Christ – Sat Sangha Salon

This Very Place the Lotus Paradise – Osho

Man lives in illusion. Man lives through illusion. Man lives for illusion. In short, man lives because of illusion. Hence the fear of truth. Nobody wants truth, although everybody goes on seeking for it. That seeking is a deception, that seeking is an avoidance. To seek truth means to avoid truth.

It has to be understood – how the seeker goes on avoiding truth. To seek means to look far away, to seek means to look somewhere else, to seek means to go on a trip. To seek means to postpone – to seek means it will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it is not happening right now. It is not here, it is there. It is not this, it is that.

Man goes on living in illusion. But to live in illusion one needs to avoid truth, because if truth comes it will shatter all your illusions and all your so-called life and all your so-called love. Truth looks like a calamity. And Friedrich Nietzsche is right in a sense when he says: Please don’t give truth to humanity. Otherwise, you will destroy people’s joy, you will destroy their enthusiasm, you will destroy their gusto. Don’t give truth to humanity, otherwise all that they have will disappear. Because all that they have is a kind of dream. Don’t wake humanity, otherwise the dreams will be shattered. And they may be seeing beautiful dreams – or hoping to see, somewhere, sometime.

That’s why Christ is crucified, Socrates is poisoned, Buddha is stoned. They bring truth to people who have become almost illusory. They bring light to people who live in darkness and dream in darkness. And their dreams depend on darkness – when somebody brings light into the darkness the darkness disappears and the dreams and the desires.

One feels hurt by a Buddha or a Christ. The Christ looks not like the saviour but like the enemy. Otherwise, why should you crucify Christ? There is no other reason. The basic reason is: he uproots you, he shatters you. This has to be understood very deeply. And when you live in illusion, you search for truth. That is a double deception, so that you can go on telling yourself and consoling yourself that ‘I am searching. Look what great efforts I am making, how much I am putting my energy into the search – look!’

The search for truth arises out of your lie. It is the lie that puts you on the search for truth. It is a protection for the lie, it is the way of the lie to survive. It says: Go and search for truth. It is there far away in some distant land. You will have to travel, and the travel is long and the travel is not going to be finished soon. It will take lives and lives, it will take millennia, but go! Go on searching, one day you will find it. The lie gives you hope, it gives you a future, it gives you future dreams. Your God is somewhere far away. It has to be far away, because close by He will be dangerous. […]

But in your very destruction is the possibility of a new birth. Out of the ashes the new is going to be born. The myth of the phoenix is not a myth, it is a metaphor for man’s rebirth. You have to die first to be reborn. […]

But if you come close to me – and initiation means coming close, initiation means coming as close as possible – you will be burned. You will be burned to ashes. You will disappear.

But that is the only real hope. If you disappear as you are, you will be born as you really are. Only the disappearance of the lie that you have become can be the birth of truth. And truth is not far away, it is just hiding within you. And you are clinging to the lie. Your personality is the lie. And because of the personality you cannot move towards the essence. The personality is taught by the society; the society creates lies. Lies are very, very convenient. Lies function like lubricants, lies make life smooth. You see somebody and you smile. And the smile is a lie – because it is not coming from your heart, it is just painted there on the lips. You have created it, you have managed it, it is a kind of exercise of the lips. But it lubricates relationship, the other man starts smiling.

If you are true, if you are as you are, it will be difficult, the relationship will become difficult. Psychologists say that if every person starts revealing what is in his heart, friendship will disappear from the earth, love will disappear from the earth. That is true. It will be impossible to find friends if you simply say what is in your heart. If you say what is in your heart your beloved will leave you and your lover will leave you.

You go on keeping it in the heart, and you go on playing something which is not really there – you do something else, just the opposite. You may be angry but you smile. You may be hurt but you smile. You may be boiling within but you smile. You may want to scream but you go on singing. You may want to do something else but it is not feasible, it is not practical, it is not the right thing to do.

The society creates this persona, this mask around you, this personality.

There are three you’s in you. You-1 – that is the personality. The word personality comes from a Greek root ’persona’. In the Greek drama they used to use masks, and the voice would come from the mask. ’Sona’ means voice, sound, and ’per’ means through the mask. The real face you don’t know – who the real actor is. There is a mask, and through the mask comes the voice. It appears as if it is coming from the mask, and you don’t know the real face. The word ’personality’ is beautiful, it comes from Greek drama.

And that’s what has happened. In the Greek drama they had only one mask. You have many. Masks upon masks, like layers of an onion. If you put one mask away there is another, if you put that away there is another. And you can go on digging and digging and you will be surprised how many faces you are carrying. How many! For lives you have been collecting them. And they are all useful, because you have to change many times. You are talking to your servant, you cannot have the same face that you have when you talk to your boss. And they may be both present in the room: when you look at the servant you have to use one mask and when you look at your boss you have to use another mask. You continuously change. It has almost become automatic – you need not change, it changes itself. You look at the boss and you are smiling. And you look at the servant and the smile disappears and you are hard – as hard as the boss is to you. When he looks at his boss, he smiles.

In a single moment you may be changing your face many times. One has to be very, very alert to know how many faces one has. Innumerable. They cannot be counted.

This is your first you, the false you. Or call it the ego. It has been given to you by the society, it is a gift from the society – from the politician and the priest and the parent and the pedagogue. They have given you many faces just to make your life smooth. They have taken away your truth, they have given you a substitute. And because of these substitute faces you don’t know who you are. You can’t know, because the faces change so fast and they are so many, you cannot trust yourself. You don’t know exactly which face is yours. In fact none of these faces is yours.

And the Zen people say: Unless you know your original face you will not know what Buddha is. Because Buddha is your original face. You were born as a Buddha and you are living a lie.

This social gift has to be dropped. That is the meaning of sannyas, initiation. You are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, that face has to be dropped. Because it is not your own face – it has been given to you by others, you have been conditioned for it. And you have not even been asked, you have not even been requested. It has been imposed forcibly, violently.

All parents are violent and all educational systems are violent. Because they don’t take any note of you. They have a-priori ideas, they already know what is right. And they put the ‘right’ on you. You squirm, you scream inside, but you are helpless. A child is so helpless and so delicate, he can be molded in any way. And that’s what the society does. Before the child becomes strong enough it is already crippled in a thousand and one ways. Paralyzed, poisoned.

The day you want to become religious you will have to drop religions. The day you want to relate to God you will have to drop all ideologies about God. The day you want to know who you are, you will have to drop all the answers that have been given to you. All that is borrowed has to be burnt.

That’s why Zen has been defined as: ‘Direct pointing to the human heart. Seeing the nature and becoming Buddha. Not standing on letters. A separate transmission outside the scriptures.’ A separate transmission outside the scriptures: the Koran cannot give it to you, neither can the Dhammapada nor the Bible nor the Talmud nor the Gita. No scripture can give it to you. And if you believe in the scripture you will go on missing truth.

Truth is in you. It has to be encountered there. ‘Seeing the nature and becoming Buddha. Direct pointing to the human heart.’ You are not to go anywhere. And wherever you go you will remain the same, so what is the point? You can go to the Himalayas; it is not going to change anything. You will carry all that you have with you. All that you have become, all that you have been made, you will carry all your artificiality. Your synthetic faces, your borrowed knowledge, your scriptures, will go on clinging inside you. Even sitting in a cave in the Himalayas alone you will not be alone. The teachers will be there around you, and the priests and the politicians and the parents and the whole society. It may not be so visible but it will be there inside you crowding you. And you will remain a Hindu there or a Christian or a Mohammedan. And you will go on repeating words like parrots. It will not change, it cannot change. […]

Wherever you go you will be yourself. Even in Heaven or in the Himalayas. You cannot be otherwise. The world is not outside you; you are the world. So wherever you go you take your world with you.

The real change has not to be of place, the real change has not to be outside, the real change has to be inner. And what do I mean by real change? I don’t mean that you have to improve upon yourself, because improvement is again a lie. Improvement means you will go on polishing your personality. You can make it immensely beautiful – but remember, the more beautiful it is, the more dangerous, because the more difficult it will be to drop it.

That’s why it happens that sometimes a sinner becomes a saint. But your so-called respectable people never become. They cannot become – they have such valuable person-alities, so much decorated, polished, and they have put so much investment in the personality, their whole life has been a kind of polishing. Now it is too costly to drop those beautiful personalities. A sinner can drop it, he has no investment in it. In fact he is fed-up with it, it is so ugly. But how can a respectable person drop it so easily? It has been paying him so well, it has been such a profit. It has been making him more and more respected, he is going higher and higher, he is reaching the pinnacle of success. It is very difficult for him to stop going on this ladder of success. It is a non-ending ladder, you can go on and on for ever. […]

When you are succeeding in the world it is difficult to stop. When you are becoming richer it is difficult to stop, when you are becoming famous it is difficult to stop. The more refined personality you have, the more it clings to you.

So I am not saying that you have to improve upon yourself. All the great masters, from Buddha to Hakuin, nobody has said to improve. Beware of the so-called ’improvement books’. The American market is full of those books: beware. Because improvement is not going to lead you anywhere. It is not a question of improvement, because by improvement the lie will be improved. The personality will be improved – will become more polished, will become more subtle, will become more valuable, will become more precious – but that is not the transformation. The transformation comes not by improvement but by dropping the personality utterly.

The lie cannot become the truth. There is no way to improve upon the lie so that it becomes the truth. It will remain the lie. It will look more and more like the truth but it will remain the lie. And the more it looks like the truth, the more you will be engrossed in it, rooted in it. The lie can look so much like the truth that you can even become oblivious of the fact that it is a lie.

The lie tells you: Search for the truth. Improve your character, your personality. Search for the truth, become this, become that. The lie goes on giving you new programs: Do this, and then everything will be good and you will be happy for ever. Do this, do that. This has failed? Don’t be worried, I have other plans for you. The lie goes on giving you plans, and you go on moving in those plans and wasting your life.

In fact the search for truth also comes out of the lie. That will be hard to understand but it has to be understood. The search for truth comes from the lie itself. It is the lie’s way to protect itself – it gives you even the search for truth, now how can you be angry with your personality? And how can you call it a lie? It propels you, it enforces you, it pushes you to search for truth.

But the search means going away. And truth is here, and the lie pushes you to go there. And truth is now, and the lie says ‘then’ and ‘there’. The lie always speaks either of the past or of the future, it never speaks of the present. And the truth is the present. This very moment! It is herenow. That’s what Hakuin means when he says:

This very place the lotus paradise,
This very body the buddha.

So the first ‘you’ is the lie, the act. The pseudo-personality that surrounds you. The public face, the phoniness. It is a fraud. The society has imposed it upon you and you have become a cooperator with it. You have to drop your cooperation with the social lie. Because only when you are utterly nude are you yourself. All clothes are social. All ideas and all identities that you think you are, are social – given by others. They have their motives to give those ideas to you. It is subtle exploitation.

The real exploitation is not economic or political, the real exploitation is psychological. That’s why all the revolutions up to now have been failures. Hitherto, no revolution has succeeded. The reason? Because they have not looked at the deepest exploitation which is psychological. They only go on changing superficial things. A capitalist society becomes communist, but it makes no difference. A democracy becomes dictatorial, a dictatorial society becomes democratic, it makes no difference. These are just superficial changes, like a whitewash, but the structure remains deep down the same.

What is the psychological exploitation? The psychological exploitation is that nobody is allowed to be himself. That nobody is accepted as himself or herself. That nobody is respected. How can you respect people if you don’t accept them as they are? If you impose things upon them and then you respect, you respect your own impositions. You don’t respect them as they are, you don’t respect their nudity. You don’t respect their naturalness, you don’t respect their spontaneity, you don’t respect their real smiles and real tears. You respect only phoniness, pretensions, actions. Their actings you respect.

This you-1 has to be utterly dropped. Freud helped much to make humanity aware of the pseudoness of personality, of the conscious mind. His revolution ii far deeper than the revolution of Marx, his revolution is far deeper than any other revolution. It goes deep, although it does not go far enough. It reaches to the second you, you-2. It is the repressed you, instinctive you, unconscious you. It is all that the society has not allowed, it is all that the society has forced inside your being and locked in there. It comes only in your dreams, it comes only in metaphors, it comes only when you are drunk, it comes only when you are no more in control. Otherwise, it remains far away from you. And it is more authentic, it is not phony.

Freud has done much to make man aware of it. And the humanistic psychologies and particularly growth groups, encounter and others, have helped tremendously to make you aware of all that is screaming inside you, all that has been repressed, crushed. And that is your vital part. That is your real life, natural life. Religions have condemned it as your animal part, they have condemned it as the source of sin. It is not the source of sin; it is the source of life. And it is not lower than the conscious. It is deeper than the conscious, certainly, but not lower than the conscious.

And nothing is wrong if it is animal. Animals are beautiful, so are trees. They still live naked in their utter simplicity. They have not yet been destroyed by the priests and the politicians, they are yet part of God. Only man has gone astray. Man is the only abnormal animal on the earth – otherwise all animals are simply normal. Hence the joy, the beauty, the health. Hence the vitality. Have you not seen it? When a bird is on the wing have you not felt jealous? Have you not seen it in a deer running fast into the forest? Have you not felt jealous of the vitality, of the sheer joy of energy?

Children: have you not felt jealous? Maybe because you feel so jealous, that’s why you go on condemning childishness. You go on condemning. Montague is right when he says that instead of telling people ‘Don’t be childish’ we should start telling people ‘Don’t be adultish’. He is right, I agree. A child is beautiful, the adult is what ugliness is. He is no more a flow; he is blocked in many ways. He is frozen, he is dull and dead. He has lost zest, he has lost enthusiasm, he is simply dragging. He is bored, he has no sense of mystery. He never feels surprised, he has forgotten the language of wonder. Mystery has disappeared for him. He has explanations, mystery is no more there. Hence he has lost poetry and the dance and all that is valuable and all that gives meaning and significance to life, all that gives flavor to life.

This second ‘you’ is far more valuable than the first. That is where I am against all the religions, that is where I am against all the priests, because they cling to the first, the superficial most. Go to the second. But the second is not the end – that is where Freud falls short. And that is where humanistic psychology also falls short – goes a little deeper than Freud but still does not go deep enough to find the third.

There is a third ‘you’, you-3. The real you, the original face, which is beyond you-1 and you-2, both. The transcendental. The Buddhahood. It is undivided pure consciousness. The first you is social, the second you is natural, the third you is divine. Or, if you want to use Hakuin’s terms, the first you is the physical body, the second you is the bliss body, and the third you is the essential body. These are the three bodies of Buddha.

And remember, I am not saying that the first is not at all useful. If the third exists then the first can be used beautifully. If the third exists, the second can be used beautifully. But only if the third exists. If the center functions well then the periphery too is okay, then the circumference too is okay. But without the center, only the circumference, is a kind of death.

That’s what has happened to man. That’s why in the West so many thinkers think that life is meaningless. It is not. It is only because you have lost touch with your source from where meaning arises.

It is as if a tree has lost its contact with its own roots. Now no flowers come. Now the foliage starts disappearing, the leaves fall and no new leaves arrive. And the juice stops flowing, the sap no more exists. The tree becomes dead, the tree is dying.

And the tree may start philosophizing, the tree may become existentialist, a Sartre or somebody else, and the tree may start saying that there are no flowers in life. That life has no flowers, that there is no fragrance, that there are no more any birds. And the tree may even start saying that it has been always so, and the ancients were only befooling themselves that there are flowers – they were imagining. ‘It has always been so, the spring has never come, people have only been fantasizing. These Buddhas and these Jinas, they have been simply imagining, fantasizing, that flowers bloom and there is great joy and birds come and sunlight. There is nothing. All is darkness, all is accidental, and there is no meaning.’ The tree can say it.

And the real thing is not that there is no meaning, not that there are no more flowers, not that flowers don’t exist, not that fragrance is fantasy, but simply that the tree has lost contact with its own roots.

Unless you are rooted in your Buddhahood you will not bloom. You will not sing, you will not know what celebration is. And how can you know God if you don’t know celebration? If you have forgotten how to dance how can you pray? If you have forgotten how to sing and how to love then God is dead. Not that God is dead. God is dead in you, only in you. Your tree is dry, the sap has disappeared. You will have to find roots again. Where to find these roots? Roots have to be found here and now. That is the whole message of Hakuin’s song of meditation. Before we enter into the song, a few things.

A man can seem to be the sum total of his days, of all that he does from the beginning to the end. But this is not the true man. What you do is just on the periphery. What you feel goes a little deeper. What you are is really at the roots. A man is not the sum total of his acts. A politician IS the sum total of his acts, because he lives only on the circumference. That’s why it is easy to write history about the politicians. It is difficult to write history about Buddhas, because they live at such depth where we cannot reach them. They live in such eternity that time takes no record of them. They exist in such a transcendental way that they leave no traces on the earth. They are like birds in the sky: they fly but no footprints are left.

Politicians leave footprints. They live in the mud, in the dirt, they drag themselves in the mundane reality. They leave many footprints; they leave much bloodshed behind them. A Buddha exists as if he has never existed. He exists so absently, he exists like a space, empty space.

Remember, a man is not a sum total of his actions. And if he is, he is not yet a man; he is just a fiction, he is living in illusion. You are not what you do. So don’t be too much concerned with your doing, start going deeper into being. That’s why all meditations are basically a way to sit silently – so silently that all action stops. On the physical plane, on the mental plane, action stops, thought stops. Because thought is also action on the mental plane – you are doing something. When all doing disappears and you are simply there, just there, a presence, then the meditation has happened.

Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

That is the meaning of the word ‘zazen’. ‘Za’ means sitting doing nothing. And ‘zen’ means: in that sitting when you are not doing anything you fall upon yourself, you encounter yourself, you see yourself. That is zen, dhyana, meditation. The word ‘zazen’ is beautiful. ’Sitting and looking into yourself’ – that is the meaning of it.

Man is more than the sum total of his acts, his thoughts, his feelings. Behind the acts, thoughts and feelings there is another man – that which is, that which essentially IS. But many seldom if ever show themselves in their essential being. Very few ever reach to that point of their essential being-hood, to their very ground of being. Those who reach, only they know that life is a benediction. A sheer joy, eternal celebration.

But if you remain on the surface, you know only misery, nothing else. Agony, nothing else. Let me say it in this way: You-1 knows only misery and agony. You-3 knows ecstasy of being and joy of being. And You-2 neither knows ecstasy nor knows agony. It knows pleasure/pain, it is just in the middle. Ecstasy is exceeding joy without any bounds to it, infinite joy. Agony is infinite misery, no bounds to it. Just between the two exists the animal and the child. It knows play, it knows pleasure/pain. It knows neither agony nor ecstasy. It does not know infinity.

If the child moves towards the first, which society forces him to do, he will know agony. If he finds somebody who can help to move him towards the third, he will know ecstasy. To find a master is nothing but to find a man who has known his essential being, so that he can help you to go towards your own essential being.

A master is not to be followed, a master is not to be imitated, a master is only to be understood. In that very understanding is the revolution.

A man’s true life is the way in which he puts off the lie imposed by others on him. Stripped, naked, natural, he is what he is. This is a matter of being, and not of becoming. The lie cannot become the truth, the personality cannot become your soul. There is no way to make the non-essential the essential. The non-essential remains non-essential and the essential remains essential, they are not convertible. And striving towards truth is nothing but creating more confusion. The truth has not to be achieved. It cannot be achieved, it is already the case. Only the lie has to be dropped.

All aims and ends and ideals and goals and ideologies, religions and systems of improvement and betterment, are lies. Beware of them. Recognize the fact that as you are, you are a lie. Manipulated, cultivated, by others. Striving after truth is a distraction and a postponement. It is the lie’s way to hide. See the lie, look deep into the lie of your personality. Because to see the lie is to cease to lie. No longer to lie is to seek no more for any truth – there is no need. The moment the lie disappears, truth is there in all its beauty and radiance. In the seeing of the lie it disappears and what is left is the truth.

To see the lie of striving after truth is to fall into an eternal silence. A stillness comes when you see the lie of your personality. There is nothing more to do. Hence the stillness – what can you do?

Just the other night, a sannyasin was saying ‘What can I do? Whatsoever I do, I fail. What can I do?’ There is nothing really to be done. Doing is not going to help, doing will be again the same rut. Only being is going to transform you, not doing. So when one fails again and again and again, only then the insight arises that ‘Doing is never going to lead me anywhere.’ The day that sword has hit you – that ‘Doing is not going to lead me anywhere’ – what will you do? Nothing is left to do.

In your utter helplessness, the surrender. And silence and stillness. This is the silence that transforms – not the silence that somehow you impose upon yourself by repeating a mantra or doing TM; that is not the real silence, that is a created silence. Any silence that you manage to create will belong to the personality. It will not be of much use, it will not go deeper than that – how can your doing go deeper than you? When you have utterly failed, when you have seen your ultimate failure and you have seen that there is no possibility and no hope for you to succeed, what will you do in that silence? You will just be there. All has stopped. The mind no more spins any thoughts.

And in that very moment the door opens. And that silence is being, that silence is Buddha.

This stillness is not the opposite of action, it is not brought about by will or by withdrawal from the world. One cannot withdraw from the world; one is the world. The want to escape keeps us imprisoned – because the wish to be without desire is still desire, and the will to be still is disturbance. You cannot will your silence, will is the base of all disturbance. Will has to disappear. You can only see into the futility of it. Doing, willing, improving, bettering yourself, achieving, reaching – all these words are just projections of the lie.

When the lie has been seen in its totality . . . the illumination, the enlightenment.

Now Hakuin’s sutras.

The pure land paradise is not far.

Zen people call the state of no-mind ‘the pure land paradise’. So please don’t interpret it in Christian ways. Paradise, to a Christian, is somewhere there in the sky. For a Buddhist, particularly for a man like Hakuin, it is the state of no-mind.

The pure land paradise is not far.

Stop thinking and you are there. And in fact that is the Biblical meaning of the parable of Adam’s expulsion. He has not been expelled, there is nobody to expel him. He has only eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge – he has become a mind. The more knowledge you accumulate, the more of a mind you become. Adam has become knowledgeable, he has become a mind, and that is the expulsion from the paradise. If he can drop his mind he will suddenly find himself again in the paradise, and he will also find that he has been always there. Even when he was thinking he had lost it, it was not lost. It was only forgotten. He became too much obsessed with knowledge, that’s why it was forgotten.

The day the child starts becoming knowledgeable he loses paradise. Each Adam loses it again and again. And don’t think that it happened once in history, and we are suffering for that ancient Adam. No. It has happened to our life – to each life, to each child. For a few months the child lives in the Garden of Eden. He knows nothing. Without knowing, he is a no-mind – he simply exists moment to moment, he has no worries. When he feels hungry, he cries, when he feels satisfied, he falls asleep. When he is happy, he smiles, when he is angry he screams. But he has no ideas about anything. He neither praises a smile nor condemns screaming. He neither feels shy about crying and weeping nor feels very good that he has been a good boy today. He knows nothing about all this nonsense. He knows nothing good, nothing bad, he makes no distinctions. He lives utterly one with reality. And whatsoever happens, happens; there is no rejection.

But by and by he will become knowledgeable, he will start learning things. The day he starts learning things he is trapped by the snake. Now he has started eating the fruit of the tree, sooner or later the paradise will disappear. Beaches will be there but no more beautiful. Butterflies will be still floating in the wind but for the child they don’t exist anymore. What exists is arithmetic, geography, history. Flowers still bloom but they don’t bloom for the child any more, he is too much into his homework. Once in a while still he hears the bird singing on the window, but only once in a while. And the whole society tries to drag him away from that.

The teacher will say ‘Look here at the blackboard! What are you doing there? Concentrate on me!’ The child was concentrating. The birdcall was so beautiful outside the window, the child was in concentration, utter concentration. This teacher has distracted him; now he has to look at the blackboard. And there is nothing to look at it, just a blackboard. But by and by we will manage to distract the child.

The expulsion is not by God but by the society. The society drags each Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. And once you have become too much of the head it is very difficult to enter back into that purity, that pure land paradise. Zen masters say, just like Jesus said: Unless you are like small children you will not enter into the kingdom of God.

A Christian missionary went to a Zen master and started reading the Sermon on the Mount. The Zen master listened and he said ‘Whosoever has said it must be very close to Buddhahood.’ The Zen master had never heard about Christ, he had never read the Bible, but he said ‘Whosoever has said it must be very close to Buddhahood.’ And when the missionary read ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God’ the Zen master said ‘Now stop. Now there is no more to read. Now there is no need to read any more. Whosoever has said it is a Buddha.’

‘Poor in spirit’ means empty of mind. ‘Poor in spirit’ means empty – all thoughts have disappeared. Then you are again back in paradise.

The pure land paradise is not far.

It is just there! Beating in your heart. Your each breath goes and touches the pure land paradise, each moment. You live from it. Every night when you fall asleep and dreams disappear, you are in it again. That’s why in the morning you feel so fresh, again young, rejuvenated. You have been on a short trip to the pure land paradise.

When in reverence this truth is heard even once,
He who praises it and gladly embraces it
Has merit without end.

Hakuin says ‘When in reverence this truth is heard even once.’ The question is not of hearing the truth many times. If you hear even once, if you have understood it even for a single moment in deep trust and reverence, it is yours forever. Doubt distracts. Doubt does not allow you to understand, doubt does not allow you to see it. Listen in reverence, in love. Be en rapport.

That is the way to be with a master – be en rapport, be bridged. But small things, very small things, distract you. Very small things which mean nothing – but you are distracted by those small things, and doubt arises. And doubt becomes a cloud and you become blind.

. . . In reverence this truth is heard even once,

It is enough.

How much more he who turns within . . .

Even hearing the truth is a deliverance. ‘How much more he who turns within’ – who not only hears it but looks within and sees it . . .

And confirms directly his own nature,
That his own nature is no-nature . . .

When you look deep into yourself you will not find anything there obstructing your vision. It is pure space. Your nature is no-nature. It is emptiness, sunyata.

Such has transcended vain words.

Only when you look into your nature . . . and find nothing. You only find an empty infinity there. Words will not have any meaning any more, you have transcended words. You have looked into your nature and now you know no word can explain it, no word can define it, no word can even indicate it. All scriptures become meaningless.

The gate opens, and cause and effect are one . . .

When you look inside yourself and there is no content, and the no-nature has been felt and you have seen your inner sky . . .

The gate opens, and cause and effect are one.

And the source and the goal are one. Now you are not to go anywhere, you have come to your source. And to be at the source is to be at the goal. To be at the beginning is to be at the end.

Straight runs the way – not two, not three.
Taking as form the form of no-form,
Going or returning, he is ever at home.

And once you have seen the form of no-form, once you have seen the thought of no-thought, once you have seen the nature of no-nature, you are a totally new being. What happens . . .

Going or returning, he is ever at home.

Then wherever you are, you are at home. In the prison you are at home, in the temple you are at home, in the shop you are at home, in the Himalayas you are at home, in the marketplace you are at home. You are simply at home. once you have seen your center, your essential being, your Buddhahood, has been glimpsed. Then wherever you are you are at home, because all is your home. Then there is no need to leave the world.

Zen people are not against the world. They say: To be against the world is still to be attached to the world. To go to the opposite extreme is not transformation. When you no more choose between two extremes, you settle in the middle. And the middle is the way.

Straight runs the way – not two, not three.

It is a simple way – one.

Going or returning, he is ever at home.
Taking as thought the thought of no-thought,
Singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.

Then whatsoever you do, you express truth. Whatsoever. Eating, you express truth. Walking, you express truth. When a Zen master hits a disciple he is expressing truth. When Kabir sings he is expressing truth, when Meera dances she is expressing truth. Jesus expresses truth dying on the cross, and Krishna expresses truth singing on his flute. Whatsoever you do, there is no way to avoid expressing truth. You are truth. The lie has been dropped.

Singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth.
Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi,
Radiant the full moon of fourfold wisdom.
What remains to be sought?
Nirvana is clear before him,
This very place the lotus paradise,
This very body the buddha.

Remember the word ‘This’.

This very place the lotus paradise…

And once you have known your source, wherever you are, you are in the lotus paradise.

This very place the lotus paradise,
And this very body the buddha.

And whatsoever you do – whatsoever, without any conditions – is the expression of truth.

I have heard a beautiful story about Roshi Taji, a great Zen master.

As Roshi Taji approached death, his senior disciples assembled at his bedside. One of them, remembering the roshi was fond of a certain kind of cake, had spent half a day searching the pastry shops of Tokyo for this confection which he now presented to Roshi Taji. With a wan smile the dying roshi accepted a piece of the cake and slowly began munching it. As the roshi grew weaker, his disciples leaned close and inquired whether he had any final words for them.

‘Yes’ the roshi replied.

The disciples leaned forward eagerly. ‘Please tell us!’

‘My, but this cake is delicious!’ And with that he died.

Meditate over it. What a man! What manner of man! A Buddha. Each act and each word and each gesture becomes the expression of truth. In that moment only that was true, the taste of the cake. In that moment anything else would have been false, untrue. If he had talked about God, that would not have been true. If he had talked about nirvana, that would not have been true. In that moment the taste on his tongue was still alive. In that moment that was his authentic gesture.

He said ‘My, but this cake is delicious.’ This cake.

This very place the lotus paradise,
This very body the buddha.

Zen people talk about four wisdoms.

Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi,
Radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom.

The first wisdom is called ‘the wisdom of the mirror’. When there is no thought you become a mirror. This is the first wisdom, becoming like a mirror. The second wisdom is called ‘the wisdom of sameness’. When you become a mirror without any thought, all distinctions in the world disappear. Then it is all one. Then the rose and the bird and the earth and the sky and the sea and the sand and the sun are all one, it is one energy.

When you are a mirror – the first wisdom – the second wisdom arises out of the first: the wisdom of sameness. Duality disappears. And out of the second arises the third wisdom, the wisdom of spiritual vision. When you have seen that all over the world it is one energy, then only can you see inside yourself that you are also that energy. Then the seer and the seen become one, the observer and the observed become one. That is the third wisdom, the wisdom of spiritual vision. Buddha has a special word for it, he calls it dhamma chakkhu – the eye for truth, or the truth-eye. The spiritual vision opens – what yogis call ‘the third eye’. What Christ also calls ‘the one eye’, when two eyes become one. Dhamma chakkhu opens, the wisdom of spiritual vision is attained.

And out of the third arises the fourth, the wisdom of perfection. When you have seen that all is the same, and when you have looked within and seen that without and within are also the same, you have become perfect. In fact, to say that you have become perfect is not true, you have always been perfect. Now it is revealed to you – it is only a revelation. In that moment one knows . . .

This very place the lotus paradise,
This very body the buddha.

-Osho

From This Very Body the Buddha, Discourse #6

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.

Man is an Opportunity – Osho

Man is not a meaning but an opportunity. The meaning is possible, but is not given. The meaning can be created, but it is not already there. It is a task not a gift. Life is a gift, but life is open opportunity. Meaning is not a gift, meaning is a search. Those who seek will certainly find it. But those who simply wait will go on missing. The meaning, the logos, has to be created by man. Man has to transform himself into that meaning. It cannot be something exterior to man, it can only be something interior.

Man’s inner being has to become illumined.

Before we enter into these sutras, a few things will be helpful to understand about man, because only then is the work possible.

The first thing to be understood is that man is a four-dimensional space-time continuum, just as the whole existence is. Three dimensions are of space, one dimension is of time. They are not separate: the dimension of time is but the fourth dimension of space. The three dimensions of space are static; the fourth dimension of time brings movement, makes life a process. Then existence is not a thing, but becomes an event.

And so is man. Man is the miniature universe. If you could understand man in his totality, you would have understood the whole existence. Man contains all – in seed. Man is a condensed universe. And these are the four dimensions of man.

The first dimension is what Patanjali calls sushupti, deep sleep, where not even a dream exists. One is utterly silent, not even a thought stirring, no wind blowing. All is absent. That absence, in deep sleep, is the first dimension. It is from that that we start. And we have to understand our sleep, only then can we go through a transformation. Only then can we build our house on a rock, otherwise not. But very few people are there who understand their sleep.

You sleep every day, you live one-third of your life in deep sleep, but you don’t understand what it is. You go into it every night, and you also gain much out of it. But it is all unconscious: you don’t know exactly where it leads you. It leads you to the simplest dimension of your life – the first dimension. It is very simple because there is no duality. It is very simple because there is no complexity. It is very simple because there is only oneness. You have not yet arisen as an ego, you have not yet become divided – but the unity is unconscious.

If this unity becomes conscious you will have samadhi instead of sushupti. If this unity becomes conscious, illumined, then you will have attained God. That’s why Patanjali says: Deep sleep and samadhi, the ultimate state of consciousness, are very much alike. Alike, because they are simple. Alike, because in both there is no duality. Alike, because in both the ego exists not.

In the first, the ego has not arisen yet; in the second, the ego has been dissolved – but there is a great difference too. The difference is that in samadhi you know what sleep is. Even while asleep your consciousness is there, your awareness is there. Your awareness goes on burning like a small light inside you.

A Zen Master was asked… It is a very famous saying in Zen:

Thus we are told that before we study Zen the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. While we are studying Zen, however, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. But then when our study of Zen is completed, the mountains are once again mountains and the rivers are once again rivers.

‘What is meant by this?’ a disciple asked a great Master.

The Master explained this: ‘It simply means that the first and the last states are alike. Only just in the middle… the disturbance. First the mountains are mountains. and again in the end the mountains are again mountains. But in the middle the mountains are no more mountains and rivers are no more rivers – everything is disturbed and confused and clouded. That clouding, that confusion, that chaos, exists only in the middle. In sushupti everything is as it should be; in samadhi, again everything is as it should be. Between the two is the problem, is the world, is the mind, is the ego, is the whole complex of misery, hell.

When the Master explained this, the disciple exclaimed ‘Well, if that’s true, then there is no difference between the ordinary man and the enlightened man.’

‘That’s true’ replied the Master. ‘There is no difference really. The only thing is, the enlightened man is six inches off the ground.’

But those six inches make all the difference. Why is the Master six inches off the ground? He lives in the world and is yet not in it – those are the six inches, the difference. He eats, and yet he is not the eater; he remains a witness – those six inches. He is ill, he knows the pain of illness but still he is not in pain; that difference – those six inches. He dies, he knows death is happening, and yet he is not dying: that difference – those six inches. He is asleep and yet he is not asleep, he is alert too.

The first state is of sushupti. We will call it ‘the first dimension’. It is dreamless undividedness, it is unconscious unity, it is ignorance, but very blissful. But the bliss too is unconscious. Only in the morning when you are awake again do you start feeling that there has been a good sleep in the night, that you have been in some faraway land, that you are feeling rejuvenated, that you are feeling very fresh, again young and alive. But only in the morning – not exactly at the time when you are in the sleep, only later on. Just some fragrance remains lingering in the memory. It reminds you that you have been to some inner depth, but where? what? – you cannot figure it out. You cannot give any account of it. Just a vague memory, a faint remembrance that somewhere you have been in a good space. There is no ego yet, so there is no misery possible, because misery is not possible without the ego.

This is the state where the rocks and the mountains and the rivers and the trees are existing. That’s why trees look so beautiful – an unconscious bliss surrounds them. That’s why mountains look so silent: they are in sushupti, they are in deep sleep, they are continuously in deep sleep. That’s why when you go to the Himalayas an eternal silence is felt – virgin silence. Nobody has ever been able to disturb it. Just think of a mountain, and suddenly you start feeling silent. Think of trees and you feel life flowing in. The whole of nature exists in the first state, that’s why nature is so simple.

The second dimension is that of dream – what Patanjali calls swabha. The first disturbance in the sleep is dream. Now you are not one anymore; the second dimension has arisen. Images have started floating in you: the beginning of the world. Now you are two: the dreamer and the dreamed.

Now you are seeing the dream and you are the dream too. Now you are divided. That silence of the deep sleep is no more there, disturbance has entered because division has entered.

Division, duality, disturbance – that is the meaning of the dream. Although the duality is still unconscious it is there; but not very consciously – not that you know about it. The turmoil is there, the world is born, but things are still undefined. They are just coming out of the smoke; things are taking shape. The form is not yet clear, the form has not yet become concrete, but because of the dualism – even though it is unconscious – misery has entered in. The nightmare is not very far away. The dream will turn into a nightmare.

This is where anima]s and birds exist. They also have a beauty, because they are very close to sushupti. Birds sitting on a tree are just dreams sitting in sleep. Birds making their nests on a tree are just dreams making their nests in sleep. There is a kind of affinity between the birds and the trees. If trees disappear, birds will disappear; and if birds disappear, trees will not be so beautiful any more. There is a deep relationship; it is one family. When you see parrots screeching and flying around a tree, it almost looks as if the leaves of the tree have got wings. They are not separate… very close. Birds and animals are more silent than man, happier than man. Birds don’t go mad. They don’t need psychiatrists; they don’t need any Freud, any Jung, any Adler. They are utterly healthy.

If you go into the forest and you see the animals, you will be surprised – they are all alike! And all healthy. You will not find a single fat animal in the natural state. I am not talking about the zoo. In the zoo things go wrong, because the zoo is no more natural. Zoo animals start following man; they even start going mad and committing suicide. Zoo animals even turn into homosexuals. The state of the zoo is not natural, it is man-created. In nature they are very, very silent, happy, healthy, but that health too is unconscious – they don’t know what is happening.

This is the second state: when you are in a dream. This is the second dimension. First: dreamless sleep, sushupti – simple one-dimensional; there is no ‘other’. Second: dream, swabha; there are two dimensions: the dreamer and the dreamed, the content and the consciousness – the division has arisen – the looker and the looked at, the observer and the observed. Duality has entered. This is the second dimension.

In the first dimension there is only the present tense. Sleep knows no past, no future. Of course because it knows no past, no future, it cannot know the present either, because the present exists only in the middle. You have to be aware of the past and the future, only then can you be aware of the present. Because there is no past and no future, sleep exists only in the present. It is pure present, but unconscious.

With the dream, the division enters. With the dream, the past becomes very, very important. Dream is past-oriented; all dreams come from the past. They are fragments of the past floating in the mind, dust from the past which has not settled yet.

It’s her old man I feel sorry for. He was in bed the other night fast asleep. Suddenly she noticed he had a smile on his face. She thought ‘Hello, he’s having one of those dreams again.’ So she put down her crisps and her bottle of stout and woke him up.

He said ‘Blimey, you would, wouldn’t you! I was having a lovely dream then! I was at this auction where they were selling mouths. They had small rosebud ones for a quid. Pert little pursed ones for two quid, and little smiling ones for a fiver.’

She said ‘Ooh! Did they have a mouth my size?’

‘Yes. They were holding the auction in it.’

Whatsoever you dream has something to say about your past. It may be that you see an auction – little smiling rosebud mouths are being sold – but the auction is being held in your wife’s mouth. Maybe you have never said to your wife ‘Shut up, and keep your big mouth closed!’ Maybe you have not said it so clearly, but you have been thinking that so many times. It is lingering in the mind. It is there. Maybe you have never been so true in your waking state as you are when you are asleep. And you can be! You can afford to be true. All dreams float from the past. With the dream past becomes existential. So the present is there, and the past.

With the third, the third dimension, waking state what Patanjali calls jagrut – multiplicity enters. The first is unity, the second is duality, the third is multiplicity. Great complexity arises. The whole world is born. In sleep you are deep inside you; in dream you are no more that deep inside you and yet you are not out either – just in the middle, on the threshold. With waking consciousness you are outside yourself, you have gone into the world.

You can understand the biblical story of Adam’s expulsion in these three dimensions. When Adam was there in the Garden of Eden and had not yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge it was deep sleep, unconscious – unconscious bliss it was. There was no disturbance, everything was simply beautiful. He had not known of any misery. Then he eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge arises, images start floating, dreams have started functioning. He is no more the same. He is still in the Garden of Eden but no more part of it – alien, stranger, an outsider. He has not yet been expelled, but in a subtle way he is no more centered there. He is uprooted. This is the state of the dream – the first taste of knowledge, because of the first taste of duality, the distinction of observer and the observed. And then he is being expelled from the Garden of Eden, thrown out – that is the third state, the waking state. Now he cannot even go back; there is no way back. He has forgotten that he has an inside too.

In deep sleep you are inside. In wakefulness you are outside. In dream you are just in the middle, hanging, not settled yet where to go, still indecisive, in doubt, uncertain. With the waking state, the ego enters in. In the dream state there are just rudimentary fragments of the ego arising, but they settle in the third. The ego becomes the most concrete, most solid, most decisive phenomenon. Then whatsoever you do, you do because of the ego.

The third state brings a little consciousness – just one per cent, not much of it, just a flickering consciousness, momentary consciousness. The first was absolutely unconscious, the second was unconsciousness disturbed, the third is the first glimpse of consciousness. And because of that – the momentary glimpse of consciousness – that one per cent of consciousness coming in creates the ego. Now the future also enters in.

First there is only the present unconscious, then there is the past unconscious, now there is future. Past, present, future, and the whole complexity of time revolves around you. This is the state where people are stuck, where you are stuck, where everybody is stuck. And if you go on building your house with these three dimensions, you will be building it on sand, because your whole effort will be unconscious.

To do something in unconsciousness is futile – it is shooting arrows in the dark not knowing where the target is. It is not going to bring much result. First, light is needed. The target has to be looked for, searched for. And enough light is needed so you can move towards the target consciously. That is possible only when the fourth dimension starts functioning. It rarely happens; but whenever it happens, then meaning is really born, logos is born.

You will live a meaningless life if you live only with these three. You will live a meaningless life because you will not be able to create yourself. How can you create in such unawareness?

The fourth dimension is of awareness, witnessing – what Patanjali calls turiya. And in the Gospels Jesus goes on saying again and again to his disciples: Awake! Beware! Watch! All these words indicate turiya. And it is one of the misfortunes of history that Christianity has not been able to bring this message clearly to the world. It has failed utterly.

Rarely has a religion failed so utterly as Christianity. Jesus was not very fortunate, because the disciples that he found turned out to be very ordinary, and the religion became almost a political organization. The church became not a follower of Jesus but deep down really antagonistic to Jesus. The church has been doing things against Jesus in the name of Jesus.

Buddha was more fortunate. The followers never became a church, they never became so organized politically and they never became so worldly. They carried little bits of Buddha’s message down the ages.

This fourth dimension has to be understood as deeply as possible, because this is the goal. It is pure consciousness, simplicity again. The first was simple but unconscious; the fourth is simple but conscious. Unity again, bliss again – with only one difference: now everything is conscious, the inner light is burning bright. You are fully alert. It is not a dark night inside you but a full-moon night, moonlit. That is the meaning of enlightenment: the inner illumination.

Again there is only one time left – present, but now it is conscious present. Past is no more hanging around. A man who is aware cannot move in the past, because it is no more. A man who is aware cannot move in the future, because it is not yet. A man who is aware lives in the present, here-now. HERE is his only space and NOW is his only time. And because he is only here-now, time as such disappears. Eternity is born, timelessness is born. And when one is totally alert, ego cannot exist.

Ego is a shadow cast in unawareness. When all is light, the ego cannot exist. You will be able to see the falsity of it, the pseudo-ness of it. And in that very seeing is its disappearance.

These are the four dimensions of human consciousness. And people live only in the first three. The fourth carries the meaning; hence the people who live only in the three live a meaningless life. They know it. You know it! If you look into your life you will not find any meaning there, just a haphazard, accidental progression of things. One thing is followed by another, but with no particular consistency, with no particular relevance. One thing is followed by another just accidentally.

That’s what Jean-Paul Sartre means when he says ‘Man is a useless passion’: man is accidental. Yes, he is true if he is talking about the three dimensions: first, second and third; but he is not true about the fourth. And he cannot say anything about the fourth because he has not experienced anything of it. Only a Christ or a Buddha can say something about the fourth.

Christ-consciousness is of the fourth, so is Buddha-consciousness. To remain confined in the three is to be in the world. To enter into the fourth is to enter into nirvana, or call it the ‘kingdom of God’. These are only different expressions for the same thing.

A few things more: The second dimension is a shadow of the first: sleep and dream. Dreams cannot exist without sleep, sleep is a must. Sleep can exist without dreams. So sleep is primary, dreams are secondary – just a shadow. And so is the case with the third and the fourth. The third is the shadow of the fourth, because the third can exist only if there is some consciousness. A little bit of consciousness has to be there, only then can the third exist. The third cannot exist without little bit of consciousness in it – a ray of light. It is not much of a light, but a ray of light is needed. The fourth can exist without the third, but the third cannot exist without the fourth. The fourth is awareness, absolute awareness; and the third is just a small ray of light in the dark night. But it exists because of that small ray of light. If that ray of light disappears, it will become the second; it will not be the third any more.

And your life looks like a shadow-life because you are living with the third. And the third is the shadow of the fourth. Only with the fourth do you come home. Only with the fourth are you grounded in existence.

The first is absolute darkness, the fourth is absolute light. Between these two are their two shadows. Those two shadows have become so important to us that we think that is our whole life. That’s why Hindus have been calling the world maya, illusion, because of these two dimensions which have become predominant – the second and the third. We have lost track of the first, and we have not yet searched for the fourth.

And one thing more: If you find the fourth you will find the first. Only one who has found the fourth will be able to know about the first, because once you have come to the fourth you can be asleep and remain alert. Krishna defines the yogi in the Gita as ‘one who is awake while asleep’. That’s his definition for the yogi. A strange definition: who is awake while asleep.

And just the reverse is the situation with you. You are asleep while awake. That is the definition of a non-yogi: asleep while awake. You look awake, and you are not.

It is just an idea, this awake state. Ninety-nine per cent consists of sleep – only one per cent of wakefulness. And that one per cent also goes on changing. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not there at all. It was there; somebody insults you – and it is not there. You have become angry, and you have lost even that small awareness. Somebody treads on your feet – and it is gone. It is very delicate. Anybody can take it and destroy it, and very easily. You were perfectly okay; a letter comes and something is written in the letter, and suddenly you are no more okay. All is disturbed. A single word can create such a disturbance! Your awareness is not very much.

And you are awake only in rare moments: in danger you are awake, because in danger you have to be awake. But when there is no danger, you start snoring. You can hear people snoring – walking down the road, they are snoring. And they are caged in their own unconsciousness.

A drunk bumped into a stop sign. Dazed and disoriented, he stepped back and then advanced in the same direction. Once more he hit the sign. He retreated a few steps, waited awhile, and then marched forward. Colliding with the post again, he embraced it in defeat and said ‘It is no use. I am fenced in. I am stopped in every direction.’

And he has not moved in any other direction. He has been moving again and again to the post. And being hit, naturally he concludes that he has been fenced in from every direction.

And that is the situation of the ordinary human consciousness. You go on moving in the same unconscious way, in the same unconscious direction. And again and again you are hit, and you think ‘Why is there so much misery? Why? Why did God create such a miserable world in the first place? Is God a kind of sadist? Does he want to torture people? Why has he created a life which is almost like a prison, and in which there is no freedom?’

Life is absolutely free. But to see that freedom, first you will have to free your consciousness. Remember it as a criterion: the more conscious you are, the more free; the less conscious you are, the less free. The more conscious you are, the more blissful; the less conscious you are, the less blissful. It depends on how conscious you are. And there are people who will go on looking into the scriptures to find out ways to become more free, to become more blissful, to attain to truth. That is not going to help, because it is not a question of the scriptures. If you are unconscious and you go on reading the Bible and the Koran and the Vedas and the Gita, it is not going to help, because your unconsciousness cannot be changed by your studies. In fact the scripture cannot change your consciousness, but your unconsciousness will change the scripture – the meaning of the scriptures. You will find your own meanings there. You will interpret in such a way that the Bible, the Veda, the Koran, will start functioning as imprisonments. that’s how Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans are – all imprisoned.

I have heard…

After booking into a large hotel, a self-styled evangelist read in his room for an hour or two – and he was reading the Bible – then went down to the bar, and after a couple of drinks, he struck up a conversation with the red-headed barmaid. He stayed up until closing time and after the girl had cleared up, they both went up to the evangelist’s room.

When he started to interfere with her clothing, the barmaid seemed to have second thoughts. ‘Are you sure this is alright?’ she said ‘after all you are a holy man.’

‘My dear’ he replied ‘it’s written in the Bible.’

She took him at his word, and they spent a very pleasant night together. The next morning, however, as the girl was preparing to leave, she said ‘You know, I don’t remember the part of the Bible you spoke about last night.’

The evangelist picked up the Gideon’s Bible from the bedside table, opened the cover, and showed her the flyleaf, on which was inscribed ‘The redheaded barmaid screws.’

Reading the whole Bible for one hour, and this was his finding. Somebody had inscribed on the flyleaf…

If you read the Bible, you read it, remember. And the meaning that you give it will be yours, the interpretation will be yours. It cannot help you, because it cannot even protect itself from you. How can it help you? The only way to have any change in life is to change consciousness. And to change consciousness you will not have to go into the Bible and the Vedas. You will have to go inwards, you will have to go into meditation. Scholarship won’t help.

A blind man was invited to a festivity and there he ate some delicious pudding. He was so enchanted by its taste that he asked someone sitting next him to tell what it looked like.

‘White’ the man said.

‘What is white?’ the blind man asked.

‘White? – like a duck,’ came the answer.

‘How does a duck look?’ persisted the blind man.

Puzzled for a moment, the man finally said ‘Here, feel this’ and took the blind man’s hand in his hand and guided it along his other hand and arm, which he bent at the elbow and wrist to resemble the shape of a duck.

At this, the blind man exclaimed ‘Oh, the pudding is crooked!’

That’s what is going to happen. You cannot help the blind man to know what is white, or what is color, or what is light. All your help is going to give him something wrong. There is no way to help the blind man by definitions, by explanations, by theories, by dogmas, by scriptures. The only way to help him is to heal his eyes.

Buddha has said ‘I am a physician. I don’t give you definitions of light, I simply heal your eyes.’ And that’s what Jesus is, and all the miracles that are reported in the Bible are not miracles but parables – that a blind man came to him and he touched his eyes, and the blind man was healed and he could see immediately. If it is just about the physical eye, this is not much. Then Jesus is already out of date, because medical science can do it. Sooner or later, Jesus will have to be completely forgotten. If he was simply curing physical eyes, then it is not going to mean much in the future. This can be done by science. And that which can be done by science should be done by science; religion should not enter into it – there is no need. Religion has far higher things to do.

So I insist again and again that these stories are not miracles but parables. People are blind, and the Jesus-touch is a magic touch. He helps them to see, he helps them to become aware, he helps them to become more conscious. He brings the fourth.

To go into the fourth, work is needed. Work in the sense that Gurdjieff used to use that word. Work means a great effort to transform your being, a great effort to center your being, a great effort to drop all that which creates darkness and to bring all that which can help a little light come in. If a door has to be opened, then open the door and let the light come in. If a wall has to be broken, then break the wall and let the light come in. Work means a conscious effort to search, to inquire to explore into the dimension of the fourth – into light, into awareness – and a conscious effort to drop all that which helps you remain unconscious, to drop all that which keeps you mechanical.

A man bought a farm and a sow. He asked his wife to watch the sow, explaining that if she saw it eating grass it was ready for mating and could be taken to the next farm. A couple of days later his wife told him that the sow had started to eat grass. So the farmer put it on a barrow and took it to the next farm to be mated. When he came back, he told his wife to watch the sow again. ‘If the sow eats grass again, it has not taken’ he explained.

A few days later, his wife reported that the sow was eating grass again. So it was put on the barrow and taken for mating again. The farmer brought it back and again asked his wife to watch it closely. Two days later he asked his wife if it had been eating grass again.

‘No’ she said ‘but it’s sitting in the barrow.’

The mechanical mind, the instinctive mind, the repetitive mind – that has to be broken and dropped. Work means an alchemical change. Great effort is needed. Hard and arduous is the path. It is an uphill task.

-Osho

From I Say Unto You, Vol. 1, Discourse #7

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.

Who is Jesus Christ – Osho

Who is Jesus Christ? The question has been asked down the centuries again and again, and it has been answered too. But the questioners were wrong, and so were those who have answered it, because the question was out of a certain prejudice, and so was the answer. They were not essentially different; their source was one and the same.

The question was asked by those who were suspicious of Jesus’ Godhood. And the question was answered by those who were not ready to believe Jesus’ manhood. They were only ready to believe half of him. The Jews were ready to believe that he was a man. And the Christians were ready to believe that he was God. The Jews were denying half of him – the Christ part. And the Christians were denying the other half – the Jesus part.

Who is Jesus Christ? Christians don’t want to see him as Jesus, son of man – man of flesh, blood and bones, man as other men are. And the Jews did not want to believe him as God, as divine – made of pure consciousness, not of flesh, blood and bones.

Nobody has been ready to believe Jesus in his totality. And that is not only the case with Jesus, that is the case with all the Masters – Buddha, Krishna, Zarathustra. And unless you allow Jesus in his totality to penetrate you, you will not be transformed. Unless you allow him as he is, you will not be in contact with him. Jesus is both Jesus and Christ, and he is not ashamed of it.

In the Bible many times he says ‘I am the Son of man’, and as many times he also says ‘I am the Son of God.’ And he seems to have no idea that there is any contradiction between these two. There is none. The contradiction exists in our minds. It doesn’t exist in Jesus’ being. His being is bridged. His being is bridged between time and eternity, body and soul, this world and that. His being is bridged between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. He is utterly bridged, he is at ease with both, because he is both. Jesus and Christ are like two shores, and the river is only possible if there are two shores. Jesus is the river that flows between these two shores: both shores are his. He exists between them, he is a river.

Who is Jesus Christ – God or man? And I say all the questions that have been asked were wrong, and so were the answers. Why? – because the questions came either from Judaic knowledge or from Muslim knowledge or from Hindu knowledge. And the answers came from Christian knowledge, and knowledge cannot answer it. Knowledge cannot even ask it! Knowledge is impotent. Such questions of such importance can be asked only out of innocence, not out of knowledge. The distinction has to be understood.

When you ask a question out of knowledge, you are not really asking, because you already know. Your question is false, inauthentic. Your heart is not there. You are asking for asking’s sake – maybe for a discussion, a debate, an argument. But you know the question beforehand – the answer is there a priori. SO you cannot receive the answer, you are not open for it, you are not available for it. You are not ready to move, to explore; you already have the answer. And the question is arising out of that answer.

The Jews had the answer. They knew that he was not the Messiah, that he was not God. Why? – because they had the idea that when the Messiah came everybody would recognize him! Everybody – without any exception. That was their idea of the Messiah, that everybody would recognize him.

And if Jesus was not recognised by everybody, how could he be the Messiah? They have a definition. They had also believed – that has also been their knowledge – that when Jesus, the real Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah came, everybody would be liberated immediately. All past sins, present sins would disappear in that light, and it had not happened. ‘Christ is there but people are not liberated yet, they are still living in sin, they are still living in misery. So this man cannot be the Messiah, cannot be the Christ.’ This was not the man they were waiting for.

These are prejudices. They had never seen any Messiah. How could they define what would happen when the Messiah came?

For example, if in the dark night of your soul you have an idea that when the morning comes, money will shower from the sky: when the sun rises, everybody will become rich. And then in the morning when the sun rises, how can you accept that this is the sun? – Because the money is not falling and everybody has not become rich, people are still poor. And you go on looking at the sky and no money is coming. And because you are too concerned with the money, you don’t see what is coming from the sun – the light, the life, the ecstasy. You cannot see that because your eyes are completely covered with your prejudice, with your idea. And then you ask ‘Who is this Jesus Christ?’ You already know how the Messiah should be. That is hindering, that is an obstruction.

That’s why the Jews missed. It was for this man that they had been waiting for centuries, and when he came and knocked on their doors, they missed. They denied him. How could they have denied? Were they bad people? No, they were people as good as you are, they were as good as Hindus and Mohammedans and Buddhists; there was nothing wrong with them. Then what was the problem? The problem was their knowledge. They had a prejudice. And when Christians answer that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, again it is knowledge.

What I want to say to you is: that the questions and the answers are coming from the same source; they are not different, they are not a little bit different. Christians say he is the only begotten son of God. Now this is stupid, because all comes from God, so how can Jesus be the son of God exclusively? Everybody is the son of God, we all partake of sonhood. God is our father, and that’s what Jesus goes on saying again and again. But Christians won’t listen. They have an idea that God has sent his only son. Why ‘only’? – too afraid that he may have another son to send, and the other son may come and then there will be conflict. Then who is right? ‘So make it sure, certain, that he has only one son so that you are finished. Once more the Bible has come, now there will be no more Bibles coming again.’ Mohammedans say ‘Mohammed is the only prophet – the last prophet. Now there will be no more coming. He has brought the ultimate.’ So nobody can improve upon the Koran, nobody can improve upon the Bible, because nobody has the right to improve.

Why ‘the only begotten son’? Are not trees, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the stars, and man, and animals, and birds created by God? Doesn’t this whole existence come from God? Is it not flowing from his being? God is the totality of all. Rocks and rivers and mountains are as much his creations as you are, as Jesus is. There is no distinction. All beings participate in God. In fact, to BE IS to participate in God. Otherwise you cannot be – there is no other way to be!

To Be is to be God!

Then what is the difference between you and Jesus? The difference is not of your being, the difference is only of your knowing, recognition, awareness. Jesus knows that he is the son of God, and you have not yet recognized it. That’s the difference. You can recognize it any moment. In that very recognition… the transformation, what Jesus calls metanoia. It is only a question of recognition.

You have become oblivious of your reality, he is aware – but there is no difference between the beings. You are as rich as he is; he knows it, you don’t know. Because you don’t know you remain poor, not because you are poor. You are not poor! How can you be poor when God is showering every moment on you? When he is beating in your heart, and circulating in your blood, and flowing into your consciousness, how can you be poor? You are not beggars. Everybody is an emperor, but you are not aware of the fact. You don’t look inside yourself where God goes on making contact with you. You don’t look into your source.

The word that Jesus uses for looking into your source is ‘return’. That word ‘return’ has been translated as ‘repent’. ‘Repent’ also means return, but it has fallen into wrong associations. It has become repentance. It has nothing to do with repentance. Return – turn into your own being, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and suddenly you see the light that you have always been. You see the light that you are. You see God. And for the first time you recognize that you have never lost track of him; he was just behind your back. You were not looking at him.

It is as if the sun has risen and you are standing in the full morning with closed eyes. Just open your eyes. Jesus is standing just by your side with open eyes, and you are standing with closed eyes. That’s the only difference, there is no other difference.

Jesus is man because you are God.

Let me tell you what I mean. Jesus is as much man as you are man, and you are as much God as Jesus is God. God and man are not two separate entities. Man is one of the forms of God’s expression in the world. Jesus is man and God, so are you. And to understand Jesus is to understand your own situation. And to love Jesus is to love your own being. To meditate on Jesus to meditate upon your own division, the gap that has come in your being between you and your own real self. To understand Jesus is to bridge that gap.

Jesus has no privilege over you, neither has Buddha. Nobody is privileged, otherwise God would be unjust. Everybody has the same powers. In the eyes of God we are all equal. Inequality is our creation. In God’s eyes everyone is equal to everything else.

The Jews were very disturbed because Jesus was claiming that he was God, or God’s son. For two thousand years Christians have been defending Jesus – that he was God, that he is God.

And they have been trying to efface all the possibilities with which it can be proved that he is man. That’s why they say he was born out of a virgin mother – that is the beginning. So they deny his manhood, so he is not just like you; he is special. Even in his birth he is special. Then they try to make his life in such a way that no indications are left that he was human. He was very human, utterly human. He was a total man. He was not a perfectionist. When it was needed to be angry he became really angry. He threw the money-changers out of the temple and he said to them ‘What are you doing here in my Father’s home, in my Father’s temple? Get out from here!’ And he was in such a rage, that alone, single-handed, he threw many people outside.

He loved people. He had friends, he mixed with people. He ate with people, drank with people, he moved with people. He lived like an ordinary man. He had no pretensions of being anything extraordinary. And even if something extraordinary happens, he always says ‘It is your faith that has performed the miracle. It is God’s mercy on you. It is something between you and your God.’ He does not even expect gratitude. Somebody is very grateful because a miracle has happened and he has been cured, and he wants to touch his feet and thank him, and he says ‘No.’ And the man says ‘You are a great man, you are so good!’ and Jesus says ‘Nobody is good except God. You thank him. Forget about me. It is your faith that has cured you, not I. And if you have to be thankful, you have to be thankful to God. Forget about me. Don’t allow me to be between you and your God.’

That’s exactly what Buddha is reported to have said to his disciples ‘If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately. Never allow me to stand between you and the reality. Hold my hand as far as you are not capable of walking alone and on your own. The moment you are capable of walking alone and on your own, just forget about me. Go ahead. Then don’t cling to me. Then don’t try to remain a shadow of me. If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately!’ he says. That’s what Jesus goes on saying again and again ‘Forget about me. Let your thanks go directly to God. Who am I?’

Christians have been trying to efface all traces of his humanity; so he is born out of the virgin Mary, a virgin mother, which is absolutely absurd. Then he lives a life in which all human traits are removed. Christians only talk about his miracles, not about his ordinary life. They are afraid. Christians say that Jesus never laughed! Now this seems to be the ultimate in stupidity. Jesus… and never laughed? Then who else can laugh? But laughter seems too human, too mundane: they cannot allow Jesus to laugh.

But Jesus’ life is such that he must have been laughing. He must have been really laughing. He must have been a man of laughter, because he says again and again ‘Rejoice! Be merry! Celebrate!’ These words cannot come from a man who has never laughed. And a man who has never laughed, why should he go to parties? Why should he drink with people? Why should he be mixing with people? And he was a mixer. Every day, every night, he was moving with people. He was not secluded. He must have been really laughing, enjoying. But Christians say he never laughed.

They have made his picture very sad-looking, long-faced, burdened. This is not possible! This is utterly wrong, because it goes against the basic realisation of a Christ, of a Buddha. Because a man who has attained to ultimate consciousness will be completely blissful, cheerful. His life will be a song and a dance. It will have the quality of flowers and stars. It can’t be sad. Why should he be sad? It is his Father’s world, it is his God’s world. Why should he be sad? He has come home. When is he going to be happy? If you are not happy by knowing God, then there is no possibility.

Jesus looks so sad. He has been painted sad. He has been painted as ‘the Savior’. He has been painted as if he is carrying the burdens of everybody and sins of everybody. He forgives you! He does not carry your burden, he simply forgives you.

This is a wrong standpoint, that he takes your burden upon himself. If it is not of worth, why should he take it upon himself? And if it is so valuable, why should he take it from you? He will put some more on you. No, he is not taking anybody’s burden, he is simply helping everybody to drop it. Because it is you who are holding and clinging to it, it is valueless. When he says you are forgiven, he says ‘Forget all about your sadnesses and forget all about hell. It is your Father’s world, and he is compassion and he is love. How can love punish you? How can love throw you in hell? How can love torture you? God is not a sadist!’

And then Christians say: resurrection. Their whole Jesus depends on three things. First: a virgin birth; second: a non-laughing, non-enjoying monotonous, sad life of miracles; and third: resurrection. These are the three things that seem to be important to them, and these are all useless because they miss the whole point. The real Jesus is missed. This is a myth that Christians have created around him, and because of this myth the real Jesus is lost.

I would like to tell you, he is a real man, an authentic man. He lived like a man, and he Loved living like a man. He lived in all the dimensions of manhood, and yet he is God.

Now there are people, strange people… Just the other night I was reading a Christian theologian, T.L.J. Altizer. He holds that ‘God has ceased to be God in becoming a man, Jesus. The incarnation is the death of God in his divine being. In short, God is dead, and Jesus is his son.’ Altizer says that God died because he became Jesus.

There are people who are against Jesus being the incarnation of God. They look like enemies, because they say how can God incarnate himself in such a small body? How can the infinite come into the finite? And how can the eternal enter time? They have their logic. How can the infinite be contained in a small body? It is not possible, because God is so great and Jesus is so small; they say it is not possible.

Now look at the other side. Now this is a Christian theologian. He says: Forget about God, God died the day Jesus was born. He became Jesus. God exists no more, now Jesus is God.

This is another extreme. First, the enemy does not allow God to incarnate because how can he incarnate? His logic is also the same; he denies Jesus’ Godhood. To oppose this man, people like Altizer are there. They are ready to kill God to make Jesus a perfect God. Now God has disappeared into Jesus, he lives no more.

These are not the right ways to bridge: either ‘God has to die’ or ‘Jesus has not to be a God’.

My understanding, my vision is totally different. God descends, not only in Jesus but in everybody. This incarnation is not only for once, it is an everyday incarnation. When a child is born to you, God is incarnated. When a seed sprouts, God is incarnated. When a sun is born, God is incarnated. When a flower blooms, God blooms. It is only God, there is nothing else. Existence is synonymous with God. And God can go on incarnating in millions and millions of forms. He remains inexhaustible, that’s what the Upanishads say. They say: You can take out of the perfect as much as you want, but the perfect remains the perfect. You can take it completely out of itself, and yet the whole remains behind intact. That is the meaning of the infinite.

If you take something from the infinite and the infinite becomes a little less, then it was not infinite in the first place. The definition of the infinite is that you can take as much as you want, but you cannot exhaust it. God goes on being born, and remains unexhausted. And there are poor thinkers like Altizer, who think God was exhausted with Jesus. That too is a very, very cunning device, so nobody can be born any more as Christ. So no more Buddha, no more Mahavir – with Jesus God is finished, the doors are closed. God is dead because Jesus is there. God has become Jesus, so God cannot remain as God. To put the whole philosophy of Altizer in short, I would like to say, he is saying: God is dead, and Jesus is his son.

The father need not die in the son, the father can give birth to many sons.

You will be surprised, an ordinary father, a human father… How many sons can a human father give birth to, do you know? Millions. One single couple, if allowed time, can populate the whole world. That’s how it has happened… Adam and Eve, one single couple, and they have populated the whole world. One single seed, and the whole earth will become green, just time is needed. An ordinary man will have intercourse at least four thousand times in his life – ordinary, very ordinary. Those who go more into lave, they can make more – eight thousand, ten thousand or even more. But the normal average is intercourse four thousand times. In each single intercourse, do you know how many cells are released? Millions. And each single cell can become a human being. Multiply four thousand by millions… A single human father can give birth to the whole earth. What to say about the ultimate Father?

Altizer’s God seems to be very poor. A single incarnation and he dies, and he disappears. But there is a cunning trick in it so that Jesus becomes God and nobody else can become god again: so that Jesus remains the ONLY begotten son. I would like to say to you that Jesus is beautiful, he is divine, because everybody else is also beautiful and everybody else is also divine. The difference is of recognition not of existence. The difference is only of knowledge not of ontology.

Jesus Christ is both Jesus and Christ. He is Christ in Jesus, and he is Jesus in Christ. He is the meeting point where two worlds meet, where two utterly polar worlds meet. And hence the beauty, and hence the ecstasy of Jesus.

Ecstasy always arises when two polarities meet. The bigger the polarities, the bigger the distance between the polarities, the bigger the ecstasy. That’s why while you are making love to a woman there is great joy, because two polarities meet. Not very big polarities, because a man and woman are not very far away – not very distant, but still distant. When a man and woman meet and are lost in love there is great ecstasy, there is great joy because they are dissolved, the egos are lost. Boundaries are no more valid – they are overlapping, overflowing into each other. Their ordinary mundane worries don’t make any sense in this moment of joy. This orgasmic moment, how does it arise? It is the meeting of the polarities. What to say about Jesus meeting Christ, Gautama meeting

Buddhahood, man meeting God – those are the ultimate polarities as far away as possible – finite meeting infinite. The very meeting is the ultimate in celebration.

Jesus must have been ecstatic. Because of the Christian painting, Christian ideology, he looks very sad. He must have been a man of great joy, overflowing with delight. What else is possible when the light has happened inside? – delight has to happen outside. They go together. When the house is lit – even with closed windows, travelers can see the light falling outside, from the curtains, from the doors. That is delight! When light has happened inside, from the outside people can see something immensely valuable flowing.

That is the definition of ecstasy: polarities meeting.

Ordinary man is like a person living in sleep, not aware of who he is. When God’s energy touches him, when he is available to God’s energy, when he is receptive to God’s energy, when that stirring energy comes dancing into him, there is ecstasy. There is no ecstasy unless we join the mundane with the supra-mundane, the mud with the sun, the earth with sky, the body with the soul, matter with mind – only then, when sun and the mud meet, is the lotus born, the lotus of ecstasy. Unless reality is as miraculous as the supposedly miraculous, we are frozen in ice.

Man as man is a frozen thing. And let me say to you: God as God is also a frozen thing. So it is not only that you are seeking God, God is also seeking you. It is not that without God you are sad, God is also sad without you. And when you meet with God, and God meets with you, it will not be only your ecstasy, it will be his ecstasy too. The whole existence will feel ecstatic. Whenever a single human being becomes a Christ or a Buddha, the whole existence dances, the whole existence is overjoyed – goes mad with ecstasy!

Meeting is the melting of the divisions. Thinking of yourself as man is creating a division. And if you don’t drop this division, this category that you have created around you, that ‘I am a man’, you will not allow God to enter in you. You have to be completely free from boundaries, from all boundaries – the boundary of the Hindu, the boundary of the Christian, the boundary of man, the boundary of richness, poorness, education, un-education, the boundary of white and black, the boundary of the brahmin and the sudra – all the boundaries have to be dropped. In that very dropping the eternal enters into your time world. Into your dark night of the soul comes that light, floods that light. And suddenly, you are no more the same. And let me repeat: God is also no more the same!

God was never so rich as he became after Christ. He was never so rich as he became after Buddha. He is not so rich as he will become when you meet him, because you will pour into him. I know you only have a small energy, but an ocean is created by small drops falling, falling, falling… Small rivers flow into the ocean and create the ocean. No single river can create the ocean, but each single river goes on creating it, goes on helping it. God is bigger than ever every day, because some water, some river again flows into him, again brings a new life, a new thrill.

God is evolving, God is not a static thing. God is evolving every moment.

Meeting is the melting of the boundaries, blurring of the divisions, overlapping, overflowing. This is what is called trust or faith or surrender. At absolute zero, absolute surrender, life takes over once more and we are returned to God or to Tao or to Dhamma, to free-flowing totality. God is the free-flowing totality, God is not a person. We return to our pure being only when we become a free-floating totality. In this state everything: is okay, right.

A rusting tin can fill us with radical awe as the sunlight catches it…

In Yoga they call it a certain state of nadam, a certain state of harmony, accord. When man disappears into God and man’s conflict with God disappears, there is nadam, there is harmony – what Heraclitus calls ‘the hidden harmony’. Nadam is homeostatis – harmony, rhythm. You are out of rhythm, out of tune with God, that is your misery. Jesus is in tune with God. That is his joy. If he is also miserable, if he is also sad, then what is the difference between you and him? The difference is that he feels for you, that he feels all compassion for you, but he himself is in utter joy. In fact, because he is in utter joy, he feels sorry for you, he feels compassion for you. He wants to bring you also to this utter Joy, and he knows it is yours just for the asking. Hence he says Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.

-Osho

From I Say Unto You, V.2, Discourse #5

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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You Will Find the Christ – Osho

Can Buddha or Christ be created or developed out of every common human being? Or is Buddha or Christ only born as such? Every man is Buddha, every man is Christ: I feel it is not true.

The Buddha or Christ cannot be created because the Buddha is your intrinsic nature. It need not be created. It has not to be developed either; it is already there; it is already the case. It has only to be unfolded, it has to be discovered. The treasure is there; you have to find the key to unlock the door. The treasure is not to be created; the treasure is not to be developed; you only have to find the right key. You have forgotten about the key — the key is also with you. God provides you with everything that is needed on the journey; you come absolutely prepared. But society disturbs every child, distorts every child, because a Buddha or a Christ is useless to the society; they don’t serve any utilitarian purpose.

What can you do with a Buddha? What purpose is he going to serve? He will be a beautiful flower, but flowers don’t serve any purpose. Flowers have to be enjoyed, appreciated, loved. You can dance around them, you can drink their beauty, but they are not commodities in the marketplace. What can you do with the full moon? You cannot sell it, you cannot purchase it, you cannot be profited by it. You cannot have a bigger bank balance because of the full moon.

Hence the society is not interested in a Buddha or a Christ. Buddha is a full moon, a Buddha is a lotus flower; a Buddha is a bird on the wing. The Buddha is a poem, the Buddha is a song, the Buddha is a celebration. Because they are utterly beyond utility, the society is not interested in them; it is really afraid of these people. It wants you to be slaves, to be cogs in the wheel of the society. It wants you to be servants to the vested interests. It does not want you to be rebels — and a Buddha is bound to be a rebel.

A Buddha cannot follow stupid commandments given by the politicians or the moralists or the puritans or the priests. And these are the people who are exploiting humanity, oppressing humanity. They start destroying every possibility of every human child ever becoming a Buddha. They start crippling, they start poisoning. And down the centuries they have learnt many ways to poison. It is a miracle that once in a while a child has escaped — must have somehow been a mistake on the part of the priests and the politicians that a child escaped from the trap and became a Buddha.

Bal Krishna, every man is born to be a Buddha; every man has the seed of Buddhahood in him. But I can understand your question.

You say: I feel it is not true.

Yes, if you look at the masses it doesn’t seem to be true. If it were true there would be many Buddhas, but one rarely hears about a Buddha. We only know that somewhere, twenty-five centuries ago, a certain Siddhartha Gautam became Buddha. Who knows whether it is true or not? It may be just a myth, a beautiful story, a consolation, an opium for the masses, to keep them hoping that one day they will also become Buddhas. Who knows whether Buddha is a historic reality?

And so many stories have been woven around the Buddha that he looks more like a mythological figure than a reality. When he becomes enlightened, gods come from heaven, play beautiful music, dance around him. Now how can this be history? And flowers shower on him from the sky — flowers of gold and silver, flowers of diamonds and emeralds. Who can believe that this is history?

This is not history, true, I agree. This is poetry. But it symbolizes something historical, because something so unique has happened in Buddha that there is no other way to describe it than to bring poetry in. Real flowers have not showered on Buddha, but whenever somebody becomes enlightened, the whole existence rejoices — because we are not separate from it.

When you have a headache your whole body suffers, and when the headache goes your whole body feels good, a well-being. We are NOT separate from existence. And until you are a Buddha you are a headache — a headache to yourself, a headache to others, a headache to the whole existence. You are a thorn in the flesh of existence. When the headache disappears, when the thorn becomes a flower, when one man becomes a Buddha, a great pain that he was creating for himself and others disappears. Certainly — I vouch for it, I am a witness to it — certainly the who]e existence rejoices, dances, sings. How to say it? It is nothing visible; photographs cannot be taken of it. Hence the poetry; hence these metaphors, symbols, similes.

It is said that when Buddha was born his mother immediately died. It may not be a historical fact, it may be. But my feeling is that it is not a historical fact — because it is said that whenever a Buddha is born, the mother immediately dies. That is not true. There have been many Buddhas — Jesus’ mother did not die, Mahavira’s mother did not die, Krishna’s mother did not die. Maybe Siddhartha Gautam’s mother died, but it cannot be said that whenever a Buddha is born the mother dies, not historically. But I know it has some significance of its own which is not historical. By ‘the mother’ is not really meant the mother; by ‘the mother’ is meant your whole past. You are reborn when you become a Buddha, your whole past functions as a womb, the mother. And the moment a Buddha is born, the moment you become enlightened, your whole past dies. That death is necessary.

Now, this is absolutely true. It happened with Mahavira, with Krishna, with Jesus; it has happened always. To say it, it is said that whenever a Buddha is born the mother dies. You will have to be very, very sympathetic to understand these things.

I can understand that it is difficult; looking at the greater part of humanity, to see that there is any possibility of every human being becoming a Christ or a Buddha. Looking at a seed can you believe that one day it can become a lotus? Just looking at the seed, dissecting the seed, will you be able to infer, conclude, that each seed is going to become a lotus? There seems to be no relationship at all. The seed looks nothing, and when you dissect it you find nothing in it, only emptiness. Still each seed carries a lotus within it — and each human being carries the Buddha within him.

You ask me: Can Buddha or Christ be created or developed…?

No, they cannot be created, and they cannot be developed: they have to be discovered, they have to be uncovered. They are already there. You just have to reach your innermost core and you will find the Buddha enshrined, you will find the Christ. Christ and Buddha mean the same: the ultimate state of consciousness.

And you say: . . . out of every common human being?

I have never come across a single common human being. I have come across thousands of people, I have looked into the depths of thousands of different people, but I have never come across a common, ordinary man. Every human being is unique, extraordinary, uncommon, exceptional. God never creates common human beings; God only creates unique consciousnesses.

Drop this idea of a common human being. This is an insult to humanity.

And you say: Is Buddha or Christ only born as such?

No. Nobody is born as such. We are all born alike. That too is again a trick of the mind to avoid growing. If it is settled that a Buddha is born as a Buddha, and a Christ is the only begotten son of God, and Krishna is a reincarnation of God, this is a beautiful strategy to avoid: “Then what can we do? If we are not Buddhas it is not our fault – we are not born like that. And if Buddha is a Buddha, so what? He is born a Buddha. No credit to him; he has not done anything special. If we were born like Buddha we would be Buddhas too. But we are born as common human beings.”

This is a strategy. Very cunning is the mind, and subtle is its cunningness: beware of it. Nobody is born as a Buddha, yet everybody brings the potential of being a Buddha. And don’t say, “I feel it is not true” — because how can you feel unless you have become a Buddha? You can only infer, you can only think, you cannot feel.

Listen to me! I feel that everybody can become a Buddha. And I feel it because I was also a common human being . . . and then suddenly this explosion, then suddenly this light, then suddenly this meditativeness blossomed. You can also become a Buddha; it is your birthright. Don’t be tricked by your mind — remain alert, aware.

-Osho

From Be Still and Know, Discourse #1

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.

Life Beyond the Senses – Jakob Boehme

The student said to the teacher, “How may I come to that life beyond the senses that I may see God and hear God speak?” The teacher said, “If you can swing yourself up for a moment into that in which no creature dwells, then you will hear what God speaks.”

The student said, “Is that near or far?” The teacher said, “It is within you. If you could remain silent from all of your willing and sensing for one hour, then you will hear unutterable words of God.”

The student said, “How may I hear when I keep silent from sensing and willing?” The teacher said, “If you keep silent from sensing and willing of yourself, then the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed within you, and God will hear and see through you. Your own hearing, willing, and seeing hinder you, so that you do not see or hear God.”

The student spoke, “With what shall I hear and see God, if God is beyond nature and creaturely life?” The teacher spoke, “If you would remain silent, then you are what God was before nature and creatureliness, that from which God created your nature and creatureliness. So hear and see with what God saw and heard in you, before your own willing, seeing, and hearing began.”

-Jakob Boehme

From Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme

The New Man – Osho

What according to you is the most significant thing that is happening today in the world?

A new man is emerging. The image of the new man is not yet clear, but the horizon is becoming red and the sun will soon be there. The morning mist is there and the image of the new man is vague, but still a few things are very crystal clear about the new man.

And this is of tremendous importance because since the monkey became man, man has remained the same. A great revolution is on the way. It will be far more deep-going than the revolution that happened when monkeys started walking on the earth and became human beings. That change created mind that change brought psychology in. Now another far more significant change is going to happen that will bring the soul in, and man will not only be a psychological being but a spiritual being too.

You are living in one of the most alive times ever.

The new man has already arrived in fragments, but only in fragments. And the new man has been arriving for centuries, but only here and there. That’s how things happen. When the spring comes it starts with one flower. But when the one flower is there, then one can be certain: that spring is not faraway – it has come. The first flower has heralded its coming: Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus – these were the first flowers. Now the new man is going to be born on a greater scale.

According to me, this new consciousness is the most important thing that is happening today. I would like to tell you something about this new consciousness, its orientations, and its characteristics, because you are to help it come out of the womb – because you have to be it. The new man cannot come from nowhere; he has to come through you. The new man can only be born through your womb. You have to become the womb.

Sannyas is an experiment to clean the ground so that new seeds can fall in. If you understand the meaning of the new man, you will be able to understand the significance of sannyas too. And it is because sannyas is concerned with the new man that the old orthodoxies of all kinds are going to be against me and against sannyas, because this will be their end. If sannyas succeeds, if the new man succeeds, the old will have to go. The old can live only if the new man is prevented from coming.

It cannot be prevented now, because it is not only a question of the new man’s coming into existence, it is a question of the survival of the whole earth, of consciousness itself, of life itself. It is a question of life and death. The old man has come to utter destructiveness. The old man has reached the end of his tether. Now there is no life possible with the old concept of man but only death. The old man is preparing for a global suicide. The old man is piling up atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, in order to commit a collective suicide. This is a very unconscious desire. Rather than allowing the new man to be, the old man would like to destroy the whole thing.

You have to understand, you have to protect the new, because the new carries the whole future with it. And man has come to a stage where a great quantum leap is possible. The old man was other-worldly, the old man was against this world. The old man was always looking to the heavens. The old man was more concerned with life after death than life before death. The new man’s concern will be life before death. The new man’s concern will be this life, because if this life is taken care of, the other will follow of its own accord. One need not worry about it, one need not think about it.

The old man was too concerned with God. That concern was out of fear. The new man will not be concerned with God, but will live and love this world, and out of that love he will experience the existence of God. The old man was speculative; the new man is going to be existential.

The old man can be defined in the Upanishadic statement: neti-neti, not this, not this. The old man was negative – life-negative, life-denying. The new man will be life-affirming: iti-iti, this and this. The old man’s concern was THAT, the new man’s concern will be this, because out of this that is born, and if you become too concerned with that, you miss both.

Tomorrow is in the womb of today. Take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow. There is no need to be in any way worried about tomorrow. If you become too worried about tomorrow you have missed today. And tomorrow will come as today – it always comes as today. If you have learned this suicidal habit of missing today, you will miss tomorrow also. You will go on missing. The old man was continuously missing, was miserable, sad. And because he was sad he was against the world, he blamed the world, he blamed samsara. He said, ‘It is because of the world that I am in misery.’ It is not so. The world is immensely beautiful, it is all beauty, bliss and benediction. There is nothing wrong with the world. Something was wrong with the old mind. The old mind was either past-oriented or future-oriented, which are not really different orientations.

The old mind was concerned with that which is not. The new man will be utterly in tune with that which is, because it is God, it is reality: iti-iti, this is it. This moment has to be lived in its totality. This moment has to be lived in its spontaneity, with no a priori ideas. The old man was carrying ready-made answers. He was stuffed with philosophy, religion and all kinds of nonsense.

The new man is going to live life without any a priori conclusion about it. Without any conclusion one has to face existence, and then one knows what it is. If you have already concluded, your conclusion will become a barrier. It will not allow you inquiry – your conclusion will become a blindfold. It will not allow you to see the truth – your investment will be in the conclusion. You will distort reality to fit your conclusion. That’s what has been done up to now.

The new man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be communist. The new man will not know all these ‘isms’. The new man will simply be an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it. He will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available; they will not be full of ideas.

The new man will not live out of belief, he will simply live. And remember, only those who can simply live, without belief, come to know what truth is. The believer or the disbeliever never comes to know what truth is. Their beliefs are too heavy on their minds. They are surrounded too much by their belief systems. The new man will not know any belief system. He will watch, he will observe, he will see, he will live, and he will allow all kinds of experiences. He will be available, he will be multi-dimensional. He will not carry scriptures in his head, he will carry only alertness awareness. He will be meditative.

The old man lived out of fear – even his God was nothing but a creation out of fear. His temples, mosques, gurudwaras, churches – they were all out of fear. He was trembling, he was afraid. The new man will live out of love, not out of fear, because fear serves death, love serves life. And if you live out of fear you will never know what life is, you will only know death again and again. And remember, the person who lives out of fear creates all kinds of situations in which he has to feel more and more fear. Yom fear creates situations, just as your love creates situations.

If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid. Love is going to be the taste of the new consciousness. Because fear was the taste of the old consciousness it created wars. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars – as if we have not been doing anything else – continuous fighting somewhere or other. This is a very mad state of affairs. Humanity’s past is insane.

The new man will become discontinuous with this insane past. He will believe in love, not in war. He will believe in life, not in death. He will be creative, not destructive. His science, his art – all will serve creativity. He will not create bombs. He will not be political, because politics is out of hatred.

Politics is rooted in fear, hate, destructiveness. The new man will not be political. The new man will not be national; the new man will be global. He will not have any political ambition, because it is stupid to have political ambition. The new man is going to be very intelligent. The first signs of that intelligence are rising on the horizon. Those who have eyes – they can see it. The children are rebelling.

It is a great moment of rejoicing that all over the world young people are rebelling against all kinds of orthodoxies – whether the orthodoxy is that of church or state doesn’t matter. They are not ready to obey – not that they have determined to disobey, they are not determined to disobey either. They will meditate, and if they feel like obeying they will obey. If they feel like disobeying, they will disobey. They have no fixed ideology. ‘My country right or wrong’ – such stupid statements they cannot make. Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes it is right. When it is right, the new man will support it. When it is wrong… Whether it is one’s own country or not will not matter. It may be one’s own family, one’s own father, mother, but if it is wrong, it is wrong.

The new man will live not out of prejudices but out of spontaneous responsibility. The old man was a slave, the new man will be free, the new man will have freedom at the very core of his being. The old man was very serious, the old man was a ‘workaholic’. The new man will be playful – homo ludens. He will believe in enjoying life. He will drop words like ‘duty’, ‘sacrifice’. He will not sacrifice for anything. He will not be a victim to any altar – that of the state or of the religion, of the priest or of the politician. He will not allow anybody to exploit his life – ‘Go and die because your country is at war.’ His commitment is towards life, his commitment is not towards anything else. He wants to live in joy, he wants to rejoice in all the gifts of God, he wants to celebrate. Alleluia will be his only mantra. Jesus says, ’Rejoice, rejoice. I say unto you rejoice.’

Man has not rejoiced yet. Man has lived under a great burden of seriousness: Work for the country. Work for the family. Work for the wife. Work for the children. Work for your father and mother. Just go on working and working and then one day die and disappear into the grave. And then others will work. And it goes on and on. Nobody seems to have any time to enjoy life.

And I am not saying that the new man will not work. He will work, but that will not be his addiction.

He will not be a ‘workaholic’, it will not be a drug, he will work because he needs a few things, but he will not continuously work for more and more. He will not be accumulative. He will not believe in having a big bank balance, and he will not believe in having a very high post; rather, he will want to sing a song, to play on the flute, on the guitar, to dance. He will not want to become famous, he will want to live, authentically live. He will be ready to be a nobody.

And that is already happening. The first rays are already available. It is still hidden in the morning mist, but if you search you will find it. The new children, the new generation, are a totally different kind of generation, hence the generation gap. It is very real. It has never been so – never before has there been any generation gap. This is the first time in the whole of human history that there is a gap. The children are speaking a different language from their parents. The parents cannot understand because the parents want them to succeed. And the children say, ’But what is the point of success if you cannot sing a song, and you cannot dance, and you cannot enjoy, and you cannot love? What is the point of being successful? Why? What is going to happen through success? Even if the whole world knows my name, what is that going to give me?’

The old generation believes in money. And you will be surprised that the belief in money is so deep that even those who renounce money – they also believe in money; otherwise there is no need to renounce it. And those who praise renunciation – they also believe in money. The more money you renounce, the greater you are. So the measurement is of money. Money remains the criterion. In the world if you have more money you are great. And even in the world of the monks: ’How much have you renounced?’ If you have renounced more money, then you are more important. Money remains important even there.

The new generation is not going to be money-manic. And remember, I am not saying it is going to be against money, it will use money. In the past money has used man, in the past man has lived in such an unconscious way that he thought he possessed things, but things possessed him. The new man will be able to use things. The new man will use money, will use technology, but the new man will remain the master. He is not going to become a victim, an instrument. This, according to me, is the greatest thing that is happening.

A few characteristics. The new consciousness is going to be counter to all orthodoxies. Any kind of orthodoxy, Catholic or communist, Hindu or Jaina – any kind of orthodoxy – is a kind of paralysis of the mind. It paralyzes. You stop living. It becomes a rigidity around you. You become a fanatic, you become stubborn. You become rock-like. You don’t behave like a liquid human being, you start behaving like a mule. That’s why for Morarji Desai I have another name: Mulish-jibhai Desai. One starts behaving in a mulish way, stubborn, dead set, no possibility of changing, no flexibility, no fluidity. But in the past that has been praised very much: people call it consistency, certainty. It is not. It is neither consistency nor certainty; it is simply deadness.

An alive person has to remain flowing. He has to respond to the changing situations. And situations are continuously changing. How can you remain fixed in your attitudes when life itself is not fixed? When life is a river how can you remain stubborn? And if you remain stubborn you lose contact with life – you are already in your grave.

The new consciousness will be non-orthodox, non-fanatic; it will be fluid. It will not react, it will respond. And the difference between these two words is great. Reaction is always rigid. You have a fixed idea, you react out of it. Before the question is raised, the answer is ready. Response is totally different. You listen to the question, you absorb the question, you see the situation, you feel the situation, you live the situation, and out of that very living your response arises. A responsible man cannot be stubborn, cannot be certain, cannot be rigid. He will have to live moment to moment. He cannot decide beforehand, he will have to decide every day, each moment. And because he has to move continuously with life and its changing challenges, he cannot be consistent in the old sense. His consistency will be only one: that he will always be in tune with life. That will be his consistency – not that he has a certain idea and he remains consistent with that idea and goes on sacrificing life for it.

There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court and the magistrate asked him, ‘Mulla, how old are you?’

He said, ‘Forty.’

The magistrate said, ‘But this is strange. You surprise me, because five years ago you were in court, and that time also you said forty.’

Mulla said, ‘Yes, I am a consistent man. Once I have said something, you can believe me. I will never say anything else.’

This is one type of consistency.

The new man will find it ridiculous. But the old man has been consistent in this way: in his character, in his statements, in his hypocrisy. The old man used to decide once and for all. Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your life is decided by the time you are seven years old – fifty percent! – and then you remain consistent with it. And life goes on changing – no wonder that you are left behind, that you start dragging, that you lose joy, that you lose the quality of dance. How can you dance? you are so far behind life. You are dead wood, you don’t grow. An alive tree grows, changes; as the season changes, the tree changes. An alive person grows, and to the very moment of death he continuously goes on growing. He never knows any end to his growth.

Psychologists say the average mental age of man is thirteen. This is the situation. This is how the old man has lived up to now. A thirteen-year mental age means: at the age of thirteen people have stopped growing. Yes, they go on growing old, but they don’t grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. Growing old is a physiological phenomenon; growing up means maturity, wisdom. And only those who go on flowing with life grow up.

The new man will not be obedient to stupid ideas that have been given from the past. And they may not have been stupid when they were born, they may have been relevant in those circumstances; but as circumstances change, things become stupid. If you carry them, if you go on persisting in your old fixed routines, you start behaving in an absurd way.

Now, look. Some religion is five thousand years old. That means five thousand years ago its rituals were born and since then they have remained fixed. How dangerous it is! How crippling! How can man be alive if these five-thousand-year-old rituals surround his soul?

The new man will be creative. Each moment he will find his religion, each moment he will find his philosophy. And everything will remain growing. He will not be obedient to the past, he cannot be – to be obedient to the past is to be obedient to death, because the past is dead; he will be obedient to the present. And in being obedient to the present, he will be rebellious against the past. To be rebellious is going to be one of his most prominent characteristics. And because he will be rebellious he will not fit in with a dead society, he will not fit in with a dead church, he will not fit in with a dead army. He will not fit anywhere where obedience is a basic requirement.

The new man is bound to create a new society around himself.

First consciousness becomes new, then society becomes new. There is going to be a long period in which the old will resist the new, will fight with the new, will try to destroy the new. But the old cannot succeed – time, the spirit of time, will not be in its favour. The old has to die. Just as the old body dies and makes space for some new child, so old societies, old orthodoxies, have to die. They have already lived overtime. They have lived too long!

The new consciousness will not be moralistic, will not be puritan; not that it will not have any morality, but it will have a different kind of morality – a morality that arises out of one’s own feeling for life, one’s sensitivity, one’s own experiences – not a morality learned from others, borrowed. The new man will not be a man of character in the old sense, because all character is binding. It creates an armour around you. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have any armour. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have a prison cell around him. Not that he will not have character, but he will give a new definition to character. He will not be a hypocrite.

The old puritanism, the old moralistic attitudes have created hypocrisy in the world; they have made man schizophrenic: on the surface one thing, deep within something else – almost the opposite.

The old man lived a double life. The new man is going to live in a unitary way. He will live a single life. Whatsoever is inside him will also be his outside. He will be authentic. Remember this word ‘authenticity’ – that is going to be the new man’s religion. That is going to be the new man’s truth, his temple, his God – authenticity. And with authenticity neurosis disappears. The old man was neurotic because he was constantly in conflict: he wanted to do one thing and he was always doing something else, because something else was required. He was taught to do something against himself; he was repressive. His own authenticity was repressed, and on top of it a bogus character was imposed.

We have praised these phony people too long. Now the time has come – their phoniness should be exposed. We have praised these mahatmas and saints so long, now we have to see their neurosis.

They were all psychologically ill, they were pathological. A healthy person is a whole person. His inside and his outside are the same. If he loves, he loves passionately. If he is angry, he is angry passionately. His anger has truth in it as much as his love has truth in it. The old man boils within and smiles on the outside. He lives without passion, without energy. He lives without any flame. His whole life is an exercise in phoniness and, naturally, he suffers. A long futile story is all that his life is ‘… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’

The new man will not be a tale told by an idiot, but will be a poem sung out of wholeness, will be a dance of immense joy for God’s gift of life and being, for the flowers and the trees and the birds, and the sun and the sand and the sea.

The new man will not look somewhere faraway for God, he will look here, close-by. Now will be his only time, here will be his only space.

The new man will be earthly. And by ‘earthly’ I don’t mean materialistic. The new man will be a realist. He will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced in. It is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: Buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved. This earth has to be loved.

The new man will find his religion in nature – not in dead stone statues, but in living dancing trees in the wind. He will find his religion surfing on the sea, climbing on the virgin mountain. He will find his prayer with the snow, with the moon, with the stars. He will be in dialogue with existence as it is. He will not live with abstract ideas, he will live with realities. His commitment will be to nature, and through that commitment he will come to know super-nature. God is hidden here in this earth, in this very body. This very body, the Buddha. This very earth, the paradise.

The new man will read the scripture of nature. This will be his Veda, his Koran, his Bible. Here he will find sermons in the stones. He will try to decipher the mysteries of life, he will not try to demystify life. He will try to love those mysteries, to enter in those mysteries. He will be a poet, he will not be a philosopher. He will be an artist; he will not be a theologian. His science will also have a different tone. His science will be that of Tao, not an effort to conquer nature, because that effort is just foolish. How can you conquer nature? – You are part of nature. His science will be of understanding nature, not of conquering nature. He will not rape nature, he will love and persuade nature to reveal its secrets.

The new man will not be ambitious, will not be political.

Politics has no future; politics has existed because of the neurosis of humankind. Once the neurosis disappears, politics will disappear.

Ambition simply means you are missing something and you are consoling yourself that you will get it in the future. Ambition is a consolation. Today it is all misery, tomorrow there will be joy. Looking at tomorrow you become capable of tolerating today and its misery: today is always hell, tomorrow is heaven. You keep on looking at heaven, you keep on hoping.

But that hope is not going to be fulfilled ever because tomorrow never comes. Ambition means you are incapable of transforming your today into a beatitude; you are impotent. Only impotent people are ambitious: they seek money, they seek power. Only impotent people seek power and money.

The potential person lives. If money comes his way, he lives the money too, but he does not seek it, he is not after it. He is not afraid of it either.

The old man was either after money or afraid of money, either after power or afraid of power; but in both ways his whole focus was on power and money. He was ambitious. The old man is pitiable. He was ambitious because he was unable to live, unable to love. The new man will be able to live and able to love. And his here-now is going to be so beautiful, why should he be worried about tomorrow? His concern will not be with having more, his concern will be with BEING more – another very important distinction to be remembered. His concern will be with being more, not having more.

Having more is just a substitute for being more. You have more money, so you think you are more.

You have more power, so you think you are more. Deep down you remain the same beggar.

Alexander dies as empty-handed as any beggar.

Being more is a totally different dimension. Being more means getting in touch with your reality, getting in tune with your being, and helping yourself to fall in harmony with the universe. To be in harmony with the universe you become more. The more you are in tune with existence, the more you are. If the harmony is total, you are a god. That’s why we call Buddha a god, Mahavira a god – utter total harmony with existence, no conflict at all. They have dissolved themselves into the whole, they have become the whole – just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. They have died in their egos, now they live as existence itself.

The new man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense, he will be true, because only through truth is there liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it – you will have to tell lies ad nauseam. Then there is no end to it. A single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being. It is like cancer.

Be truthful and you need not hide, you can be open. Be truthful and you need not protect yourself against existence, you can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches your heart.

Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him. You will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping from yourself, from others, from God.

You will be constantly hiding behind your pretensions. Hypocrisy will become your life style, and that’s where hell exists. Hypocrisy creates hell. Authenticity is the only joy – the only joy, I say. And if you are not authentic you will never be joyous.

The new consciousness will not put up with double-talk. The new consciousness will hate this kind of thing with a passion. This hatred for phoniness is the deepest mark of the new man. The new man will be opposed to structured, inflexible and infallible systems, because life is a beautiful flow. It is not structured, it is freedom. It is not a prison, it is a temple. He will want organizations to be fluid, changing, adapting and human. Our states are inhuman, our armies are inhuman, our churches are inhuman. They dehumanize man. They reduce man into a thing because they don’t respect man’s freedom. The new man will respect his freedom and respect others’ freedom, too. The old man is constantly interfering, poking his nose into everybody’s affairs, trying to manipulate, criticizing, condemning, rewarding, punishing. The old man is continuously concerned with others: ‘What are you doing?’

I was staying in Bombay once. A Parsee woman came to me because just the day before I had criticized Satya Sai Baba and had called him a phony guru. She came to see me and she said, ‘I have come to tell you a few more things.’ She was thinking that I would be very happy because she had brought some information against Satya Sai Baba. She said, ‘He is a homosexual. And I know it from reliable sources.’ I said, ‘But why should you be concerned? Homosexual or heterosexual – that is his business. It is his life. Who are you? Why should you be bothered about it?’

She was very shocked when I said that. She had come feeling that I would be very grateful to her, because she was giving me such great information.

Why should you be concerned? Can’t you leave people to their own life? I criticize only when the other’s life is concerned; otherwise there is no question of criticism. What Satya Sai Baba is doing with his sexuality is his business, it is nobody else’s business.

But the old woman was constantly poking her nose into everybody’s affairs.

It happens here every day. The old kind of people come and they are very much in agony because some man is holding some woman’s hand. Why? – he is not holding your hand. And if those two persons have decided to hold hands, they have absolute freedom to do that. And if they are enjoying, who are you to interfere? If the man is holding some woman’s hand against her will, then maybe your help is needed; but if they both are willing then you should not be concerned at all. But this is the old consciousness. It is always trying to find ways and means to manipulate others, to be dominant over others.

The new consciousness will leave everyone to his own life. Unless somebody is harming others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is a danger to others, he should not be prevented.

Unless somebody is interfering in somebody else’s freedom, he should not be interfered with.

The old world remained without individuality. It hated individuality, it liked only sheep, crowds – people behaving in the same way with everybody following the same routine and the same structure.

The new man will allow all kinds of possibilities. The new man will love liquid structures. He will be human, he will respect human beings. His respect will be almost religious.

The new man will have to find new forms of community, of closeness, of intimacy, of shared purpose, because the old society is not going to disappear immediately. It will linger, it will put up all kinds of fight to the new society – as it always happens. It has so many vested interests, it cannot go easily.

It will go only when it becomes impossible for it to remain in existence.

Before it goes the new man will have to create new kinds of communes, new kinds of families, new communities of closeness, intimacy, shared purpose.

That’s why I am trying to create a small commune where you can be totally yourself – away from the structured and the rotten world – and you can be given absolute freedom. It will be an experiment, because the future is going to move on those lines. It will be a small experiment but of immense significance.

The new consciousness will not have anything to do with institutions like marriage. The new man will have a natural distrust of marriage as an institution. A man-woman relationship has deep value for him only when it is a mutually enhancing, growing, flowing relationship. He will have little regard for marriage as a ceremony or for vows of permanence which prove to be highly impermanent. He will love the moment and live it in its totality.

Marriage has no future. Love has a future.

In the past love was not a reality, marriage was a reality. In the future love is going to be the reality and marriage is going to become more and more unreal. In the past people were married to each other, hence by and by they started liking and loving. In the future people will love and like each other, only then will they live together. In the past to live together came first and, naturally, when you live together, a liking arises, a dependence arises. It was a need phenomenon. The husband needed the wife, the wife needed the husband, and then the children needed the parents to be together. It was, more or less, an economic phenomenon; but it was not out of love.

The future will know a different kind of relationship which is based purely on love and which will remain in existence only while love remains. And there will be no hankering for its permanence, because in life nothing is permanent; only plastic flowers are permanent.

Real roses are born in the morning and are gone by the evening. And that is their beauty: they are beautiful when they come, and they are beautiful when their petals start withering away. Their life is beautiful, their birth is beautiful, their death is beautiful, because there is aliveness. A plastic flower is never born, never lives, never dies.

Marriage has been a plastic flower in the past. The new consciousness can have no respect for marriage. It will have to create a new kind of intimacy – friendship. And it will have to learn to live with the impermanent phenomenon of love and of everything.

It needs guts to live with the impermanence of life, because each time something changes you have to change yourself again. One wants to remain fixed – it seems safer, more secure. That’s how the old man has lived. The old man was not adventurous; his whole concern was security. The new man will have the spirit of adventure; his concern will not be security, his concern will be ecstasy.

He will not believe, because belief is a search for security, he will explore. He may not have neat answers to every question, but he will accept every challenge to inquire, to explore. He will go as far as life can take him, he will try to reach to the stars; but he will remain open. He will not start with a belief, with a conclusion, he will start only with a quest, a question. To start with a belief is not to start at all. To start with a belief is just playing a game with yourself. You have already believed, how can you explore? To explore one has to be agnostic. And that is going to be the religion of the future: agnosticism.

One will be capable and courageous enough to say, ‘I don’t know, but I am interested in knowing.

And I am ready to go into any dimension, into any adventure.’ The new man will be ready to risk.

The old man was very businesslike, never ready to risk. Risk was anathema; security was his goal.

But with security you start dying. It is only in adventure, continuous adventure, that life grows to higher and higher plenitudes, that it reaches to the Himalayan peaks.

The new person will be a spontaneous person, unpredictable, willing to risk newness, often willing to risk saying or doing the wild, the far-out thing. He will believe that everything is possible and anything can be tried. He will not cling to the known, he will always remain available to the unknown, even to the unknowable. And he will not sacrifice for any future because he will not be an idealist.

He will not sacrifice for any abstract ideas, ideals, ideologies.

He will have a trust in his own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority. The new man will trust only his own experience. Unless he knows something he will not trust it. No external authority can help the new man. Nobody can say, ’I say so, so you have to believe. Because we have always believed, so you have to believe. Because our forefathers believed, so you have to believe. Because it is written in the Vedas and the Bible, you have to believe.’ The new man is not going to have anything to do with such nonsense, the new man will believe only if HE knows. This is real trust – trust in one’s own possibilities, one’s own potential. The new man will respect himself. To believe in external authorities is disrespectful towards one’s own being.

And, finally, the new man will like being close to elemental nature: to the sea, the sun, the snow; flowers, animals, birds; to life, growth, death.

This, according to me, is the most important phenomenon that is happening today. A new man is coming into existence. The first rays are already on the horizon. Prepare yourself to receive the new man. Get ready. Become a host to the guest who is just about to knock on your doors at any moment. And that’s what sannyas is all about: a preparation – getting ready to receive the new man.

It is going to be a great adventure to receive the new man. It is going to be risky, too, because the old will not like it.

Now you can understand why the orthodox mind is against me. I am preparing their graveyard, and I am preparing for something new. I am preparing a garden for the new. You are to open your hearts for the new. Uproot all the weeds of the old, drop all the conditionings that the old has given to you, so you can receive the new.

And remember, the days of the messiahs are over. Don’t wait for Christ’s coming again, and don’t wait for Buddha’s coming again. Nobody comes again, at least not Buddha and Christ. Those who come again are the people who live without learning anything from life. Buddha has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Christ has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Don’t wait for any messiah to come; wait for a new consciousness, not for a messiah to deliver you.

That is what the old man used to believe – somebody will come. Hindus think Krishna will come: ‘When things are really dark and difficult and dismal, Krishna will come and deliver us.’ All nonsense!

All holy cow dung! A new consciousness is going to deliver you, not some person – Buddha, Krishna, Christ. They were here and they could not deliver you. No single person can do it – it is impossible. Only a new consciousness can deliver man from his bondage. And the new consciousness can come only through you. You have to become the womb, you have to accept it, receive it, prepare yourself for it.

Sannyas is nothing but getting ready for something immensely valuable, so that when the gift comes you are not fast asleep, so that when the new consciousness knocks on your door you are ready to embrace it.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #14, Q1

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

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

The Christ Is Here – William Samuel

There Is No Mystery In Christ

If one hundred theologians were asked to define Christ, they would likely give a thousand different answers. Why are there so many opinions? Because theology echoes the myriad distortions that spring from the intellect.

Once the intellect has been subdued sufficiently to allow the Heart to be heard, we begin to get the answers; and the Heart’s messages are soothing and uncomplicated, nothing like the bedeviling bamboozlement of a befuddling intellect!

So, how does the Heart interpret the Christ? As simple truth! As gentle, unpretentious truth. You can spell this word with a capital or not—it is the same truth which is the Christ! The Heart reveals that “Truth” and “Christ” are identical—meaning “the same one.”

The dictionary defines truth as “fact; that which is; conforming to reality.” “I am the truth,” said Jesus Himself. “Identity-I (and not the possessor of it) am the Truth, the fact of Reality.” Identity is the Christ-Truth itself.

This is much too simple and unsophisticated for human theology, of course. Man has a penchant for complicating the simple. He would have the Christ range from a very literal, bleeding body named Jesus of Nazareth, to a metaphysical mystery of transcending Light and Illumination, or both. The simplicity of “Christ” and simple, lowly, unpretentious, gentle “Truth” as synonymous terms is too naïve a concept for intellectual churchdom. Erudition is steeped in the esoteric, ego-building disciplines of its man-hewn theological “mysteries.”

The world church makes Truth one thing and Christ another; but the fact is, simple Truth (truth) itself is everything meant by the term. The Christ proclaims; “I am the Truth. I, Truth, am come to take away the untruths of the world. Behold, I am with you always. I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Indeed, the Christ-Truth is here—not far off, not something we must struggle up a long, rugged mountain to reach. Let us understand this here and now!

If we can comprehend and admit that the alphabet is here or the principle of arithmetic is here, that the harmonious principle of music is here, or that Life, this Now-Awareness-I-Am, is here—then we can surely rest, stop fighting it and admit, concede, surrender to the fact that the simple truth—the Christ-Truth—concerning our rightful Identity is right here, right now, present!

Are you willing to make this simple admission? Or will you deny it? The only “second coming” Truth awaits is our individual acknowledgement of its presence as our very own Identity!

The Christ Is Here

Surely, the truth that is “with us always” and “withholds himself from no man” is not so arcane and difficult that only the Illuminated Elect are “saved,” as mysticism teaches! Surely, the truth that says “Come unto me all who are weary” doesn’t withhold itself from all but those who have suffered long years of self-immolation or have died as intellectual churchdom has taught from its conception! The truth withholds itself naught! It is not out there somewhere else, but here, ready and available to separate fact from fiction; present to awaken mankind from his prodigal-like peregrinations around his silly misjudgments of Identity. The Christ is here this instant to show us all truth.

Light

Inevitably, the truth puts a new light on everything because Truth and Light are the same Christ. The truth of anything is the light that dispels the darkness (ignorance) concerning it.

“I am the light,” says the Christ-truth. Furthermore, “I am the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Does this sound as if the Christ were something far removed, nebulous and unattainable? Or that we must await its first or second coming?

-William Samuel

From A Guide To Awareness And Tranquility, Chapter VI

More posts on Sat Sangha Salon from the works of William Samuel.

The Church is Always Anti-Christ – Osho

I will speak on Christ, but not on Christianity. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ. In fact, Christianity is anti-Christ — just as Buddhism is anti-Buddha and Jainism anti-Mahavir. Christ has something in him which cannot be organized: the very nature of it is rebellion and a rebellion cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it. Then the dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you. That’s why, from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you want Christ, you have to go beyond Christianity. If you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ. Christ is beyond all churches.

Christ is the very principle of religion. In Christ all the aspirations of humanity are fulfilled. He is a rare synthesis. Ordinarily a human being lives in agony, anguish, anxiety, pain and misery. If you look at Krishna, he has moved to the other polarity: he lives in ecstasy. There is no agony left; the anguish has disappeared. You can love him, you can dance with him for a while, but the bridge will be missing. You are in agony, he is in ecstasy — where is the bridge?

A Buddha has gone even farther away. He is neither in agony, nor in ecstasy. He is absolutely quiet and calm. He is so far away that you can look at him, but you cannot believe that he is. It looks like a myth — maybe a wish fulfillment of humanity. How can such a man walk on this earth, so transcendental to all agony and ecstasy? He is too far away.

Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born — in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves: he celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see that his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but transcendence.

That’s the beauty of Christ: there exists a bridge. You can move towards him by and by, and he can lead you towards the unknown — and so slowly that you will not even be aware when you cross the boundary, when you enter the unknown from the known, when the world disappears and God appears. You can trust him, because he is so like you and yet so unlike. You can believe in him because he is part of your agony; you can understand his language.

That’s why Jesus became a great milestone in the history of consciousness. It is not just coincidental that Jesus’ birth has become the most important date in history. It has to be so. Before Christ, one world; after Christ, a totally different world has existed — a demarcation in the consciousness of man. There are so many calendars, so many ways, but the calendar that is based on Christ is the most significant. With him something has changed in man; with him something has penetrated into the consciousness of man. Buddha is beautiful, superb, but not of this world; Krishna is lovable — but still the bridge is missing. Christ is the bridge.

Hence I have chosen to talk on Christ. But remember always, I am not talking on Christianity. The Church is always anti-Christ. Once you try to organize a rebellion, the rebellion has to be subsided. You cannot organize a storm — how can you organize a rebellion? A rebellion is true and alive only when it is a chaos.

With Jesus, a chaos entered into human consciousness. Now the organization is not to be done on the outside, in the society; the order has to be brought into the innermost core of your being. Christ has brought a chaos. Now, out of that chaos, you have to be born totally new, an order coming from the innermost being — not a new Church but a new man, not a new society but a new human consciousness. That is the message.

And these words from the gospel of St. John — you must have heard them so many times, you must have read them so many times. They have become almost useless, meaningless, insignificant, trivial. They have been repeated so many times that now no bell rings within you when you hear them. But these words are tremendously potential. You may have lost the significance of them, but if you become a little alert, aware, the meaning of these words can be reclaimed. It is going to be a struggle to reclaim the meaning… just like you reclaim a land from the ocean.

Christianity has covered these beautiful words with so many interpretations that the original freshness is lost — through the mouths of the priests who are simply repeating like parrots without knowing what they are saying: without knowing, without hesitating, without trembling before the sacredness of these words. They are simply repeating words like mechanical robots. Their gestures are false, because everything has been trained.

Once I was invited to a Christian theological college. I was surprised when they took me around the college. It is one of the greatest theological colleges in India: every year they prepare two hundred to three hundred Christian priests and missionaries there — a five-year training. And everything has to be taught: even how to stand on the pulpit, how to speak, where to give more emphasis, how to move your hands — everything has to be taught. Then everything becomes false, then the person is just making empty gestures.

These words are like fire, but through centuries of repetition, parrot-like repetition, much dust has gathered around the fire. My effort will be to uncover them again. Be very alert because we will be treading on a well-known path in a very unknown way, treading on very well-known territory with a very different, totally new attitude. The territory is going to be old. My effort will be to give you a new consciousness to see it. I would like to lend you my eyes so that you can see the old things in new light. And when you have new eyes, everything becomes new.

-Osho

Excerpt from Come Follow To You,Vol.1 (Originally titled Come Follow Me, Vol. 1), Discourse #1

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.

Till the Self reveals Himself – Lakshmana Sarma

The first step in the Quest of the real Self is to understand that Self is not the body — physical or mental. The reason for this is two-fold. On the one hand the body is unconscious and hence cannot be the self, finite or otherwise. On the other hand we are sure that the Self — whatever it may be — can exist without a body. We know that this is so in sleep. Few people can even imagine the possibility of the Self ceasing to exist during sleep. Those that do so are the over sophisticated ones; their perplexity on this point is dealt with in a long talk given by the Sage to a doubter, which will be given later. Thus the ego itself is a proof that we exist. We are not the ego; we are That from which the ego takes its rise. That must be found by seeking the Source of the ego. Revelation tells us that if and when we find that Source, we shall find not only the Self, but also the Reality that underlies the world-appearance; and this will be the case, because the Self and the Reality are one and the same.

The ego is thus seen to be the arch-deceiver, the true Satan or Ahriman. He is the only enemy of God and man. He is the enemy of right knowledge. He is the inventor of murder and lying. He is the cosmic Macbeth, who is constantly murdering Peace, which is true Happiness. He is the impostor who has usurped the seat of the real Self. Therefore he is debarred from entrance into the State of Deliverance, the Kingdom of Heaven that is in us, taught by Jesus.

The Sage has told us that the ego is all the evil there is, while egolessness is all the good there is. From the ego, which is ignorance, proceed all the evils that beset life. All that is good and worthy of reverent cultivation belongs to egolessness.

Apart from the ego there is neither death nor rebirth. This vicious circle of deaths and rebirths is sustained only by the primary ignorance which is the ego. The ego itself is death, because he is the negation of the Truth, which is Life. He must not only be dethroned, but must be put to death. For there is no safety so long as he survives.

The ego must become considerably attenuated for the teaching of the Sages to be understood. This is clear from the following utterance of the Sage. He was explaining the true inwardness of the current notion that a disciple must, after finding a Guru, remain with him for a long time, serving him faithfully, and surrender himself utterly to the Guru, and that the latter would then teach him the great secret, ‘Thou art That.’ The Sage explained it as follows: “The true meaning of what is here called surrender is the complete wearing away of the ego-sense, which is individuality. And this is a necessary condition for the disciple being able to receive the teaching; for if there be no surrender in this sense, the teaching is sure to be misunderstood. Even with the limited egoism that now exists, man is liable to outbreaks of fury, to be tyrannical, fanatical and so on. What will he not do, if he be told that he himself is that Great Being? He would not understand that teaching in its true sense, but would take it to mean that his individual soul, the ego, is that Great Being. This is not at all the true sense of the teaching, because the ego is simply non-existent.”

The true meaning of the teaching is that though the soul as such is a non-entity, there is in it an element of reality, namely the light of consciousness proceeding from the real Self, and experienced by us as ‘I am’. This light of consciousness does not belong to the soul; it belongs to the Self, the Reality, It must therefore be surrendered to Him. When that surrender is complete, then that Self alone will remain. And if individuality be thus lost, it is well lost. For this loss of individuality is not a loss. It is the loss of the greatest of all losses, the loss of the self; it is therefore the highest of all possible gains, the gain of the real Self. The effect of this surrender is thus described in the ancient lore: “As the rivers flowing into the ocean, and therein losing name and form, become one with the ocean, so does the Sage, losing name and form, become one with the Supreme Being, who is the transcendental Reality.”

Even leaving aside the truth that the ego is unreal, it has to be said that what the Sage has lost is just a mathematical zero, while what he has gained is the Infinite Reality. This is expressed by the Sage as follows — in one of his hymns to Arunachala: “What profit hast thou got, O Arunachala, taking me — of no worth here and hereafter — in exchange for Thyself, the greatest of all gains?”

This surrender to the real Self, to become final and perfect, needs to be effected by the Quest of the real Self in the manner taught in a later chapter. And since surrender is the culmination of devotion, the seeker of Deliverance needs to cherish devotion to the real Self. When this devotion becomes perfect, then it will be possible to enter on and persist in the Quest till success is won — till the real Self reveals Himself.

By “WHO” (Lakshmana Sarma)

Excerpted from Maha Yoga, Chapter Six, The Soul

You can download a PDF file of the entire book here: https://pgoodnight.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/maha-yoga.pdf

The Only Miracle – Osho

The real problem is the mind, because the mind is created by human society, specially designed to keep you a slave. The body has a beauty of its own. It is still part of the trees and the ocean and the mountains and the stars. It has not been polluted by the society. It has not been poisoned by the churches and religions and the priests. But the mind has been completely conditioned, distorted, given ideas which are absolutely false. Your mind is functioning almost like a mask and hiding your original face.

To transcend the mind is the whole art of meditation, and the East has devoted almost ten thousand years to a single purpose – all its intelligence and genius – of discovering how to transcend the mind and its conditionings. That whole effort of ten thousand years has culminated in refining the method of meditation.

In a single word, meditation means watching the mind, witnessing the mind. If you can witness the mind, just silently looking at it – without any justification, without any appreciation, without any condemnation, with no judgment at all, for or against – simply watching as if you have nothing to do with it… it is just the traffic that goes on in the mind. Stand by the side and watch it. And the miracle of meditation is that just by watching it, it slowly, slowly disappears.

The moment mind disappears, you come to the last door which is very fragile – and that too is not polluted by the society – your heart. In fact, your heart immediately gives you a way. It never prevents you, it is ready almost every moment for you to come to it and it will open the door towards the being. The heart is your friend.

The head is your enemy. The body is your friend, the heart is your friend, but just in between the two stands the enemy like a Himalaya, a big mountain wall. But it can be crossed over by a simple method. Gautam Buddha called the method Vipassana. Patanjali called the method Dhyan. And the Sanskrit word dhyan became, in China, Ch’an and in Japan it became Zen. But it is the same word. In English there is not exactly any equivalent for zen or dhyan or ch’an. We arbitrarily use the word meditation.

But you should remember: whatever meaning is given to the word meditation in your dictionaries, is not the meaning as I am using it. All the dictionaries will say meditation means thinking about something. Whenever I say to a Western mind, “Meditate” the immediate question is, “On what?” The reason is that in the West, meditation never developed to the point dhyan or ch’an or zen have developed in the East.

Meditation means simply awareness – not thinking about something or concentrating on something or contemplating something. The Western word is always concerned with something. Meditation as I am using it simply means a state of awareness.

Just like a mirror – do you think a mirror is trying to concentrate on something? Whatever comes before it is reflected, but the mirror is unconcerned. Whether a beautiful woman comes before it or an ugly woman comes before it or nobody comes before it, it is absolutely unconcerned; a simple, reflective source. Meditation is only a reflecting awareness. You simply watch whatever comes in front of you.

And by this simple watching, mind disappears. You have heard about miracles, but this is the only miracle. All other miracles are simply stories.

Jesus walking on water or turning water into wine or making dead people come to life again… all are beautiful stories. If they are symbolically understood they have great significance. But if you insist that they are historical facts, then you are being simply stupid. Symbolically they are beautiful. Symbolically, every master in the world is bringing people to life who are dead. What am I doing here? Pulling people out of their graves! And Jesus pulled out Lazarus after he had been dead only four days. I have been pulling people out who have been dead for years, for lives! And because they have lived in their graves so long they are very reluctant to come out. They give all their resistance – “What are you doing? This is our house! We have lived here peacefully, don’t disturb us!”

Symbolically it is right: every master is trying to give you a new life. As you are, you are not really alive. You are just vegetating. If the miracles are interpreted as metaphors, they have a beauty.

I am reminded of a strange story which Christians have completely dropped from their scriptures. But it exists in the Sufi literature. The Sufi story is about Jesus.

Jesus is coming into a town and just as he enters the town he sees a man whom he recognizes; he had known him before. He was blind and Jesus had cured his eyes. That man is running after a prostitute. Jesus stops the man and asks him, “Do you remember me?”

He said, “Yes, I remember you and I can never forgive you! I was blind and I was perfectly happy, because I had never seen any beauty. You gave me eyes. Now tell me – what am I to do with these eyes? These eyes are attracted towards beautiful women.”

Jesus could not believe… he was stunned, shocked: “I thought I had done some great service to this man and he is angry! He is saying, ‘Before you gave me eyes, I never thought about women,

I never thought that there were prostitutes. But since you have given me eyes you have destroyed me.’”

Jesus leaves the man without saying anything – there is nothing to say. And as he moves on he finds another man lying in the gutter, saying all kinds of meaningless things, completely drunk. Jesus pulls him out of the gutter and recognizes that he had given him legs. But now he is feeling a little shaky himself. He asks the man, “Do you know me?”

The man says, “Yes, I know you. Even though I am drunk, I cannot forgive you: it is you who disturbed my peaceful life. Without legs I could not go anywhere. I was a peaceful person – no fight, no gambling, no question of friends, no question of going to the pub. You gave me legs, and since then I have not found a single moment of peacefulness, of sitting silently. I am running after this, after that, and in the end when I am tired I get drunk. And you can see yourself what is happening to me. You are responsible for my situation! You should have told me beforehand that if I was getting the legs, all these problems were going to arise. You did not warn me. You simply cured me without even asking my permission.”

Jesus became so freaked, he left the city. He did not go any further. He said, “Nobody knows what kind of people I am going to meet.” But as he was coming out of the city he saw a man who was trying to hang himself from a tree. He said, “Wait, what are you doing?”

He said, “Again you have come! I was dead, and you forced me to be alive again. Now I don’t have employment, my wife has left me because she thinks a man who has died cannot be revived; she thinks I am a ghost. Nobody wants to meet me. Friends simply don’t recognize me. I go into the city and people don’t look at me. Now what do you want me to do? And again when I am going to hang myself you are here! What kind of revenge are you taking? Can’t you leave me alone? Now I cannot even hang myself. Once I was dead and you revived me – if I hang myself you are going to revive me again. You are so intent on making miracles, you don’t even care who are the sufferers of your miracles!”

When I came to see this story, I loved it. Every Christian should know about it.

There is no miracle except one, and that is the miracle of meditation which takes you away from the mind. And the heart is always welcoming you. It is always ready to give you a way, to guide you towards your being. And the being is your wholeness; it is your ultimate well-being.

-Osho

Excerpted from Om Mani Padme Hum, Discourse #2

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

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

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