – his doctrine is his keyhole.

Talking about so many standpoints, what I am trying to do? – I am trying to do only this: to give you a bigger perspective. Many keyholes in the walls and you can look at the east and you can look at the west, you can look at the south and you can look at the north; and looking at the east you don’t say, “This is the only direction,” you know other directions are there. Looking at the east, you don’t say that “This is the only true doctrine,” because then the perspective becomes narrow. I am talking about so many doctrines so that you can be freed of all directions and all doctrines.

Freedom comes through understanding. The more you understand, the more you become free. And by and by, when you come to know that through so many holes your old keyhole has just become out of date, doesn’t mean much, then an urge arises in you: what will happen if you break down all these walls and just simply run out? Even a single new hole and the whole perspective changes, and you come to know things which you have never known, not even imagined, not even dreamed. What will happen when all the walls disappear, and you are directly face to face with reality under the open sky?

And when I say under the open sky, remember that the sky is not a thing, it is a nothingness. It is everywhere, but you cannot find it anywhere; it is a nothingness. It is simply a vastness. So I never say God is vast – God is vastness. Existence is not vast, because even a vast existence will have limitations. Howsoever vast, somewhere the boundary must be there. Existence is vastness.

That is the Hindu conception of brahma. Brahma means: that which goes on expanding. The very word brahma means that which goes on expanding. The expanse is brahma. In English there is no word; you cannot call brahma God because God is very limited, a concept. Brahma is not God. That’s why in India we don’t have a conception of one God, but many gods. Gods are many; brahma is one. And by brahma . . . the very word simply means the vastness, the expanse; you cannot exhaust it.

That is the meaning when I say under the sky, the open sky: with no walls around it, no doctrines, no senses, no thoughts, no mind; you are simply out of the mechanism, for the first time naked, face to face with reality. Then [in] its full perspective . . . an object is experienced in its full perspective, and to experience an object in its full perspective means that the object simply disappears and becomes the vastness. It may be a focusing of energy.

It is just like, go and look at a well. A quantity of water is there in the well; if you draw the water out, more water is supplied through the hidden springs. You don’t see the springs. You go on taking the water out and new water is continuously flowing. The well is just a hole to the ocean. Many hidden springs are bringing water from all around. If you enter into the well, the well is nothing; really those springs are the things, the real things. The well is not a storage, because in a storage there are no springs. A storage is dead; a well is alive. A storage is a thing; a well is a person. Move now with the springs, go deeper into the springs, and finally you will reach to the ocean. And if you move through all the springs, then from all directions the ocean is flowing in the well: it is all one.

If you look at an object with full perspective, the object is joined from every part of it with infinity; it cannot exist without that. No object exists independently. There is no individuality. Individuality is just an interpretation. Everywhere the whole exists. If you make the part the whole, you are misguided. That is the standpoint of ignorance – then you make the part as if it is the whole. When you look at the part and the whole appears in it, this is the standpoint of an awakened consciousness.

An object is experienced in its full perspective, because in this state knowledge is gained direct, without the use of the senses.

No mediums are used; then many new things suddenly become possible. These new things are the siddhis, the powers. When you have no dependence on the senses, telepathy becomes simply possible. It is because of the senses telepathy is not possible. Clairvoyance becomes simply possible. It is because of the senses clairvoyance is not possible. Miracles become ordinary things. You can read anybody’s thought; there is no need for him to say, no need for him to communicate it. With full perspective, everything becomes revealed, all the veils are taken up. Now there are no more veils; the whole reality is before you. Materialization of things becomes possible. Just whatsoever you want to do, immediately it happens; action is not needed. Action was needed because of the body.

That’s what Lao Tzu means when he says, “The sage lives in inactivity and everything happens.” Millions of things happen around a sage without his doing anything. He looks at you and suddenly there is a transformation – suddenly you are no longer the body; while he looks you have become a consciousness.

Of course this cannot be permanent with you, because when his look has moved you are again the body. Just by being near him you become citizens of some unknown world. You have a taste of the unknown through him because he is now the vast sky himself. Not doing anything, many things happen. But when these things become possible . . . the desires of the sage have disappeared before these things become possible, so a sage never does any miracle. And those who do miracles are not sages, because the doer is not there, and their miracles cannot be miracles; they are ordinary magical tricks. They are fooling people and deceiving them.

A miracle happens – cannot be done. It happens near the sage. Not that he produces Swiss-made watches . . . […]

Miracles happen only when nirvichara samadhi is attained and you come out of your body, but they are never done. That is the basic quality of a miracle – it is never done, it happens, and when it happens, it never produces Swiss-made watches. To attain to nirvichara samadhi and then to produce Swiss-made watches does not make sense! It transforms beings; it helps others to attain to the highest.

Through a sage you can become more watchful, but you will not get a Swiss-made watch! Watchfulness happens; he makes you more aware, alert. He does not give you time, he gives you timelessness. But these things happen, nobody does them, because the door is gone. Only then the nirvichara samadhi is possible. With the doer, how can you cease thinking? – the doer is the thinker. In fact, before you do anything you have to think; the thinker comes first, the doer follows. When the thinker and the doer both are gone and only a witnessing, only a consciousness has remained, then many things simply become possible, they happen.

When Buddha moves, many things happen, but they are not so visible. Only few people will be able to understand what is happening because they belong to a very unknown world. You don’t have any language for it, no concepts for it, and you cannot see it unless it happens to you.

. . . In this state knowledge is gained direct, without the use of the senses.

The mind has gone, and with the mind all the assistants, all the idiots. They are not functioning, they don’t distract you, they don’t disturb your perception, they don’t create any types of hindrances, they don’t project, they don’t interpret. That whole thing is no more there. Simply consciousness is there before reality. And when this happens, consciousness faces consciousness, because there is no matter.

The most beautiful metaphor that I have come across is a mirror facing another mirror. What will happen when a mirror faces another mirror? One mirror mirrors another mirror; the other mirrors this mirror, and there is nothing in the mirror, only mirroring reflected millions of times into each other. The whole world becomes millions of mirrors – and you are also a mirror – and all mirrors empty, because nothing else is there to reflect, not even the frame of the mirror. There is just the mirror – two mirrors facing each other. That is the most graceful moment, the most blissful; grace descends, flowers shower, the whole celebrates that one more has attained, one more traveler has reached home.

The perception gained in nirvichara samadhi transcends all normal perceptions, both in extent and intensity.

These two words are very meaningful: “extent” and “intensity.” When you see the world through the senses, brain and the mind, the world is very dull. It has no luminosity in it, dusty, and soon it becomes boring, and one feels fed up: the same trees, the same people, the same actions – everything just a rut. It is not so.

Sometimes on LSD, or marijuana or hashish, suddenly the tree becomes more green. You have never known it, that the tree was so green, or the rose was so rosy. […]

The whole world becomes beautiful. But this is nothing, absolutely nothing. If you can attain to a single moment of nirvichara, then you will be able to know. The world becomes millions of times more beautiful than any LSD can give you a glimpse. And it is not because you are hitting the mules on the head, it is simply you are no more inside the mules, you have come out, you have dropped the idiots. You face reality with your total nudity.

With no thoughts, you are nude. With no thoughts who are you? – a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a communist? Who are you without thoughts? – a man, a woman? Who are you without thoughts? – religious, irreligious? You are nobody without thoughts. All clothes have dropped. You are simply a nudity, a purity, an emptiness. Then the perception is clear, and with that clarity comes extent and intensity. Now you can look at the vast expanse of existence. Now there is no barrier to your perception; your eyes have become infinite.

And intensity: you can look into any event, any person, because things are no more there. Even flowers are persons now, and trees are friends, and rocks sleeping souls. Now intensity happens; you can look through and through. When you can look through and through to a flower, then you will be able to understand what mystics have been saying, and poets.

Tennyson says that “If I can understand a flower, a small flower in its totality, I would have understood all.” Right, absolutely right! If you can understand the part, you will understand the whole, because the part is the whole. And when you try to understand the part, by and by, unknowingly, you will have moved to the whole, because the part is organic to the whole. […]

Intensity becomes so much that you look at a pebble, and through the pebble roads are moving into the whole, and through the pebble you can enter into the highest of mysteries. Everywhere is a door; and you knock, and everywhere you are accepted, welcome. From wherever you enter, you enter into the infinity because all the doors are of the whole. Individuals may be there like doors. Love a person and you enter infinity. Look at a flower and the temple has opened. Lie down on the sand, and every particle of sand is as vast as the whole. This is the higher mathematics of religion.

Ordinary mathematics says the part can never be the whole. This is one of the maxims of ordinary mathematics that start in the universities: the part can never be the whole, and the part is always smaller than the whole, and the part can never be bigger than the whole. These are simple maxims of mathematics, and everybody will agree this is so.

But then there is a higher mathematics. When you have come out of the senses – the world of higher mathematics, and these are the maxims: the part is always the whole; the part is never, never smaller than the whole, and-the absurdity of absurdities – sometimes the part is bigger than the whole.

Now I cannot explain it to you. Nobody can explain, but these are the maxims. Once you are out of your prison you will see that this is how things are. A pebble is part, a very small part, but if you look at it with a thoughtless mind, with simple consciousness, direct, suddenly the pebble becomes the whole – because only one exists. Because no part is in fact a part, or separate: the part depends on the whole, the whole depends on the part. It is not only that when the sun rises, flowers open; the other way is also true – when the flowers open, the sun rises. If there were no flowers, for whom will the sun rise? It is not only that the sun rises, the birds sing; the other way is as true as this-because the birds sing, the sun rises. Otherwise, for whom . . .? Everything is interdependent; everything is related to everything else; everything is intertwined with everything else. Even if a leaf disappears, the whole will miss it; the whole will not be the whole then.

In one of his prayers, Meister Eckhart has said . . . and this is one of the rarest men that Christianity has produced. In fact, he looks a stranger in the world of Christians. He should have been born in Japan as a Zen Master, his insight is so clear, so deep, so beyond dogma.

He says in one of his prayers, “Yes, I depend on you, God, but you also depend on me. If I were not here, who will worship and who will pray? and you would have missed me.” And he is true: it is not out of any ego; it is a simple fact. I know God must have nodded at that moment, “You are true, Eckhart, because if you were not there, I would not have been here.”

The worshipper and the worshipped exist together; the lover and the beloved exist together. One cannot exist without the other, and this is the mystery of existence: everything exists together. This togetherness is God. God is not a person; this very togetherness of all, is God.

The perception gained in nirvichara samadhi transcends all normal perceptions both in extent and intensity.

From everywhere vastness opens, and from everywhere, the depth . . . Look into a flower, and there is an abyss. You can fall into a flower and disappear. […]

It cannot happen, that I know; but in nirvichara it happens. In a flower is abyss. Because of your intensity, you look into the flower and there is the depth, and you can fall into a flower and disappear forever. You look at a beautiful face with nirvichara and there is abyss in beauty, and you can be forever and forever lost; you can fall into it. Everything becomes a door, everything! With your intensity of look, all the doors are open for you.

When this controlling of all controls is transcended, the seedless samadhi is attained, and with it, freedom from life and death.

This is where all the paths culminate, all the Buddhas meet: Tantra and Yoga, Zen and Hassid, Sufi and Baul – all the paths. Paths may be different – they are – but now this comes, the peak; here paths disappear. When this controlling of all controls is transcended . . . because Patanjali says that it is still a controlled state. Thoughts have disappeared: you can perceive now the existence, but still the perceiver and the perception, the object and the subject . . . With the body, the knowledge was indirect. Now it is direct, but still the knower is different from the known. The last barrier exists, the division. When even this is dropped, when this control is transcended, and the painter disappears in the painting and the lover disappears in the love, object and subject disappear. There is no knower and no known.

When this controlling of all controls is transcended . . .

This is the last control, the nirvichara samadhi, samadhi where thoughts have ceased. This is the last control. Still you are, not as an ego, but as a self. Still you are separate from the known – just a very transparent veil, but it is there – and if you cling to this you will be born, because the division has not been transcended; you have not attained to non-duality yet. The seed of duality is still there, and that seed will sprout into new lives and the wheel of life and death will go on moving.

When this controlling of all other controls is transcended, the seedless samadhi is attained – then you attain nirvichara samadhi, seedless – and with it, freedom from life and death.

Then the wheel stops for you. Then there is no time, no space. Life and death have both disappeared like a dream. How to transcend this last control? – it is the most difficult. To attain to nirvichara is very arduous, but nothing compared to the dropping of the last control, because it is very subtle. How to do it? “How” is not relevant at that stage. One has simply to live, watch, enjoy, be loose and natural. This is where Tilopa becomes meaningful.

Because these people like Tilopa are Zen Masters they talk about the goal: loose and natural one lives, doing nothing, doing nothing to transcend the control. Because if you do something, that will again be a control. Your doing will be undoing. Loose and natural – that is the point where the tenth picture of the ten ox herding series becomes meaningful: back again into the world, and not only back again into the world . . . carrying a bottle of wine. Enjoying, celebrating, being ordinary – that is the meaning. Nothing can be done now. All that could be done you have done. Now you simply become loose and natural and forget everything about yoga, control, sadhana, seeking, search. Forget everything about it, because now, if you do something, then the control will continue, and with control there is no freedom. You have to wait, just being loose and natural. […]

This is the state where Zenerin says, “Sitting quietly, sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” Beyond this, words cannot explain. One has to reach to nirvichara and then wait for the seedless samadhi. It comes on its own, just like the grass grows by itself. Then the last control is transcended, and there is no one who transcends it. It is simply transcended. There is no one who transcends it, because if someone is there to transcend it, again the control is there. So you cannot do anything about it. That’s why Patanjali simply ends: it is samadhi both.

Here ends the chapter on samadhis – nothing more to say. He doesn’t say anything how to do it. There is no how to it. This is the point where Krishnamurti gets very angry, when people ask, “How?” There is no point, no method, no technique, because if any technique is possible here, then the control will remain. The control is transcended, but there is no one who transcends. Remaining loose and natural, chopping wood and carrying water, sitting silently, the spring comes, the grass grows by itself.

So you don’t bother about seedless samadhi. You simply think of nirvichara samadhi, samadhi where thoughts cease. Up to there, search continues. Beyond that is the land of no-search. When you have become nirvichara, then, then only you will understand now what to do. All that could be done you have done.

The last barrier is there. That last barrier is created by your doing. The last barrier is created; it is very transparent. It is as if you are sitting behind a glass wall, very beautiful and pure glass, and you can see everything as clearly as without the wall, but the wall is there, and if you try to cross it you will be hit hard and thrown back.

So nirvichara samadhi is not the last thing, it is the last but one. And that “last but one” is the goal. Beyond that, read Zenerin, Tilopa, Lin Chi; sit silently and let the grass grow by itself. Beyond that you can live in the market, because the market is as beautiful as the monastery. Beyond that you can do whatsoever you feel like doing – you can do your own thing – but not before that. You can relax; the search is over. In that relaxation comes the moment of inner tuning with the cosmos, and the wall disappears. Because it is created by your doing; when you don’t do, it disappears. It is fed by your doing. When you don’t do, it disappears, and when the doing has disappeared and you have transcended all control, then there is no life and no death, because life is of the doer, death is of the doer.

Now you are no more; you have dissolved. You have dissolved like a piece of salt thrown into the ocean dissolves, and you cannot find where it has gone. Can you find a piece of salt which has dissolved into the ocean? It has become one with the ocean. You can taste the ocean, but you cannot find the piece.

That’s why, when again and again people ask Buddha, “What will happen when a Buddha dies? What happens when a Buddha dies?” – Buddha remains silent; he never answers about it. It was a very persistent question “What happens to a Buddha?” Buddha remains silent because Buddha appears to be to you – for himself, he is no more. Inside, he is no more. Inside, outside have become one; the part and the whole has become one; the devotee and the God have become one; the lover is dissolved into the beloved.

Then what remains? – love remains: the lover no more, the beloved no more, the knower no more, the known no more – knowing remains. Simple consciousness remains, with no center to it, vast as existence, deep as existence, mysterious as existence. But nothing can be done.

When you come to this point someday – if you seek hard you will come; if you seek hard you will come to nirvichara samadhi – then don’t carry the old habit of doing, then don’t carry the old pattern of doing, then don’t ask “How?” Then simply be loose and natural and let things be. Accept whatsoever happens; celebrate whatsoever happens. Chop wood, carry water, sit silently and let the grass grow.

-Osho

From The Mystery Beyond Mind, Yoga: The Science of the Soul, V.3, Discourse #9 (previously titled Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, V.3).

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

This discourse is the Listening Meditation is the seventh program of the module, Osho Yoga and the Discipline of Transformation, one of several modules in A Course in Witnessing.

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

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

The Switchover is Absolutely Sudden – Jean Klein

When you have a glimpse of reality, it is already in a certain way in your background. You see things less and less personally. There comes the quality of global vision, where there is no choice, no selection. You see things more and more as they are, not as you wish them to be, but as they really are. You live in this perspective, you love it, it is a jewel you wear, maybe several times a day. Then there comes a moment in your life that even this geometrical representation, the perspective, dissolves in your real nature. And then there is no return. This switchover is absolutely sudden, instantaneous. You live now without anticipation, without end-gaining. You live absolutely in the now. Thinking is a practical, useful tool which you use when you need it, but you no longer think when there is no need to think. There is no more daydreaming. You enjoy really freedom from thought. Oh! You will become a happy man! What more do you want?

-Jean Klein

From The book of Listening, pp. 17-18

You can read more from Jean Klein here.

 

You Cannot be Related to a White Cloud – Osho

Would you tell us what your relationship is to the white clouds?

I am a white cloud. There is no relationship, and there cannot be. Relationship exists when you are two, divided. So relationship is really not a relationship. Wherever relationship exists there is separation.

I am a white cloud. You cannot be related to a white cloud. You can become one with it and allow the white cloud to become one with you, but relationship is not possible. In relationship you remain separate, and in relationship you go on manipulating.

This is one of the miseries of human life, that even in love we create relationship. Then the love is missed. Love should not be a relationship. You should become the lover or the beloved. You should become the other and let the other become you. There should be a merger, only then conflict ceases. Otherwise love becomes a conflict, a struggle.

If you are, then you will try to manipulate, then you would like to possess, then you would like to be the master, then exploitation comes in. Then the other will be used as a means, not as an end.

With white clouds you cannot do that, you cannot make them wives and husbands. You cannot chain them or persuade them into a relationship. They won’t allow it, they won’t listen to you. They have had enough of it – that’s why now they have become white clouds. You can be one with them, and then their hearts are open.

But human mind cannot think beyond relationship, because we cannot think of ourselves as if we are not. We are. Howsoever we hide it, we are there. Deep down the ego is there, and deep down the ego goes on manipulating.

With a white cloud this is not possible. With your ego you can look at the white cloud, think about it, but the mysteries will not be opened. The doors will remain closed. You will remain in a dark night. If your ego disappears you have become the white cloud.

In Zen they have one of the oldest traditions of painting. One Zen master had a disciple who was learning to paint, and through painting, of course, meditation. The disciple was obsessed with bamboos; he was continuously drawing and painting bamboos. The master is reported to have said to his disciple: Unless you become a bamboo, nothing is going to happen.

For ten years the disciple had been drawing bamboos; he had become so efficient that even with closed eyes in a dark night without light he could draw bamboos. And his bamboos were so perfect and so alive.

But the master would not approve. He said: No, unless you become a bamboo, how can you draw it? You remain separate, you remain an onlooker, you remain a spectator. So you may have known the bamboo from without, but that is the periphery, not the soul of the bamboo. Unless you become one, unless you become a bamboo, how can you know it from within?

Ten years the disciple struggled, but the master would not approve. So the disciple disappeared into the forest, into a bamboo forest. For three years nothing was heard of him. Then news started coming that he had become a bamboo. Now he doesn’t draw. He lives with bamboos, he stands with bamboos. Winds blow, bamboos dance – he also dances.

Then the master went to find out. And really, the disciple had become a bamboo. The master said: Now, forget all about you and bamboo. The disciple said: But you told me to become the bamboo and I have become it.

The master said: Now forget this also, because now this is the only barrier. Deep down somewhere you are still separate and remembering that you have become the bamboo. So you are not yet a perfect bamboo, because a bamboo would not remember this. So forget it.

For ten years the bamboos were not discussed. Then one day the master called the disciple and said: Now you can draw. First become the bamboos, then forget the bamboos, so you become so perfect a bamboo that the drawing is not a drawing but a growth.

I am not related with white clouds at all. I am a white cloud. I would like you also to be white clouds, not related. Enough of relationship – you have suffered enough. Many, many lives you have been related with this or that. And you have suffered enough, more than enough. You have suffered more than you deserve.

The suffering has been centered on the wrong concept of relationship. The wrong concept is: you have to be yourself and then related. Then there is tension, conflict, violence, aggression, and the whole hell follows.

Sartre says somewhere: The other is hell. But really, the other is not hell – the other is the other because you are the ego. If you are no more, the other has disappeared.

Whenever this happens – between a man and a tree, between a man and a cloud, between a man and a woman, or between a man and a rock – whenever it happens that you are not, hell disappears. Suddenly you are transfigured, you have entered paradise.

The old biblical story is beautiful: Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden of Eden because they had eaten a forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of Knowledge. This is one of the most wonderful parables ever devised.

Why was the fruit of the tree of Knowledge forbidden? Because the moment knowledge enters, the ego is there. The moment you know you are, you have fallen. This is the original sin. Nobody threw Adam and Eve out of heaven. The moment they became aware that they were, the garden of Eden disappeared. For such eyes, which are filled with ego, the garden cannot exist. It is not that they have been thrown out of the garden – the garden is here and now. It is just by your side. It has always been following you wherever you go, but you cannot see it. If the ego is not there, you enter again, the garden is revealed. You have never been out of it.

Try this: sitting under a tree, forget yourself. Let only the tree be there. This happened to Buddha under the bodhi tree. He was not: in that moment everything happened. Only the bodhi tree was there.

You may not be aware that for five hundred years after Buddha his statue was not created, his picture was not painted. For five hundred years continuously, whenever a Buddhist temple was created, only the picture of the bodhi tree was there. That was beautiful – because in that moment when Gautam Siddhartha became Buddha, he was not there, only the tree was there. He had disappeared for a moment – only the tree was there.

Find moments when you are not, and those will be the moments when you will be for the first time . . . really.

So I am the white cloud, and the whole effort is to make you also white clouds drifting in the sky. Nowhere to go, coming from nowhere, just being there this very moment – perfect.

I don’t teach you any ideals, I don’t teach you any oughts. I don’t say to you be this, become that. My whole teaching is simply this: Whatsoever you are, accept it so totally that nothing is left to be achieved, and you will become a white cloud.

-Osho

From My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, Discourse #1, 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.

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.

Where Does the Fire Come From – Osho

Maneesha, before discussing your sutras, a little biographical note on Isan is essential. I say it is essential because unless you understand the man, his background, his upbringing, his qualities, you will not be able to grasp just the pure sutras. They are almost writings in the air, or, if you prefer, in the water. The man who has written the sutras or told the sutras, or managed these anecdotes, has to be understood to understand all that is connected with him, because his whole being covers and colors whatever he says. You cannot take it out of context.

Isan is a totally different personality than Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was a hard master; Isan was very polite. Naturally his politeness would affect whatever happened around him. He was a very humble person, never tried to convert anybody, but on the contrary slipped deep down into the forest, so nobody came to him. He felt it a little embarrassing to be the master and degrade somebody as a follower – a very nice, very delicate personality, the personality of a poet, of a singer, of a dancer.

Isan was a mellow and patient master in guiding his disciples to attain their enlightenment.

He never used shouting or hitting or beating; that was not possible for him. He was such a loving, compassionate being that to think of him hitting the way Zen masters hit is impossible. He was very humble; hence he had to create absolutely different devices than those of Bodhidharma or Nansen.

Isan was a mellow and patient master in guiding his disciples to attain their enlightenment. Unlike those Zen masters who preceded him, he did not use the stick or shout.

However, his mildness of manner was only a veneer for the iconoclast and rebel within.

You should not understand that his humbleness was not a rebellious quality. You should not think that his humbleness made him compromise with the past and the traditions. He remained a great rebel against all that goes towards preventing a person’s enlightenment.

So his mildness of manner was only a veneer, just a cover for the iconoclast and rebel within. Deep down he was fire. On the surface he was very polite. Those who came to him because of his politeness – because there were many who were afraid of the Zen masters who would beat, who would hit, who would suddenly jump on you; their behavior looked so irrational. Isan looked very good compared to the other predecessors. Although he never was interested in people, still in the deepest forest one thousand disciples had gathered, and they had come from such faraway places just because they had heard that Isan was not a man to hit or slap. He was so mild and so humble and so loving. . .

But this was only a veneer. Inside there was glowing fire. Once you had come close to him, because of his humbleness, because of his very friendly behavior, you were caught in the net. As you would come closer, you would know the fiery nature of his being – but it was too late to go back. You had fallen in love with the man. Now whatever happens, if you have to pass through this fire, you will pass through this fire.

Maneesha has brought one anecdote:

Our beloved master,

On one occasion, a monk came to Isan’s monastery to be taught, and seeing him, Isan made as if to get up.

“Please don’t stand up!” Exclaimed the monk.

“I have not sat down yet!” Said Isan.

When you are in the middle, it is very difficult to say whether you are going to sit down or you are going to get up.

Mulla Nasruddin used to suggest to his followers that if you don’t want to be bored by anybody, just take your umbrella and stand in the door.

If the fellow is alright and you would like to welcome him, you can say, “You came at the right time; I was just coming in.” And if the fellow is a bore, you can say, “Excuse me, you came at a wrong time. I am going out.” But just standing at the door with the umbrella, now it is very difficult to decide where the man is going, whether in or out. He is standing in the door, in the middle.

The same was the position: the man has come to be taught, and seeing him, Isan made as if to get up. It was a strategy to know his response, how the other man will behave. Isan was not getting up; he just made as if he was going to get up.

“Please don’t stand up!” Because you stand up to give honor to someone, the man naturally thought that Isan was going to honor him by standing. “Please don’t stand up!” Exclaimed the monk.”

But such was the subtle way of Isan to know about the inner mind of man. This man looks perfectly right in saying, “Please don’t stand up!” But on what grounds has he assumed that Isan should be standing up to welcome him?

“I haven’t sat down yet!” Said Isan. “What about standing up? – I was just going to sit down. Why did you assume . . .?”

Perhaps that assumption is a deep expectation that he should be honored. Perhaps it is unconscious, but Isan has brought it to the surface. The man could have thought that Isan was going to sit down. He was in the middle – both possibilities were available to him – but the man had chosen the possibility that Isan was going to stand up. That shows his mind – a deep longing, a desire to be honored, although he has come only as a student to be taught.

Isan said, “I haven’t sat down yet” – the question of standing does not arise.

But the poor monk did not understand the subtle way: “I haven’t bowed yet,” The monk said.

“You rude creature!” Commented Isan.

Very strange encounters! When Isan said, “I haven’t sat down yet!”, that was the moment to bow down and touch his feet, and to offer himself for the discipline, for the meditation, for all his teachings.

Rather than taking that, he retorted – he thought as if Isan was making a fool of him – “I haven’t bowed yet,” The monk said.

“You rude creature!” Commented Isan. “This is not the way to be with me. You have to be grateful to be allowed to see me. Instead of it you are showing your ego.”

“I haven’t bowed yet,” he is saying. “Don’t consider that I am your disciple, or I am your student; I have not even bowed yet.” And he has come to learn, but ego is such a subtle phenomenon that without your knowing, it immediately asserts. The ego simply retorted, “I haven’t bowed yet.”

Now, this has to be understood. There are things which should not be said; the very moment you say them they lose all their grandeur, gratefulness. You have to behave in a way that shows your gratitude, not your words.

Bowing down is a gesture of saying, “I am ready. You can trust that I will not misuse the time that you will give me, or the meditation or any kind of discipline. I will not misuse it. I have come to you whole-heartedly.” It is just a way, without words, of saying, “I am available.”

But the man said instead, “I haven’t bowed yet.”

As if a man like Isan is in need of your gratefulness! By being grateful to a person like Isan, you are not making him in any way richer; on the contrary, you are becoming richer. You are learning a new way, a new gesture and its significance.

In the West it never evolved that the disciple should touch the feet of the master, and even today the Western mind thinks it really strange – one human being touching the feet of another human being. But they don’t know the significance of it, they don’t know the esoteric significance of it.

When the disciple touches the feet of the master, it is not only what you see, something else is happening. When the disciple touches the feet, the master touches his head. A circle of energy is created that is not visible to the eyes – because no energy is ever visible to you. You only see the gesture: one is touching the feet, the other is touching his head.

But the East, for at least ten thousand years, has come to know this secret way of approaching a master. And the master will put his hand on your head only if he feels your energy is worth it. By touching his feet . . . You should remember that energy moves only from the fingers of the hand or from the toes of the feet; energy moves from points which are dead ends. When somebody touches his feet, the master immediately recognizes the kind of energy. If he feels that the person has to be accepted, is worth being worked upon, then he touches his head, and with his hand he gives a taste of his energy, and then both energies become a circle. And if the circle becomes smooth great possibilities can happen.

But for the outsider it seems simply that one person is touching the feet of another person. The West has not been able, even today, to understand. Life is not what it appears from the outside; it is much more, immensely more, on the inside.

The man showed an egoistic pattern of his mind. That’s why Isan had to comment, “You rude creature!” He was not accepted as a disciple.

To be accepted as a disciple by a great master is not a small thing. In that very acceptance your enlightenment has come miles closer, your liberation has taken a tremendous quantum leap. You are just on the verge, ready, just because the master has accepted you. He accepts only when he sees the possibility, the vulnerability, the openness. It is an inner drama which is not visible to the eyes.

On another occasion, Isan was watching a brush fire, and asked his disciple, Dogo, “Do you see the fire?”

Now, it will look strange – the fire is there, Dogo, his disciple, is there, Isan is sitting there. There is no reason why Dogo should be asked, “Do you see the fire?”

Replied Dogo, “I see it.”

The master asked Dogo, “Where does the fire come from?”

Dogo said, “I would like you to ask me something that has nothing to do with walking around or zazen or lying down” – At which Isan left off talking and went away.

Dogo has closed all the doors. When Isan was asking, “Do you see the fire?” he should have been alert. When you are with a master you have to be alert every moment. What he says must imply some greater significance which may not appear in the words.

Now, it is a strange question. They both are seeing the fire; but if the master asks, “Do you see the fire?” he means many things which Dogo is missing. He means, “Are you here?” You can be seeing the fire and yet you may be somewhere else, and the fire may be just a faraway, faded thing. It may not be a living experience right now. If your mind is full of thoughts, you can even miss the fire, because who is going to see it? You have to be here – that is the point that is hidden behind the question.

If Dogo had had the understanding he would have immediately thought that the question means his mind has moved somewhere else. He must have been thinking of other things, other worlds, other matters.

I have told you a story about two friends.

One morning they met. The first friend said, “You will not believe it: last night I had a dream I had gone fishing, and I caught such big fish that I had to carry one fish at a time. The whole night it continued. It was strange – for years I have been fishing and I have never found such great fish. You should have seen what a joy it was.”

The other man said, “That is nothing. Last night I dreamed that in my bedroom, in my bed itself, on one side was Marilyn Monroe, utterly naked, on the other side Sophia Loren, utterly naked. I was greatly shocked. I had never believed that this chance would arise in my lifetime.”

The first friend said, “You idiot! Why did you not call me?”

The second man said, “I did call, but your wife said you had gone fishing!”

People seem to be somewhere, but their minds may be anywhere. To be in the moment is a clear-cut message of Zen.

Isan’s asking Dogo, “Do you see the fire?” certainly meant that Dogo was not there. He was just sitting there but his mind had roamed away. It would have been right for him to say, “I don’t see it, because I have gone into my thoughts somewhere else.” But rather than telling the truth he said, “I see it.”

The master asked Dogo, “If you see it, can you tell me Where does the fire come from?” Now he is asking, from where do all things come – the fire is only a symbol – and where do they go finally? What is the source from which they arise and what is the point where they disappear?

To the meditator it becomes slowly clear that the source and the goal are one. The same point is the source; the energy moves in a circle and comes back to the same point. You are at the same point both the times – when you are born and when you die. You may have changed much meanwhile – so much experience, so much knowledge – that’s why you miss the pure innocence of death. You missed the innocence of birth because of your ignorance, and you miss the innocence of death because of your knowledge.

Of course, you were not expected to recognize innocence in your birth, you can be forgiven for that; you were not told or taught. The experience was so new, you could not name it even. But the man who dies full of knowledge again misses the innocence, because of his knowledgeability.

In mystic circles around the world, it has been a long-standing understanding that unless a man is just like his birth-innocence when he dies, he missed the whole point and the whole dance of life, he missed the whole significance of life. He has taken a long route of seventy or eighty years, and has come back to the source, but missed it again.

In India, the word for the experience of this circle, the word that is used is sansar. Sansar means both the world and the circle. The whole world is a circular experience. In the beginning you are innocent; you should be innocent at the end. Then your life has been a great life of love, of understanding, of many flowers, of many blessings. You have not lived insanely, you have lived intelligently, you have lived meditatively; you have lived out of silence, not out of anxiety, anguish, and thoughts.

A man is complete only when at the moment of his death he is again the same as he was when he was born, again a child – the second childhood.

So when Dogo was asked by the master, “Where does the fire come from?” the fire was just an excuse. He was asking, “From where do things come and where do they go?”

But Dogo again missed. Rather than answering the question, Dogo said, “I would like to ask you to ask me something that has nothing to do with walking around or zazen or lying down” – At which Isan left off talking and went away.

Dogo has closed all the doors. He is saying, “You should ask me something which is not concerned with zazen – that is intense meditation – or a walking meditation, or a lying down meditation.”

Buddha used all actions in life as an opportunity to meditate. Walking, you should walk meditatively, each step with full awareness. Lying down, you should lie down with awareness, not just out of old habit. And zazen is the intense and urgent quality of meditativeness.

Dogo is saying to his master, who has asked, “Where does the fire come from?” . . . He has not answered the question because that question implies meditation. Only in meditation can you know that everything comes from the same source and goes back to the same eternity. Nothing ever dies, nothing ever is born; everything is, only forms go on changing. What was sometime before wood, is now fire; what is fire soon will be smoke.

These are the ways of disappearing into the ultimate reality. The fire was hidden, so long remained hidden in the tree. Now it has blossomed, just as flowers blossom; it has come out of the prison. A little dance, a little joyful life, and the fire will turn into smoke. Smoke will have a little joyful life, and slowly, slowly will disappear into the eternal. This implies a meditative experience.

Rather than answering it, because only a meditator can answer from where the fire comes . . . Unless you know your own center, how can you answer from where your fire comes? Your life is a fire, and where does it go finally? Does it disappear outside or does it again relapse into the origin? Only the meditator has known the secrets of inner life. Life sometimes is dormant in the center and sometimes comes to the circumference, and when tired goes back to the center.

One of the greatest men in history was Patanjali, who created a whole science of yoga singlehanded. It is very difficult to create a whole science alone. Five thousand years have passed and not a single word has been added, it has such a completion; neither has a single word been taken out. The system is so complete in itself, there is no possibility to go beyond Patanjali as far as yoga is concerned.

But only people who will go deeper into themselves will know that they are carrying the source and the goal both at the same center. Everything comes from the same center of the universe and goes back finally into the same center.

But rather than answering the question – perhaps he was not able to answer it – on the contrary, he was closing all doors. He was saying, “I would like you to ask me something that has nothing to do with walking – because in Zen monasteries there is a special place for walking meditation – or zazen – which is sitting meditation – or lying down.” These three meditations are followed by all meditators on the path of Zen. He is saying, “Leave these out and ask me something.”

Now, Zen is not concerned with anything else. In fact, there have been cases when a new disciple comes to a master and the master almost always asks, “From where are you coming?” The authentic seeker will say, “I don’t know. I have come to you to find out from where I am coming.” This kind of disciple will be immediately accepted.

But instead of it he says, “From some town, some village . . .”

And the master asks, “How much is the price of rice in that village?”

And the person starts talking about the prices, not knowing that the master is trying to find out whether this man has the capacity, is made of the right stuff to be a meditator.

One Sufi mystic, Bayazid, went to his master for the first time. The master was staying in a mosque. Bayazid entered the mosque – he was perfectly alone, as far as you could see – but the master immediately said, “Keep the crowd out! You come alone; this is not a place for the crowd.”

Bayazid looked all around and said, “What crowd? There is no one here except me.”

The master said, “Don’t look around, look in. You have been carrying a whole crowd – all the friends you have left behind, your wife, your children, your parents. They had all come to say good-bye to you at the boundary of the village, but they are still in your mind. I am talking about that crowd. Just go out, and until that crowd is gone don’t come in.”

It took one year for Bayazid. He remained sitting outside, watching his mind, waiting for the moment when the mind was empty. The moment he found, “Now the crowd is gone,” he entered the mosque.

The master hugged him and told him, “My hands are small, I cannot hug a whole crowd. Now you have come alone, something is possible.”

Once, Isan was asked by Ichu to compose a gatha for him.

Gatha means a poem. Ordinarily that question is not right; it is asked only at the time when the master is dying. The disciples ask as a memorial, “Just write down a small poem. Your last word, in your own handwriting, will be our greatest treasure.” That last word is called gatha.

Isan was asked by Ichu to compose a gatha for him. That was so stupid a question, because Isan was not going to die.

Isan replied: “It is foolish to compose one when face to face. When I am face to face with you, read me, read my heart. A gatha is written when a master is dying because he will not be anymore available. It is so foolish to ask such a thing when we are face to face. Feel my presence. And, in any case, writing things on paper!” . . .

Isan is saying, “In the first place, it is foolish when I am present not to rejoice in my presence, not to dance with my presence, not to be ecstatic and drunk with my presence. And secondly, in any case, writing things on paper! – what will be their value? When you cannot understand the living master and his word, that dead paper, that dead ink – what are you going to do with it?”

So Ichu went to Kyozan, a disciple of Isan, and made the same request.

In response, Kyozan drew a circle on paper and wrote a note next to it . . .

It is a beautiful note. He has not compiled a gatha, but he has responded in a different, unique way, in his own way.

He has not composed a poem; on the contrary, he drew a circle on the paper and wrote a note next to it that said: “To think and then know is the second grade. Not to think and then know is the third grade.”

He has left out the first grade because something has to be left for the disciple to find. What is the first grade? He says, “Not to think and then know is the third grade. To think and then know is the second grade.”

But Ichu did not ask him, “What is the first grade?”

The first grade is just to know; no question of thinking or not thinking, but just to know.

The moment you enter into deep meditation you pass through many things: the thinking mind, the feeling heart. You come into a space where everything is empty, only witnessing has remained. That witnessing is the only authentic knowing; that is the first grade.

But Ichu went on missing. In all these sutras he could not make a single step deeper into the mystery of life, although every possibility was made available to him.

Soseki wrote:

Don’t ask why the pine trees

In the front garden

Are gnarled and crooked.

The straightness

They were born with

Is right there inside them.

It is a very significant statement. You see the tree – a pine tree or any tree which is not straight for any reason. Circumstances may not have allowed it to be straight, or perhaps the gardener did not want it to be straight, but in the innermost being of the tree the possibility of being straight is still there.

All these poems are about you. Whatever the symbol – the fire, or the pine tree – these symbols don’t matter; they simply give you an indication.

Don’t ask why the pine trees in the front garden are gnarled and crooked. The straightness they were born with is right there inside them.

This is exactly the case with you all. Whatever you have become, however far you have gone from your natural potential, it does not matter. Your buddha remains within you. Your straightness remains within you. You can come back home any moment you decide with totality and utter urgency. Nothing can prevent you.

-Osho

From Isan: No Footprints in the Blue Sky, Discourse #3

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.

Your Intensity, Your Wholeness is Your Witness – Osho

Can one be absorbed in doing something – for instance, these dynamic mediation techniques – with absolute total intensity and at the same time remain a witness who is separate, apart?

The same is the problem in many forms. You think that a witness is something apart, separate. It is not. Your intensity, your wholeness, is your witness. So when you are witnessing and doing something you are not two – the doer is the witness.

For example, you are dancing here in kirtan. You are dancing: the dancer and the witness are not two, there is no separation. The separation is only in language. The dancer is the witness. And if the dancer is not the witness, then you cannot be total in the dance, because the witness will need some energy and you will have to divide yourself. A part will remain a witness and the remaining will move in the dance. It cannot be total; it will be divided. And this is not what is meant, because really this is the state of a schizophrenic patient – divided, split. It is pathological. If you become two you are ill. You must remain one. You must move totally into the dance, and your totality will become the witness. It is not going to be something set apart, your wholeness is aware. This happens.

So don’t try to divide yourself. While dancing become the dance. Just remain alert; don’t fall asleep, don’t be unconscious. You are not under a drug, you are alert, fully alert. But this alertness is not a part standing aloof; it is your totality, it is your whole being.

But this is again the same thing as whether two lovers are two or one. Only on the surface are they two, deep inside they are one. Only in language will you appear two, the dancer and the witness, but deep down you are the one. The whole dancer is alert. Then only peace, equilibrium, silence, will happen to you. If you are divided there will be tension, and that tension will not allow you to be totally here and now, to merge into existence.

So remember that, don’t try to divide. Become the dancer and still be aware. This happens. This I am saying through my experience. This I am saying through many others’ experience who have been working with me. This will happen to you also. This may have happened to many already. But remember this: don’t get split. Remain one and yet aware.

Enough for today.

-Osho

From Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi, Discourse #11, Q3

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

For a related post see Q2, Love Becomes the Door.

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.

 

 

 

Today the Bird Opens Its Wings – Osho

Maneesha, this is the last anecdote in this series, and you have chosen a very beautiful, meaningful, and significant dialogue for any seeker. The words are from a great master, hence you have to be very silent to understand it, as silent as if you are not. You can sit silently like a Gautam Buddha, but your mind goes on weaving strange and unnecessary thought patterns. And those patterns become the barrier to understanding what we are trying to do. It is not a mere lecture; it is a search together for your innermost being. […]

Nobody is absolutely here, because the moment you are absolutely here, you disappear and the buddha appears in your place. You will find yourself dispersing like a cloud; and a new image, a new golden image of pure consciousness will start arising in you, just like a mountain peak. Each silent moment is the only moment when you live.

In a seventy-year life span, if you can live only seven minutes as a buddha, that is enough. But unfortunately, even in seventy years you cannot manage seven minutes. The mind goes on and on like a stuck record, repeating the same thing. The mind can never be original, it only knows how to repeat. Have you seen a buffalo chewing? That’s exactly what the mind goes on doing. But all chewing is nothing but chewing gum; it is a stupid act. Even the bamboos are laughing. They know that although everyone thinks he is silent, underneath he is sitting on a volcano.

This anecdote can become a transforming force in your life. These few minutes here can create a new man out of you. Just a small thing has to be done: tell the mind to shut up, and be strong enough not to be involved or identified with the thinking process. It has become our habit. We have almost forgotten that we were born without any thinking. All thoughts are nothing but dust that has gathered upon you during the time you have been growing up, and this dust is preventing you from seeing yourself.

These anecdotes are small but very emphatic ways to remove the dust, to make the mirror clean, so that you can see your original face. It is the face that existence has given to you, not the face and the personality which the society has imposed upon you. Remember this, that your personality is an imposition by others on you. With all good intent, your parents, your society, your teachers have all been trying that you should not be yourself, you should be somebody else. And they provide the ideal – who it is that you have to be.

But unfortunately, it is impossible; you cannot be anyone other than who existence has intended you to be. But you can miss your destiny. You cannot be anybody else’s destiny, but you can miss your own destiny. And the way to miss it is very simple: try to be somebody else, and slowly, slowly a personality, a false mask which is not you – which consists of the expectations of others – will arise and cover your innocence. And that innocence is your only treasure, your very eternity, your deathless life.

Once, when Tozan was traveling with another monk, they saw a vegetable leaf floating down a valley stream. Tozan said, “If there were no-one in the deep mountains, how could there be a vegetable leaf here? If we go upstream, we might find a wayfarer staying there.” Making their way through the brush and going several miles up the valley, they suddenly saw the strange-looking, emaciated figure of a man. It was master Ryuzan.

A very famous name in the history of Zen.

His name meant “Dragon Mountain,” and he was also known as Yinshan, meaning, “hidden in the mountains.”

Because he was there in the mountains, far away from people, just sitting there doing nothing. The silent mountains . . .

If you are not doing anything, how long can your mind go on persisting with things which have become out of date, which do not relate to you anymore? As time passes the thoughts become thinner, and a moment comes when simply you are, without any thought. This moment when you arrive to the clearance, the opening of your consciousness, is the most precious moment, because it is your hidden nature. It is your splendor, it is your dance, it is your joy, it is your freedom. Once you have entered into it there is no way to be miserable, there is no way to be tense, there is no way to be in anguish – you have simply passed all those things, which used to be your constant companions.

Ryuzan, in his answers, proves his great understanding.

Tozan and the other monk put down their bundles and greeted Ryuzan.

Ryuzan then said, “There is no road on this mountain – how did you get here?”

Tozan said, “Leaving aside the fact that there is no road, where did you enter?”

Now these are great dialogues; they are no more talking about ordinary roads. Ryuzan’s question is not concerned with the ordinary road, but it appears on the surface as if he is asking, “There is no road on this mountain – how did you get here?” Tozan himself was a master. Anyone else in his place would have been a failure; he would not have understood the meaning that there is a place in our being which no road leads to – but still you can reach there, without any vehicle, without any road, without any guide, without any map. There is a point in our being which we can reach because we are there already – we don’t have to come. We just have to withdraw our thoughts and imaginations, to drop all that is false, and just remain together in the deep solitude.

Tozan understood it exactly, that Ryuzan is not talking about ordinary roads. He said, “Leaving aside the fact that there is no road, where did you enter? We can discuss the road later. For the moment . . . if you can enter here, why cannot we enter here, leaving aside the fact that there is no road?” He is showing his Zen understanding very clearly; if you can reach here without any way, why can we not reach? He is making such a great statement that can be translated in a thousand ways, with a thousand implications.

It means that if even one person can become a buddha, in his buddhahood he declares everybody’s buddhahood. His buddhahood means that man has the capacity and the potentiality of being a buddha. Whether you become the buddha or not, that is not the point; but your potential has been shown clearly, that this is the destiny of every human consciousness.

Ryuzan said, “I did not come by clouds or water.” Tozan then asked, “How long have you been living on this mountain?”

He dropped the subject because Ryuzan’s answer makes it clear that there is no way to say . . . all that he can say is that he did not come by clouds or water. There is no road, but he did come.

Tozn then asked, “How long have you been living on this mountain?”

Ryuzan said, “The passing of seasons and years cannot reach it.”

Time is not a measurement for consciousness. In your deepest being you have been always here, and you will remain always here; you never move from here. Everything else moves around you – the whole world moves; all the stars move. There is not a single thing except your consciousness which does not move. But your consciousness is the center of the cyclone. It simply remains here.

Ryuzan’s answer is so beautiful: “The passing of seasons and years cannot reach it.”

It is beyond time, so the passing of seasons and years . . . don’t ask stupid questions.

Tozan asked, “Were you here first, or was the mountain here first?”

From the point where he was rebuffed, he tried another way to bring time in, and to bring it in such a way that Ryuzan would be caught. He asked, “Were you here first, or was the mountain here first?”

Ryuzan answered, “I do not know.”

Who was here first – “I live here without bothering about the mountain and the forest, or who came first and who came second.”

It has been a question constantly asked by all theologians and philosophers: who came first? The Bible says that in the beginning was the Word – it was first, and then came God; but seeing the foolishness of it, whoever wrote that statement immediately added that God and the Word are one.

Because the question will be – without anybody else, how can there be a Word? The Word needs somebody to speak it. But if you put God first, the question remains the same … for centuries it has been discussed. Zen never discusses that question in the old way, with words like ‘god’, ‘creation’ . . . […]

Zen does not talk about God. It is the only religious phenomenon which has no God, no prayer, and yet has attained to the highest peaks, unavailable to any other religion in the world.

This question, “Were you here first, or was the mountain here first?” was asked to Jesus also. “If you think you are the son of God, were you here before Abraham, the father of the Jews? Were you before him? If you are the son of God, you must have been.”

Jesus said, “Yes, I have been before Abraham.”

This is the difference between other religions and Zen. When Tozan asked, “Were you here first, or was the mountain here first?”

Ryuzan answered, “I do not know.”

Only a man of great understanding and realization can say innocently, “I do not know.”

Tozan said, “Why not?”

Ryuzan said, “I don’t come from celestial or human realms.”

I don’t come from gods – the celestial realm – and I don’t come from human realms. My consciousness has no designation, no categorization, it is simply universal. I really don’t come from anywhere; I have been here.

Tozan said, “What truth have you realized that you come to dwell here on this mountain?”

Ryuzan said, “I saw two clay bulls fighting, go into the ocean, and up till now have no news of them.”

In a very symbolic way, he is saying, “I saw, amongst humanity, that people are fighting over clay bulls.” What are your gods, except clay bulls? Seeing that everybody is fighting about thoughts and concepts and scriptures and statues and temples, Ryuzan said, “Seeing that  . . . and they have not yet settled. I have heard no news about them.”

For the first time, Tozan bowed with deep respect for Ryuzan, seeing that he cannot be entangled in any controversy, he cannot be forced to say things which should not be said.

He knows; that’s why he can say “I do not know.”

Ordinarily, people who know nothing go on claiming their wisdom. All your Shankaracharyas and all your popes – not a single one is enlightened, but they are religious heads. Now what kind of guidance will these people give? They are going to poison people’s minds. But Ryuzan, a man who has the dignity and courage to say, “I do not know,” is declaring his innocence, his childlike purity. This made Tozan bow down with deep respect to Ryuzan.

Then he asked Ryuzan, “What is the guest within the host?” These are traditional Zen questions, which decide whether the master is really a master or just a teacher, a man of realization or just a man who has gathered knowledge from others, from scriptures.

“What is the guest within the host?”

Ryuzan said, “The blue mountain is covered by white clouds.”

The white clouds are the guests. The blue mountain is the host, because it will remain, and the clouds will come and go. That which comes and goes is the guest, and that which remains is the host. But he said it in a very beautiful poetic way. Zen is sheer poetry: “The blue mountain is covered by white clouds.”

Tozan asked, “What is the host within the host?” That is another traditional question. Ryuzan answered very beautifully. He said, “He never goes out of the door.” The host never goes outside the door. That which goes outside is the mind; it goes around everywhere, Bangkok . . . where are you going right now, L.A? […]. In you, in everybody, the consciousness always remains in; it never goes out of the door.

The mind travels around the world. The moment the mind stops traveling, you come to a great realization: that you are not the one who has been traveling. You are the one who has not moved even a single inch, who is always inside you at the deepest center, never leaving that place.

In our meditations we are searching for the host. We have all become guests and gone too far away from our own beings. In our meditations we are trying to come back and let the guest merge into the host. The moment you enter into your very interiority, there is a great explosion of light. You are no more a human being; you have become a buddha. You have become pure awareness, unconfined, unlimited.

Ryuzan’s answer is so beautiful:

“He never goes out of the door.”

Tozan then asked, “How far apart are host and guest?”

Ryuzan said, “Waves on a river.”

He must be a great master, of tremendous understanding. He is saying that just as a river has waves, those waves are the guests. And when the waves have disappeared, the guest has disappeared in the host. The river remains; the waves come and go.

Ryuzan said, “Waves on a river.”

Tozan then asked, “When guest and host meet, what is said?”

Ryuzan said, “The pure breeze sweeps the white moon”

Nothing is said.

“The pure breeze sweeps the white moon.”

Just a tremendous beauty, a blissfulness, a benediction arises. Nothing is said, not even a hello.

Tozan took his leave and departed.

Hakuyo has written:

Over the peak-spreading clouds,

At its source the river is cold.

If you would see,

Climb the mountain top.

If you want to see you will have to climb the mountain top. If you want to see you will have to reach to the highest point of your consciousness.

Another Zen poet:

For long years, a bird in a cage,

Today, flying along with the cloud.

These small statements defeat the great scriptures of other religions. In what a beautiful way he says everything that needs to be said!

For long years, perhaps many, many births,

A bird in a cage,

Today, flying along with the cloud.

Freedom is the ultimate goal. We are all living in cages, not only of body and mind, but of all kinds of concepts, superstitions. Unless we drop all these cages, scatter them, burn them, and become free – just like a bird on the wing, flying away with the clouds – we will not know what is possible. We will not know what our destiny is. We will not be able to realize the joy, the ultimate experience of truth.

-Osho

From Zen: The Diamond Thunderbolt, Discourse #13

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.

In that Point of Balance – Osho

Sometimes I feel in a state of non-doing, very passive, but my awareness of what is happening around me seems less. In fact, I feel detached from things around me. This somehow means false passivity, as I imagine non-doing should be synonymous with increased awareness. Can you please define this?

Ordinarily we are in a feverish state – active, but feverishly. If you become passive the fever will be lost. If you become passive, non-doing, if you relax within yourself, activity will be lost, fever will be lost, and the intensity that comes through fever will not be there. You will feel a little dull, you will feel as if your awareness is decreasing. It is not decreasing; only the feverish glow is decreasing.

And it is good, so don’t be afraid of it, and don’t think that this passivity is not real. This is being said by your mind which needs and wants the feverish activity and the glow that comes through fever. Fever is not awareness, but in fever you can have a very unhealthy awareness, alertness. That is diseased; don’t hanker for it. Allow it to go, fall into passivity.

In the beginning it will look like your awareness is decreasing rather than increasing. Allow it to decrease, because whatsoever decreases with passivity was feverish, that’s why it decreases. Allow it to decrease. A moment will come when you will gain a balance. In that point of balance there will be no increase and no decrease. That is a healthy point; now the fever has gone. On that point of balance, whatsoever awareness you have, that is real, that is not feverish. And if you can wait for that moment to come . . . It is difficult, because in the beginning you feel that you are losing grip, you are becoming really dead; your activity, your alertness, everything has gone – you are relaxing into death. It appears that way because whatsoever you know about life is feverish.

It is not really life but just a fever, just a state of tension, just a state of hyper-activity. So in the Beginning . . . And you know only one state – this state of fever. You don’t know anything else so how can you compare?

When you become passive, relaxed, you will feel that something is lost. Allow it to be lost. Remain with passivity. A balancing point will come soon when you will be right at the point where there is no fever. You will be simply your own self – not pushed by someone else into activity, not pulled by someone else into activity. Now activity will start happening to you, but it will be spontaneous, it will be natural. You will do something, but you will not be pulled and pushed.

And what is the criterion by which to know whether this activity is not forced on you, is not feverish?

This is the point: if the activity is spontaneous, you will not feel any tension through it, you will not feel any burden. You will enjoy it. And the activity will become an end unto itself; there will be no end.

This will not be a means to reach somewhere else; it will be just an overflow of your own energy. And this overflow will be here and now; it will not be for something in the future. You will enjoy it. Whatsoever it is – digging a hole in the garden, or pruning the trees, or just sitting, or walking, or eating – whatsoever you are doing will become absolute in itself, total action. And after it you will not be tired; rather, you will feel refreshed. A feverish activity tires you; it is ill. A natural activity nourishes you; you feel more energetic, more vital after it. You feel more alive after it. It gives you more life.

But in the beginning when you start becoming passive and you fall into non-doing, it is bound to be felt that you are losing awareness. No, you are not losing awareness. You are simply losing a feverish type of mentation, a feverish type of alertness. You will settle into passivity and a natural awareness will happen.

This is the difference between a feverish alertness and natural awareness; this is the difference: in feverish alertness there is a concentration; it excludes everything. You can concentrate on a thing.

You are listening to me. If it is a feverish alertness, then you listen to me and you are totally unaware of anything else. But if it is a passive awareness, not feverish, but balanced, natural, then if a car passes by, you hear that car also. You are simply aware. You are aware of everything; of whatsoever is happening around you. And this is the beauty of it – that the car passes by and you hear the noise, but it is not a disturbance.

If you are feverishly attentive and you hear the car, you will miss listening to me; it will be a disturbance, because you don’t know how to be totally, simply aware of everything that is happening. You know only one way: how to be alert of one thing at the cost of everything else. If you move to something else, then you lose the contact with the first thing. If you are listening to me in a feverish mind, then anything can disturb you. Because your alertness goes there, then you are cut off from me. It is one-pointed; it is not total. A natural, passive awareness is just total; nothing disturbs it. It is not concentration, it is meditation.

Concentration is always feverish, because you are forcing your energy to one point. Energy by itself flows in all directions. It has no direction in which to move; it simply enjoys flowing all over. We create conflict because we say, ‘This is good to listen to; that is bad.’ If you are doing your prayer and a child starts laughing, it is a disturbance – because you cannot conceive of a simple awareness in which the prayer continues and the child goes on laughing and there is no conflict between the two; they both are part of a bigger whole.

Try this: be totally alert, totally aware. Don’t concentrate. Every concentration is tiring, you feel tired, because you are forcing energy unnaturally. Simple awareness is inclusive of all. When you are passive and non-doing then everything happens around you. Nothing disturbs you and nothing bypasses you. Everything happens and you know it, you witness it.

A noise comes: it happens to you, it moves within you, then it passes, and you remain as you were. Just as in an empty room: if there was no one here the traffic would go on passing, the noise would come into this room, then it would pass and the room would remain unaffected, as if nothing had happened. In passive awareness you remain unaffected. Everything goes on happening; just passes you, but never touches you. You remain unscarred. In feverish concentration everything touches you, impresses you.

One more point about this. In the eastern psychology we have a word, sanskar – conditioning. If you are concentrating on something you will be conditioned, you will get a sanskar, you will get impressed by something. If you are simply aware – passively aware, not concentrating, not focusing yourself, just being there – nothing conditions you. Then you don’t accumulate any sanskar, you don’t accumulate any impressions. You go on remaining virgin, pure, unscarred; nothing touches you. If one can be passively aware, he passes through the world, but the world never passes through him.

One Zen monk, Bokuju, used to say, ‘Go and cross the stream, but don’t allow the water to touch you.’ And there was no bridge over the stream near his monastery.

Many would try, but when they crossed, of course the water would touch them. So one day one monk came and he said, ‘You give us puzzles. We try to cross that stream; there is no bridge.

If there was a bridge, of course we could have crossed the stream and the water would not have touched us. But we have to pass through the stream – the water touches.’

So Bokuju said, ‘I will come and I will cross and you watch.’ And Bokuju crossed. Of course, water touched his feet, and they said, ‘Look, the water has touched you!’

Bokuju said, ‘As far as I know, it has not touched me. I was just a witness. The water was touching my feet, but not me. I was just witnessing.’

With passive alertness, with witnessing, you pass through the world. You are in the world, but the world is not in you.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #58, Q4

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

The Self is Light – Lucy Cornelssen

In December 31, 1989. Lucy Cornelssen – “Lucy Ma” to us, the Ashramites – “went gently into the night”. She did not “rage against the ending of the light”. Why should she? It was the end of the shadow, not the light. Her Sadguru Ramana had shown her that the Self, one’s own true Being, is eternal Light. So she went gently. After ninety beautiful years on earth, her last day here was also the last day of the year.

Lucy Ma came from a land which has produced great Indologists, like Max Mueller and Heinrich Zimmer. In earlier times, Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the world as a Will and an Idea, lost his heart to Indian metaphysics. “If I were to be reborn,” said he, “I would like it to be in India.” Goethe, Germany’s Shakespeare was enraptured by Kalidasa’s famous play and sang in praise of its heroine Sakuntala. One may see in Lucy Ma’s return to the Source the restoration of her Fatherland’s unity.

This love of India was in Lucy’s blood too. Her mother was an Indologist of impressive erudition. Young Lucy often saw “Mutti” poring over huge tomes. One day, the girl was struck by the jacket of a book on her mother’s table and opened it at random. This book fascinated her before she read a single word of it.

A page in it had a strange picture which t

ransformed her all at once. She lost all sense of her body and surroundings. All that remained was an awareness of immense joy. After a while, her mother came in, shook the girl, and brought her back to herself. Lucy pointed to the picture and asked, “Mutti, what is that?” The mother said: “My dear child! This is Siva, the great god of India. There are three main gods for them: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, while Siva destroys to make way for re-creation. See, how fierce Siva looks as He dances on the cremation ground! But to His devotees, He is sweet and gentle like a mother.” Precocious young Lucy was thrilled! From that moment she became a devotee of Siva at heart. It was years later that she realized that the trance-like state induced in her by that picture was very deep meditation which comes but rarely to people, what we call ‘samadhi’.

Siva became for her a living god. During many of her wakeful moments, she saw the fierce-looking figure dancing before her mind’s eye. Far from resisting that experience, she revelled in it.

Lucy was a beautiful girl. Left to herself, she would have remained single, wedded only to Siva. But “the stars that govern our conditions” decided otherwise and lovely Lucy married and became Frau Lucy Cornelssen. Lucy took to writing or rather was called to that vocation. Those were days when serious writers could just manage to keep the wolf from the door. “I was always poor!” said Lucy Ma once. But that was sadhana in a rich sense. Did she not in later years become a very articulate, highly polished writer, producing such well-received books as ‘Hunting the I’ and very perceptive German translations of Sri Bhagavan’s works?

The Second World War broke out in 1939, which did not spare a single household. “Wars always devour the best”, says a German proverb. The best in physical strength and valour, in patriotism and heroism. The best-minded Germans, like the great novelist Thomas Mann, left the Fatherland reluctantly and in disgust. Bertolt Brecht, the dramatist and passionate pacifist, dared the warmongers who burned his inflammable books, to burn him, and moved from one country to another to escape the evil of war. Einstein, the greatest German since Goethe, had left the country earlier, an exit which was later to prove disastrous to those who made him quit. Many stayed and suffered; Lucy was one of them. she had already found a measure of inward poise; the war did not touch her inmost being. She quietly retired to a life of solitude in a little hut in the midst of a dense forest.

Siva had come to Lucy in her childhood. Now Arunachala Siva Ramana came, for she was ready to receive and spread His teaching.

One night Lucy had lost the way to her hut and was groping around in the dark. Weary and dispirited, Lucy was about to collapse, when she saw a dot of light at some distance. When she reached the spot, she saw that it was another hut. The door was open. Lucy was not the kind of person to walk into a house unannounced. But on that night, she neither knocked nor called out. She just walked in. On a table near the candle, whose little flame had guided her to that hut, there stood the photograph of the head and shoulders of a man whose eyes shone with a rare lustre. Lucy saw the photo and stood still, a monument of bliss. . . Lucy found it strange that she now felt fully alive as never before and yet her body was nowhere.

The owner of the hut walked in after a while. She was surprised to see a youthful lady standing entranced and statue-like, a look of rapture on her radiant face. She shook Lucy and brought her out of the trance.

Lucy learnt that the person was the lady’s spiritual Master, that he lived at the foot of Arunachala, the Hill of the Holy Beacon, in South India, and was called Sri Ramana Maharshi.

Not much later a copy of Heinrich Zimmer’s book “Der Weg zum Selbst” (The Way to the Self) in which the great Indologist had written a glowing account of the Sage’s life and teachings and had made first-class translations of some of His works, “somehow found its way into my deep forest solitude.” That photograph and that book totally transformed Lucy’s life. The devotee of Siva had found her Sadguru!

Lucy Ma wrote in The Mountain Path in 1979: “I should say that it was my spiritual earnestness which brought about my acquaintance with Sri Ramana Maharshi through that book. I was able to perceive that Ramana was an authentic representative of the lofty Upanishadic Wisdom in our own days.”

Lucy started saving money to go to South India to be at the feet of her Master. Just when she was ready to leave, news came of His Mahasamadhi. She was just not destined to see her Sadguru in the body. True, he often said that He was not the body, but she was sad.

However, she soon braced herself and her grief was transmuted into energy for action. She resolved to bring out accurate translations in German of Bhagavan Ramana’s works, and towards this end, she made up her mind to acquire adequate proficiency in Tamil. By the time she left for India in 1956, she had a good passive knowledge of Tamil and had put together a manuscript of her German translation of His works. She said that she completed the draft translation “in a matter of weeks”. But then deeply meditative preparation had lasted years.

Lucy Ma came to Sri Ramanasramam because it was there that her Master had lived and sanctified every inch of the Holy Hill and the ashram by His footsteps. She would place her manuscripts at His feet and also seek confirmation from His disciples that her translation was flawless and worthy of the original. At the Ashram she got an excellent guide. T.K. Sundaresa Iyer – popularly called TKS – was well-read in English, Tamil and Sanskrit and had a deep understanding of Sri Bhagavan*s teachings. Affectionately called “Sundaresa” by Bhagavan, he was held in esteem by everyone in the Ashram. Lucy found in TKS a match for her Teutonic diligence and thoroughness.

When her translations were printed – In three volumes – Lucy Ma in characteristic humility, had hidden behind the nome-de-plume “Satyamayi”. Lucy Ma and TKS allowed me the privilege of assisting them in this project.

Lucy Ma, lover of peace and loneliness, spent more than seven months in sylvan surroundings at “Nirudhi Lingam” shrine on the hill-round route. It was here that Nayana (Kavyakantfia Ganapati Muni) had done tapasya before he met the young Swami whom he recognized and named as Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. Now around this sacred spot has sprung up a colony of very earnest sadhakas, deeply devoted to Sri Bhagavan, most of them from West Germany.

Lucy Ma kept shuttling between Germany and Tiruvannamabi. In response to my humble request and Ashram’s invitation, she finally came to Arunachala forever in the 70’s. Her daughter, Heike Becker-Foss, kept coming from Germany to spend some time with her mother, but Lucy Ma stayed put in Arunachala. Heike, daughter of her mother, tall and regal, bright and sensitive, wrote of the Ashram: “It Is another world than we are used to live in; strange and yet as if it were, the real world of the Soul, seemingly lost since centuries, yet never forgotten!”

Lucy Ma lived, till her last day, in a little apartment offered by me in front of the ashram. Once during my long absence from the town, she had arranged for her permanent stay in an Old Women’s Home in Germany. When I returned, she divulged her plan to me. With tears in my eyes, I pleaded with her not to leave dozens of her spiritual children, and me, her son, who needed her guidance most. She pleaded she was becoming too weak and a burden on the Ashram. I reasoned with her. Where was the question of burden? Lucy Ma magnanimously relented and said she would stay on if only for my sake. I was overwhelmed. When comes such another mother?

Lucy Ma observed silence on Mondays. The board “MOUNAM ~ MONDAY” hung at her door every Monday. But she would graciously consent to receive and talk to a serious seeker who could not wait till Tuesday. Actually, it was an atmosphere of silence prevailed in Lucy Ma’s apartment on all days. Her soft-spoken words had the quality of silence. She spoke little, but with great effect.

And wrote likewise. Her book ‘Hunting the I’ is one of the best and most original books on Sri Bhagavan on our shelves. It has fascinated many seekers with an intellectual bent of mind. Using her knowledge of philosophy, sociology, biology, archaeology, psychology, and other disciplines, she has interpreted Sri Bhagavan’s teachings in a novel and convincing way, anticipating all questions and copiously quoting Sri Bhagavan’s own words. …

The little book of 100 pages is a masterpiece of rigorous analysis and clarity of thought. Lucy Ma showed her gracious affection when she dedicated the original German version of ‘Hunting the I’ to me.

Her clarity impressed visitors. Only those were sent to her who would benefit by talking to her – mainly those who wanted to see her and those who knew only German or French. After a brief session of conversation with her, many came away clearer in mind.

Like me, Helga, the brave Bulgarian-born German lady, regularly visited Lucy Ma. She is now sorting out Lucy Ma’s few unpublished writings and translating them into English.

It so turned out that neither Helga nor I was at Lucy Ma’s bedside when she passed away. We were both out of town. Before I left, when I went to her to take leave, she was intensely emotional and said: “Thank you for everything, my son! You are taking leave of me and I am taking leave of everybody soon. I bless you!” I drenched her feet with my tears and walked away.

A day after I left, she was absorbed in Arunachala. Her body was interred inside the Ashram premises; her samadhi is built near those of Major Chadwick, S.S. Cohen and H.C. Khanna.

She went gently, happily. It was into the great Light that she went. Goethe, in his last moments, muttered: “Light, more light”. To Lucy Ma that great Light was never in doubt, ever since she realized the truth of Sri Bhagavan’s teaching, “the Self is Light”.

– The Mountain Path 1990

Here you can see more posts from Lucy Cornelssen.