Kabir – Sat Sangha Salon

Let Your Aloneness Become a Dance – Osho

Osho,
Never belonged,
Never been on the ‘inside’,
Never felt ‘at one’ with another,
Why such a loner all my life?

Prem Madhura,

Life is a mystery, but you can reduce it to a problem. And once you make a mystery a problem you will be in difficulty, because there can be no solution to it. A mystery remains a mystery; it is insoluble – that’s why it is called a mystery. Life is not a problem.

And that is one of the most basic mistakes we all go on committing: we immediately put a question mark. And if you put a question mark on a mystery, you will be searching for the answer your whole life and you will not find it, and naturally it brings great frustration.

My observation of you, Madhura, is that you are a born meditator. Rather than making it a problem, rejoice! Not to belong is one of the greatest experiences of life. To be utterly an outsider, never feeling to be a part anywhere, is a great experience of transcendence.

An American tourist went to see a Sufi Master. For many years he had heard about him, had fallen in deep love with his words, his message. Finally he decided to go to see him. When he entered his room, he was surprised – it was an utterly empty room! The Master was sitting; there was no furniture at all! The American could not conceive of a living space without any furniture. He immediately asked, “Where is your furniture, sir?”

And the old Sufi laughed and he said, “And where is yours?”

And the American said, “Of course I am a tourist here. I cannot go on carrying my furniture!”

And the old man said, “So am I a tourist for only just a few days, and then I will be gone, just as you will be gone.”

This world is just a pilgrimage – of great significance, but not a place to belong to, not a place to become part of Remain a lotus leaf, as Kabir says.

Madhura, this is one of the calamities that has happened to the human mind: we make a problem out of everything. Now this should be something of immense joy to you. Don’t call yourself a ‘loner’.

You are using a wrong word, because the very word connotes some condemnation. You are alone, and the word ’alone’ has great beauty. You are not even lonely. To be lonely means you are in need of the other; to be alone means you are utterly rooted in yourself, centered in yourself. You are enough unto yourself.

You have not yet accepted this gift of God, hence you are unnecessarily suffering. And this is my observation: millions of people go on suffering unnecessarily.

Look at it from another perspective. I am not giving you an answer, I never give any answers. I simply give you new perspectives to see, new angles.

Think of yourself as a born meditator who is capable of being alone, who is strong enough to be alone, who is so centered and rooted that the other is not needed at all. Yes, one can relate with the other, but it never becomes a relationship. To relate is perfectly good. Two persons who are both alone can relate, two persons who are both alone cannot be in relationship.

Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two lonely persons fall into a relationship. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone. Their aloneness remains uncontaminated; their aloneness remains virgin, pure. They are like peaks, Himalayan peaks, high in the sky above the clouds. No two peaks ever meet, yet there is a kind of communion through the wind and through the rain and through the rivers and through the sun and through the stars. Yes, there is a communion; much dialogue goes on. They whisper to each other, but their aloneness remains absolute, they never compromise.

Be like an alone peak high in the sky. Why should you hanker to belong? You are not a thing! Things belong!

You say, “Never belonged, never been on the inside.”

There is no need! To be an insider in this world is to get lost. The worldly is the insider; a Buddha is bound to remain an outsider. All Buddhas are outsiders. Even if they are in the crowd, they are alone. Even if they are in the marketplace they are not there. Even if they relate, they remain separate. There is a kind of subtle distance that is always there.

And that distance is freedom, that distance is great joy, that distance is your own space. And you call yourself a loner? You must be comparing yourself with others: “They are having so many relationships, they are having love affairs. They belong to each other, they are insiders – and I am a loner. Why?” You must be creating anguish unnecessarily.

My approach always is: whatsoever God has given to you must be a subtle necessity of your soul, otherwise it would not have been given in the first place.

Think more of aloneness. Celebrate aloneness, celebrate your pure space, and great song will arise in your heart. And it will be a song of awareness, it will be a song of meditation. It will be a song of an alone bird calling in the distance – not calling to somebody in particular, but just calling because the heart is full and wants to call, because the cloud is full and wants to rain, because the flower is full and the petals open and the fragrance is released . . . unaddressed. Let your aloneness become a dance.

And Madhura is a dancer. And I am utterly happy with you, Madhura. If you stop creating problems for yourself . . . I don’t see that there are real problems. The only problem is, people go on creating problems! Problems are never solved, they are only dissolved.

I am giving you a perspective, a vision. Dissolve your problem! Accept it as a gift of God, with great gratitude, and live it. And you will be surprised: what a precious gift, and you have not even appreciated it yet. What a precious gift, and it is lying there in your heart, unappreciated.

Dance your aloneness, sing your aloneness, live your aloneness!

And I am not saying don’t love. In fact, only a person who is capable of being alone is capable of love. Lonely persons cannot love. Their need is so much that they cling – how can they love? Lonely persons cannot love, they can only exploit. Lonely persons pretend to love; deep down they want to get love. They don’t have it to give, they have nothing to give. Only a person who knows how to be alone and joyous is so full of love that he can share it. He can share it with strangers.

And all are strangers, remember. Your husband, your wife, your children, all are strangers. Never forget it! You don’t know your husband, you don’t know your wife. You don’t know even your child; the child that you have carried in your womb for nine months is a stranger.

This whole life is a strange land; we come from some unknown. source. Suddenly we are here, and one day suddenly we are gone, back to the original source. This is a few days’ journey; make it as joyous as possible. But we do just the opposite – we make it as miserable as possible. We put our whole energies into making it more and more miserable.

-Osho

From The Guest, Discourse #11, 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.

So Much Magnificence – Osho

The darkness of night is coming along fast,
And the shadows of love
Close in the body and the mind.
Open the window to the West, and disappear
Into the air inside you.

Near your breastbone there is an open flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.
Waves are coming in:
There is so much magnificence near the ocean.
Listen: Sound of immense seashells! Sound of bells
Kabir says, ‘Friend, listen,
This is what I have to say:
The guest I love is inside me!’

Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive.
Think and think while you are alive.
What you call ‘salvation’
Belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
Do you think ghosts
Will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten –
That is all fantasy.
What is found is found then.
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up
With an apartment in the city of death.

And if you make love with the divine now,
In the next life you will have the face
Of satisfied desire.
Then plunge into the truth,
Find out who the teacher is,
Believe in the great sound!

Kabir says this:
‘When the guest is being searched for, it is the
Intensity of the longing for the guest
That does all the work.

Look at me…
You will see a slave of that intensity.’

-Kabir

As seen in Osho’s book on Kabir, The Revolution, Discourse #9

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.

Now Wake Up! – Osho

Kabir says:

My inside, listen to me, the greatest spirit,

the teacher, is near,

wake up, wake up!

The original is:

Parmatma guru nikat viraje,

jag jag man mere . . .

Your real Master, your God, is very close by. You need not go to Kaaba or to Kashi in search of him. He is so close by that even to say that he is close by is not right, because closeness also shows a little distance. He is exactly you! God asleep – that’s what you are. If you awake you need not go anywhere else.

The difference between you and a Buddha is not the difference of any physical distance, is not the difference of any quantitative changes. The distance is only of one thing, otherwise you are exactly the same: you are asleep, he is awake. Open your eyes and you are a Buddha, be awake and you are a Buddha.

Parmatma guru nikat viraje . . .

For whom are you searching? He is just within you, and He is the real Master. The outer Master only functions as a mirror; he simply shows you who you are. He does not impose anything upon you, he only reflects.

The pseudo-Master imposes things upon you. He teaches you this and that, he conditions you, makes you a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian, creates great greed in you for the other world, for heavenly pleasures, makes you afraid of hell. He is using a very psychological strategy.

That’s what the most materialistic school of psychologists goes on teaching, the school of the behaviorists – Watson, Skinner, Pavlov. Their whole teaching is that man can be conditioned only by two things, and those two things are fear of punishment and greed for reward – punishment and reward. That’s how they go on working on rats, and when they succeed in conditioning a rat they think the same can be done with man. They don’t give you more respect than they give to the rats. And in a way they are right; about ninety-nine percent of you they are right. They are not right only when a person is awake; they are not right about a Buddha. Otherwise, humanity works almost like rats, there is not much difference. The rats function through punishment and reward, and that’s how man functions.

The false Master simply makes you afraid of hell, greedy for heaven, and through this strategy he exploits you. The real Master does not make you afraid and does not make you greedy either. Then what is the function of a real Master?

The function of the real Master is to be a pure mirror so you can see your own face, so that you can recognize your own face. Once you have seen your own heart throbbing in the mirror, your own being reflected, you will become aware of the inner Master.

The function of the outer Master is to make you aware of the inner Master. Once that is done then the outer mirror is no longer needed. You may remain grateful to it because it helped you, you may remain thankful to it for ever and ever, but it is no longer needed. The real Master works hard so that he is no longer needed. His success will simply make him unneeded.

The false Master works in such a way that he is always needed, that without him you cannot move a single inch. He makes you dependent on him. He does not give you awareness, eyes to see, to function; he gives you ready-made formulas. And of course, life goes on changing, and those formulas become out-of-date every day. […]

The real Master never gives you principles, he gives you only insights. He gives you understanding, not commandments. He simply makes you more aware so whatsoever the situation is you can always respond to the situation on your own. You need not follow a certain fixed principle. He makes you more fluid, more flexible, because life goes on changing and if you are very, very inflexible you will suffer.

Parmatma guru nikat viraje

Jag jag man mere. . . Kabir says: The only thing worth doing is to wake up my mind. The God, the real guru, is inside. The word ‘guru’ is untranslatable. Neither does the word ‘teacher’ nor the word ‘Master’ have that beauty. In fact, the phenomenon of the guru is so deeply Indian that no other language of any country is capable of translating it. It is something intrinsically Eastern. The word ‘guru’ is made of two words, ‘gu’ and ‘ru’. ’Gu’ means darkness, ‘ru’ means one who dispels it. Guru literally means ‘the light’. And you have the light within you, yes! If you come across a Buddha or a Jesus or a Krishna or a Mahavir, it will be of tremendous help to you in finding your inner guru, because seeing Buddha, suddenly a great enthusiasm and hope will arise in you: “If it can happen to Buddha” – who is just like you, the same body, the same blood, bone, marrow – “if it can happen to this man, why not to me?” The hope is the beginning. Meeting with the Master on the outside is the beginning of a great hope, a great aspiration.

And this can happen only if you meet a living Master. It cannot happen just by reading about Buddha, because who knows whether this man was really historical or not? And the way the story is being told is such that nobody can believe that he was historical.

The followers always go on creating more and more unnecessary stories about their Masters. Maybe they do it with good intentions, but even good intentions coming out of unconscious people are of no use; they are harmful. Maybe they want to impress people so people can become more attracted, but what really happens is just the opposite.

Now the Buddhist story is that when Buddha was born, the mother was standing, was walking in a garden. Buddha was born while the mother was walking. And not only that, the first thing that he did was that he himself walked seven steps. The first thing the child did – he walked seven steps! Not only that, the second thing that he did after the seventh step was that he declared, looking at the sky, “I am the awakened one, I am the great Buddha! Nobody has ever been like me and nobody will ever be like me.”

Now these stupid stories naturally make intelligent people suspicious. And one thing is absolutely certain: that Buddha is not like us, so maybe, perhaps, he became enlightened, but he gives no hope to us. Jesus is born of a virgin mother – nonsense, patent nonsense! But how can you become enlightened? You are not born of a virgin mother. Krishna is born as God, he is an incarnation of God; you are not an incarnation of God.

Rather than these stories creating a hope in you, they create a kind of hopelessness.

You need living Masters who have not yet become myths. You need living Masters who are just like you and yet different, just like you but with something plus, something mysterious surrounding them in every other way the same as you, but only in one respect different: they have a certain understanding which is missing in you, they have a certain luminosity which is missing in you, they have a certain grace, a certain climate which is missing with you. But in every other way they are exactly like you: they fall ill, they need food, they become thirsty, they are tired, they have to go to sleep; they are just exactly like you in every possible way. Then great hope arises: maybe the ‘one plus’ thing that has happened to them is also latent in you and can become manifest.

The outer Master is simply a mirror so that you can see your face, so that you can see that you also have the same face, the same possibility, the same potential. And once this has settled in your heart, that “I have also the same potential, the same seed,” a great journey has started. You will never be the same again. Looking into the eyes of a living Master, something synchronizes in you, something is triggered in your being, a process has already started.

My inside, listen to me, the greatest spirit the teacher, is near, wake up, wake up!

But we have been asleep so long, for millions of years, for millions of lives, that sleep has become a deep-rooted habit, almost our nature. So it is possible that you may even be with a living Master and miss, because the mind goes on creating new ways to go on sleeping, new rationalizations. The mind will say, “Now I have found the guru, I have found the Master. Now what more is needed? It is enough. Now by his blessings I will become enlightened one day.”

Now this is a trick of the mind. Blessings are of immense help, but only blessings will not make you enlightened. Otherwise one Master would make the whole earth enlightened, because his heart is not miserly about blessings. He can bless the whole world – he blesses the whole world – but just his blessings won’t do.

But the mind can give you these ideas – that there is no need for you to wake up. The mind always thinks in its own old patterns.

A teacher was checking her children’s knowledge of proverbs.

“Cleanliness is next to what?” she asked. “Impossible!” a small boy replied with great feeling.

Now the boy knows that the most difficult thing is cleanliness, just next to impossible. His response comes out of his experience.

When you are with a living Master your responses are bound to come from your own experience. There is every possibility you may distort. The Master may mirror your real face, but you may close your eyes, you may start dreaming about your face, you may project something else.

“What did you learn in school today?” a mother asked her young son.

He replied, “We learned that one and one, the son of a bitch makes two. Two and two, the son of a bitch makes four. Four and four, the son of a bitch makes eight.”

The mother was shocked. She went to school and complained to the teacher, “How could you teach your class such a terrible thing?”

“Madam,” said the teacher, “I taught them ‘one and one, the sum of which makes two’.”

The real Master can also be misunderstood, misinterpreted. He may reflect your face, but you may go on seeing something else. You have been asleep so long that you will need to be shocked again and again.

Hence a constant companionship with the Master is needed; it can’t be a hit-and-run affair. A few people come here and they say, “We have come here for three days. Is something possible?” They don’t see the absurdity of it. They don’t see how long they have been asleep; they want to be awakened within three days. In fact, by the way they say that they are here for three days, it seems as if they are obliging me by being here for three days. Even if in three lives you become awakened, that would be too early.

And yes, still I say it can happen in a single moment – it depends on you. […]

My inside, listen to me, the greatest spirit

the teacher, is near,

wake up, wake up!

Run to his feet –

he is standing close to your head right now.

The original is:

Dhaya ke pitam charanam lage, sai khada sir tere . . .

The original has some beauty in it:

Dhaya ke pitam charanam lage. . . Don’t waste time, not even a single moment. Run, fall at the feet of the beloved. He has been standing there for so long, waiting and waiting for you. For lives and lives God has been waiting for you; His patience is infinite. There are only two things that are infinite: God’s patience and man’s stupidity!

If you are fortunate enough to be in the presence of a Master, look into his eyes and RUSH inwards. Don’t waste time! Dhaya ke pitam charanam lage . . .

The beloved is within you, the worshipper is the worshipped. The beloved is within you; you just need to go to the very core of your being. Descend from the head to the heart, and from the heart to the being. Move from thinking to feeling and from feeling to being. Just be! and that is the meeting with the beloved. And the meeting has already been happening, you are just not aware, you are just unconscious.

Run to his feet – He is standing close to your head right now. And without finding Him you will remain dissatisfied, discontented. Whatsoever you do, everything is doomed to fail. Except God, nothing succeeds. They say, “Nothing succeeds like success,” and I say to you: Nothing fails like success. Once you succeed in your so-called worldly matters – money, power, prestige, respectability – then you will know that all has failed. The money is there and so is your inner poverty; it has not changed even an iota. In fact because of the richness now you will become more and more aware of your inner poverty; in contrast, you will be able to see it more.

That’s why poor people look a little more satisfied than the rich – not that the poor people are satisfied, not that poverty has something spiritual about it, not that poverty has to be preached. Enough of all those stupid things that have been told to people down the ages! But the poor person looks a little satisfied for a totally different reason. The reason is, he has nothing to compare himself with, he has no contrast. He is a white line drawn on a white board. The rich man is a white line drawn on a blackboard . . . the contrast.

The richer a country gets, the more frustrated it becomes. Indians brag very much; they think their satisfaction, their so-called contentment, has something to do with spirituality. It has nothing to do with spirituality at all! It is a simple psychological fact: you are so poor you cannot afford even to be discontented. Only rich people can afford to be discontented. Only rich people really become aware of discontentment.

But one thing is certain: whatsoever you attain – you can become rich, you can become respectable, you can become virtuous, you can become a so-called saint, a mahatma, worshipped by thousands of people – but if you have not attained the inner beloved you will remain poor, you will remain in misery deep down, you will remain in darkness.

No one is ever satisfied. Poor men wish they were rich, rich men wish they were handsome, bachelors wish they were married, and married men wish they were dead, and so on and so forth, it goes and it goes . . .

Have you ever come across a person who is really contented? If you come across a person who is really contented, then be with him, then imbibe as much of the vibes of his being as possible, because that is the only way to find your inner beloved. The person who is contented must have found him.

Buddhas are surrounded by tremendous contentment, a great silence, almost tangible; you can touch it, you can feel its texture. Buddhas are surrounded by great grace; if you are not closed you will be overwhelmed by it. Buddhas are just pure love; if your hearts are open and beating, if you are still alive, then immediately a great dance will arise in your being. You will start celebrating immediately, because seeing the Buddha you will become immediately aware of the inner Buddha that has been asleep so long. But so what? Even if you have been asleep for millions of lives it makes no difference, you can wake up right now, this very moment.

You have slept for millions and millions of years

Says Kabir –

Why not wake up this morning?

Jugan jugan tohi sobat bita ajahu na savere? . . .

Don’t be foolish anymore! The time has come, This is the time!

Buddhas always speak of this moment.

Ajahyu na jag sabere? . . . The morning has come. THIS is the morning for which you have been waiting for so long, This is the moment! Buddhas know only one time, that is now, and only one place, that is here. Their time is always now and their space is always here. They don’t talk about the yesterdays and they don’t talk about the tomorrows.

Ajahyu na jag sabere?. . . The morning has come, and you are still asleep? Are you not going to wake up? Are you not going to wake up and see the sun rising? You have missed so long, so long, but forget all about it; you can still wake up, it is still early. Whenever you wake up, it is early.

But the weight of the old habits is not easy to throw away. You listen, you may even feel a little understanding arising, but still your investment is in the sleep. You have been dreaming such beautiful dreams in your sleep, and now suddenly Kabir comes, and he says, “Wake up!” You would like to awake, but not right now – and the insistence of the Masters is RIGHT NOW. They don’t want to wait; they start shaking you. You feel angry, naturally. All the great Buddhas of the world have created great anger in people against them for a simple reason: they disturb your sleep, and who wants to be disturbed? and particularly in the early morning when it is cold, and you would like to have a turnover and pull the blanket and tuck yourself in again just a little more, and you are having such a beautiful dream. Particularly in the early morning, people have beautiful dreams. You have become the president of America or something, and here comes Kabir and says, “Wake up!”

Ajahyu na jag sabere?. . . The morning has come. And what are you doing here? You would like to tell him, “Shut up! Is this the moment to wake me up? It has been a hard, hard struggle for me to become the president of America. Somehow I have managed, now here you come. Where had you been before?” The weight of the dreams, of the sleep, of all the investments is great.

A man arrived at the Pearly Gates, and on being asked his name replied, “Charlie Graball.” “I don’t think we have any notice of your coming,” he was informed. “What was your occupation in earthly life?”

“Scrap metal merchant,” the visitor said.

“Oh,” said the angel, “I will go and enquire.”

When he returned Charlie Graball had disappeared. So had the Pearly Gates.

Old habits! . . . A scrap metal merchant . . . even at the gate of heaven! Who cares about heaven? When you can escape with the gate, who bothers about heaven?

And this is the reason why people go on finding new excuses to go on sleeping. You cannot believe how much you have invested in your sleep. And the most cunning thing that the mind can do is to make you convinced that you are not asleep at all, that you are already awake: “Kabir must be talking to somebody else.”

That’s what happens when I am talking here – you always think that I must be talking about other people. I am talking about you! Sometimes it happens that when I go on looking for two, three seconds at one person, he starts looking here and there: I must be looking at somebody else – because nobody can think that he is Charlie Graball, no. It is always somebody else. This is one of the most powerful strategies of the mind to keep you asleep.

Gurdjieff used to tell a story again and again:

There was once a magician who had many sheep. Every day one fat sheep was to be killed for him, and of course – sheep are not so foolish as man! – they became alert. One thing was certain, that everybody was to be killed one day or other. They started escaping into the hills, into the forest. The magician was at a loss as to what to do; the sheep were becoming aware about their destiny.

Then he invented a strategy: he gathered all the sheep, hypnotized them, and told every sheep different things. For example, he told a few, “You are exceptional, you are not ordinary. What happens to others is never going to happen to you.” Since that day those sheep stopped escaping. You could have killed another sheep in front of them, but they were not afraid any more because they knew they were exceptional.

Just watch your mind deep down – you all have that idea, that “I am exceptional.”

One Arabian proverb says that when God creates a man and sends him into the world, before He drops him, He always whispers one thing in his ear: “You are unique, exceptional.” He goes on playing that joke, and every person carries that deep down in his heart, that “I am exceptional.” That’s why you go on seeing people dying, but you never think, “I am going to die.” It is always somebody else who dies, it is never I – “I am exceptional.”

. . . To a few other sheep that he hypnotized, he told, “You are lions, you are not sheep at all.” And since that day they stopped escaping; they started roaring like lions.

To a few other sheep he told, “You are not sheep, you are men. You are here to keep all the other sheep imprisoned. You are to help me; you are my friends.” Since that day those sheep became detectives against their own friends. They would inform the magician that a certain sheep was trying to escape.

To a few others he even told, “You are magicians – not only men but magicians. You can do miracles! You are immortal!”

Once he had done these strategies no sheep were escaping, and every day they were butchered.

And every day you are butchered. Every day somebody dies, somebody is killed, somebody is murdered, somebody commits suicide. Every day it is going on, but somehow, deep down, you go on believing you are exceptional. When somebody goes mad you think, “Poor fellow.” You don’t think that you can also go mad . . . because the difference between you and mad people is not much; it is very nominal, very minimal, only of degrees. Maybe you are at ninety-nine degrees and he is at a hundred and one; just one degree more and you cross the boundary, and you are mad. Just one day before that other person was also as normal as you are – now he is mad. Today you are normal, tomorrow you can be mad. But in our deep sleep we have auto-hypnotized ourselves. This auto-hypnosis is what is meant by sleep, metaphysical sleep.

Jugan jugan tohi sobat bita ajahu na savere? How long have you remained auto-hypnotized, in a deep metaphysical slumber? And the dawn has come. Now wake up! It is time! Now don’t postpone any more, you have postponed enough.

Why not wake up this morning?

There is a flag no one sees blowing in the gagan,

in the sky temple.

A blue cloth has been stretched up,

it is decorated with the moon and many jewels.

Gagan math gaib nisan ure

chandrahar chandva Jahan tange, mutata -manik marhe. . .

. . . If you wake up, you will be surprised that you are living in such a tremendously beautiful world. But how can you know the beauty of it if you are asleep? You are not aware of the splendor that is showering all around. You are not aware of the glories of life, of the benediction that life is. How can you be aware of it? You are so deeply asleep, you are dreaming your private dreams, utterly unaware that the whole existence is a constant celebration.

There is a flag no one sees blowing in the sky temple. A blue cloth has been stretched up, it is decorated with the moon and many jewels.

It is a very mysterious existence. You cannot conceive more mystery, more miracles, more splendor, more beauty. It is the ultimate in all that one can imagine, but we are missing it. It is like a man who is asleep in the garden and cannot see the rose blooming and cannot hear the distant call of a lonely bird, and cannot see a bird on the wing, cannot see the sun and the moon and the stars. He is fast asleep. The fragrance from the roses comes to his nostrils but he cannot be aware of it; the fragrance of the wet earth, but he is unaware; the dewdrops shining like pearls in the morning sun, but he is unaware of it, he is fast asleep. This is our situation.

Why not wake up this morning? Ajahu na jag sabere? . . .

. . . The morning is knocking on the door, the sun is rising, the call has come, and you go on sleeping? This is the Master’s work: to go on hammering his disciples, to go on hammering; in some moment maybe . . . the disciple will wake up. There are moments when you are more vulnerable; there are moments when you are very hard, impossible to penetrate. There are moments when you are more flexible, more feminine. Hence the Master goes on hammering every day. He goes on, without taking any note of whether you listen or not. He knows one thing: that ultimately everybody has to listen. Finally, everybody HAS to listen.

The sun and the moon can be seen in that place;

when looking at that, bring your mind down to silence.

Mahima tasu dekh han thir kar, ravi-sasi jot jare.

Says Kabir: If you can do only one thing, if you can attain to silence, you will know the splendor of God.

Mahima tasu dekh . . . You can see that splendor; you can see that infinite beauty. That joy is yours. Just do one thing: become silent. It is another way of saying wake up – because the mind remains asleep because of so many thoughts. Sleep simply means a continuous thought process inside you, a procession of thoughts, a continuous traffic. And it is always rush hour there: day in, day out, thousands of thoughts and desires and imaginations and projections and memories go on rushing in a crowd. You are always surrounded by a big crowd; this is your sleep.

This inner talk has to stop. You can call it being awake, you can call it being silent – it is the same thing. To be silent is the way to be awake, or, to be awake is the way to be silent; both methods have been used.

Buddha uses the method of being silent so that you can be aware. Krishnamurti uses the method of being aware so that you can be silent. They both are two aspects of the same coin; if you have one you will have the other automatically.

Mahima tasu dekh man thir kar . . . Stop this constant traffic of the mind, stop this thought process. Then you can see the infinite Beauty . . . ravi-sasi jot jare . . . You will see the sun and the moon and the stars inside yourself. The whole sky is yours. Even the sky is not the limit – you are all. If you are ready to die as a drop you will become the ocean.

I will tell you the truth:

the man who has drunk from that liquid

wanders around like someone insane.

This world is almost a madhouse. To be sane here will look like becoming insane. […]

Kabir says: I will tell you the truth. I will not tell you to wake up without telling the truth. He is saying, “Let me tell you the truth: if you decide to wake up one thing is certain – you will be thought mad. You have to take that risk. Otherwise go on sleeping, go on dreaming, remain part of the mad crowd. Please don’t blame me later on.” That’s why Kabir says: I will tell you the truth.

If you decide to wake up . . . Maybe listening to Kabir or to Buddha or to me, you start deciding to wake up. The truth has to be told beforehand, before you decide to wake up. The man who has drunk from that liquid wanders around like someone insane.

You have to risk your so-called sanity. It is insanity! but you will have to risk it, and you will have to be ready to accept the world of the few sanest people. But they are very few – Mansoor and Jesus and Buddha and Kabir and Farid and Nanak…. They are very few, they can be counted on the fingers. If you wake up you will become part of that small, fortunate minority, but you will be thought insane by the people.

Kahe Kabir piye joi jan, mana firat mare.

Not only that you will live like a madman in the world, you will also die like a madman. But it is worth it; the risk is worth taking. It is better to be mad like Kabir than to be sane like Morarji Desai. It is better to be mad like Jesus than to be sane like Pontius Pilate. It is a great decision; guts are needed, great courage is needed.

Sannyas – initiation into the world of truth – is not for the cowards. Cowards can go on rationalizing, cowards can go on sleeping, dreaming. Cowards can even start dreaming that they are awake, but they will not risk. They will remain part of the mob, of the insane crowd. And of course their lives will remain of misery, of pain, of agony.

If you want to be ecstatic, risk – risk all. Only by risking all does one attain the all. Blessed are those who are drunk with God. Blessed are those who are mad for God. Blessed are those who are no more part of the insane crowd but have learned a new way of insanity – the way of the Buddhas. Kahe Kabir piye joi jan . . .

It is very rare that somebody decides, because it is very rare to be so courageous, so brave . . . mana firat mare

Then he lives like a madman, in utter ecstasy, in absolute benediction, and he dies in utter ecstasy, in an absolute benediction. Life can be a celebration and death too, but you will need to risk.

And that’s what my whole effort here is: to seduce you into risking all for God. Remember, you have slept enough and you have not found anything, you have dreamt enough and your hands are empty, you have thought enough and where have you arrived? Now wake up.

Friend, now wake up!

Enough for today?

-Osho

From The Guest, Discourse #10

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The Guest is Found in the Host – Osho

Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead and hence man is free. That has been one of the most ancient arguments: if God is, man cannot be free. How can man be free if God is? Then God is the master and man is the slave. Then God decides, man has only to follow. Then God has will and man has no will; man is only a plaything in the hands of God. So either God is, or man is free. If man is free, there can be no God at all.

Charvakas in ancient India, Epicurus in Greece, and then Nietzsche, Marx, Diderot, Freud, Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, they all have been repeating the same argument again and again in different words. The argument seems to be very appealing. The argument proposes freedom for man: man can be free only if God is removed. Then there is nobody above man. Then there is nobody to dominate man, nobody to decide for man. If there is nothing higher than man, then freedom is absolute. But howsoever appealing the argument, it is fundamentally wrong; it is based on wrong premises.

The declaration that God is dead is in a sense true: the false god, the man-made God, is certainly dead. The god of the temples and the churches and the synagogues and the mosques and the gurudwaras is certainly dead. The god that man has imagined in his own image, the god that man has made according to his own wishes, the god that is nothing but a projection of man’s mind and desires, that god certainly is dead.

But that god had really never existed; it is dead because it has never existed in the first place. And it is good that the man-made god is dead, because when the artificial is removed the natural can sprout. When the false ceases the true can explode. The untrue MUST cease for the truth to be.

I look at atheism with great respect, because it removes the false. It has a great work to do. Its work is not against God; its work really is for God, because it destroys all man-made idols of God. And then, in that emptiness, the time God can become manifest, can be revealed.

All the great saints have been against the false god. They will agree perfectly with Nietzsche, Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre. Of course, they will agree for a totally different reason: not that the true God is dead, not that the true God can ever be dead. To say that God is dead is a contradiction in terms if by God you mean the true God, the God ‘that which is’. It is a contradiction in terms because God is nothing but life, and how can life be dead? It goes on and on, it is an unending process. Life is a pilgrimage with no beginning and no end; God is another name for life.

Those who know, they know God as the fragrance of life, the perfume of existence, the very ground of being. For them, God is not a concept, not a theory, not a hypothesis. For them, God is an existential experience. For them God is not separate from man, for them God is man’s innermost core.

Hence how can man’s freedom and God be antagonistic? Without God there would be no freedom, because without God there would be no man. Without God there would be no inner core to your being. Without God you would be hollow; you wouldn’t have any meaning, any significance. Without God you would be just accidental, a plaything of circumstances. With God you have a certain significance, some meaning, some poetry.

With God you are free because God is your freedom. God gives you space to grow; God is the space to grow in. Because there is something higher, you can grow, you can reach for it, but the higher is not separate from you. The higher is nothing but your own depth trying to manifest itself. The higher is not something like a goal to be achieved. It is more like something which is already there and has only to be recognized. The height and the depth are one and the same. Your innermost core is also the innermost core of the whole existence.

To think of God and man is wrong. God is man fulfilled, man is God on the way. Man is the journey, God is the reaching, the arrival. Man is like a seed and God is like a flower… one chain of growth.

God is not to be worshiped but realized. There is no need to make temples for God. You have to learn how to look within you. The temple is already there: your body is the temple! That’s what Kabir goes on saying again and again: your body is the temple. God has already chosen it as its abode.

God is already in you, God exists as you. Hence there is no question of any conflict between you and God; there cannot be. Without God you would be just a flower without fragrance. Without God you would be a temple without any deity, empty. Without God you would be just pure accident, with no significance at all. It is only with God that you become part of the great symphony of existence, that you become something which is needed, utterly needed; that without you existence will miss something, that without you existence will be less.

God is not an ideal as we have been thinking down the ages. And it is good that that God is dead; now we can declare the birth of a new God. Now we can declare the true God. The true God is always your interiority, your subjectivity.

Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most important atheists of this age, says that we cannot allow God to exist because His existence reduces us to objects. He becomes the subject – He is omniscient, He goes on looking at us, and because He looks at us and we cannot look at Him, we are reduced to objects, things, commodities. Whenever you look at a thing you cannot look at its interiority, you can look only at its outer core. By looking, you reduce everything to a thing.

That’s why in all the cultures, in all the societies down the ages, looking at somebody for a certain period is thought to be unmannerly. For almost two or three seconds you can look and there will be no objection, that is casual; you are passing by and you look at a person, just a casual look, a glance. But if you stare it is offensive. Why? Why is looking at a person for too long offensive? It reduces him into an object: you become the seer and he becomes the seen. And who are you to reduce him into an object? It is offensive!

Jean-Paul Sartre also says that that is one of the reasons why lovers always go on fighting, because they both go on looking at each other, reducing each other into things, and nobody likes it. The man does not like to be reduced into a thing, neither does the woman like it. And they are lovers so they stare at each other – it is offensive; even in love it is offensive. Deep down somewhere your being revolts against it.

Women are far more sensitive, naturally. They are more graceful. When they are making love they close their eyes; they don’t reduce the man who is making love to them into an object. Man is a little crude: he likes to see while he is making love. Even while he is making love he wants to see, he would like to keep the light on. And there are extremists also who would like it to be photographed, so they can make an album and later on they can look at it.

But the woman feels offended. Certainly she is more sensitive, and her sense of propriety is far more refined than the sense of man. You kiss a woman, she immediately closes her eyes – she gives you the freedom of being a subject.

Jean-Paul Sartre has some truth in his statement that lovers are always in conflict because they reduce each other into things, and nobody wants to be a thing. Then what to say about God? – He reduces the whole humanity, all beings, into things. He is the eternal subject and we are objects. Hence Sartre says we cannot allow God to exist. Even if He is, He has to be killed, He has to be destroyed.

There have been thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Schiller, Hegel, who say: If there is no God He has to be invented, because without God man will lose all significance. And they are also right: even if there is no God he has to be invented, for man’s sake. It is better to have an invented God than not to have any. At least He will give an appearance of significance to life, a certain rhythm. The noise will start looking at least like music. The accidental will not be accidental any more, some meaning will arise. Hence they say if there is no God, He has to be invented.

And on the other pole, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud say: Even if there is God, He has to be killed, because if He remains man is reduced into an object. Man loses all freedom, man loses all will. But both are wrong, because both are thinking in terms of God as if God is the other.

Kabir says – just as all the mystics of all the ages have been saying – God is not the other. He is you. He is your inside. He is your subjectivity, so how can He reduce you into an object? He is not separate, so how can He take your freedom away? He need not be invented because He is already there. And He need not be killed, because in killing Him you will be simply committing suicide – and that is impossible; nobody can commit suicide. You can drop one body, you will immediately enter into another womb. Suicide is impossible. You can pretend the game of committing suicide but you can never succeed in it, because nothing can be destroyed. Not even a grain of sand can be destroyed.

Physicists say there is no possibility of destroying anything. Neither can something new be created nor can something existent be destroyed. If this is so even about a grain of sand, what to say about the being of man?’ – that is the highest flowering – how can it be destroyed?

Life is eternal. Life is immortal. It changes forms, certainly, just like the waves in the ocean go on changing but the ocean remains. Bodies come and go, minds come and go, but your innermost witness remains always there. And that witness is God.

Hegel, Kant, Schiller, are wrong; so is Freud, so is Nietzsche, so is Jean-Paul Sartre. They both accept the same premise: that God is the other. And God is not the other. God is your very soul.

God is already in you… just a little alertness.

Wake up and see! You need not wait for the Guest. The Guest has already arrived in the very being of the host. The Guest is found in the host.

-Osho

From The Guest, Discourse #13

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Whole Life is Yoga – Osho

Sri Aurobindo says somewhere that the whole life is yoga – and it is so. Everything can become a meditation. And unless everything becomes a meditation, meditation has not happened to you.

Meditation cannot be a part, a fragment. Either it is – and when it is you are wholly in it – or it is not. You cannot make a part of your life meditative. That is impossible, and that is what is being tried everywhere.

You can become meditative, not a part of you; that is impossible because meditation is a quality of your being. It is just like breathing: you go on breathing whatsoever you are doing. Irrelevant of what you are doing, you go on breathing. Walking, sitting, lying, sleeping, you continue breathing. You cannot arrange it in such a way that sometimes you breathe and sometimes you don’t breathe. It is a continuum.

Meditation is an inner breathing, and when I say “an inner breathing,” I mean it literally; it is not a metaphor. Just as you are breathing air you can breathe consciousness, and once you start breathing consciousness in and out you are no more just a physical body. And with that start, beginning with a higher breathing – a breathing of consciousness, of life itself, as it were – you enter a different realm, a different dimension. That dimension is metaphysics.

Your breathing is physical; meditation is metaphysical. So you cannot make a part of your life meditative. You cannot meditate in the morning and then forget it. You cannot go to a temple or to a church and meditate there and come out of your meditation as you come out of the temple. That is not possible, and if you try it you will be trying a false thing. You can enter a church and you come out of it, but you cannot enter meditation and come out of it. When you enter, you have entered.

Wherever you go, now meditation will be you. This is one of the basic, primary, elemental facts to be remembered always. Secondly, you can enter meditation from anywhere because the whole life is in a deep meditation.

The hills are meditating, the stars are meditating, the flowers, the trees, the elements are meditating, the very earth is meditating. The whole life is meditating, and you can enter it from anywhere; anything can become an entrance. This has been used. That is why there are so many techniques; that is why there are so many religions; that is why one religion cannot understand another – because their entrances are different. And sometimes there are religions which are not known even by the name of religion. You will not recognize certain persons as religious because their entrance is so different.

For example, a poet. A poet can enter meditation without going to any teacher, without going to any temple, without in any way being religious, so-called religious. His poetry, his creativity, can become an entrance; he can enter through it. Or a potter who is just creating earthen pots can enter meditation just by creating earthen pots. The very craft can become an entry. Or an archer can become meditative through his archery, or a gardener, or anyone can enter from anywhere.

Whatsoever you can do can become a door. If the quality of awareness changes while you are doing something, it becomes a technique. So there can be as many techniques as you can imagine.

Any act can become a door. So the act, the technique, the way, the method, is not primary, but the quality of consciousness that you bring to the act is the basic thing. […]

Any act can become meditative, and once you know how an act becomes meditative you can transform all your acts into meditation. Then the whole life becomes yoga. Walking on the street or working in the office or just sitting and not doing anything – just idling, or anything – can become meditation. So remember, meditation doesn’t belong to the act; it belongs to the quality you bring to the act.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #39

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He is the Breath Inside the Breath – Osho

Kabir says, ‘Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.’

Whenever you ask about God you ask as if God is there like a problem to be encountered. You ask as if you are standing outside God and speculating, observing Him. You ask as if God is an object. God is not an object, God is your subjectivity. God is not there outside, God is your interiority, your innerness. That is the meaning when Kabir says:

He is the breath inside the breath.

Watch your breath and you will come to know what he means – you will see one thing which cannot be seen unless you watch your breath. Buddha made it a great technique for meditation, watching the breath, because through watching it you will come to know the breath inside the breath.

The word ‘breath’ means life. In Sanskrit the word for breath is prana: prana means life. In Hebrew the word for breath means spirit. In all the languages of the world, breath is thought to be synonymous with life or spirit or soul. But breath is not the real soul – you will come to this experience only when you watch.

Try a small experiment: sitting silently, just start watching your breath. The easiest way to watch is from the entrance of the nose. When the breath comes in, feel the touch of the breath at the entrance of the nose – watch it there. The touch will be easier to watch, breath will be too subtle; in the beginning just watch the touch. The breath goes in, and you feel it going in: watch it. And then follow it, go with it. You will find there comes a point where it stops. Just somewhere near your navel it stops – for a tiny, tiny moment, for a pal, it stops. Then it moves outwards again; then follow it – again feel the touch, the breath going out of the nose. Follow it, go with it outside – again you will come to a point, the breath stops for a very tiny moment. Then again the cycle starts.

Inhalation, gap, exhalation, gap, inhalation, gap. That gap is the most mysterious phenomenon inside you. When the breath comes in and stops and there is no movement, that is the point where one can meet God. Or when the breath goes out and stops and there is no movement.

Remember, you are not to stop it; it stops on its own. If you stop it you will miss the whole point, because the doer will come in and witnessing will disappear. You are not to do anything about it. You are not to change the breath pattern, you are neither to inhale nor to exhale. It is not like pranayama of yoga, where you start manipulating the breath; it is not that. You don’t touch the breath at all – you allow its naturalness, its natural flow. When it goes out you follow it, when it comes in you follow it.

And soon you will become aware that there are two gaps. In those two gaps is the door. And in those two gaps you will understand, you will see, that breath itself is not life – maybe a food for life, just like other foods, but not life itself. Because when the breathing stops you are there, perfectly there – you are perfectly conscious, utterly conscious. And the breath has stopped, breathing is no more there, and you are there.

And once you continue this watching of the breath – what Buddha calls vipassana or anapanasati you – if you go on watching it, watching it, watching it, slowly, slowly you will see the gap is increasing and becoming bigger. Finally it happens that for minutes together the gap remains. One breath goes in, and the gap… and for minutes the breath does not go out. All has stopped. The world has stopped, time has stopped, thinking has stopped. Because when the breath stops, thinking is not possible. And when the breath stops for minutes together, thinking is impossible, absolutely impossible – because the thought process needs continuous oxygen, and your thought process and your breathing are very deeply related.

When you are angry your breath has a different rhythm, when you are sexually stimulated you have a different breath rhythm, when you are silent a different breath rhythm again. When you are happy a different breath rhythm, when you are sad a different rhythm again. Your breathing goes on changing with the moods of the mind. The vice versa is also true – when the breath changes, the moods of the mind change. And when breath stops, mind stops.

In that stopping of the mind the whole world stops – because the mind is the world. And in that stopping you come to know for the first time what is the breath inside the breath: life inside life. That experience is liberating. That experience makes you alert of God – and God is not a person but the experience of life itself.

-Osho

From The Revolution, Discourse #3

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And Being IS Meditation – Osho

I thought that meditation was a simple thing. But seeing people doing Vipassana, I am losing all hope of ever becoming a successful meditator. Please give me a little encouragement.

Meditation is simple. Precisely because it is simple, it looks difficult. Your mind is accustomed to dealing with difficult problems, and it has completely forgotten how to respond to the simple things of life. The more simple a thing is, the more difficult it looks to the mind, because the mind is very efficient in solving difficult things. It has been trained to solve difficult things; it does not know how to tackle the simple. Meditation is simple, your mind is complex. It is not a problem that meditation is creating. The problem is coming from your mind, not from meditation.

Vipassana is the most simple meditation in the world. It is through Vipassana that Buddha became enlightened, and it is through Vipassana that many more people have become enlightened than through any other method. Vipassana is the method. Yes, there are other methods also, but they have helped only very few people. Vipassana has helped thousands, and it is really very simple; is not like yoga.

Yoga is difficult, arduous, complex. You have to torture yourself in many ways: distort your body, contort your body, sit this way and that, torture, stand on your head – exercises and exercises… but yoga seems to be very appealing to people.

Vipassana is so simple that you don’t take any note of it. In fact, coming across Vipassana for the first time, one doubts whether it can be called a meditation at all. What is it? – no physical exercise, no breathing exercise; a very simple phenomenon: just watching your breath coming in, going out…finished, this is the method; sitting silently, watching your breath coming in, going out; not losing track, that’s all. Not that you have to change your breathing – it is not pranayam; it is not a breathing exercise where you have to take deep breaths, exhale, inhale, no. Let the breathing be simple, as it is. You just have to bring one new quality to it: awareness.

The breath goes out, watch; the breath comes in, watch. You will become aware: the breath touching your nostrils at one point, you will become aware. You can concentrate there: the breath comes in, you feel the touch of the breath on the nostrils; then it goes out, you feel the touch again. Remain there at the tip of the nose. It is not that you have to concentrate at the tip of the nose; you have just to be alert, aware, watchful. It is not concentration. Don’t miss, just go on remembering. In the beginning you will miss again and again; then bring yourself back If it is difficult for you – for a few people it is difficult to watch it there – then they can watch the breath in the belly. When the breath goes in, the belly goes up; when the breath goes out, the belly goes in. You go on watching your belly. If you have a really good belly, it will help.

Have you watched? If you see Indian statues of Buddha, those statues don’t have real bellies – in fact, no belly at all. Buddha looks a perfect athlete: chest coming out, belly in. But if you see a Japanese statue of Buddha you will be surprised: it does not look buddhalike at all – a big belly, so big that you cannot see the chest at all, almost as if Buddha is pregnant, all belly. The reason why this change happened is that in India, while Buddha was alive, he himself was watching the breath at the nose, hence the belly was not important at all. But as Vipassana moved from India to Tibet to China to Korea to Burma to Japan, slowly, slowly people became aware that it is easier to watch in the belly than at the nose. Then Buddha statues started becoming different, with bigger bellies.

You can watch either at the belly or at the nose, whichever feels right for you or whichever feels easier for you. That it be easier is the point. And just watching the breath, miracles happen.

Meditation is not difficult. It is simple. Precisely because it is simple you are feeling the difficulty. You would like to do many things, and there is nothing to do; that is the problem. It is a great problem, because we have been taught to do things. We ask what should be done, and meditation means a state of non-doing: you have not to do anything, you have to stop doing. You have to be in a state of utter inaction. Even thinking is a kind of doing – drop that too. Feeling is a kind of doing – drop that too. Doing, thinking, feeling – all gone, you simply are. That is being. And being is meditation. It is very simple.

In your mother’s womb you were in the same space. In Vipassana you will be entering again into the same space. And you will remember, you will have a déjà vu. When you enter into deep Vipassana, you will be surprised that you know it, you have known it before. You will recognize it immediately because for nine months in your mother’s womb you were in the same space, doing nothing, just being.

You ask me, “I thought that meditation was a simple thing, but seeing people doing Vipassana I am losing all hope of ever becoming a successful meditator.”

Never think about meditation in terms of success, because that is bringing your achieving mind into it, the egoistic mind into it. Then meditation becomes your ego trip. Don’t think in terms of success or failure. Those terms are not applicable in the world of meditation. Forget all about that. Those are mind terms; they are comparative. And that’s the problem: you must be watching others succeeding, reaching, ecstatic, and you will be feeling very low. You will be feeling silly, sitting and looking at your breath, watching your breath. You must be looking very silly and nothing is happening. Nothing is happening because you are expecting something to happen too much.

-Osho

From The Guest, Discourse #15

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The Eternity of Your Being – Osho

What does it mean when you say, “Just be yourself”? How can I be myself when I don’t know who I am? I know many of my preferences, likings, disliking and tendencies, which seem to be the outcome of a programmed biocomputer called the mind. Does just being oneself mean that one totally lives out the whole content of the mind as watchfully as possible?

Yes, it exactly means that—to live as an awareness: awareness of all the programs the mind has been conditioned for, awareness of all the impulses, desires, memories, imaginations… all that the mind can do.

One has to be not part of it, but separate—seeing it but not being it—watching it. And this is one of the most essential things to remember, that you cannot watch your watchfulness. If you watch your watchfulness, then the watcher is you, not the watched. So you cannot go beyond watchfulness. The point that you cannot transcend is your being. The point that you cannot go beyond is you. You can watch very easily any thought, any emotion, any sentiment. Just one thing you cannot watch—and that is your watchfulness. And if you manage to watch it, that means you have shifted: the first watchfulness has become just a thought; now you are the second watcher.

You can go on shifting back, but you cannot get out of watchfulness because it is you: you cannot be otherwise.

So when I say, “Just be yourself,” I am saying to you, “Just be unprogrammed, unconditioned awareness.” That’s how you had come into the world, and that’s how the enlightened person leaves the world. He lives in the world but remains totally separate.

One of the great mystics, Kabir, has a beautiful poem about it. All his poems are just perfect—nothing can be better. One of his poems says, “I will give back the soul that was given to me at the time of my birth as pure, as clean, as it was given to me. I will give it back that way when I die.” He is talking about awareness, that it has remained unpolluted. The whole world was there to pollute it, but he has remained watchful.

All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence—all the treasures that you have been endowed with.

But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. And you need not be an ascetic, you need not be anti-life; you need not renounce the world and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can continue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved: whatever you do, you do with awareness—even the smallest act of the body or the mind—and with each act of awareness you will become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the eternity of your being.

-Osho

From Beyond Psychology, Discourse #22

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Flowering, Awakening, Self-Realization and Enlightenment – Osho

A short time ago you said that spring has come and many sannyasins are ready to flower. Do “flowering,” “awakening” and “self-realization” all mean enlightenment, the ultimate truth? Or is there a difference? And can a person, after attaining, fall back into identification with the mind?

Mukto, there is a difference between flowering, awakening, self-realization, and enlightenment. Enlightenment is the ultimate truth—the seeker disappears but the truth is found. The pilgrim disappears but God is found. It is important to understand the differences . . .

From enlightenment there is no possibility of falling back, because you are no longer there to fall back. As long as you are, there is a possibility.

Only your absence is the guarantee that you cannot fall back.

Flowering is just the beginning of entering within yourself—just as you enter into a garden. It is immensely important, because without entering you are never going to reach to the center. But in flowering, for the first time you recognize your potential, your possibility. In flowering is the transition period, from human to divine. But one can fall back, because the flowering is so new and so fragile and your past is so old and so strong—it can pull you back; it is still there.

Awakening is getting very close to your center. And as you get closer to the center, falling back becomes more and more difficult because your new experience is gathering power, strength, experience, and the old is losing. But the old is still there; it has not disappeared. Ordinarily people don’t fall from awakening, but the possibility remains: one can fall.

Self-realization is reaching to your center. Many religions have believed that self-realization is the end—for example, Jainism—you have come to your ultimate truth. It is not true. Self-realization is only a dewdrop which has become aware, alert, contented, fulfilled. It is almost impossible to fall back from self-realization—but I am saying almost impossible, not absolutely impossible, because the self can deceive you; it can bring your ego back.

The self and the ego are very similar. The self is the natural thing and the ego is the synthetic, so it happens sometimes that a self-realized man becomes a pious egoist. His egoism is not going to harm anyone, but it certainly prevents him from dropping into the ocean and disappearing completely.

Enlightenment is the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the vast, infinite ocean. Once the dewdrop has fallen into the ocean, now there is no way even to find it. The question of turning back does not arise.

Enlightenment, hence, is the ultimate truth. What begins as flowering moves on the path of awakening, reaches to self-realization. Then one quantum leap more—disappearing into the eternal, into the infinite.

You are no more, only existence is.

I have told you about Kabir, India’s greatest mystic. When he was young, he became self-realized and he wrote a small couplet:

Herat, herat he sakhi
Rahya, Kabir, herai

“Searching and searching and searching, oh my friend, the searcher is lost. Seeking and seeking and seeking, the seeker is lost.”

Bund samani samund mein
Sokat herijai

“The dewdrop has slipped into the ocean; now there is no way to get it back.”

But it was too early to say that. The dewdrop was still there, slipping towards the ocean, but it had not yet fallen into the ocean.

When Kabir was dying, he became enlightened. He called his son Kamaal and told him, “I have written something wrong. At that moment, that was my feeling—that I had come to the ultimate. Before I die, you write this down, and change it.”

The change is very small in words, but in experience it is tremendous. He has used again the same words:

Herat, herat he sakhi
“Oh beloved, seeking and searching, the seeker is lost.”

Samund samund bund mein
Sokat herijai
“And the ocean has fallen into the dewdrop; now it is impossible to find it.”

Just a little difference in the words . . . “The dewdrop has fallen into the ocean” – something of the self has remained in it. But “the ocean has fallen into the dewdrop” . . . that is the tremendous experience and explosion of enlightenment. The first statement was about self-realization; the second statement is about enlightenment.

From enlightenment, falling is simply impossible. You are gone—and gone forever; not even a shadow or a trace of you is left behind.

Up to self-realization the possibility remains—it becomes less and less, but it remains.

You can start being egoistic about your self-realization: “I have known, I am a realized person. I am a saint, I have encountered God “—but that “I” is there, howsoever pious. Even its shadow is dangerous; it can pull you back.

I have heard a very beautiful story about Jesus…

Jesus was walking through Jerusalem when he saw an angry crowd shouting and screaming at a woman. He came closer and heard the mob accusing the woman of adultery. Jesus strode to the front of the mob, held up his arms and said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

The crowd fell silent, but one little old lady pushed to the front, picked up a huge rock, and hurled it at the sobbing woman. Jesus gently took the old lady by the arm and said quietly,

“Mother, why do you always embarrass me?”

Jesus’ mother! She is a virtuous woman—so virtuous that she has given birth to Jesus without any contact with another human being. She stands alone in the whole of history with the claim—even after the birth of the son, of being the virgin Mary. That idea must have got into the old woman’s mind too much. Her virtue, her piousness—God has chosen her to be the mother of His only begotten son-has become a subtle ego in her. The others were not pious. The moment Jesus said, “The first stone has to be hurled by one who is virtuous,” the mob stopped. They were all in the same boat.

And you can see it in your saints . . . a strange but very subtle ego. Spirituality has become their achievement. Somebody has all the riches of the world, somebody is the most beautiful person, somebody is the strongest, and somebody is the most pious. The question is not what it is by which the ego can get nourished—any idea can make you fall.

One has not to stop until he has reached the point when he is not: when there is no claimer, when one has moved the full circle and has come back to the world, just nobody. Perhaps people may not recognize him as a great saint . . . and this is my understanding, that the greatest of saints have remained unrecognized, because you understand only the language of the ego. You don’t understand the language of egolessness.

The greatest sage will appear to you just an ordinary man, nothing special, with no claim for any talent, for any possession, for any power, for any genius, for any knowledge – no claim at all. He has become absolutely a zero. But the zero is not negative, it is full of godliness, overflowing with godliness.

-Osho

From The Hidden Splendor, Discourse #16

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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