Tag: Buddha

That One Technique is Witnessing – Osho

Paul Reps in the foreword to this book, ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,’ writes, “ . . . that the one hundred and twelve techniques of ‘Vigyan Bhairava Tantra’ may well be the roots of Zen.”

Beloved Osho, do you agree with Paul Reps?

There is a possibility . . . the one hundred and twelve techniques of Vigyan Bhairava Tantra are basically one technique in different combinations. That one technique is witnessing. In different situations use witnessing, and you have created a new technique. In all those one hundred and twelve techniques, that simple witnessing is used.

And there is a possibility that it may not be joined directly with Shiva’s book. Vigyan Bhairava Tantra is five thousand years old, and Gautam Buddha is only twenty-five centuries old. The gap between Shiva and Buddha is long – twenty-five centuries – and there seems to be no connecting link.

So it may not be that he has directly taken the technique of witnessing from Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. But whether he has taken it directly or not, there is a possibility that somehow, from somebody, he may have heard. He had moved with many masters before he became a buddha. Before he himself found the technique of witnessing, he had moved with many masters. Somewhere he may have heard mention of Vigyan Bhairava Tantra but it does not seem to have a very direct connection, because he was still searching. In fact, it was not witnessing that he was practicing when he became a buddha.

The situation is just the reverse: he became a buddha first. Then he found, “My God! It is witnessing that has made me a buddha.” It was not that he was practicing witnessing, he had dropped everything. Tired of all kinds of yogas and mantras and tantras, one evening he simply dropped . . . He had renounced the kingdom; he had renounced everything. For six years he had been torturing himself with all kinds of methods.

That evening, he dropped all those methods, and under a tree which became known by his name, the bodhi tree, he slept silently. And in the morning when he opened his eyes, the last star was disappearing. And as the star disappeared – a sudden silence all around, and he became a witness. He was not doing anything special, he was just lying down underneath the tree, resting, watching the disappearing star. And as the star disappeared there was nothing to watch – only watching remained. Suddenly he found, “Whoever I have been seeking, I am it.”

So it was Buddha himself who discovered that witnessing had been his path without his awareness. But since Buddha, witnessing, or the method of sakshin, became a specific method of Zen.

Paul Reps’ guess has a possibility, but it cannot be proved historically. And according to me, Buddha was not practicing witnessing. He found witnessing after he found that he was a buddha. So certainly it has nothing to do with Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, but the method is the same. […]

Because the method is the same, in the mind of Paul Reps, a scholarly mind, the idea may have arisen easily that Buddha’s method, the Zen method, is connected with Vigyan Bhairava Tantra. […]

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom From Oneself, 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.

 

That Area is Meditation – Osho

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

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

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

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

Then a small child was born to him.

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

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

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

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

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

That area is meditation.

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

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

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

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

But everything is happening so silently on its own accord.

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

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

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

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

To realize this is the greatest experience in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

From Turning In, Discourse #1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

Surrender vs Be a Light unto Oneself – Osho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

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

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

Transcendence is True Therapy – Osho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

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

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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

My Beloved Bodhisattvas – Osho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this time you have pulled me back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Osho

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

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Take Note Twice: The Buddhist Meditation Technique of Taking Note – Osho

The Lord said:

‘The Tathagata speaks in accordance with reality, speaks the truth, speaks of what is, not otherwise.

Tathagata, Subhuti, is synonymous with true suchness.’

The word suchness is of immense importance in Buddha’s approach towards reality. The word suchness is as important in Buddhism as God is in other religions.

The Buddhist word for suchness is tathata. It means, “Seeing things are such, don’t take any attitude, don’t make any opinion, don’t judge or condemn.” The Buddhist meditation consists of suchness. The method is very practical and very deep-going. Buddha has said to his disciples, “Just watch things as they are, without interfering.” For example, you have a headache. The moment you note it, immediately the opinion enters that “this is not good. Why should I have a headache? What should I do not to have it?” You are immediately worried, you have taken an opinion, you are against it, you have started repressing it. Either you have to repress it chemically, through an Aspro or Novalgin, or you have to repress it in the consciousness — you don’t look at it, you put it aside. You get involved in something else, you want to be distracted in something else so you can forget it. But in both ways you have missed suchness.

What will Buddha suggest? Buddha says take note twice, “Headache, headache.” Don’t feel inimical towards it, neither friendly nor antagonistic. Just take a simple note, as if it has nothing to do with you: “Headache, headache.” And remain undisturbed, undistracted, uninfluenced by it, without any opinion.

See the point. Immediately, ninety percent of the headache is gone . . . because a headache is not a real headache, ninety percent arises out of the antagonistic opinion. Immediately you will see that the greater part of it is no longer there. And another thing will be noted: sooner or later you will see that the headache is disappearing in something else — maybe you are now feeling anger. What happened? If you repress the headache you will never come to know what its real message was. The headache was there just as an indicator that you are full of anger in this moment and the anger is creating a tension in the head, hence the headache. But you watched, you simply took note of it — “Headache, headache” — you remained impartial, objective.

Then the headache disappears. And the headache gives you the message that “I am not a headache, I am anger.” Now Buddha says take note again, “Anger, anger.” Now don’t become angry with anger, otherwise again you are trapped and you have missed suchness. If you say, “Anger, anger,” ninety percent of the anger will be gone immediately. This is a very practical method. And the ten percent that will be left will release its message. You may come to see that it is not anger, it is ego. Take note again: “Ego, ego.” And so on and so forth. One thing is connected with another, and the deeper you move the closer you come to the original cause. And once you have come to the original cause, the chain is broken – there is no beyond it.

A moment will come when you will take note of the last link in the chain, and then nothingness. Then you are released from the whole chain, and there will arise great purity, great silence. That silence is called suchness.

This has to be practiced continuously. Sometimes it may happen that you forget, and you have made an opinion unconsciously, mechanically. Then Buddha says remember again, “Opinion, opinion.” Now don’t get distracted by this — that you have made an opinion. Don’t get depressed that you have missed. Just take note, “Opinion, opinion,” and suddenly you will see — ninety percent of the opinion is gone, ten percent remains, and that releases its message to you. What is its message? The message is that there is some inhibition, some taboo; out of that taboo the opinion has arisen.

A sex desire comes in the mind and immediately you say, “This is bad.” This is opinion. Why is it bad? — Because you have been taught it is bad, it is a taboo. Take note, “Taboo, taboo,” and go on.

Sometimes it will also happen that you have judged — not only judged, you have made an opinion; not only made an opinion, you have become depressed that you have missed. Then take note again, “Depression, depression,” and go on.

Whenever you become conscious, at whatsoever point, from there take note — just a simple note — and leave the whole thing. And soon you will see the entangled mind is no longer as entangled as it has always been. Things start disappearing, and there will be moments of suchness, tathata, when you will be simply there and the existence is there and there is no opinion between you and existence. All is undisturbed by thought, unpolluted by thought. Existence is, but mind has disappeared. That state of no-mind is called suchness.

Buddha says A Tathagata is synonymous with suchness. Synonymous — not that he has the quality of suchness, he is suchness.

And Buddha says: A Tathagata speaks in accordance with reality. He cannot do otherwise. It is not that he chooses to speak in accordance with reality – there is no choice. Whatsoever is real is spoken through him. It is not that he chooses, “This is real and I should speak this, and that is unreal and I will not speak that.” If that choice has arisen, you are not a Buddha yet.

A Tathagata speaks out of choicelessness. So it is not that the Tathagata speaks truth. In fact it should be said in this way, that whatsoever is spoken by a Tathagata is truth. He speaks in accordance with reality. In fact, reality speaks through him. He is just a medium, a hollow bamboo. The reality sings its song through him, he has no song of his own. All his opinions have disappeared and he himself has disappeared. He is pure space. Truth can pass through him into the world, truth can descend through him into the world. He . . . speaks the truth, he speaks of what is. . .

Yatha bhutam – whatsoever is the case, he speaks. He has no mind about it, he never interferes. He does not drop a thing, he does not add a thing. He is a mirror: whatsoever comes in front of the mirror the mirror reflects. This reflectiveness is suchness.

‘A Tathagata, Subhuti, is synonymous with true suchness.’

And why does he say true suchness? Is there some untrue suchness too? Yes. You can practice. You can practice, you can cultivate a certain quality called suchness, but that will not be true. The true suchness has not to be cultivated, it comes.

For example, what do I mean when I say you can cultivate? You can decide, “I will only speak the truth, whatsoever the consequence. Even if I have to lose my life I will speak the truth.” And you speak the truth — but this is not true suchness, it is your decision. The untruth arises in you. You go on pushing down the untruth. You say, “I have decided that even if my life is at stake I am going to be true.” It is effort. Truth has become your prestige. Deep down you are longing to be a martyr. Deep down you want to let the whole world know that you are a truthful man, that you are ready to sacrifice your life also for it; you are a great man, a mahatma. And you sacrifice your life, but it is not true suchness.

True suchness knows nothing of choice. You are simply an instrument of reality. You don’t come in, you don’t stand in between, you simply have withdrawn yourself. The mirror docs not decide, “This man is standing in front of me. I am going to show him his real face, whatsoever the consequence. Even if he throws a stone at me — because he is so ugly, he may get angry — but I am going to show him his real face.”

If a mirror thinks that way then the mirror is no longer a mirror — mind has come in. It is not mirroring, it is his decision. The purity is lost. But a mirror is simply there, it has no mind. So is a Buddha. That’s why Buddha uses the word ‘true’ suchness.

This Buddhist meditation of taking note — try it, play with it. I cannot say practice it; I can only say play with it. Sitting, walking, sometimes remember it — just play with it. And you will be surprised that Buddha has given to the world one of the greatest techniques to penetrate into your innermost core.

Psychoanalysis does not go that deep. It also depends on something like this – free association of thoughts — but it remains superficial, because the other’s presence is a hindrance. The psychoanalyst is sitting there; even if he is sitting behind a screen, but you know he is there. That very knowledge that somebody is there hinders. You cannot be a real mirror, because the presence of the other cannot allow you to open totally. You can open totally only to your own self.

Buddha’s method is far more deep-going because it is not to be told to anybody else. You have just to take note inside. It is subjective and yet objective. The phenomenon has to happen in your subjectivity, but you have to remain objective.

Just take note, and go on taking note as if it is none of your business, as if it is not happening to you, as if you have been appointed to do some job: “Stand on this corner of the road and just take note of whosoever passes by. A woman, a woman. A dog, a dog. A car, a car.” You have nothing to do, you are not involved. You are absolutely aloof, distant.

It can take you from one thing to another. And one moment comes when you have reached to the very cause of a certain chain. And there are many chains in your being, thousands of threads have got intertwined into each other. You have become a mess. You will have to follow each thread, slowly, slowly, and you will have to come to the end of each thread. Once the end is reached, that chain disappears from your being. You are less burdened.

Slowly, slowly, one day it happens — all threads have disappeared, because you have looked into all causes that were causing them. They were effects. One day, when all causes have been looked into, you have observed everything — all the games of the mind that it goes on playing with you, all the tricks and cunningnesses of it, all the deceptions and mischiefs — the whole mind disappears, as if it has never been there.

There is a famous sutra which Buddha has said about the mind, about life, about existence. The sutra is one of the most golden ones. He says:

Think about the mind
As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dewdrops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.

Mind is a conditioned phenomenon. It is the effect of some causes. You cannot destroy the effects directly, you will have to go to the causes. You cannot destroy a tree just by cutting its branches and leaves and foliage; you will have to go to the roots — and roots are hidden underneath. So are the roots in you. These things have to be understood. Buddha says, “Think of your mind as stars.” Why? Stars exist only in darkness. When the morning comes and the sun rises, they disappear.

So is your mind; it exists only in unconsciousness. When the sun of consciousness rises it disappears — just like stars. Don’t fight with the stars. You will not be able to destroy them, they are millions. Just become more aware and they will disappear on their own accord.

A fault of vision . . . Your eye is ill, it has some fault. Then you see things which are not there. For example, you may be seeing double or you may be seeing patterns, because your eye is not as it should be. If your liver is not good your eyes will start seeing things which are not there; a weak liver, and eyes will see patterns in the air, bubbles, designs, patterns. They are not really there, they are caused by your eye itself. You cannot fight with them, you cannot destroy them, because they don’t exist. All that is needed is that you will have to go to a physician. Your eye needs treatment, your eye needs to be cured.

Buddha used to say, “I am not a philosopher, I am a physician. I don’t give you a doctrine, I doctor you. I don’t give you a theory, I simply give you a medicine. I don’t talk about what light is, I only help you open your eyes so you yourself can see it.”

The blind man cannot be helped by definitions of light and color and rainbows. The only help possible is that his eyes have to be brought back. You cannot explain to a deaf person what music is. Only when he can hear will he know. The experience is the only explanation.

Third, Buddha says think of the mind as a lamp. Why as a lamp? The lamp burns only while the oil in it lasts. Once the oil is finished the flame disappears. So is the mind – and the oil is the desire. If there are desires in the mind, the mind will remain alive. Don’t fight with the flame, just don’t go on pouring fuel on it. Desire is the fuel.

Desire means that which is, you are not satisfied with it, you want something else. You are not living in suchness — that’s what desire means. Desire means you want things to be other than they are. You don’t want them the way they are. You have your own ideas, you have your private dreams to impose upon reality. You are not contented with reality as such, you want to change it according to your heart’s desire. Then mind will remain. Mind exists because you are not contented with reality.

So many people come to me and they ask, “How to stop the thoughts?” They want to stop the thoughts directly. They cannot be stopped. Thoughts exist because desires exist. Unless you understand desire and drop desire, you will not be able to drop thoughts — because thoughts are by-products.

First the desire comes in. You see a beautiful car passing by and a desire arises. Buddha will say, “Say, ‘Car, car.’ Finished. If a desire has arisen in you, say again, ‘Desire, desire,’ and be finished”. But you have seen a beautiful car, and a dream, a desire, takes possession of you.

Now so many thoughts will arise — “How can I manage to purchase this car. Should I sell my house? Should I go to the bank? Should I earn more money, legal/illegal? What should I do? This car has to be possessed.” Now how can you stop thoughts? […]

But if you don’t drop desire, how can you stop thinking? Thinking comes as a help. You want to be the chief minister, the mind starts spinning and weaving. The mind says, “Now I have to look into things, into how it should be managed.” Now there are a thousand and one problems to be solved, only then can your desire be fulfilled. Thinking is a device of desire to fulfill itself. You cannot stop thinking directly.

Buddha says desire is like oil in a lamp. If the oil is no more, the flame will disappear on its own.

Think of mind as a lamp, think of mind as a mock show, a magic show. Nothing is substantial there, it is a kind of hypnotic state. The hypnotist has hypnotized you and he says, “Look — the animal, the camel is coming.” And there arises a form of a camel in your mind, and you start looking at the camel and the camel is there — for you. Everybody is laughing, because nobody is seeing the camel but you are seeing it.

Your mind is a magic-box, that’s what Buddha has said again and again. It goes on creating phantoms, imaginations, which have no substance in them — but if you want to believe in them, they will become real. Your mind is a great mock show. In fact the English word magic comes from the Indian word maya. Maya means illusion.

Illusions can be created, and you all create illusions. You see a woman, but you never see yatha buhtam — as she is. That’s why there is so much frustration afterwards. You start seeing things which are not there, which are only projections of your mind. You project beauty, you project a thousand and one things on the poor woman. When you come closer, when you are able to live with the woman, those phantoms will start wearing out. Those imaginations cannot persist against reality for long, the woman’s reality will assert. And then you will feel cheated and you will think she has cheated you.

She has not done a thing. She herself is feeling cheated by you, because she has also projected something on you. She was thinking you are a hero, an Alexander or something, a great man, and now you are just a mouse and nothing else. And she was thinking you are a mountain — you are not even a molehill! She feels cheated. You both feel cheated, you both feel frustrated.

I have heard:

A woman walked into the Missing Persons Bureau. “My husband disappeared last night,” she reported.

“We’ll do our best to find him,” the officers assured her. “Kindly give us a description of the man.”

“Well,” she waited a little and then said, “he’s about five feet tall, wears thick glasses, has a bald head, drinks a lot, has a red nose, has a high squeaky voice . . .” And then she stopped and thought for a moment, and said, “Oh, just forget the whole thing!”

If you see the reality, that is how it is. You will say, “Oh, forget the whole thing.” But you don’t see. You go on projecting. […]

Buddha says it is a mock show. Be aware — your mind is a magician. It shows you things which are not there, which have never been there. It deludes you, it creates an unreal world around you, and then you live in that unreal world.

This world of trees and birds and animals and mountains is not unreal! But the world that your mind creates is unreal.

When you hear people like Buddha talking about the unreality of the world, don’t misunderstand them. They don’t mean that the trees are unreal, they don’t mean that the people are unreal. They mean that whatsoever you have been thinking about reality is unreal — your mind is unreal. Once mind is dropped, all is real. Then you live in suchness, then you become tathata, then you are suchness.

The professor was telling his 8 a.m. class, “I have found that the best way to start the day is to exercise for five minutes, take a deep breath of air and then finish with a cold shower. Then I feel rosy all over.”

A sleepy voice from the back of the room responded, “Tell us more about Rosy!”

The mind is ready to jump upon anything, to project. Be very careful with the mind. That’s what meditation is all about — being careful, being not deceived by the mind.

The fifth thing: think of the mind as dew drops. Very fragile . . . Just for the moment the dewdrops exist. Comes the morning sun and they evaporate. Comes a little breeze and they slip and are gone. So is the mind. It knows nothing of reality, knows nothing of eternity. It is a time-phenomenon. Think of it as dewdrops. But you think of it as pearls, diamonds — as if it is going to stay.

And you need not believe in Buddha, you just watch your mind. It is not the same even for two consecutive moments. It goes on changing, it is a flux. One moment it is this, another moment it is that. One moment you are in deep love, another moment you are in deep hate. One moment you are so happy, and another moment you are so unhappy. Just watch your mind!

If you cling with this mind, you will always remain in a turmoil, because you will never be able to remain in silence — something or other will go on happening. And you will never be able to have any taste of eternity and only that taste fulfills. Time is constant change.

And sixth: think of your mind as a bubble. Like bubbles, all mind experiences burst sooner or later and then nothingness is left in the hands. Go after the mind — it is a bubble. And sometimes the bubble looks very beautiful. In the sunrays it may look like a rainbow, it may have all the colors of the rainbow, and it looks really enchanting, majestic. But go rushing for it, catch hold of it, and the moment you catch hold of it, it is no longer there.

And that’s what happens every day in your life. You go on rushing after this and that, and the moment you catch hold of something it is no longer the same. Then all beauty is gone — that beauty was only in your imagination. Then all joy is gone — that joy was only in your hope. Then all those ecstasies that you were thinking were going to happen, do not happen — they were only in your imagination, they were only in the waiting.

Reality is totally different than these bubbles of your imagination — and they all burst. Failure frustrates, so does success. Success also frustrates, ask the successful people. Poverty is frustrating, so is richness, ask the rich people. Everything, good or bad, is frustrating because all are mind-bubbles. But we go on chasing the bubbles — not only chasing, we want to make them bigger and bigger and bigger. There is a great mania in the world to make every experience bigger.

There is a story to the effect that a group of students from different nations were asked to write individual essays on the elephant. A German student wrote on the uses of the elephant in warfare. An English student, on the elephant’s aristocratic character. A French student, on lovemaking among the elephants. An Indian, on the elephant’s philosophical attitude. And an American chose for his subject, how to make bigger and better elephants.

The mind is continuously thinking. The mind is American, how to make things bigger — a bigger house, a bigger car, everything has to be bigger. And naturally, the bigger the bubble becomes the closer it comes to bursting. Small bubbles may float a little longer on the surface of the water; bigger bubbles cannot even float that much. Hence the American frustration. Nobody is as frustrated as the American.

The American mind has succeeded in making the bubble very big; now it is bursting from everywhere. Now there seems to be no possibility to protect it, to save it; it is exploding. And nobody is at fault, because nobody thinks, “It is our deepest desire and we have succeeded in it.” Nothing fails like success.

Seventh: Buddha says think of the mind as a dream. It is imagination, subjective, one’s own creation. You are the director, you are the actor and you are the audience. All that goes on in your mind is a private imagination. The world has nothing to do with it. The existence has no obligation to fulfill it.

A doctor had just finished giving a patient, who was quite a bit more than middle-aged, a thorough physical examination. “I can’t find a thing wrong with you, sir,” the doctor said. “But I recommend you give up about half of your love life.”

The old man stared at the doctor for a moment and then said, “Which half – thinking about it or talking about it?”

Mind is insubstantial — thinking or talking. It knows nothing of the real. The more mind you have the less reality you will have; the less mind you have the more reality. The no-mind knows what reality is, tathata. Then you become a tathagata — one who has known suchness.

Or think of the mind as a lightning flash, says Buddha. Don’t cling to it, because the moment you cling to it you will create suffering for yourself. The lightning is only for the moment there, and it is gone. Everything comes and goes, nothing remains, and we go on clinging. And by clinging we go on creating misery.

Watch your mind, how ready it is to cling to anything, how afraid the mind is of the future, of change. It wants to make everything stable, it wants to cling to everything that happens. You are happy, you want this happiness to remain. You will cling with it. And the moment you cling you have crushed it already, it is no more there.

You have met a man, a woman, you are in love, and you cling and you want this love to stay forever. In that very moment — when you desire that the love should stay forever – it has disappeared. It is no longer there. All mind experiences are like lightning, they come and they go.

Buddha says: “You simply watch.” There is not time enough to cling! You simply watch, take note: “Headache, headache.” “Love, love.” “Beauty, beauty.” Just take note. That is enough. It is such a small moment that nothing more can be done. Take note and become aware.

Awareness can become your eternity — nothing else.

And the last thing, the ninth: Buddha says think about mind experiences as clouds, changing forms, fluxes. You look at the cloud; sometimes the cloud is like an elephant, and immediately it starts changing and becomes a camel or a horse, and so many things. It goes on changing. It is never static, so many forms arise and disappear. But you are not worried. What does it matter to you whether the cloud looks like an elephant or it looks like a camel? It does not matter, it is just a cloud.

So is the mind a cloud around your consciousness. Your consciousness is the sky and the mind is the cloud. Sometimes it is an anger cloud, sometimes it is a love cloud, sometimes it is a greed cloud — but these are forms of the same energy. Don’t choose, don’t become attached. If you become attached with the elephant in the cloud you will be miserable. Next time you will see that the elephant is gone and you will cry and you will weep. But who is responsible? Is the cloud responsible? The cloud is simply following its nature. You just remember — a cloud is there to change, so is the mind.

Watch from your inner sky and let the clouds float. Become just a watcher. And remember, clouds will come and go, you can remain indifferent.

Buddha has given indifference very great value. He calls it upeksha. Remain indifferent, it doesn’t matter.

Two astronauts, a man and a woman, were visiting the planet Mars, where they found the Martians very hospitable and eager to show them around. After a few days the astronauts decided to pose a pressing question to their hosts, “How is life reproduced on Mars?”

The Martian leader proceeded to take the astronauts to a laboratory where he showed them how it was done. First he measured some white liquid into a tube, and then carefully sprinkled a brown powder on top, stirred the mixture and set it aside. In nine months, the astronauts were told, this mixture would develop into a new Martian.

Then it was the turn of the Martians to ask how life was reproduced on earth. The astronauts, a bit embarrassed, eventually gathered courage to give a demonstration, and began to make love. They were interrupted, however, by the hysterical laughter of the Martians.

“What is so funny?” the astronauts asked.

“That,” replied the Martian leader, “is how we make Nescafe.”

All forms. One need not be worried about these forms. Just watch. Think of mind . . .

As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dewdrops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.

And then the conditioning disappears, and you come to the unconditioned. That unconditioned is suchness, truth, reality – yatha bhutam.

-Osho

From The Diamond Sutra, Discourse #11

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Not Enough to Love the Master Because that May Become a Consolation – Osho

Need we love enlightenment – “The Great Matter” – For enlightenment’s sake? Is it enough to love the master and want more than anything to “requite his kindness”?

Maneesha, you cannot love enlightenment, you cannot hate enlightenment. These are not possible ways of approaching enlightenment. You can be enlightened or not, there is no question of loving enlightenment or not loving enlightenment. And it is not enough to love the master because that may become a consolation: that you are with the master, you love the master, what else is needed?

Loving the master has only one meaning – that you open up to such a point that the master can hit and cut like a sword all the barriers to your enlightenment.

You will not allow anybody to come too close without trust. To be with a master simply means to be defenseless; if he cuts off your head, you will still be grateful. And he has to cut off much more than your head. He has to cut all your mind activities; he has to cut all your heart feelings. Unless thoughts and feelings disappear, you cannot be absolutely silent.

If you love the master, this is not the end; it is just the beginning of a process. The master himself is a device. On your own, it will be very difficult. But if you trust someone – and you can feel that he has arrived – you can open your heart, there is no fear.

The master is pure love, not addressed to anybody in particular. You can open to the master, exposing yourself, not hiding behind thoughts, theories, philosophies or religions. Just open and expose yourself with all your wounds, with all your darkness, with all your misery, with all your anger and jealousy. You can open yourself without any fear, because a master never judges. A master has no judgment, he simply loves. And out of his love, he cuts all the barriers and leaves you alone like a flame. There is nothing that you have to do – just your dancing flame is enough gratitude.

In your enlightenment, the master has again become enlightened. As each disciple becomes enlightened, the master becomes again and again enlightened; and with the sheer joy of a gardener when each of his plants start blossoming. Just watch his eyes – all those colors, all those flowers dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun – and how long he has been waiting! You are my garden. I will wait until you gather courage, and this courage means disappearing into the soil, losing yourself in complete let-go.

Enlightenment is not somewhere else. It is hiding behind your seed, inside you. You just have to trust. If you trust in yourself, the master is not needed. But because the society has created you in such a way that you cannot trust yourself, you are always divided – to do it or not to do it, to be or not to be – your mind is continuously wavering. You need someone unwavering. It is almost like surgery; you cannot do surgery on yourself, it will be very difficult, almost impossible. You will need someone else and you will have to trust because he is opening your heart or opening your brain and who knows what kind of man he is. But ordinarily you do trust a surgeon even though you do not know him. The function of the master is far more deep. It needs a very conscious love and trust on the disciple’s side because the master is going to tear down all your personality and shatter all your mind habits to bring out the hidden flame with all its splendor. You don’t have to love it. You will rejoice, you will dance, you will sing, you will share, you will now love all that surrounds you.

Maneesha, even gratitude is not needed; it comes on its own. With your enlightenment your gratitude comes on its own accord. The West is absolutely unaware of why in the East disciples touch the feet of the master.

One day a man came and wanted to touch Gautam Buddha’s feet and he said, “Wait. It is not yet time.”

The man said, “What do you mean, not yet time?”

Buddha said, “Your hands are empty. Just wait a little until I can see that your hands are full of gratitude. But nothing has happened yet in you which will bring gratitude of its own accord. When it does – without any effort – your head will want to touch the feet of your master.” The master has been working without any reward. You cannot pay him, you cannot do anything in response to all that has happened to you through him. Gratitude is a very helpless awareness: “At the most, I can touch your feet.”

When Sariputta became enlightened, one of the great disciples of Gautam Buddha, he did not even touch his feet. He simply touched the dust near his feet.

Buddha said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “To touch your feet seems to be too much. It is enough to touch the dust under your feet.”

Sariputta says this even though he is enlightened, but he also understands that nothing can be done in return. There is no way to repay it. All that we can do is show our gratitude.

-Osho

From Zen: The Diamond Thunderbolt, Discourse #5

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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The Only Way to Repay Them – Osho

My parents are so disappointed in me, they worry all the time. They have made my being here possible, so how can I turn from them? What do I owe my parents?

The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of their parenthood! Man has not even yet learned that parenthood is not something that you have to cling to it forever. When the child is a grown-up person, your parenthood is finished. The child needed it – he was helpless. He needed the mother, the father, their protection; but when the child can stand on his own, the parents have to learn how to withdraw from the life of the child. And because parents never withdraw from the life of the child, they remain a constant anxiety to themselves and to the children. They destroy, they create guilt; they don’t help beyond a certain limit.

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing – any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.

And the criterion is that the real parents will give freedom. They will not impose themselves upon the child, they will not encroach upon his space. From the very beginning their effort will be to help the child to be himself or to be herself. They are to support, they are to strengthen, they are to nourish, but not to impose their ideas, not to give the shoulds and should-nots. They are not to create slaves.

But that’s what parents all over the world go on doing: their whole effort is to fulfill their ambitions through the child. Of course nobody has been ever able to fulfill his ambitions, so every parent is in a turmoil. He knows the death is coming close by every day, he can feel the death is growing bigger and bigger and life is shrinking, and his ambitions are still unfulfilled, his desires are still not realized. He knows that he has been a failure. He is perfectly aware that he will die with empty hands – just the way he had come, with empty hands, he will go.

Now his whole effort is how to implant his ambitions into the child. He will be gone, but the child will live according to him. What he has not been able to do, the child will be able to do. At least through the child he will fulfill certain dreams.

It is not going to happen. All that is going to happen is the child will remain unfulfilled as the parent and the child will go on doing the same to his children. This goes on and on from one generation to another generation. We go on giving our diseases; we go on infecting children with our ideas which have not proved valid in our own lives. Somebody has lived as a Christian, and his life can show that no bliss has happened through it. Somebody had lived like a Hindu and you can see that his life is a hell but he wants his children to be Hindus or Christians or Mohammedans. How unconscious man is!

I have heard:

A very sad, mournful man visited a doctor in London. Seating himself in a chair in the waiting room and glumly ignoring the other patients he waited his turn. Finally, the doctor motioned him into the inner office where after a careful examination the man appeared even more serious, sad and miserable than ever.

“There’s nothing really the matter with you,” explained the doctor, “you are merely depressed. What you need is to forget your work and your worries. Go out and see a Charlie Chaplin movie and have a good laugh!”

A sad look spread over the little man’s face. “But I am Charlie Chaplin!” he said.

It is a very strange world! You don’t know people’s real lives; all that you know is their masks. You see them in the churches, you see them in the clubs, in the hotels, in the dancing halls, and it seems everybody is rejoicing, everybody is living a heavenly life, except you – of course, because you know how miserable you are within. And the same is the case with everybody else! They are all wearing masks, deceiving everybody, but how can you deceive yourself? You know that the mask is not your original face.

But the parents go on pretending before their children, go on deceiving their own children. They are not even authentic with their own children! They will not confess that their life has been a failure; on the contrary, they will pretend that they have been very successful. And they would like the children also to live in the same way as they have lived.

Prem Shunya, you ask: My parents are so disappointed in me . . .

Don’t be worried at all – all parents are disappointed in their children! And I say all, without any exception. Even the parents of Gautam the Buddha were very much disappointed in him, the parents of Jesus Christ were very much disappointed in him, obviously. They had lived a certain kind of life – they were orthodox Jews – and this son, this Jesus, was going against many traditional ideas, conventions. Jesus’ father, Joseph, must have hoped that now he is growing old the son will help him in his carpentry, in his work, in his shop – and the stupid son started talking about kingdom of God! Do you think he was very much happy in his old age?

Gautam Buddha’s father was very old, and he had only one son, and that too was born to him when he was very old His whole life he has waited and prayed and worshipped and did all kinds of religious rituals so that he can have a son, because who is going to look after his great kingdom? And then one day the son disappeared from the palace. Do you think he was very happy? He was so angry, violently angry, he would have killed Gautam Buddha if he had found him! His police, his detectives were searching all over the kingdom. “Where he is hiding? Bring him to me!”

And Buddha knew it, that he will be caught by his father’s agents, so the first thing he did was he left the boundary of his father’s kingdom; escaped into another kingdom, and for twelve years nothing was heard about him.

When he became enlightened, he came back home to share his joy, to say to the father that, “I have arrived home,” that “I have realized,” that “I have known the truth – and this is the way.”

But the father was so angry, he was trembling and shaking – he was old, very old. He shouted at Buddha, and he said, “You are a disgrace to me!” He saw Buddha – he was standing there in a beggar’s robe with a begging bowl – and he said, “How you dare to stand before me like a beggar? You are the son of an emperor, and in our family there has never been a beggar! My father was an emperor, his father was too, and for centuries we have been emperors! You have disgraced the whole heritage!”

Buddha listened for half an hour; he didn’t say a single word. When the father ran out of gas, cooled down a little . . . tears were coming out of his eyes, tears of anger, frustration. Then Buddha said, “I ask for only one favor. Please wipe your tears and look at me – I am not the same person who had left the home, I am totally transformed. But your eyes are so full of tears you cannot see. And you are still talking to somebody who is no more! He has died.”

And this triggered another anger, and the father said, “You are trying to teach me? Do you think I am a fool? Can’t I recognize my own son? My blood is running in your veins – and I cannot recognize you?”

Buddha said, “Please don’t misunderstand me. The body certainly belongs to you, but not my consciousness. And my consciousness is my reality, not my body. And you are right that your father was an emperor and his father too, but as far as I know about myself, I was a beggar in my past life and I was a beggar in a previous life too, because I have been searching for truth. My body has come through you, but you have been just like a passage. You have not created me, you have been a medium, and my consciousness has nothing to do with your consciousness. And what I am saying is that now I have come home with a new consciousness, I have gone through a rebirth. Just look at me, look at my joy!”

And the father looked at the son, not believing what he is saying. But one thing was certainly there: that he was so angry, but the son has not reacted at all. That was absolutely new – he knew his son. If he was just the old person he would have become as angry as the father or even more, because he was young and his blood was hotter than the father’s. But he is not angry at all, there is absolute peace on his face, a great silence. He is undisturbed, undistracted by the father’s anger. The father has abused him, but it seems not to have affected him at all.

He wiped his tears from the old eyes, looked again, saw the new grace . . .

Shunya, your parents will be disappointed in you because they must have been trying to fulfill some expectations through you. Now you have become a sannyasin, all their expectations have fallen to the ground. Naturally they are disappointed. but don’t become guilty because of it, otherwise they will destroy your joy, your silence. your growth You remain undisturbed, unworried. Don’t feel any guilt. Your life is yours and you have to live according to your own light.

And when you have arrived at the source of joy, your inner bliss, go to them to share. They will be angry – wait, because anger is not anything permanent; it comes like a cloud and passes. Wait! Go there, be with them, but only when you are certain that you can still remain cool, only when you know that nothing will create any reaction in you, only when you know that you will be able to respond with love even though they are angry. And that will be the only way to help them.

You say: They worry all the time.

That is their business! And don’t think that if you had followed their ideas they would not have worried. They would have still worried; that is their conditioning. Their parents must have worried, and their parents’ parents must have worried; that is their heritage. And you have disappointed them because you are no more worrying. You are going astray! They are miserable, their parents have been miserable, and so on, so forth . . . up to Adam and Eve! And you are going astray, hence the great worry.

But if you become worried you miss an opportunity, and then they have dragged you again back into the same mire. They will feel good, they will rejoice that you have come back to the old traditional, conventional way, but that is not going to help you or them.

If you remain to be independent, if you attain to the fragrance of freedom, if you become more meditative – and that’s why you are here: to become more meditative, to be more silent, more loving, more blissful – then one day you can share your bliss. To share first you have to have it; you can share only that which you have already got.

Right now, you can also worry, but two persons worrying simply multiply worries; they don’t help each other.

You say: They worry all the time.

It must have become their conditioning. It is the conditioning of everybody in the world.

A rabbi was being hosted by a family, and the man of the house, impressed by the honor, warned his children to behave seriously at the dinner table because the great rabbi is coming. But during the course of the meal they laughed at something, and he ordered them from the table.

The rabbi then arose and prepared to leave.

“Anything wrong?” asked the concerned father.

“Well,” said the rabbi, “I laughed too!”

You don’t be worried about their seriousness, about their worrying about you. They are trying unconsciously to make you feel guilty. Don’t let them succeed, because if they succeed they will destroy you and they will also destroy an opportunity for them which would have become possible through you.

You say: They have made my being here possible.

Be thankful for that, but there is no need to feel guilty.

So how can I turn from them?

There is no need to turn from them, but there is no need either to follow them. Go on loving them. When you meditate, after each meditation pray to the existence that “Something of my meditativeness should reach to my parents.”

Be prayerful for them, be loving to them, but don’t follow them. That won’t help you or them.

You say: What do I owe to my parents?

You owe this: that you have to be yourself. You owe this: that you have to be blissful, that you have to be ecstatic, that you have to become a celebration unto yourself, that you have to learn to laugh and rejoice. This is what you owe to them: you owe to them enlightenment.

Become enlightened like Gautam the Buddha and then go to your parents to share your joy. Right now, what can you do? Right now, nothing is possible. Right now you can only pray.

So I am not saying turn away from them, I am saying don’t follow them, and this is the only way you can be of some help to them. They have helped you physically, you have to help them spiritually. That will be the only way to repay them.

-Osho

From I Am That, Discourse #6, Q2

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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Enlightenment: The Only Way Home – Osho

What is enlightenment? Have the experience and the idea of enlightenment evolved with time?

Enlightenment is not something special, it is one of the most simple, natural phenomena. Just because it is so simple and natural it has become extraordinarily difficult for man to understand.

Man’s mind is attracted towards the difficult. There is challenge, something to prove, something to feel one’s mettle. Man is interested in going to the moon. It is absolutely pointless. There is nothing there at all; it is a dead planet. But man is ready to risk his life to go to a dead planet where he is not going to meet anybody, even to say hello.

Man is interested in reaching Everest. The peak, the highest peak in the world is so narrow that you can barely stand on top of it. You cannot do anything else there, and there is nothing else to Do . . . eternal snow. But for a hundred years, hundreds of adventurers have been going to climb Everest. The majority of them have died on the way, but still it has not prevented new adventurers, new climbers.

One has to understand this point very clearly: the difficult is attractive because it is ego-fulfilling. The impossible is very magnetic; it pulls you to risk everything, to risk even life, because if you can manage that which has been thought up to now impossible, you have fulfilled your ego the way nobody has yet been able to fulfill it. You are the first man, like Edmund Hillary on Everest – the first man in history – but what is the point? What have you gained? What has humanity gained? No, nobody even asks the question. Everybody knows, deep down, the answer; that’s why nobody asks the question.

The more difficult, the more impossible, the more attractive: its impossibility has a fascination. The ego is not interested in the simple, in the ordinary, in the day to day; everybody is doing it. Because of this stupid ego, religions turned enlightenment also into something very difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing in existence. It has to be so. It is the realization of God; it is the realization of eternity. It is going beyond death; it is moving into the very mystery of existence.

All the religions of the world have been exploiting your ego. And the ego is very vulnerable to being exploited; it is just ready to be exploited: show it a goal, give it a way, make it difficult, almost impossible. I say almost impossible; I’m not saying absolutely impossible, because if you make it absolutely impossible then the ego loses hope. You have to keep the candle of hope burning. It is difficult but possible – almost impossible, but yet possible. But it is possible only for rare, superhuman beings.

All the religions learned the simple strategy, in what man becomes interested, and why. And they want you to remain interested your whole life. It is not something that you achieve today and you are finished tomorrow. Religion does not deal in the commodities which you can get and be finished with. It deals with commodities which you can never get, but only hope for. And you go on hoping till death comes and destroys you.

Enlightenment itself is absolutely simple, but to say so is to destroy all priesthood. To say it is ordinary is to take away the very base of all the religions, their great scriptures, great masters, rabbis, messiahs. What meaning will these people have if enlightenment is an ordinary, simple, human experience?

No, they all will deny that it is simple and human, and they will all emphasize that it is superhuman, very arduous. Hindus say it takes thousands of lives to attain it. Buddhists say even Gautam Buddha, such a superman, had to pass through millions of lives before he could manage to reach the peak which is enlightenment. In fact the very idea of extending life into millions of lives is a byproduct of making the experience of enlightenment so difficult, so impossible, so far away, that one life is not enough.

How can you attain enlightenment in one life? One life is too short. Perhaps that is the reason that in Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity, there exists nothing equivalent to enlightenment. These three religions were born outside India. These three religions believe only in one life. Just in one life, all that you can do is to believe in a savior, in a messiah: cling to his apron and he will take you. You cannot depend upon your own effort, because what effort can you make?

Just look at your life. Half your life is simply wasted in sleeping, taking baths, eating food, changing clothes, shaving your beard. The most important years of life are wasted in learning all kinds of rubbish: geography, history, geometry. By the time you come out of university you are almost thirty. If you have gone on to attain a Ph.D. or D.Litt., you are thirty. The best time of your life has gone down the drain. And now you have to get married, and the wife, and the children, and the service, and the politics . . . all your time is taken up.

If you count, you will not find even seven hours in seventy years which are absolutely yours. No, life keeps you engaged . . . in the movies, with the television, with the radio, in the churches, in the synagogues, in things in which perhaps you are not interested at all . . . in God . . . I can’t think what kind of a man is interested in God. And why? What wrong has he done to you? You don’t even know whether he exists or not but you listen to sermons on God every Sunday. People are reading the same Bible, the same Gita, every day continually, their whole life. And how much life you have got? Only seventy years.

One day just sit down and note how your life is being wasted, and how much time is left just for you. You will not find seven hours. I am absolutely certain it will be impossible to find seven hours in seventy years of life. If sometimes you have some time, then friends are there, picnics are there, football matches are there, Olympics are there. From every direction you are being called.

So these three religions never developed the idea of enlightenment. In English there is no equivalent to the Eastern words for enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’ is a very poor substitute. In the Western languages, a person who is well educated, cultured – you call him enlightened. A whole century, when science developed in the beginning, is called the Age of Enlightenment. In Western history books you will call Bertrand Russell a very enlightened man. About each and every subject he is very progressive; he does not accept anything just because tradition has brought it to him – no, he thinks it over. Unless he is rationally satisfied, he is not going to believe in it. […]

He was born a Christian, but he wrote a book, Why I am not a Christian, because he found so many logical contradictions, fallacies, inconsistencies in The Bible, that he could not accept it. And he wrote a beautiful book bringing in all his arguments as to why he cannot accept Jesus. He would love to accept him, but he cannot because of the contradictory nature of his statements. He cannot accept him because Jesus gives no logic, no proof . . . What proof has he got that he is the only begotten son of God? Anybody can say that. Any madman can declare that – there are madmen who have been declaring that. There have always been madmen who have been declaring that. Neither they have any proof nor did Jesus have any proof.

What he says and the way he behaves are contradictory. He says, “Blessed are the humble.” But he is not a humble person at all. He is very arrogant, very irritable, very egoistic. What more can the ego declare than to say, “I am the only begotten son of God”? At least Mahavira accepts twenty-three other tirthankaras. He is only the twenty-fourth. Buddha accepts twenty-four lives of his own before he became a buddha; but he accepts the fact that others can become a buddha. Anybody who tries, endeavors, is capable of becoming a buddha. So it is not his monopoly. But Jesus seems to be very monopolistic, a real Jew: the only begotten son of God. He closes all doors for anybody else to be the son of God – nobody before him, nobody after him. He is incomparably unique.

Hindus have twenty-four avataras, and Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – all the three religions born in India – believe in cycles. One creation is one cycle. And it seems to be very close to modern physics and its explorations. Modern physics has come to know that in existence there are black holes – it is a very strange thing, the black hole. And there are white holes. Anything coming close to a black hole is simply pulled in. For example, if this earth passes by the side of a black hole, it will be pulled in. It will be a de-creation. It will disappear into the basic elements, electrons, protons, neutrons, of which it is constituted. It is only a hypothesis right now, that perhaps the black hole is one side and the white hole is the other side of the same phenomenon. The black hole pulls things into de-creation and the white hole creates them again. From the white hole, new earths, new stars, new suns go on pouring out.

This has been accepted by all the three religions of India – that this is only one creation. It is a cycle, just as the sun rises, then the sun sets, then again the sun rises, then again the sun sets, in a cycle. In one cycle there are twenty-four tirthankaras, according to Jainas – in one cycle. They are not making claims about the whole universe and eternity. There are millions of cycles, infinite cycles. There is no beginning and no end. Each cycle will have twenty-four tirthankaras. If you count all the tirthankaras of all the circles, they will be millions and millions. So Mahavira is nothing unique. He is not trying to say, “I am the only one; with me comes the full stop.” What happened to God after Jesus? Has he accepted the idea of birth control? Or is the holy ghost no longer interested in women? – has become really holy? What happened to God?

In India the religions make enlightenment very difficult, but they have a different strategy to make it difficult. One cycle is millions of years. Even if you can attain in one cycle, you have attained it easily; otherwise, souls go on from one cycle to another cycle, to another cycle – and just moving in the same vicious circle again and again and again.

A man, a very rich young man, listening to Buddha, asked to be initiated. Buddha said, “You should think about it; don’t be so hasty” – because Buddha knew about the man. He was well known in the capital; perhaps he was the richest man after the king. And he lived such a luxurious life that even the king was jealous of him, because the king had to think of many things, the whole kingdom, and this man has no responsibility of any kind. He was living as luxuriously as one can live. So Buddha knew about the man, that he has never even walked on the bare earth; he sleeps the whole day, and the whole night goes in music, dances, girls, wine. He was a drunkard. It was a miracle that he had come in the early morning. Perhaps he had come directly from his wine and women. He had not gone to sleep, thinking, “One day at least I should listen to this man. So many people are going there and talking about him . . . gather about him.”

Shrone was his name, that young man’s name. Indian stories use names with some significance. Shrone means one who is capable of hearing, of listening. So the name is significant. He heard Buddha for the first time and he went to him and he said, “Initiate me.”

Buddha said, “Think it over. I know you; I know about you.”

Shrone said, “Once I have decided something, I have decided it. I am not accustomed to thinking twice about anything. Give me initiation right now.” As he was so determined, Buddha gave him initiation. He became a Buddhist monk.

But he was the latest arrival. The serai, the caravanserai where Buddha was staying, was full of Buddhist monks. There was no space inside for him to sleep, so he had to sleep just on the steps – and he could not sleep. He had never even dreamed of such hardship . . . just on the steps. And Buddha had this idea that the monk can have only three pieces of material for clothes. So one he uses for the bed – a long piece of cloth – and also uses it to cover himself, so it becomes a kind of sleeping bag. And two he uses for himself: one for the lower body, one for the upper body. That’s all a Buddhist monk is allowed to use. He could not sleep on a stone step with just a thin cloth . . . and there were so many mosquitoes, and the whole night monks were coming in, going out, coming in, going out, and he was just on the steps, so each time anybody would come out or go in he was awakened.

Just early in the morning, when he was falling asleep at last, tired, Buddha came, awakened him, and said, “There is still time – you go back home. Nobody knows you have become a sannyasin. Once people know, it will be difficult for you to go back. Go back! I know the whole night you have not been able to sleep. It is difficult: there are mosquitoes, and only three pieces of cloth are allowed, and in this place there is no space. And you are the youngest monk, just one day old, so you cannot have the space of some elderly monk. There is a seniority, and you are the last.”

Shrone said, “Don’t disturb me. What step I have taken, I have taken. Now whatsoever consequence has to be suffered, I will suffer. But I don’t know how to look back. The question of going back simply does not arise; I never even look back.”

Buddha said, “It is good, because in the last life you had become a monk and just because of these same difficulties you had gone back. So I thought perhaps you might do it again, because people go on in the same vicious circle again and again and again – the same habit. And they go on moving in the wheel of the habits. I had come to ask you particularly because I knew that in the last life you had turned back. This is a good sign that you have grown up, that you have stopped turning back. But ahead it is not easy; perhaps a few lives with this determination, if you go on and on and on, you might achieve nirvana” – that is the Buddhist term for enlightenment.

Bertrand Russell cannot be called an enlightened person. He is a very great intellectual, a rational being, very progressive, and capable of getting out of the bondage of convention, tradition, but the reasons he chooses to get out are all of the mind. He finds Jesus to be contradictory – it is a mind statement. Jesus behaves arrogantly, and he talks of being humble. He says to the people, “Blessed are the poor,” and then he promises them the kingdom of God. Now, there is an apparent contradiction. If poverty is a blessing, then all the sages in heaven should be the most poor, because it is a blessing. In fact, the people who live in hell should all be rich, super-rich, if you follow it logically. Jesus says, “Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven.” Well, where are rich men going? They must be going somewhere. So all the rich and super-rich – if you want to meet the Fords and Rockefellers and Morgans, you have to go to hell. They will all be there, with all their riches. Because if rich people cannot go to heaven, how can their riches go? Who will take them? And perhaps hell will be, right now, the most luxurious place to live in. You will find all Hollywood there; where else will they go? All the actors and actresses must be there in hell.

“Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” But what is the kingdom of God? Is it poor or rich? If you call it a kingdom, it means it is rich, tremendously rich. So it is a strange logic: being poor makes you capable of being rich in the other world; being rich makes you capable of entering into hell.

This is strange. It is against all mathematics, because these poor people will not be able to enjoy the kingdom of God – they have known only poverty. Only the rich people have exercised, prepared for how to use riches. In fact, they should get into heaven and the kingdom of God. They are prepared and they will enjoy it. What are the poor people going to do there? And what kind of argument is this, that poverty makes you blessed in the eyes of God?

Bertrand Russell could not agree; hence he is called one of the enlightened men of the twentieth century. But this is not the meaning of enlightenment when I use the word. It is out of compulsion that I have to use it. The Buddhist word is nirvana. Nirvana means, literally: you are sitting with a candle on a dark night, and you blow out the candle. Suddenly the light disappears, and all is darkness. With the light disappearing all the objects that were seen because of the presence of light disappear. Now there is infinite darkness, and silence.

Nirvana simply means cessation of the candlelight, so that you are in absolute silence. And darkness has no bad connotation in Buddhism. It is peaceful, it has depth. Light is shallow; darkness is infinitely deep. Light is always bounded, it has boundaries. Darkness has no boundaries, it is unbounded. Light comes and goes; darkness always is. When there is light you cannot see it. When light is not there you can see it. But it is always there; you cannot cause it. Light has a cause. You burn the fire, you put on wood. When the wood is finished the light will be gone. It is caused, hence it is an effect. But darkness is not caused by anything, it is not an effect. It is uncaused eternity. […]

Nirvana is a very simple phenomenon. It simply means blowing out the small candle of the ego. And suddenly . . . The reality has always been there, but just because of the candle of the ego you were not able to see it. Now the candle is no longer there, the reality is. It has always been there. You had never lost it in the first place. One cannot lose it even if one tries. It is your very nature, so how can you lose it? It is you – your very being. Yes, you can forget, at the most.

Now, see the emphasis. It is not an achievement. Achievement is in the future, far away. Achievement is difficult, can be almost impossible, will take time, will take will and willpower, struggle. No, it is not an achievement. You have not lost it. Even if you want to lose it, there is no way to lose it. Wherever you go it will go with you. It is you, too. How can you escape from yourself? You can try, but you will always find you are there. You can hide behind trees and mountains, in caves, but whenever you look around you will see you are there. Where can you go from yourself?

So nirvana is just like darkness. The light is put off and your reality is all there, with all its beauty, benediction, blessing. But there is no word in English to translate nirvana. Jainas use the word moksha. Moksha means absolute freedom, ultimate freedom, freedom from all fetters. And the biggest fetter is the ego. Other fetters are just parts of the ego: greed, lust, ambition, anger. All that is thought to be sin in other religions, in Jainism is thought only to be a fetter.

But the root, the main root of the whole tree of your slavery, is the ego. So cut the main root and all other roots will die of their own accord. Don’t bother to cut small roots, branches, leaves, because they will come again. Cut the main root and the whole tree will die. And when all your fetters fall, what remains? The unfettered consciousness, the freedom.

That freedom is not anything political, anything economic. It has nothing to do with the word freedom and its connotations that you have become acquainted with. It is simply an unfettered existence. You don’t find anywhere around you, anything holding you. You are no longer tethered to anything. This untethered state they have called moksha. It makes no difference, just their terminology is different. […]

Patanjali, the founder of the system of yoga, has his own name. He calls it kaivalya. Kaivalya means absolute aloneness, where the other is no longer needed. Otherwise, you are continuously in need of the other: the father, the mother, the brother, the wife, the children. You are continuously hankering for the other. You cannot live alone, you are afraid of being alone. You have never tasted it, still you are afraid – because from your very childhood you have not been told to make a distinction between two words, loneliness and aloneness. All your dictionaries go on saying they are synonymous. They are not. They are as far away from each other as two things can be. Loneliness is where you are missing the other. Aloneness is when you are finding yourself.

Aloneness is the finding of your true and authentic being. Loneliness is simply searching for the other, to get occupied, because if the other is not there then you don’t know what to do with yourself. Anytime when you are lonely you start doing something or other. […]

Kaivalya means aloneness. That is Patanjali’s word for enlightenment. Now, in English there is no word which can convey these tremendous insights. ’Enlightenment’ has been chosen for the simple reason that it means you become full of light. Yes, it is a lightening, uncaused – not from the outside, but an explosion within. And suddenly there is no problem, no question, no quest. Suddenly you are at home, for the first time at ease, not going anywhere; for the first time in this moment herenow . . . […]

Enlightenment is a very simple and ordinary experience.

I emphasize it again and again because I am not a priest, I am not a rabbi, I am not a messiah. I have no desire to exploit anyone in the world. My function is totally different. I want to share with you something that is overflowing in me. I don’t need anything in return. Just that you share it is enough obligation upon me; I am grateful.

That’s why I say this is the first religion in the world: because all those religions were making you, forcing you to be grateful to the messiah, to the tirthankara, to the master – but why? Why should you be grateful to Jesus or Buddha or anybody? If Buddha had something too much in him, and was overburdened just like a cloud full of rainwater, in tremendous need of showering upon you – actually that’s the case: Buddha wants to shower upon you – then who is going to be obliged? He or the earth that receives it, that opens its heart and invites it?

A real master is grateful to the disciple, to the devotee. Only a pseudo-master tries to satisfy his ego trip through the disciples, the crowd of disciples, the number of disciples.

And because it is your own nature I’m not giving anything to you. All that I am doing is just putting a mirror before you so that you can look into it. The mirror loses nothing when you look into it. Or do you think it becomes less of a mirror once you have looked into it? Twice you have looked into it, thrice you have looked into it – is it exhausted, spent? No, in fact the more you go on looking into the mirror, the more you go on cleaning the mirror, because you have to see into it. If nobody looks into it, dust is going to gather on it.

The mirror is grateful that you go on looking into it, and you go on cleaning it. But the mirror does not give you anything. Still, in a way it gives you . . . it gives you yourself. It takes away all the wrong ideas you have about you and gives you your original face.

You have asked, Sheela, “Has the experience and the idea of enlightenment evolved with time?”

Experience is the same. It cannot evolve, because it is not a thing. It is an experience when all things and thoughts are dropped – just a clean mirror, empty. Now in what way can emptiness become more empty? If it can become more empty then it was not emptiness in the first place. Emptiness, aloneness, freedom – all these different names – they can only be total.

It is just like the circle in geometry. You cannot draw half a circle, or can you? If it is half, it is not a circle. You may have thought before that you can draw half a circle, what is wrong in it? You cannot draw half a circle because – just because it is half, it is not a circle. It is only an arc. The circle is always complete, there is no other way for it to be. So whenever enlightenment has happened – ten thousand years ago, now, or ten thousand years ahead – it is the same experience. As far as experiencing is concerned it is the same.

But the idea evolves, the concept evolves. You have to understand the difference between the experience and the idea. The experience is when you are absolutely thoughtless, wordless, in absolute emptiness . . . no movement, utter rest. When you bring it into language then it becomes an idea, it becomes a concept. Then certainly as language evolves, man evolves, the idea, the concept evolves.[…]

For example: Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism use very crude and primitive terms – the kingdom of God. This is a very primitive way of pointing to enlightenment. But Jesus is a poor man, uncultured, uneducated, a carpenter’s son, born in a country which is very primitive. Buddha was born five hundred years before Jesus, but that was the peak for India. It never came to such a height again, not even now, and perhaps may not come to that peak again. The languages had evolved to such accuracy, to such scientific expression, to such beautiful poetic potentiality. Now, no language can compete with Sanskrit. There are beautiful languages in the world, tremendously beautiful languages in the world, but no language can compete with Sanskrit. It has such a long history of evolution that for an experience like enlightenment . . .

In English you have to coin the word enlightenment, and you have to know that you can be misunderstood because it is being used in other contexts too. Bertrand Russell is an enlightened man, Kant is an enlightened man, Hegel is an enlightened man. None of them is enlightened in the way I am using the word. They are far away from enlightenment – much farther away than you are because they are more in the mind, and they have very disciplined minds, hence they are caged in their own minds. And they have not even heard . . . Bertrand Russell lived a hundred years and had not even heard about enlightenment, the way I am using the word.

Buddha used another language which had evolved side by side with Sanskrit. He used Pali. Mahavira used Prakrit, another language, which is perhaps more ancient than Sanskrit, perhaps the most ancient language in the whole world, out of all the languages. Its very name indicates it. You will have to understand: prakrit means natural and sanskrit means refined. The very word sanskrit means refined, cultured. Prakrit is the language which is not refined. It is not yet the language of the scholars, of the learned people; it is the language of the masses. But it is certainly far more experienced than Sanskrit, because Sanskrit is nothing but Prakrit refined, just like crude oil – you go on refining it and it becomes petrol, and you refine it more and it becomes something else . . .

Sanskrit is refined Prakrit. Prakrit is just like a raw diamond, just out of the mine, not polished, not cut, not given a shape yet. But that too has its beauty, because it has its naturalness. Sanskrit is very refined, very polished. For ten thousand years millions of brahmins were refining it, giving it such a quality which is not available in any other language.

It is so difficult to translate anything from Sanskrit to English because Sanskrit has fifty-two letters in its alphabet – almost all the possibilities. You cannot make another sound, more than fifty-two. They have exhausted all the possibilities of sounds. In English you will be in trouble because there are not fifty-two letters in the alphabet. So those letters which are missing you will have to somehow coin, somehow make. And the same is true about words.

Because the experience of enlightenment has been going on for thousands of years, different people using different languages use different words – nirvana for example. Nirvana is a Sanskrit word. Buddha actually never used the word nirvana. Pali is the language of the masses, so he used the word nibbana. Now that is crude, nibbana. Sanskrit has cut it, made it rounded: nirvana . . . given it music.

But you cannot hope for that from Jesus. He is at a loss. He has to use the Old Testament words which were available to him. He must have felt the difficulty, and he got into unnecessary trouble. If he had used some words other than kingdom of God he might not have been crucified and there would have been no Christianity at all. These words, kingdom of God, created suspicion in the Romans, who were the rulers of Judea. They thought that this man really means a kingdom. And Romans have never been philosophical. They are not like Greeks. They have not produced a single Socrates or a Plato or an Aristotle or a Heraclitus or a Diogenes or a Plotinus – not a single man who can be counted in the galaxy of philosophers. Romans were soldiers, great soldiers. But a soldier’s life and work is very momentary. Poetry lasts longer, philosophy lasts longer. But the Romans were only soldiers. They had no idea what this man was talking about. They were afraid, they were really so afraid . . .

King Herod who was on the throne in Judea heard this Jewish story, that soon the messiah is going to be born, “and once the messiah is born you will be redeemed from all suffering.” Naturally Herod thought, “This means you will be redeemed from slavery too; you will become free from the Roman empire.” He asked his soldiers, “Find all the children below two years of age and kill them all. Don’t leave a single child below two” – because the Jews were saying, “The messiah is born, and he must be nearabout two by now.” The rumor was spreading so fast, like wildfire, because everybody was waiting for the messiah. They were in so much suffering, they could not do anything other than hope. And this was purely a rumor. But Herod became so afraid that he ordered a massacre, a wholesale massacre of all children below two years of age.

Joseph and Mary just heard that this was going to happen, that it had started happening in the capital. Soon they would be coming into the villages, and the smaller villages. Bethlehem was a very small village, so small . . . and perhaps there may have been some story about it, I don’t know, because it is said that Jews used to laugh at the idea that the messiah has been born in Bethlehem. They used to say, “Who has ever heard of a messiah being born in Bethlehem?” […]

So something about Bethlehem must have been true. I don’t know what was the matter, why Jews consistently again and again said to Jesus and his apostles, “Who has ever heard of a messiah being born in Bethlehem?” It was a small village, a very small village, almost a nonentity. So first they were destroying the children in Jerusalem. As they started destroying the children in Jerusalem, Joseph and Mary ran away to Egypt. That’s the only place Jews knew. From Egypt they had come – that’s what the great dream of Moses had been; he had brought them from Egypt. […]

And Jesus was brought up in Egypt. Whatsoever he knew was only heard from others. He traveled far and wide but still he was an uncultured man, uneducated. He could not give a concept, a refined idea to enlightenment. So it has not happened because Jesus was not able to give it. The fools who have been following Jesus – and remember, only fools follow – the popes and the so-called Christian saints and sages . . . they have all been following and they have been stuck where Jesus left them, because he was the last word of God. So no evolution has happened; otherwise, they would have come to beautiful concepts, beautiful ideas.

Islam has stopped where Mohammed stopped, and he was even more uneducated than Jesus. But Buddha was very cultured, the son of a great king. All the great scholars were teaching him every possible subject that was available in those days. Mahavira was very cultured. He was also the son of a great king. So they brought refined words, and that process has continued. It has never stopped in India, because India has a tradition of writing commentaries which no other country has.

People think that what Jesus has said is enough. When I spoke on the gospel of Thomas, I received many letters from Christians: “What is the need of commenting on it? What Thomas has said is enough, clear enough.” Certainly, it is clear enough, because Thomas was also an uneducated man; he has ideas that are not very complex, that can be explained. But if I want to make something complex out of something simple, I can. That is not difficult. And when they heard me on Thomas, then they started writing letters to me: “We had never known that this is the meaning of Thomas.” It has nothing to do with Thomas, it is simply my meaning. It is my gun on poor Thomas’ shoulder. I am using him as a jumping board; and I have used all these people as jumping boards. I don’t say that what I have said is their meaning – how can it be? I have come twenty-five centuries after Buddha; how can it be? Twenty-five centuries have not gone by uselessly. So when I speak on Buddha, it is not the meaning of Buddha, it is my meaning. I am using his words and putting my meaning into his words. This has been a continuity in India that makes for a tremendous development of ideas.

Krishna’s Gita – there are one thousand commentaries on it. One thousand people of different kinds, using their intelligence, their experience, and putting it into Krishna’s mouth. Of course, if Krishna comes back, he will be very angry, particularly with me, because I have put many things into his mouth with which he cannot agree. But he is not going to come, so there is no problem. I don’t think that we are going to meet anywhere. And even if we meet, I can simply say I’m sorry.

Okay Sheela?

-Osho

From From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, Discourse #21

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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A New Look at the Three Gachchhamis

Recently, I’ve been considering the three Gachchhamis, or the three jewels as they are known in the world of Buddhism.

First, I should point out that there is a difference in the order of the three jewels and the three Gachchhamis as recited by the Osho sannyasins.

In the Buddhist world they are:

I take refuge in the Buddha

I take refuge in the Dharma

I take refuge in the Sangha

But for his sannyasins, Osho changed the order to:

First: Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami – I bow down to the feet of the Awakened One

Second: Sangham Sharanam Gachchhami – I bow down to the Community of the Awakened One

And third: Dhammam Sharanam Gachchhami – I bow down to the Ultimate Teaching of the Awakened One

So as I mentioned, I have been considering these three steps recently. A few years ago, I wrote an essay on the Gachchhamis, Be a Light Unto Ourselves, which is my own personal account of how they acted on me through my journey. When retelling this account to others, I realized that I needed a broader narrative for it to be relevant to contemporary seekers. While they certainly have deep resonance in my own life and perhaps for others who share similar experiences, it is limiting for those who find themselves in very different circumstances.

After some contemplation, a new way of looking, a more universal way of looking at the three jewels dawned on me.

The first Gachchhami, “I take refuge in the Awakened One” means one comes in contact with, becomes open to the teaching of spiritual awakening, of enlightenment, and is drawn into the mystery. It is tremendously important to move into this discovery more and more. It happens by stumbling across a book, a video on YouTube, listening to an audio, and for some, even just seeing the photograph of one in whom the greatest transformation has occurred.

The second Gachchhami, “I take refuge in the Sangha of the Awakened One” means we then come in contact with, become open to a community of, those who are interested in enlightenment, in spiritual awakening, and through this contact, we gain support and are able to nurture our own journey. This may happen through social media, online meditation meetings, and of course, in person events and meditations. We may even come to know about the vast community of enlightened masters, both the ancient ones and the contemporary seers.

And the third Gachchhami, “I take refuge in the Ultimate Teaching of the Awakened One” means we begin to internalize and start actualizing our own awakening. We begin to see all that is preventing us from realizing our own true nature. We discover what real meditation is. We discover the witnessing consciousness, and we become open to our potentiality, the destiny of our very own enlightenment. Surely this is the only way to pay tribute to those who have come before, by becoming a light unto ourselves.

-purushottama

See all 0f Prem’s notes.