Tag: Mind

You are in Prison and You Think You are Free – Osho

George Gurdjieff has said: “You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

What are the prisons that I call “home”?

Rama Prem, George Gurdjieff is one of the most significant masters of this age.

He is unique in many ways — nobody has said things in the contemporary world the way Gurdjieff has said them. He is almost like another Bodhidharma or Chuang Tzu, apparently absurd but in reality giving great indications towards the liberation of human consciousness.

You are asking about one of his significant statements. He often used to say, “You are in prison.” Sometimes he was even deeper into the reality, and instead of saying, “You are in prison,” he would say, “You are the prison.” That is more true.

If you wish to get out of prison — or better to say, if you don’t want to be a prison — the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison… or you are the prison. This is something to be always remembered as one of the first principles for any seeker of truth.

The tendency of the human mind is to deny those things which are ugly, to hide those things which he does not want others to know — to hide in such a way, in such depths of the unconscious that even he himself becomes unaware of them. This way he maintains his superficial personality.

Gurdjieff had a story about it…

There was a magician who used to live in faraway deep forests, and he had many sheep because that was his only food. In those deep forests he was keeping all those sheep just to kill them every day, one by one. Naturally, the sheep were very afraid of the man, and they used to run into the forest being afraid that any day can be their day. Their friends are gone, there is no reliability… tomorrow they may be gone. Out of fear they used to go far away, deep into the forest. And to find them was a tedious job every day.

Finally, the magician did a trick. He hypnotized all the sheep, and told every sheep, “You are an exception; everybody may be killed but you can never be killed. You are no ordinary sheep; you have a divine privilege.” To some he said, “You are not sheep at all; you are lions, you are tigers, you are wolves. Only sheep are killed. You need not hide yourself in the forest; that is very embarrassing, because a lion hiding himself in the forest in the fear that he will be killed… only sheep are killed.” And in this way, he managed to hypnotize all the sheep in different ways.

He even said to a few sheep, “You are men, human beings, and human beings don’t kill each other. You are just like me. Never be afraid and never escape out of fear.” Since that day, no sheep escaped and hid in the forest, although they all saw every day that one sheep was being killed, slaughtered. But naturally everybody thought, That must be a sheep; I am a tiger, a lion, a human being. I am special and exceptional, I have a divine privilege…. So many different stories he put in their minds.

Gurdjieff says that unless you realize the first thing — that you are in prison, that you are the prison — then there is no hope for freedom. If you already believe that you are free, you are a hypnotized sheep which believes himself to be a lion — exceptional, there is no need to be afraid — which even believes he is a human being. He goes on seeing other sheep being killed, and still remains in a hypnotized state, never being aware of his actuality. To be free, if you already know that you are free, there is no problem.

All the religions together, perhaps unintentionally, have created a tremendous hypnotic state. People believe they have immortal souls. I am not saying that they don’t have, I am simply saying that they don’t know what they are believing. And because they believe they have an immortal soul, they never discover that they already have it. They have been told, “You are the very kingdom of God”… and it is so comfortable and so consoling to believe. But then there is no way to seek and search and find whether your hypothetical belief has any truth in it, or is just a hypnotic trick used by the society to keep you unafraid of death, to keep you unafraid of disease, old age, to keep you unafraid of your loneliness.

Your God may be just a psychological hypnosis. It is not your discovery. That is true — that much is absolutely true. It has been implanted in your mind, and because you go on believing in it, your belief prevents any adventure in seeking the truth.

Ordinarily, you have been told continually that unless you believe, you will not find. But the truth is just the contrary. Belief is a barrier, it is not a bridge. Those who believe never find, because they never even begin the search; there is no need.

You are in prison and you think you are free.

You are in chains but you think they are ornaments. You are a slave but you have been told that you are humble, that you are simple, that this is the way a religious person should be. You are surrounded by many hypnotic strategies developed by society down the ages. And those hypnotic strategies are the root cause of your ignorance, of your misery, of your unenlightened state.

Hence the first thing to realize is that you are in prison. The moment you recognize that you are in prison, you cannot tolerate the prison. Nobody can tolerate it; it goes against human dignity. You will start finding ways to get out of it. You will start finding people who have already got out of it. You may start seeking and searching outside help beyond the walls, because there are people beyond the walls ready with every kind of help. But they are absolutely helpless if you believe that you are living in absolute freedom.

If you believe this imprisonment is your home, then of course it is absolute nonsense even to think of getting rid of it. The wall that keeps you a prisoner, you think is a protection. Then there is no question of making a hole in the wall and getting out, or finding a ladder, or taking some help from the outside. A rope can be thrown from the outside, a ladder can be arranged from the outside, but this is possible only if the basic thing, that you are in prison, is recognized. George Gurdjieff was consistently insisting, “This is a basic realization. Without it, there is no progress towards enlightenment. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

“What are the prisons that I call `home’?” Rama Prem, all the so-called homes are nothing but prisons, because they don’t give you freedom, they only give you security, safety, and in place they take away your very being, your freedom, your joy, your dance. But certainly they give you security, safety — and naturally you have to pay for it.

The price that one has to pay is immensely great in comparison to what you get. You have to sell your very soul. But then what is the point of safety and security? You were searching for security and safety for your being, and in the very search you have sold your being. Now you are secure and safe, but what is the point? For whom is the safety and security? It does not serve you, it serves those who have managed to convince you that “If you give your soul, your being, we will take care — then you need not be worried, then we are responsible for your safety and security.”

The moment you give up your responsibility, you give up everything. Then you are just an empty shell, without any meaning and without any essence. Your homes are nothing but beautiful prisons made by you, decorated by you. You think they are protecting you; they are destroying you. Certainly they protect you from the rains and they protect you from the winds and they protect you from the sun, but for these trivia they destroy you completely. You lose all joy, you lose all freedom, you lose all sense of direction. You lose the very purpose you are here for. You get lost in your own home. You become too much concerned about the furniture and about the decorations, and you forget yourself completely. This forgetfulness is a kind of deep psychological sleep.

Your wife, your husband, your children — nobody is yours. All are man-made, arbitrary relationships — even your own children are not your own. They come through you; they don’t belong to you. You belong to the past; they belong to the future. There is no connection, there is no relationship; hence, as man has become more and more intelligent there has come a great generation gap.

One great Russian novelist, Turgenev, has written a book — perhaps his best, his masterpiece – Fathers and Sons. The whole book is about the struggle between the fathers and the sons, because the fathers would like the sons just to be their replicas. Naturally, they will not allow the sons any freedom. Obedience they expect; they expect their sons to be their carbon copies. […]

Religions have created all kinds of crimes in the mind of man, just by prohibiting them. They have also created ideas which prevent man from any search. They say, “Believe” — and belief is cheap. You don’t have to do anything. Gurdjieff had to go to such extents that he started saying to people, “You don’t have souls. It is a wrong idea, implanted within you by religions, that everybody has a soul.”

He had to say such a thing just to wake you up to search whether it is true or not; otherwise, everybody was perfectly asleep. What is the need to search? You already have it; God is within you! So do other things which, if you don’t do, you will not get — become a president, prime minister, become the richest man in the world, conquer the world — because these things will not happen on their own. As far as God is concerned you already have him; he is within you, you don’t have to go anywhere. Any day, any rainy day when you can’t go anywhere to conquer the world, and you don’t have anything else to do — to correct the mechanism of your car, or to open your wall clock, or to open your radio or television even though they are functioning perfectly well, but you don’t have anything else to do…. Any day, when you don’t have anything to do, you can find God. He is within you, in your pocket.

Gurdjieff is perhaps the only man in the whole of history who insisted against all religions that you don’t have a soul — that a soul has to be created, then you have it. You are not born with it, you are born only with the possibility. If you make a great effort, perhaps you may achieve it. Otherwise most people are born and die; there is no soul that survives.

He was telling a compassionate lie. He was not right, but I cannot say that he was telling the lie for any other reason than compassion. It is true you are born with the soul, but it has become such an accepted fact that you don’t even look within yourself. Somebody needs to shatter your idea that you are born with a soul, to tell you that inside you are just empty, hollow. Perhaps this may shake you up, wake you up. Perhaps this may give you the idea to look inside at least one time, whether there is a soul or you have been deceived.

And George Gurdjieff helped more people in this century than anybody else, because he created a great longing: “Don’t die before you have created a soul; otherwise nothing will survive the death. Crystallize your being so that death cannot destroy it. But you are not born with it, you have to create it.”

The idea of all the religions, although true, has not been helpful; it has become a hindrance. Gurdjieff’s compassion is great. All the religions were against him, obviously, because that is the one point they all agree on — that everybody is born with a soul. But Gurdjieff’s point is more psychological, and more effective in creating liberation. He says you are just empty, and you will remain empty unless you make the effort, with a determined will, to create a center within you. There is possibility, potential, but you have to make it an actuality. His insight was great.

And since Gurdjieff, people have forgotten it completely. He was alive just thirty years ago and just within thirty years people have forgotten the great teacher who was compassionate enough even to lie, just to make you shocked; just to create an opening in you so that you can start searching whether what all the religions have been saying has any truth in it or not.

The first thing he says is to realize you are in prison. The first thing that can also be said is, you have to realize that you are not yet. You have to be. You are a seed, but you have to find the right soil, and nobody else can do it for you. If you go on depending on priests and your so-called saints, you will miss this great opportunity that life has given to you. And one does not know whether a second chance is being given or not. It has to be made emphatically clear to you that there is a possibility — once missed, you have missed it forever.

Gurdjieff created a great turmoil in a few intelligent people, and he put them to great work in finding themselves. I don’t agree with George Gurdjieff as far as his methods are concerned, but as far as this statement is concerned I agree totally. It is simply a psychological fact.

There are people who believe they are intelligent. In fact, it is very difficult to find somebody who believes he is unintelligent. If you can find somebody who believes he is unintelligent, there is a possibility for him to be intelligent. But for all those who already believe they are intelligent, you can’t help them. And certainly this whole humanity is not intelligent. Their actions show it, their behavior shows it, their misery shows it — it shows nothing but their retardedness.

But their belief is that they are geniuses — life is just not giving them the right opportunities to show their talents; otherwise, they could have been Picasso, or Sartre, or Bertrand Russell, or Martin Buber; there is no problem. It is just because life is preventing them; otherwise, they have everything. It is not so.

Now education is universal, particularly in advanced countries, but even universal education does not create universal geniuses. Everybody is educated but even that does not give you the same talent. Man is living in a kind of half-awake and half-asleep state, and it is very easy to believe that you are great – great in intelligence, great in beauty, great in everything — rather than finding greatness, creating greatness, because that will require effort, tremendous effort. And enlightenment is the ultimate intelligence. If you already believe you are intelligent, you have stopped yourself from growing.

Just watch exactly where you are. Be very impartial about judging yourself. See exactly, even if it hurts, that you are a slave — of some political ideology, of some religious theology, of some racial stupidity. Just watch and be very impartial and objective about yourself, and you will find what Gurdjieff calls your prisons. And once you recognize your prisons, it is not difficult to get out, because they are your own creations.

Bernstein died and went to hell. The receptionist asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“Do I have a choice?” asked the surprised Bernstein.

“Certainly! This anteroom is surrounded by closed doors. Just listen at each one and decide which you want to enter.”

Bernstein listened at the first door and heard horrible shrieks of agony. He went to the second, then the third — always hearing screams, cries, and yells. Finally, at the seventh door, he heard nothing but gentle murmuring.

He said quickly, “I’ll take this one.”

The door was flung open and he was propelled inside. He found himself up to his lower lip in a vast sea of shit. With him were millions of others, standing on tiptoe, muttering, “Don’t make waves! Don’t make waves!”

Whatever you have made your life is your own choice. Even in hell you have a choice – everywhere you have a choice. Your life is your own creation. Once you recognize it, then every change is possible.

Churchill’s commentary on man was: “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.” Man is a very strange animal, strangest of all the animals you see. He goes on believing in things which are not, he goes on believing in things which he has not. He never makes any effort, even in finding one very fundamental thing: who he is, from where he comes, and what is his destiny, where he is going.

People discuss all kinds of things, and people read about all kinds of things, but generally they never bother about themselves. It seems they take themselves for granted, and that’s what Gurdjieff wants to stop: Don’t take yourself for granted. Look inside, search for who you are, and whether you are or if there is just emptiness and something has to be done to bring the seed to sprout, to take care of the seed so that one day it can blossom.

Sinking uneasily into the depths of the psychiatrist’s couch, the patient sighed, “Doctor, I have a problem.” He loosened his collar and continued, “I’ve got one son in Harvard and another at Yale. I’ve just gifted them with twin Ferraris. I have a townhouse on upper Fifth Avenue, and a summer home at East Hampton, and a sprawling ranch in Venezuela.”

“Well,” smiled the psychiatrist, obviously impressed, “either I missed something or you really don’t have a problem.”

“Doc,” the harried chap croaked, “I only make seventy-five dollars a week.”

Naturally you will have problems! You make seventy-five dollars a week, and you imagine all these things: two Ferraris, two sons — one in Harvard, one in Yale — a townhouse, a house in the hills, a big ranch in Venezuela, and seventy-five dollars a week! People create their problems. People are utterly poor in their consciousness, and go on believing that the kingdom of God is within. In your poor consciousness, you can have only a very poor God — seventy-five dollars a week. Your God is as rich as your consciousness is, because the God is another name for your consciousness.

-Osho

Excerpt from The Invitation, Discourse #4

The Invitation

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

Something Belonging to Eternity – Osho

A few months ago, my friend and I were visiting his dying father. Lots of people were around, his body was about finished. To most people he was indifferent, but when everyone left, he suddenly opened his eyes and told us, “I feel like I have two bodies; one body is sick and the other is completely healthy.” We told him, “That’s right! The healthy body is the real you, so stay with that one.” He said, “Okay,” and closed his eyes. As we sat with him, the sick energy around the hospital bed changed. We couldn’t believe this new energy; it was as if we were in darshan with you . . . such beautiful silence. I felt a bit strange saying these words to someone who was really experiencing this. Whatever I said wasn’t really my experience, just something I’d thought about. After we left he improved for a while, went home and died peacefully in his bed.

Beloved Osho, even though I’ve been with you for ten years, I felt so ignorant in front of this man who was ready to let go of everything with such trust and clarity and peace.

Geeta, the experience that you went through always is possible when someone is dying. All that is required is a little alertness. The man who was dying was aware – not much awareness is needed for this experience.

At the moment of death your physical body and your spiritual body start separating. Ordinarily, they are so much involved with each other that you don’t feel their separation. But at the moment of death, just before death happens, both the bodies start getting unidentified with each other. Now their ways are going to be different; the physical body is going to the physical elements, and the spiritual body is on its pilgrimage onwards, to a new birth, in a new form, in a new womb.

If the person is a little alert he can see it himself, and because you said to him that the healthier body is you, and the body that is sick and dying is not you . . . In those moments, to trust is very easy because it is happening just before the eyes of the person himself; he cannot identify with the body that is falling apart, and he can immediately recognize the fact that he is the healthier one, the deeper one.

But you could have helped the man even a little more – this was good, but not good enough. Even this experience of the man, of getting unidentified with the physical body, immediately changed the energy in the room; it became silent, peaceful.

But if you had learned the art of how to help a dying man, you would not have stopped where you stopped. A second thing was absolutely necessary to tell him because he was in a trusting state – everybody is, at the moment of death.

It is life which creates problems and doubts and postponements, but death has no time to postpone. The man cannot say, “I will try to see,” or, “I will see tomorrow.” He has to do it right now, this very moment, because even the next moment is not certain. Most probably he is not going to survive. And what is he going to lose by trusting? Death anyway, is going to take away everything. So the fear of trust is not there; time to think about it is not there. And a clarity is there that the physical body is getting farther and farther away.

It was a good step to tell him, “You are the healthier body.” The second step would have been to tell him, “You are the witness of both the bodies; the body that is dying is physical, and the body that you are feeling is healthy is psychological. But who are you? You can see both the bodies . . . certainly you must be the third; you cannot be one of these two.”

This is the whole process of the bardo. Only in Tibet have they developed the art of dying. While the whole world has been trying to develop the art of living, Tibet is the only country in the world which has developed the whole science and art of dying. They call it the bardo.

If you had told the person, “This is good that you have taken one step, you are out of the physical body; but now you have got identified with the psychological body. You are not even that; you are only awareness, a pure consciousness, a perceptivity….” If you could have helped the person to understand that he is neither this body nor that body, but something bodiless, formless, a pure consciousness, then his death would have been a totally different phenomenon.

You saw the change of energy; you would have seen another change of energy. You saw silence descending; you would have seen music also, a certain dancing energy also, a certain fragrance filling the whole space. And the man’s face would have shown a new phenomenon – the aura of light.

If he had taken the second step also, then his death would have been the last death. In the bardo they call it “the great death,” because now he will not be born into another form, into another imprisonment; now he will remain in the eternal, in the oceanic consciousness that fills the whole universe.

So remember it – it may happen to many of you. You may be with a friend or with a relative, your mother, your father. While they are dying, help them to realize two things: first, they are not the physical body – which is very simple for a dying man to recognize. Second – which is a little difficult, but if the man is able to recognize the first, there is a possibility of the second recognition too – that you are not even the second body; you are beyond both the bodies. You are pure freedom and pure consciousness.

If he had taken the second step, then you would have seen a miracle happening around him – something, not just silence, but something more alive, something belonging to eternity, to immortality. And all of you who were present there would have been overwhelmed with gratitude that this death has not been a time of mourning, but it has become a moment of celebration.

If you can transform a death into a moment of celebration, you have helped your friend, your mother, your father, your brother, your wife, your husband. You have given them the greatest gift that is possible in existence. And close to death it is very easy. The child is not even worried about life or death; he has no concern. The young man is too much involved in biological games, in ambitions, in becoming richer, in becoming powerful, in having more prestige; he has no time to think of eternal questions.

But at the moment of death, just before death is going to happen, you don’t have any ambition. And whether you are rich or poor makes no difference; whether you are a criminal or a saint makes no difference. Death takes you beyond all discriminations of life and beyond all stupid games of life.

But rather than helping people, people destroy that beautiful moment. It is the most precious in a man’s whole life. Even if he has lived one hundred years, this is the most precious moment. But people start crying and weeping and showing their sympathy, saying, “This is very untimely, it should not happen.” Or they start consoling the person, saying, “Don’t be worried, the doctors are saying that you will be saved.”

These are all foolishnesses. Even the doctors play a part in these stupid things. They don’t tell you that your death has come. They avoid the subject; they go on giving you hope. They say, “Don’t be worried, you will be saved,” knowing perfectly well that the man is going to die. They are giving him a false consolation, not knowing that this is the moment when he should be made fully aware of death – so acutely and so impeccably aware that pure consciousness is experienced. That moment has become a moment of great victory. Now there is no death for him, but only eternal life.

-Osho

From The Razor’s Edge, Discourse #3

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

A State of Silent Identification – Osho

Please explain. Is life an observer and death observed?

No, both are the observed – life and death. Beyond both is the observer. You cannot call that observer ‘life’ because life contains death in it. You cannot call that observer ’death’ because death presupposes life. That observer is just transcendence.

That which you are is neither life nor death. You pass through life, you pass through death, but you are neither. You are just a witness to it all. You pass through happiness, you pass through misery, you pass through disease, you pass through health, you pass through success, you pass through failure – but you are none of these. You remain the watcher, you remain the witness.

That witnessing is beyond all dualities. So don’t try to make it identified with one part of the polarity. Life is one part of the same circle in which the other half, death, exists. Death and life are not apart, they are together. Death and life are two aspects of the same energy, two faces of the same coin – on one side life, on the other side death. Can you think of life without death? Or can you think of death without life? So they are not really opposites but complementaries. They are friends not enemies; they are business partners.

I can understand your question. You would like to be identified with life, so that you can say, ‘I am immortal. No death for me.’ That is your hankering. And I am not saying that you are not immortal, but the word ‘immortal’ is not right. You are eternal, not immortal. ‘Immortal’ means you have no death – always life, always life. ‘Eternity’ means you don’t have either. You are part of this totality that goes on and on – through lives, through deaths, ups and downs, valleys and peaks – and goes on moving. You are that which lives and that which dies, and yet remains aloof… a lotus in the pond, untouched.

It happened, Maharshi Raman was dying. On Thursday April 13th, a doctor brought Maharshi a palliative to relieve the congestion in the lungs, but he refused it. ‘It is not necessary, everything will come right within two days,’ he said. And after two days he died.

At about sunset, Maharshi told the attendants to sit him up. They knew already that every movement, every touch, was painful, but he told them not to worry about that. He was suffering from cancer – he had a throat cancer, very painful. Even to drink water was impossible, to eat anything was impossible, to move his head was impossible. Even to say a few words was very difficult. He sat with one of the attendants supporting his head. A doctor began to give him oxygen, but with a wave of his right hand he motioned him away.

Unexpectedly, a group of devotees sitting on the verandah outside the hall began singing ‘Arunachala-Siva’ – a bhajan that Maharshi liked very much. He liked that spot, Arunachala, very much; the hill he used to live upon – that hill is called ‘Arunachala’. And the bhajan was a praise, a praise for the hill.

On hearing it, Maharshi’s eyes opened and shone. He gave a brief smile of indescribable tenderness. From the outer edges of his eyes tears of bliss rolled down.

Somebody asked him, ‘Maharshi, are you really leaving us?’

It was hard for him to say, but still he uttered these few words: ‘They say that I am dying – but I am not going away. Where could I go? I am always here.’

One more breath, and no more. There was no struggle, no spasm, no other sign of death: only that the next breath did not come.

What he says is of immense significance – ‘Where could I go? I am always here.’ There is nowhere to go. This is the only existence there is, this is the only dance there is – where can one go? Life comes and goes, death comes and goes – but where can ONE go? You were there before life.

That’s why Zen masters go on saying to their disciples: Go meditate, and try to see the face that you had before you were born – or sometimes even before your parents were born, or before your grand-parents were born. Look for the original face that you had before you were born.

You were there before birth and you will be there after death. Life is between birth and death. You are not life. You are eternity, you are timelessness. You will be here and now, always and always. But don’t call it immortality, because the word ‘mortal’ comes from ‘death’. It is not immortality – it is life-less, it is death-less.

Remember always, whenever you are dropping the duality, drop the WHOLE of it. If you save half, the other half is saved automatically. If you think that you are life, then you will remain afraid of death. Then you can go on convincing yourself that you are not going to die – but you are identified with life, and you know life dies.

Life is an expression, a manifestation. Death is the energy again moving into unmanifestation. Life is one act of the energy, death is another act, but the energy is beyond acts: it is being.

Yakusan’s manner of death was a piece with his life – a great Zen master, Yakusan. When he was about to die, he yelled out, ‘The hall’s falling down! The hall’s falling down!’ The monks brought various things and began to prop it up. Yakusan threw up his hands and said, ‘None of you understand what I meant!’ and died.

‘The hall’ is based on life-and-death duality. The duality is the house, the hall. The duality is falling – that’s what Yakusan means when he says, ‘The hall is falling down.’ The dual is disappearing and the non-dual is arising… the clouds are disappearing and only the pure sky is left. That pure sky cannot be identified by any word that comes from any pair of any duality. You cannot call it light, because light is a part of darkness, a partner with darkness. You cannot call it love, because love is a partner with hate. You cannot call it man, because man is a partner with woman. You cannot call it any name, because all names are part of dualities.

Hence, Buddha is silent about it. Whenever somebody asks him, ‘What will happen to you, Sir, when you leave the body?’ he smiles. He does not say a single word – because ALL words will be wrong, inadequate. All words will be false, untrue – because all words come from the dual language. Our language is dual; the non-dual cannot be expressed. That’s why Buddha kept silent about God, about the eternal, about the ultimate – he would not say a single word.

A Ch’an story describes how the Abbot Hui-ming approached the master, Hui-neng. Hui-neng is the second great name in Zen history. The first is Bodhidharma, the second is Hui-neng – these are the two foundation-stones of the whole story of Zen. They laid down the whole structure.

Bodhidharma gave the technique, the Zen technique of meditation, zazen – sitting silently doing nothing, and the grass grows by itself. Non-doing, just witnessing, wei-wu-wei – action through inaction. For nine years he was sitting just facing a wall, this Bodhidharma – that was his technique that he gave to the world, one of the greatest. All other meditations look childish before Bodhidharma’s technique.

Hui-neng gave the koan – another great technique that is very special to Zen. Bodhidharma’s technique is not very special to Zen, it comes from Buddha. In that way Hui-neng is more of an original thinker than Bodhidharma; even Bodhidharma is not so original – Hui-neng gave the koan. ‘Koan’ means an absurd question which cannot be answered, any way you try. It is unanswerable. And one has to meditate on that unanswerable question: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Now, one hand cannot clap. So the answer is, from the very beginning, impossible. But one has to think about it.

And Hui-neng says when you think about that which cannot be thought, by and by, slowly, slowly, thinking becomes impossible. One day, suddenly the whole structure of thinking falls to the ground, shattered. Suddenly you are in a state of no-thought. That’s what meditation is.

A Ch’an story describes how the Abbot Hui-ming approached Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch, begging for the doctrine. The patriarch said: ‘For the moment, concentrate your mind, not letting your thoughts dwell either on good or evil.’

Hui-neng, is just sitting there with his staff, ready to hit. And he says to Hui-ming, ‘Just close your eyes. For the moment, concentrate your mind, not letting your thoughts dwell either on good or evil.’ Good or evil is just one kind of duality. You can call it life and death, you can call it hate and love, or good and bad – just one kind of duality.

And Hui-neng says: I am sitting here. You just keep your mind alert, so that it does not fall a victim of the duality of good and bad. Don’t say anything is good, and don’t say anything is bad. Don’t judge. If thoughts pass, let them pass. If Buddha passes, don’t say, ‘Good, I am blessed, I have seen Buddha in my thought.’ Or if a prostitute passes, alluring you, don’t say that this is bad – ‘Why should this thought occur to me? Why should this prostitute follow me?’ Don’t call it any name. Buddha passes, let him pass, remain unconcerned. The prostitute passes, let her pass. Remain unconcerned, just remain yourself. When you are not in duality, you are yourself.

After the Abbot said that he was thus prepared, the Patriarch continued: ‘Now that you are no longer thinking of either good or evil, recall the aspect of the Abbot Ming as he was before his parents had yet brought him to life.’

Now the second question – when the Ming said, ‘I am ready now. Now I am not saying good or bad, I am clean of judgment.’

Must have been a rare man, this Ming himself – must have been meditating. He was a monk, a sannyasin, may have been meditating for years – otherwise it is not so easy. And you cannot deceive a Zen master; you cannot just pretend, ‘Yes, I have attained.’ Immediately your head will be hit hard.

A Zen master does not believe in politeness, a Zen master does not believe in etiquette, a Zen master is a very wild master. And when the Abbot said, ‘Now I am prepared,’ Hui-neng said…

‘Now that you are no longer thinking of either good or evil, recall the aspect of the Abbot Ming as he was before his parents had yet brought him to life.’

Now go backwards. Find out about yourself, who you were before you were born, what you were before you were born. Think of that consciousness, go into it.

The Abbot, under the impact of these words, abruptly entered a state of silent identification. He then did obeisance and said: ‘It is like a man who drinks water. He knows in himself whether it is cold or warm.’

Now he cannot answer; he himself cannot answer. He has tasted, he has known who he was, and who he is, and who he will be – but now he cannot say anything about it. It is unutterable, it is ineffable.

He says only one thing: ‘Sir, it is like a man who drinks water. He knows in himself whether it is cold or warm. Now I know, but I cannot tell you.’

So knows Hui-neng, but he cannot tell. So knows Buddha, but he cannot tell. So know I – but I cannot tell what exactly it is.

One thing I can say, but that will be always negative: It is neither life nor death. It is neither time nor space. It is neither body nor mind. It is neither the visible nor the invisible. It is neither good nor bad. It is neither God nor Devil. I can only negate, I can only say that which it is not.

But what it is, you will have to drink. Only when a man drinks water, he knows… whether it is cold or warm.

-Osho

From Zen: The Path of Paradox, V.2, Discourse #6

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

 

Rebel Against Personality – Osho

Does the being, or self, in the person die with the death of the person; or does it live beyond death in another body?

The question is a little complicated.

First you have to understand that your personality is not your reality; it is given by the culture, by the society.

Individuality is yours, but personality is not yours.

As personality you are always dead; only as individuality are you alive. But to be an individual you have to rebel against personality and against all those people who are forcing a certain personality on you.

Each child is born with a certain potential to be – and each society tries to make him something else.

I have heard about a man who was celebrating the golden jubilee of his marriage. All his friends, relatives, acquaintances, had gathered. There was much joy, laughter. But suddenly they realized that the man was missing. They could not understand where he had gone. They looked in the garden and he was sitting in the shadows, in darkness, by the side of a tree, very sad.

His friends said, “This is strange. You have called all of us to celebrate, and you are sitting here in such sadness as if somebody has died! What is the problem?”

He said, “The problem is… This woman that I married has tortured me so much that twenty-five years ago I enquired of my attorney, ‘If I shoot her what will be the result?’ and he said, ‘Are you mad? If you shoot her you will get twenty-five years in jail!’ I am feeling sad because today I would have been free. That idiot attorney has died; otherwise I would have killed him! He made me afraid.”

A man has to live with a woman he does not love, which is simply misery. A woman has to live with a man… which is simply misery, hell. A man has to work in a certain profession he hates. Everybody becomes something that he does not like. This is your personality. Society distracts everybody from his natural individuality and makes him something other than he was destined to be.

So the first thing to be understood is that you are not a person, you are not a personality. The word ‘person’ comes from Greek drama. In Greek drama the actors used masks, and the mask… you could not see the person’s real face; you could only hear his sound. Sona means sound. Persona means you don’t know who is speaking; you just hear the sound, the face is missing. The word ‘personality’ comes from that Greek drama.

Everybody is wearing a mask. You can hear the sound but you can’t see the face; you can’t see the individual. So the first thing: you are not a ‘person’. If you are a person, you are already dead. If you are only a personality, you have dragged yourself from the cradle to the grave but you never lived. You live only when you are an individuality – when you assert yourself against every tradition, every religion, every past that wants you to be someone other than existence wants you to be. Then you live.

Again I am reminded: a great surgeon I used to know – perhaps he was the most famous surgeon in India – was retiring, and all his friends, his colleagues, had given him a party, a farewell party, but he was very sad. I asked him, “Why are you sad? You should be happy: you are the topmost surgeon in the whole country.”

He said, “You don’t understand. I never wanted to become a surgeon in the first place, so who cares that I am the topmost surgeon? I hate to hear that! I wanted to become a musician, but my parents forced me to become a surgeon – against my will I became a surgeon. By chance I became the topmost surgeon; perhaps I would not have been able to become the topmost musician. I am rich, I have everything, I have respectability, but that does not help me to be happy.

“Even if I had remained a beggar, as a musician I would have been blissful because I would have been myself. This surgeon seems to be somebody else; it is a role that I have played, but it is not me. These people are celebrating, and I am crying within myself that my whole life is lost.”

So first, you are not a ‘person’; otherwise you are dead before death. And there are millions of people who die thirty, forty, or fifty years before they actually die. You are an individual, and only individuality is capable of knowing your real self. Personality has no self – only an ego, as false as personality. Individuality has a self, a soul. The individual is a living principle of life.

If you know life you will never ask this kind of question. Knowing life authentically means you also know that it is immortal. The knowledge of its immortality is intrinsic. It is not something informed, from outside. Just living your true being in totality you slowly, slowly become aware of the immortal current of life within you. You know the body will die, but this soul, which is life’s whole essence, cannot die.

In existence nothing is destructible.

And it is not something to believe in, it is a scientific truth that you cannot destroy anything. You cannot destroy even a small piece of stone. Whatever you do it will remain in some form or other.

Science enquires into the objective world and finds that even objective reality is immortal. Religion works exactly like science in the inner world and finds the dancing life is intrinsically immortal.

It will be good to remember Socrates at this point because he was not a man to believe anything. If you had asked him whether your soul would survive after bodily death he would say, “Let me first die – because unless I die, how can I say?” And the day he was given poison is one of the most significant days in the history of man. His disciples were sitting around him and he was lying down. He told his disciples, “I will tell you what is happening. As long as I can, I will go on informing you.”

Then he said, “Up to my knees, my legs are dead. Please somebody pinch my legs so I can know whether I can feel it or not.” Somebody pinched his legs. He said, “I cannot feel it; the legs have died. But remember one thing: I am as alive as I ever was. The death of the legs has not cut a part of my life; my life is as whole as it ever was.” Then all of the legs became dead, half of the body. And he said, “Half of my body is dead, but I am whole, as whole as ever.”

Then his hands became dead and he said, “I am still here and I am still whole. Perhaps now my heart will stop, but I can say to you that even though I may not be able to inform you, I will remain, because if all these parts are gone and I am whole, then it doesn’t matter: the heart is only a part.”

And when he died his face was so delighted, so joyous, that Plato, his disciple, remembers, “We have never seen his face so full of light, so radiant. Perhaps the last moment when the soul is leaving the body is just like the sunset when the sun is going down and the whole sky becomes so beautiful and radiant.”

It is not a question of belief. I am not a believer in anything, so I will not say to you to believe me that the soul is immortal. But it is my experience that it is immortal because I can remember my past lives, and that is a solid proof that there are going to be future lives. I can teach you techniques for remembering past lives and that will become a solid proof for you that you have a future. You have an eternity of past and an eternity of future.

You have always been here and you will always be here.

But first drop your fake personality.

Grow into your authentic individuality.

Live the way existence wanted you to live. Your very life should be so intense and so total that you burn your life’s torch from both ends. In that very intensity you will know that you have touched something of eternity. And if you have known it in your life, in your death you will find a deeper confirmation of the fact.

People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don’t know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That’s why we don’t remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness.

But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying – so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too.

In the East there are three great religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. They disagree on every point – their philosophies are different about everything – but on one point they agree, and that is the eternal existence of the soul, because it is not a question of theoretical discussion, it is a question of existential experience. You can’t disagree about it – it is exactly so.

Against these three religions in the East, outside of India there are three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. They all believe in one life, and that simply shows their poverty. They have not explored deeply enough to find past lives, and they cannot guarantee anything about the future. These three religions born outside India are superficial. Their work is not in-depth research.

But in India for ten thousand years thousands of people have entered into self-realization and have found that there is some light that remains forever. It goes on moving from one body to another body but is indestructible.

I will not tell you to believe it; I will only tell you to experiment. I am against all beliefs, because every belief destroys you, destroys your thinking. I am in favor of experimenting, and there are techniques available.

That has been my whole life’s work – to make those techniques available to anybody who really wants to search and to find, to one who is not only a curious person but is a seeker who is ready to risk everything for the search. And it is a search for which you need to risk everything because you are going to find the greatest treasure.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #1

 

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

Mind is the Whole Problem – Osho

The darkness seems so deep, my eyes covered in a haze, my mind never ending noise – except for those moments I am with you – swirling around and around. The light is there but seems so far away in all this darkness. Sometimes I wonder if I am going to make it. Beloved Master, I cannot find the door.

Don’t be worried. You don’t need to find the door because you are outside the door! You are never inside; you only believe you are inside. Existentially, you are always outside. The moment you understand that you are out – it was just an idea that you were in – the faraway light is no longer far away; it is you. And the darkness that surrounds you is not found anymore.

But the basic thing is to realize that you are already outside the door. There is no way for you to be inside the door. That’s what I was saying: watchfulness is not part of the mind and cannot be part of the mind.

Mind cannot be a witness.

Mind is the darkness.

Mind is the whole problem, and the solution is just outside the door waiting for you to recognize that you are not in, you are out.

Witnessing the content of your mind, the moment comes when you suddenly become aware of your being always out – even in the darkest nights that have passed you were not in. Such a great joy descends over you that it is existentially impossible for you to get in. It is good that you are not finding the door; otherwise, you will get in!

There is no door. Mind remains in; you remain out. Neither the mind can come out nor you can come in. But the attachment with the mind is possible without any door. The identification with the mind is possible without any door.

You have just forgotten yourself.

Nothing is lost, nothing is missing, nothing has to be found. Just remember. A simple remembering – the simplest things are very difficult, that’s true – and this is the most simple thing.

None of the problems are yours. As far as you are concerned, no problem can enter in you, but you can get identified with something which is not you.

I remember a story. A man’s house caught fire. The house was on fire, and it had taken the man’s whole life’s effort to make that beautiful place. Thousands of people had gathered, but there was nothing that could be done. The fire had become so big. And you can understand that man: tears were coming from his eyes. It was his whole life burning in front of him. And then suddenly his son came running and he said, “Dad, why are you worried? We sold the house yesterday. You were out . . . but we have sold the house. It is now for somebody else to cry and weep, not for you. And we have got enough profit out of it.”

The man immediately wiped away his tears and became just a spectator like the others were spectators. The identity, the invisible identity, “It is my house,” was no longer there. There was no pain, there was no misery, there was no problem at all. And he was really happy in a way: “Now we can make a better house.” He was feeling relieved; the house was burning, and he was feeling relieved.

And then a second son came running. He said, “It is true that we had negotiated the sale, but the papers were not signed and the money has not been transferred. So it is our house that is burning, and you are looking at it as if you are just a spectator!” Again those tears were flowing and again the heart was breaking. And nothing has visibly changed: the house is burning, the man is standing there. But these people who are bringing messages are changing everything! When he becomes identified, he is burning with the house. When he gets unidentified, he is relieved and he has nothing to do with the house; it is somebody else’s house.

The only thing to be remembered is that you are already out, and by nature there is no way for you to be in. You can believe, you can imagine . . . still you will be outside. Sitting on the steps of your house you are trying to find the door to go out. You will never find it; it is not there; the whole sky is available. You just stand up and walk in any direction; there is no need of opening any door.

But your attachment, your identification, is with the mind, which is in and which cannot come out. It cannot exist in the light. Now this is the situation: witnessing is always out and cannot enter in; it can exist only in the light, it cannot exist in darkness. Mind is always in; it can exist only in darkness, it cannot exist in light.

Between these two absolutely different things you are having an identification, an attachment, that is creating the trouble for you.

So just remember: you are outside. If you cannot do it suddenly, do it slowly, part by part. When anger is there, watch it, and you will find anger is in and you are out.

When Gurdjieff’s father died Gurdjieff was only nine years old. The father was poor. He called Gurdjieff close to him and told him, “I have nothing to give you as your inheritance. I am poor, and my father was also poor, but he gave me one thing that made me the richest man in the world, although the outside poverty remained. I can only transfer the same to you.

“It is some advice. Perhaps you are too young and you may not be able to do it right now, but remember it. When you are able to act according to the advice, act according to it. The advice is simple. I will repeat it, and because I am dying, listen carefully and repeat in front of me what I have said so I can die satisfied that I have transferred the message that may have come down from father to son for centuries.”

The message was simple. The father said, “If somebody insults you, irritates you, annoys you, just tell him, ‘I have received your message, but I have promised my father that I will answer only after twenty-four hours. I know you are angry, I have understood it. I will come after twenty-four hours and answer you.’ And the same with anything. Give a gap of twenty-four hours.”

The nine-year-old boy repeated what the father said, and the father died, but because it was such a moment the message became engraved. As he repeated the message, the father said, “Good. My blessings will be with you, and now I can die peacefully.” He closed his eyes and died. And Gurdjieff, even though he was nine, started practicing what was given to him. Somebody would insult him, and he would say, “I will come after twenty-four hours to answer you because that’s what I have promised my dying father. Right now, I cannot answer you.”

Somebody might beat him, and he would say, “You can beat me right now, but I cannot answer. After twenty-four hours I will come and answer you because I have promised my dying father.” And later on, he used to say to his disciples, “That simple message transformed me totally. The person was beating me but I was not going to react at that moment so there was no question except to watch. There was nothing I had to do: now the person was beating me, I just had to be a spectator. For twenty-four hours there was nothing to do.

“And watching the man created a new kind of crystallization in me. After twenty-four hours I could see more clearly. At the moment when he was beating me, it was impossible to see clearly. My eyes were full of anger. If I was going to answer at that moment, I would have wrestled with the man, I would have hit the man, and everything would have been an unconscious reaction.

“But after twenty-four hours I could think about it more calmly, more quietly. Either he was right – I had done something wrong and I needed, deserved, to be beaten, to be insulted – or he was absolutely wrong. If he was right, there was nothing to say to him except to go and give him thanks. If he was absolutely wrong . . . then there was no point at all in fighting with a man who is utterly stupid and goes on doing such wrong things. It is meaningless, it is wasting time. He does not deserve any answer.”

So after twenty-four hours everything settled down and a clarity was there. And with that clarity and the watchfulness of the moment, Gurdjieff changed into one of the most unique beings of this age. And this was the basic foundation of the whole crystallization of his being.

You are always outside.

Just watch.

The mind is always inside. Don’t be identified with it. Unidentified, you will become more and more clear, and the mind will die on its own accord.

The death of the mind and the birth of watchfulness is the beginning of your evolution. And the light will not be far away – it is the light. The darkness will be gone, because when you are light, darkness cannot be around you. That’s why I said that watchfulness is not a technique, it is your nature. Just remember it.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #12, Q3

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

 

 

Everything in its Right Place – Osho

You always talk against the mind – that we should drop it, tell it to shut up, that it is not needed in the search for truth. You seem to regret that none of your sannyasins is a Nobel Prize winner and you give us unfertilized eggs to nourish our brains. Hence I almost feel guilty when I make an attempt to become informed about one thing or another, though it seems almost impossible to survive in the market place totally ignorant. What is the mind for? Is it really totally mischievous?

Prem Mandira, mind is one of the most significant things in life, but only as a servant, not as a master.

The moment the mind becomes your master, then the problems arise; then it displaces your heart, displaces your being, takes over the whole possession of you. Then rather than following your orders, it starts ordering you.

I am not saying to destroy the mind. It is the most evolved phenomenon in existence. I am saying beware that the servant does not become the master. Remember your being comes first, your heart comes second, your mind comes third – that is the balanced personality of an authentic human being.

Mind is logic… immensely useful, and in the marketplace you cannot exist without the mind. And I have never said that you should not use your mind in the marketplace – you should use it. But you should use it; you should not be used by it. And the difference is great….

It is mind which has given you all technology, all science, but because the mind has given so much, it has claimed to be the master of your being. That’s where the mischief begins; it has completely closed the doors of your heart.

Heart is not useful; it has no purpose to fulfill. It is just like a rose flower. The mind can give you bread, but the mind cannot give you joy. It cannot make you rejoice in life. It is very serious, it cannot even tolerate laughter. And a life without laughter has fallen below human standards. It has become subhuman because it is only man, in the whole existence, who is capable of laughing.

Laughter indicates consciousness and its highest growth. Animals cannot laugh, trees cannot laugh, and the people who remain encaged in the mind – the saints, the scientists, the so-called great leaders – they cannot laugh either. They are all too serious, and seriousness is a disease. It is the cancer of your soul; it is destructive.

And because we are in the hands of the mind, all its creativity has gone in the service of destruction; people are dying from starvation, and the mind is trying to pile up more nuclear weapons. People are hungry, and the mind is trying to reach to the moon.

Mind is absolutely without any compassion. For compassion, for love, for joy, for laughter… a heart, freed from the imprisonment of mind, is needed.

Heart has a higher value. It is not of any use in the marketplace, because the marketplace is not your temple; the marketplace is not your life’s meaning. The marketplace is the lowest of all the activities of human beings.

Jesus is right when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” But mind can only provide bread. You can survive, but survival is not life. Life needs something more – a dance, a song, a joy.

Hence I want you to put everything in its right place: The heart should be listened to first if there is any kind of conflict between mind and heart. In any conflict between love and logic, then logic cannot be decisive, love has to be decisive. Logic cannot give you any juice – it is dry. It is good for calculations; it is good for mathematics and good for scientific technology. But it is not good for human relationships, not good for the growth of your inner potential.

Above your heart is your being. Just as mind is logic and the heart is love, being is meditation. Being is to know yourself. And by knowing yourself, to know the very meaning of existence.

Knowing the being, is bringing a light into the darkness of your inner world; and unless you are enlightened inside, all the light outside is of no use. Within you, there is just darkness, abysmal darkness, unconsciousness, and all your actions are going to arise out of that darkness, out of that blindness.

So when I say anything against mind, don’t misunderstand me. I am not against mind, and I don’t want you to destroy it. I want you to become an orchestra. The same musical instruments can create a hell of a noise if you don’t know how to create a symphony, how to create a synthesis, how to put things in their right place.

Being should be your ultimate… there is nothing beyond it – it is part of God within you. It will give you that which neither mind can give, nor the heart can give: It will give you silence. It will give you peace. It will give you serenity. It will give you blissfulness, and finally, a sense of being immortal. Knowing being, death becomes a fiction and life takes wings into eternity. A man who is unaware of his own being cannot be said to be really alive. He may be a useful mechanism, a robot….

Through meditation, search your being, your isness, your existence. Through love, through your heart, share your blissfulness – that’s what love is all about: Sharing your blissfulness, sharing your joy, sharing your dance, sharing your ecstasy.

Mind has its own function in the marketplace, but when you come home; your mind should not continue chattering. Just as you take off your business coat, your hat, your shoes, you should say to the mind, “Now be quiet, this is not your world.” This is not being against the mind. In fact, this is giving rest to the mind.

In the home, with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your parents, with your friends, there is no need for the mind. The need is for an overflowing heart. Unless there is love overflowing in a house, it never becomes a home; it remains a house. And if in the home you can find a few moments for meditation, for experiencing your own being, it raises the home to the highest peak of being a temple.

The same house… for the mind is only a house; for the heart it becomes a home; for the being it becomes a temple. The house remains the same; you go through the changes – your vision changes, your dimension changes, your way of understanding and looking at things changes. And a house that is not all three, is incomplete, is poor.

A man that is not all three, in deep harmony – the mind serving the heart, the heart serving the being, and the being belonging to the intelligence spread all over existence…. People have called it God; I love to call it godliness. There is nothing above it.

I will read your question, Mandira. Do you remember the meaning of your name that I have given to you: Prem Mandira, “Love Temple”. In your question there are many misunderstandings.

You are saying, “Osho, You always talk against the mind.” I have to talk against the mind, because of you, because you are clinging so much to the mind. You drop clinging and I will never even mention the word.

I am tired of talking against it. It has not done any harm to me, it is not my enemy; it has served me perfectly. It is because of you that I have to go on and on, until one day you decide, “Let us try to put the mind aside.” And you say to it, “Shut up for the moment.” Unless you all get out of the cage of the mind, I will have to talk against it; although I am not against it.

“You are saying that we should drop it, tell it to shut up.” I say drop it if you want to meditate. And the moment you are going to the marketplace, pick it up. Who is preventing you? Is there a need that you should continually cling to it for twenty-four hours? – Because tomorrow you are going to the marketplace, so in the night you also have to keep it with you, under your blanket? Are you afraid that it will escape?

I say drop it because I want you to feel that you are the master. If you want to drop it you can drop it, and if you want to pick it up, you can pick it up. It is just a mechanism.

“You are saying that it is not needed in the search for truth.” It is not needed. As far as the search for truth is concerned, it is not needed. On the contrary, it is a hindrance.

And truth is not available in the marketplace; it is not something you can purchase, not something that you can steal, not something that you can borrow – it is something within you. But it is beyond the reach of the mind. The reach of the mind is only to outside things. As far as your inner world is concerned, mind is absolutely impotent. It is not its fault; it is not made for that purpose.

As far as truth is concerned, you need a state of no-mind – I mean no thought, not even a ripple in your consciousness, no disturbance – just absolute silence.

One discovers one’s truth only in silence, in aloneness. Even your mind will not be a witness to it.

And Mandira, you are absolutely wrong in saying, “You seem to regret that none of your sannyasins is a Nobel Prize winner.” Where you got the idea from, I don’t know.

I have certainly said that the vegetarians have not been able to get a single Nobel Prize. And the reason is that intelligence needs certain chemicals, certain proteins, which are not available in their vegetarian food. But I am not regretting it; I am simply stating a fact.

A Nobel Prize does not necessarily prove that somebody has achieved the highest consciousness. J. Krishnamurti did not receive it; Raman Maharishi did not receive it. Meher Baba did not get it. And these were people who reached to the highest peak; they belong to the same category as Gautam Buddha.

Even if Gautam Buddha was alive, he would not receive the Nobel Prize because the Nobel prize is a political game. It is not decided by the height of your intelligence; you need some political reasons. Even politicians like Kissinger have received the Nobel Prize, yet J. Krishnamurti’s name was never even mentioned. […]

I do not regret that none of my sannyasins is a politician. I am immensely happy that my sannyasins are not politicians. And the Nobel prize has not been given, at least up to now, even to a single meditator. Meditation does not come into their consideration.

A novelist can get a Nobel Prize. A film director can get a Nobel Prize. A scientist can get a Nobel Prize. A politician can get a Nobel Prize. But there is no category in the Nobel Prize for a man like Jesus, or Gautam Buddha, or Zarathustra, or Lao Tzu.

And even if these people are given Nobel prizes, they will laugh. To them your Nobel prizes are just like toys; they are good for children to play with. In what way can they enhance Gautam Buddha?

This is how people go on hearing things which are not sane… I have never regretted….

And you are saying, “I feel almost guilty when I make an attempt to become informed about one thing or another….” You are misunderstanding me completely. Who has told you, “Don’t become informed”? I have been telling you that by informing yourself you cannot attain to self-realization. But if you want to be an electrician, I will not suggest: Meditate, and you will become an electrician; meditate, and you will become a mechanic in a factory – you will need information.

There is no need to feel guilty. This is how your mind goes on making distortions, interpretations, and you go on carrying in your mind things which I have never said.

You are saying, “… it seems almost impossible to survive in the marketplace totally ignorant.” But who has said to you that in the marketplace be totally ignorant? Be as knowledgeable as possible.

In the marketplace innocence is not needed, neither is silence needed, nor is self-realization needed. The more you are knowledgeable, the more you will be successful.

I have been talking, not about the marketplace; I have been talking about the realization of who you are. This is not possible through gathering information; this is not possible through becoming knowledgeable – this is possible only if you become innocent.

And remember, innocence is not ignorance. There is a very fine demarcation, but the difference is immense. Ignorance means absence of knowledge, and innocence means presence of silence, presence of clarity. Ignorance is a negative thing. Innocence is a positive phenomenon. They don’t mean the same thing.

You can be innocent as far as your inner growth is concerned, and you can be knowledgeable as far as your outside world is concerned. They are two different things; they don’t clash with each other.

I have heard… two cowboys come upon an Indian lying on his stomach with his ear to the ground. One of the cowboys stops and says to the other, ”You see that Indian?” ”Yah,” says the other cowboy.

“Look,” says the first one, “he is listening to the ground. He can hear things for miles in any direction.”

Just then the Indian looks up, “Covered wagon,” he says, “about two miles away. Has two horses – one brown, one white – a man, a woman, a child, and household effects in the wagon.”

“Incredible!” says the cowboy to his friend. ”This Indian knows how far away they are, how many horses, what color they are, who is in the wagon, and what is in the wagon. Amazing!”
The Indian looks up and says, “Ran over me about a half hour ago.” […]

Prem Mandira, when you are listening to me, be alert that your mind does not start interpreting it. Just listen exactly to what I am saying; otherwise you can go on listening to me for years and still remain in the same vicious circle, moving round and round but going nowhere.

I really mean business. I want you to be the new man. The whole of humanity needs the new man; it is not only your need. It used to be the need of the individual in the past, but now we have come to a point where the new man is needed for the survival of the whole of humanity, for the survival of life itself on the earth.

-Osho

From The Razor’s Edge, Discourse #25

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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Authentic Living – Osho

In the West we are constantly drilled with the aphorism: Don’t just stand there—do something! Yet, Buddha would say: Don’t just do something—stand there! The unconscious man reacts while the wise man watches. But what about spontaneity? Is spontaneity compatible with watching?

Buddha certainly says: Don’t just do something — stand there! But that is only the beginning of the pilgrimage, not the end. When you have learned how to stand, when you have learned how to be utterly silent, unmoving, undisturbed, when you know how to just sit…sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. But the grass grows, remember!

Action does not disappear: the grass grows by itself. The Buddha does not become inactive; great action happens through him, although there is no doer anymore. The doer disappears, the doing continues. And when there is no doer, the doing is spontaneous; it cannot be otherwise. It is the doer that does not allow spontaneity.

The doer means the ego, the ego means the past. When you act, you are always acting through the past, you are acting out of experience that you have accumulated, you are acting out of the conclusions that you have arrived at in the past. How can you be spontaneous? The past dominates, and because of the past you cannot even see the present. Your eyes are so full of the past, the smoke of the past is so much, that seeing is impossible. You cannot see! You are almost completely blind — blind because of the smoke, blind because of the past conclusions, blind because of knowledge.

The knowledgeable man is the most blind man in the world. Because he functions out of his knowledge, he does not see what the case is. He simply goes on functioning mechanically. He has learned something; it has become a ready-made mechanism in him…he acts out of it.

There is a famous story:

There were two temples in Japan, both enemies to each other, as temples have always been down the ages. The priests were so antagonistic that they had stopped even looking at each other. If they came across each other on the road, they would not look at each other. If they came across each other on the road they stopped talking; for centuries those two temples and their priests had not talked.

But both the priests had two small boys — to serve them, just for running errands. Both the priests were afraid that boys, after all, will be boys, and they might start becoming friends to each other.

The one priest said to his boy, “Remember, the other temple is our enemy. Never talk to the boy of the other temple! They are dangerous people — avoid them as one avoids a disease, as one avoids the plague. Avoid them!” The boy was always interested, because he used to get tired of listening to great sermons — he could not understand them. Strange scriptures were read, he could not understand the language. Great, ultimate problems were discussed. There was nobody to play with, nobody even to talk with. And when he was told, “Don’t talk to the boy of the other temple,” great temptation arose in him. That’s how temptation arises.

That day he could not avoid talking to the other boy. When he saw him on the road he asked him, “Where are you going?”

The other boy was a little philosophical; listening to great philosophy he had become philosophical. He said, “Going? There is nobody who comes and goes! It is happening — wherever the wind takes me….” He had heard the master say many times that that’s how a buddha lives, like a dead leaf: wherever the wind takes it, it goes. So the boy said, “I am not! There is no doer. So how can I go? What nonsense are you talking? I am a dead leaf. Wherever the wind takes me….”

The other boy was struck dumb. He could not even answer. He could not find anything to say. He was really embarrassed, ashamed, and felt also, “My master was right not to talk with these people — these are dangerous people! What kind of talk is this? I had asked a simple question: ‘Where are you going?’ In fact I already knew where he was going, because we were both going to purchase vegetables in the market. A simple answer would have done.”

He went back, told his master, “I am sorry, excuse me. You had prohibited me, I didn’t listen to you. In fact, because of your prohibition I was tempted. This is the first time I have talked to those dangerous people. I just asked a simple question. ‘Where are you going?’ and he started saying strange things: ‘There is no going, no coming. Who comes? Who goes? I am utter emptiness,’ he was saying, ‘just a dead leaf in the wind. And wherever the wind takes me….'”

The master said, “I told you before! Now, tomorrow stand in the same place and when he comes ask him again, ‘Where are you going?’ And when he says these things, you simply say, ‘That’s true. Yes, you are a dead leaf, so am I. But when the wind is not blowing, where are you going? Then where can you go?’ Just say that, and that will embarrass him — and he has to be embarrassed, he has to be defeated. We have been constantly quarreling, and those people have not been able to defeat us in any debate. So tomorrow it has to be done!”

Early the boy got up, prepared his answer, repeated it many times before he went. Then he stood in the place where the boy used to cross the road, repeated again and again, prepared himself, and then he saw the boy coming. He said, “Okay, now!”

The boy came. He asked, “Where are you going?” And he was hoping that now the opportunity would come….

But the boy said, “Wherever the legs will take me….” No mention of wind! No talk of nothingness! No question of the non-doer! Now what to do? His whole ready-made answer looked absurd. Now to talk about the wind would be irrelevant.

Again crestfallen, now really ashamed that he was simply stupid: “And this boy certainly knows some strange things — now he says, ‘Wherever the legs take me….'”

He went back to the master. The master said, “I have told you not to talk with those people — they are dangerous! This is our centuries-long experience. But now something has to be done. So tomorrow you ask again, ‘Where are you going?’ and when he says, ‘Wherever my legs take me,’ tell him, ‘If you had no legs, then…?’ He has to be silenced one way or other!”

So the next day he asked again, “Where are you going?” and waited.

And the boy said, “I am going to the market to fetch vegetables.”

Man ordinarily functions out of the past, and life goes on changing. Life has no obligation to fit with your conclusions. That’s why life is very confusing — confusing to the knowledgeable person. He has all ready-made answers: The Bhagavad-Gita, the holy Koran, the Bible, the Vedas. He has everything crammed, he knows all the answers. But life never raises the same question again; hence the knowledgeable person always falls short.

Buddha certainly says: Know how to sit silently. That does not mean that he says: Go on sitting silently forever. He is not saying you have to become inactive; on the contrary, it is only out of silence that action arises. If you are not silent, if you don’t know how to sit silently, or stand silently in deep meditation, whatsoever you go on doing is reaction, not action. You react.

Somebody insults you, pushes a button, and you react. You are angry, you jump on him — the manipulator and you are the manipulated. He has pushed a button and you have functioned like a machine. Just like you push a button and the light goes on, and you push the button and the light goes off — that’s what people are doing to you: they put you on, they put you off.

Somebody comes and praises you and puffs up your ego, and you feel so great; and then somebody comes and punctures you, and you are simply flat on the ground. You are not your own master: anybody can insult you and make you sad, angry, irritated, annoyed, violent, mad. And anybody can praise you and make you feel at the heights, can make you feel that you are the greatest — that Alexander the Great was nothing compared to you.

And you act according to others’ manipulations. This is not real action.

Buddha was passing through a village and the people came and they insulted him. And they used all the insulting words that they could use — all the four-letter words that they knew. Buddha stood there, listened silently, very attentively, and then said, “Thank you for coming to me, but I am in a hurry. I have to reach the next village; people will be waiting for me there. I cannot devote more time to you today, but tomorrow coming back I will have more time. You can gather again, and tomorrow if something is left which you wanted to say and have not been able to say, you can say it to me. But today, excuse me.”

Those people could not believe their ears, their eyes: this man has remained utterly unaffected, undistracted. One of them asked, “Have you not heard us? We have been abusing you like anything, and you have not even answered!”

Buddha said, “If you wanted an answer then you have come too late. You should have come ten years ago, then I would have answered you. But for these ten years I have stopped being manipulated by others. I am no longer a slave, I am my own master. I act according to myself, not according to anybody else. I act according to my inner need. You cannot force me to do anything. It’s perfectly good: you wanted to abuse me, you abused me! Feel fulfilled. You have done your work perfectly well. But as far as I am concerned, I don’t take your insults, and unless I take them, they are meaningless.”

When somebody insults you, you have to become a receiver, you have to accept what he says; only then can you react. But if you don’t accept, if you simply remain detached, if you keep the distance, if you remain cool, what can he do?

Buddha said, “Somebody can throw a burning torch into the river. It will remain alight till it reaches the river. The moment it falls into the river, all fire is gone — the river cools it. I have become a river. You throw abuses at me. They are fire when you throw them, but the moment they reach me, in my coolness, their fire is lost. They no longer hurt. You throw thorns — falling in my silence they become flowers. I act out of my own intrinsic nature.”

This is spontaneity. The man of awareness, understanding, acts. The man who is unaware, unconscious, mechanical, robot-like, reacts.

Curtis, you ask me, “The unconscious man reacts while the wise man watches.” It is not that he simply watches — watching is one aspect of his being. He does not act without watching. But don’t misunderstand the Buddha. The buddhas have always been misunderstood; you are not the first to misunderstand. This whole country has been misunderstanding the Buddha; hence the whole country has become inactive. Thinking that all the great masters say: Sit silently, the country has become lazy, lousy; the country has lost energy, vitality, life. It has become utterly dull, unintelligent, because intelligence becomes sharpened only when you act.

And when you act moment to moment out of your awareness and watchfulness, great intelligence arises. You start shining, glowing, you become luminous. But it happens through two things: watching, and action out of that watching. If watching becomes inaction, you are committing suicide. Watching should lead you into action, a new kind of action; a new quality is brought to action.

You watch, you are utterly quiet and silent. You see what the situation is, and out of that seeing you respond. The man of awareness responds, he is responsible — literally! He is responsive, he does not react. His action is born out of his awareness, not out of your manipulation; that is the difference. Hence, there is no question of there being any incompatibility between watching and spontaneity. Watching is the beginning of spontaneity; spontaneity is the fulfillment of watching.

The real man of understanding acts — acts tremendously, acts totally, but he acts in the moment, out of his consciousness. He is like a mirror. The ordinary man, the unconscious man, is not like a mirror, he is like a photo plate. What is the difference between a mirror and a photo plate? A photo plate, once exposed, becomes useless. It receives the impression, becomes impressed by it — it carries the picture. But remember, the picture is not reality — the reality goes on growing. You can go into the garden and you can take a picture of a rosebush. Tomorrow the picture will be the same, the day after tomorrow the picture will also be the same. Go again and see the rosebush: it is no longer the same. The roses have gone, or new roses have arrived. A thousand and one things have happened.

It is said that once a realist philosopher went to see the famous painter, Picasso. The philosopher believed in realism and he had come to criticize Picasso because Picasso’s paintings are abstract, they are not realistic. They don’t depict reality as it is. On the contrary, they are symbolic, have a totally different dimension — they are symbolic.

The realist said, “I don’t like your paintings. A painting should be real! If you paint my wife, then your painting should look like my wife.” And he took out a picture of his wife and said, “Look at this picture! The painting should be like this.”

Picasso looked at the picture and said, “This is your wife?”

He said, “Yes, this is my wife!”

Picasso said, “I am surprised! She is very small and flat.”

The picture cannot be the wife!

Another story is told:

A beautiful woman came to Picasso and said, “Just the other day I saw your self-portrait in a friend’s home. It was so beautiful, I was so influenced, almost hypnotized, that I hugged the picture and kissed it.”

Picasso said, “Really! And then what did the picture do to you? Did the picture kiss you back?”

The woman said, “Are you mad?! The picture did not kiss me back.”

Picasso said, “Then it was not me.”

A picture is a dead thing. The camera, the photo plate, catches only a static phenomenon. And life is never static, it goes on changing. Your mind functions like a camera, it goes on collecting pictures — it is an album. And then out of those pictures you go on reacting. Hence, you are never true to life, because whatsoever you do is wrong; whatsoever you do, I say, is wrong. It never fits.

A woman was showing the family album to her child, and they came across a picture of a beautiful man: long hair, beard, very young, very alive.

The boy asked, “Mummy, who is this man?”

And the woman said, “Can’t you recognize him? He is your daddy!”

The boy looked puzzled and said, “If he is my daddy, then who is that bald man who lives with us?”

A picture is static. It remains as it is, it never changes. The unconscious mind functions like a camera, it functions like a photo plate. The watchful mind, the meditative mind, functions like a mirror. It catches no impression; it remains utterly empty, always empty. So whatsoever comes in front of the mirror, it is reflected. If you are standing before the mirror, it reflects you. If you are gone, don’t say that the mirror betrays you. The mirror is simply a mirror. When you are gone, it no longer reflects you; it has no obligation to reflect you anymore. Now somebody else is facing it — it reflects somebody else. If nobody is there, it reflects nothing. It is always true to life.

The photo plate is never true to life. Even if your photo is taken right now, by the time the photographer has taken it out of the camera, you are no longer the same! Much water has already gone down the Ganges. You have grown, changed, you have become older. Maybe only one minute has passed, but one minute can be a great thing — you may be dead! Just one minute before you were alive; after one minute, you may be dead. The picture will never die.

But in the mirror, if you are alive, you are alive; if you are dead, you are dead.

Buddha says: Learn sitting silently — become a mirror. Silence makes a mirror out of your consciousness, and then you function moment to moment. You reflect life. You don’t carry an album within your head. Then your eyes are clear and innocent, you have clarity, you have vision, and you are never untrue to life.

This is authentic living.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: the Way of the Buddha, V.2, Discourse #10

The Dhammapada

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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The Metaphor of the Third Eye – Osho

The other day, you talked about the third eye as a door for connecting with you and existence. Whenever I feel open, flowing, connecting with you, other people, nature or myself, I mostly feel it in my heart as silence and expanding spaciousness, and sometimes as radiating light. Beloved Osho, is this the same kind of experience you were talking about, or is there a difference between connecting through the third eye or the heart; or are there different stages?

What you are experiencing is in itself valuable, but it is not the experience of the third eye. The third eye is a little higher than your experience. The way the mystics in the East have categorized the evolution of consciousness is in seven centers. Your experiences belong to the fourth center, the heart. It is one of the most important centers because it is exactly in the middle. Three centers are below it and three centers are above it. That’s why love is such a balancing experience.

Your description is, “Whenever I feel open, flowing, connecting with you, other people, nature or myself, I mostly feel it in my heart as silence and expanding spaciousness, and sometimes as radiating light. Is this the same kind of experience you were talking about?” I was talking about the third eye which is above the heart. There are three centers above the heart. One is in your throat which is the center of creativity; one is between your two eyebrows, exactly in the middle, which is called the third eye. Just as you have two eyes to know the outside world . . . the third eye is only a metaphor, but the experience is knowing oneself, seeing oneself.

The last center is sahastrara, the seventh; that is at the top of your head. As consciousness goes on moving upward, first you know yourself; and in the second step, you know the whole universe — you know the whole and yourself as part of it.

In the old language, the seventh is “knowing God,” the sixth is “knowing yourself,” the fifth is “being creative,” and the fourth is “being loving, sharing and knowing others.” With the fourth, your journey becomes certain; it can be guaranteed that you will reach the seventh. Before the fourth, there is a possibility you may go astray.

The first center is the sex center which is for reproduction — so that life continues. Just above it . . . the sex energy can be moved upward, and it is a great experience; for the first time you find yourself self-sufficient.

Sex always needs the other. The second center is the center of contentment, self-sufficiency: you are enough unto yourself. At the third center you start exploring — who are you? Who is this self-sufficient being? These centers are all significant . . . and the moment you find who you are, the fourth center opens, and you find you are love.

Before the fourth, the journey has started, but there is a possibility you may not be able to complete it. You can go astray. For example, finding yourself self-sufficient, contented, you can remain there; there is no need to do anything anymore. You may not even ask the question, “Who am I?” The sufficiency is so much that all questions disappear.

A master is needed in these moments so that you don’t settle somewhere in the middle without reaching the goal. And there are beautiful spots to settle . . . feeling contented, what is the need to go on? But the master goes on nagging you and wants you to know who you are; you may be contented but at least know who you are. The moment you know who you are, a new door opens because you become aware of life, of love, of joy. You can stay there; it is so much, there is no need to move any more. But the master goads you on, “Move to the fourth! Unless you find the purest energy of love, you will not know the splendor of existence.”

After the fourth, you cannot go astray. Once you have known the splendor of existence, creativity arises on its own. You have known beauty; you would like to create it also. You want to be a creator. A tremendous longing for creativity arises. Whenever you feel love, you always feel creativity just as a shadow coming with it. The man of creativity cannot simply go on looking outside. There is much beauty outside . . . but he becomes aware that just as there is an infinite sky outside, to balance it, there must be the same infinity inside.

If a master is available, it is good; if he is not available, these experiences will lead you onward.

Once your third eye is open, and you see yourself — the whole expanse of your consciousness — you have come very close to the temple of God. You are just standing on the steps. You can see the door and you cannot resist the temptation to go inside the temple and see what is there. There you find universal consciousness, there you find enlightenment, there you find ultimate liberation. There you find your eternity.

So these are the seven centers — just arbitrarily created divisions — so the seeker can move from one to another in a systematic way; otherwise, there is every possibility, if you are working by yourself, to get muddled. Particularly before the fourth center there are dangers, and even after the fourth center . . .

There have been many poets who have lived at the fifth center of creativity and never gone ahead — many painters, many dancers, many singers who created great art but never moved to the third eye. And there have been mystics who have remained with the third eye — knowing their own inner beauty; it is so fulfilling that they thought they had arrived. Somebody is needed to tell you that there is still something more ahead; otherwise, in your ignorance, what you will do is almost unpredictable.

Mike had decided to join the police force and went along for the entrance examination.

The examining sergeant, realizing that the prospective recruit was an Irishman, decided to ask him a simple question. “Who killed Jesus Christ?” he asked.

Mike looked worried and said nothing, so the sergeant told him not to worry and that he could have some time to think about it. Mike was on his way home when he met Paddy.

“Well,” said Paddy, “are you a policeman yet?”

“Not only that,” says Mike, “but I am on my first case.”

Man is such that he needs someone who has known the path and knows the pitfalls, knows the beautiful spots where one can remain stuck, and has compassion enough to go on pushing you — even against you — until you have reached to the final stage of your potentiality.

-Osho

From The Golden Future, Discourse #6, Q2

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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

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.

 

What is the Source of Consciousness – Osho

What is the source of consciousness?

Prem Komal, consciousness is the source of all. Consciousness is the stuff existence is made of. But there is no source of consciousness itself. Consciousness is another name of God – a better name, more scientific, less mythological.

You never ask, what is the source of God? You know that that question is going to lead into an infinite regress. God is the source of existence, but you never ask what is the source of God. Those who have asked are thought to be atheists, and they are condemned: “You are asking an absurd question.” They are not asking an absurd question. They are simply making your God himself an absurdity.

The religions have been saying that existence cannot be without a creator; nothing can be without a creator – that has been the argument of all the religions for centuries. But then the question naturally arises to any intelligent mind that if everything needs a creator, then God must also need a creator.

But then there is no end. God number one is created by God number two. God number two is created by God number three … Where are you going to stop? There is no terminus. The train goes on and on. And finally you will become so tired.

People like Gautam Buddha, who had a greater clarity than anybody else ever had, say that bringing God in is in itself absurd. Existence has always been here. Nobody has created it, and nobody can destroy it. But that does not mean that Gautam Buddha is an atheist. It simply means he has a more scientific and less mythological approach.

He says existence consists of consciousness. Existence itself is made of consciousness. And consciousness has always been here, is here, will be here. It can be asleep, it can be awake, but it is consciousness all the same.

When it is asleep you work blindly, unconsciously. When it becomes awake you are enlightened.

But there is no source of consciousness, Prem Komal.

Consciousness itself is the very foundation of the whole existence. Nothing is deeper than that. You cannot go beyond consciousness.

An English couple wanted to have twins but also wanted them to be very polite and gentlemanly.

So they went to see the genetic specialist who reprogrammed two of the husband’s sperms and implanted them into the egg in the mother’s womb.

Very satisfied the English couple went home. After nine months, the woman was ready to give birth but nothing happened. After ten months there was still nothing. Then after a year she was still pregnant. This went on year after year.

After fifty years her husband died, and still she had not given birth. After seventy years the old lady felt that she might die soon, and so she went to the hospital and asked them to remove the babies surgically.

The woman was put on the operating table and the surgeon opened up her stomach. To the great surprise of all present, inside her stomach were two old English gentlemen, saying one to the other, “After you, I insist.”

“No, no. After you, I insist.”

Just remember one thing: don’t wait for such intellectual questions to be decided. They are never decided. But if you want to experience what is the source of all, go deeper into meditation, and you will find that there is nothing deeper than meditation. You will find that everything comes out of consciousness. Even matter is condensed consciousness, in deep sleep – perhaps in a coma. There are degrees of consciousness. Man is the only being whose unconsciousness has allowed a little bit of consciousness to arise and to be awake. Now this little piece, this little layer of consciousness is enough, if you use it rightly, to bring unconsciousness more and more into a state of consciousness.

Right now it is one tenth of your whole consciousness. The day it becomes all consciousness and no unconsciousness in you, a pure awareness from abc to xyz, from the beginning to the end – you will find all questions have disappeared, because you are in a state of knowing without questioning.

You are consciousness itself and you know that it is the source of everything; it does not need any source for itself.

While questioning a suspect, the police detective flipped through the man’s folder.

“I see here,” he said, “that you have a string of previous arrests. Here is one for armed robbery, one for breaking and entering, and another for sexual assault.”

“Yes sir,” replied the suspect modestly. “It took me a little while to find out what I do best.”

Even the criminal, even the worst criminal has a little consciousness. But he does not allow his consciousness to grow. On the contrary, he allows his unconsciousness to use his consciousness.

The unconscious remains the master and consciousness is being used as a servant.

The day you became an initiate, the day you entered into sannyas, you took a quantum leap: “From now on consciousness will be the master and unconsciousness will be the servant. I will not allow unconsciousness to infiltrate into my consciousness. Howsoever small my consciousness is, I have to work only consciously so that slowly, slowly it becomes stronger, more crystallized, and capable of making unconscious parts of me also join hands with it.”

Your unconscious will join hands with your consciousness only when consciousness is the master.

Who joins hands with servants? With a master the unconsciousness will certainly join hands, knowing that now it is reduced to a servant. And nobody wants to be a servant.

A firebrand women’s lib activist was invited to speak at a teamsters’ convention. Addressing the all-male audience, she declared that women were the foundation of the American republic.

“That may be so,” rumbled a voice from the back of the room, “but remember who laid the foundation!”

People use their consciousness once in a while, but it is not the active part of their being twenty-four hours a day.

A sannyasin has to be conscious twenty-four hours a day. At least he has to make the effort. Slowly, slowly consciousness goes on seeping into the unconscious layers of your being. And it is not just a philosophy or an imaginary idea, because thousands of people have become totally conscious. Those who have become totally conscious have been our highest flowering. In them is the argument for our evolution.

These people who have become fully conscious have all agreed on the point that consciousness is the stuff the universe is made of – different forms, different stages, but it is consciousness.

Asking a question, “What is the source of consciousness?” is simply an intellectual question. It is not existential. If you want to ask the question existentially, become fully conscious – and you will never ask it. The question will disappear. The question will look absurd.

-Osho

From The New Dawn, Discourse #28

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

You Have Never Been In – Osho

We hear what you say, but we in the West keep the information in our heads. How can we get out of our heads? What methods can we use, and can will-power help us?

No. Will-power will not help you. Will-power is not a power at all, because will depends on the ego – a very tiny phenomenon, it cannot create much power. When you are will-less, then you are powerful – because then you are one with the whole.

Deep down, will-power is a sort of impotency. To hide the fact that we are impotent, we create will. We create the opposite to deceive ourselves and others.

Persons who feel they are foolish try to show that they are wise. They are constantly aware that they are foolish, so they do everything to look wise. Persons who are ugly or feel they are ugly always try to beautify themselves – even a painted beauty, just a face, a mask. People who are weak always try to look strong. The opposite is created; that is the only way to hide the reality within.

A Hitler is a weakling. That’s why he creates so much will-power around him, just to hide the fact. A person who is really strong will be unaware that he is strong. Strength will be flowing, it will be there, but he will not even be conscious of it.

Says Lao Tzu: A man of real virtue never knows that he is virtuous. A man who is really moral is never aware that he is moral. But a man who is aware that he is moral has immorality hidden deep down. A man who thinks he is good, saintly, a sage, is a sinner – and he knows it! And just to hide the fact he creates the opposite.

Will-power is not really power but weakness. A really powerful man has no will of his own – the whole is his will. He floats like a white cloud, one with existence, in tune with it. Your will will always create conflict. It will shrink you, make you an island, and then the struggle starts.

A will-less person will be naturally headless. And remember, you cannot get out of your head. You can cut it – and that is easier. Getting out of it is almost impossible, because even this concept of getting out is part of it. The head is a mess, it is a chaos. You think, and you also think against thinking. The thinking that is against thinking is also thinking. You are not moving out of it. You can condemn your thoughts, but this condemning is again a thought. Nothing has been achieved, you are moving in a vicious circle. You can go on moving, but you will not be out.

So, what to do? How to get out of the head?

Only one thing is possible: don’t create any fight inside and don’t create any effort to come out, because every effort will be self-suicidal. What can be done then? Simply watch. Be in and watch.

Don’t try to get out – be in and watch.

If you can watch, in those moments of watchfulness, there will be no head. Suddenly you will be beyond. Not out – beyond. Suddenly you will be hovering beyond yourself.

There is one Zen story – very absurd, as all Zen stories are. But they have to be absurd because life is such; they depict life as it is.

One Zen master used to ask his disciples: Some time ago, I put a goose in a bottle. Now the goose has grown, and the neck of the bottle is very small so the goose cannot come out. The bottle is very precious, and I don’t want to break it, so now there is a crisis. If the goose is not allowed out, she will die. I can break the bottle and the goose will be out, but I don’t want to break the bottle – the bottle is precious. I don’t want to kill the goose either. So what would you do?

This is the problem! The goose is in the head and the neck is very narrow. You can break the head, but it is precious. Or you can let the goose die, but that too cannot be allowed – because you are the goose.

That old Zen master continued asking his disciples, and beating them, and saying to them: Find out a way because there is no time. And only once did he allow an answer. One disciple said: The goose is out! Many answers were tried, but he would always beat the person and say no. Someone would suggest doing something with the bottle, but again the master would say: The bottle will be broken, or something will go wrong, and that cannot be allowed. Or somebody would say: Let the goose die if the bottle is so precious. These were the only two ways; there was no other way. and the master wouldn’t give any other clue. But to this disciple he bowed down and touched his feet and said: He is right – the goose is out! It has never been in.

You are out! You have never been in. The feeling that you are in is just a false conception.

So there is no real problem of how to bring you out of your head. Just watch. When you watch, what happens? Just close your eyes and watch the thoughts. What happens? Thoughts are there, in, but you are not in. The watcher is always beyond. The watcher is always standing on the hill. Everything moves around and around, and the watcher is beyond.

The watcher can never be the in, can never be the insider – he is always out. Watching means to be out. You may call it witnessing, awareness, mindfulness, or whatsoever you choose to call it, but the secret is – watch!

So whenever you feel the head is too much, just sit under a tree and watch, and don’t try to come out. Who will come out? No one has been in. The whole effort is futile, because if you have never been in then how can you come out? You may go on trying and trying and getting involved in it, you may get mad, but you will never be out.

Once you know that in a moment of watchfulness you are beyond, transcending – you are out. And from that moment you will be headless. The head belongs to the body, not to you.

The head is part of the body, it belongs to the body, it has a function in the body, it is beautiful, it is good. The bottle is precious, and if you know the way, the secrets of it, it can be used. When I am talking to you, what am I doing? Using the bottle. When Buddha is preaching, what is he doing? – using the bottle. The bottle is really precious, worth preserving. But this is no way to preserve it – to get into it and get caught into it, and then make efforts to come out. The whole life becomes chaos.

Once you know that watching you are out, you become headless. Then you move on this earth without any head. What a beautiful phenomenon, a man moving without a head! That’s what I mean when I say become a white cloud – a headless phenomenon.

You cannot even imagine how much silence can descend upon you when the head is not there. Your physical head will be there, but the involvement, the obsession, is not there.

The head is not a problem! It is beautiful, a wonderful device, the greatest computer yet invented, such a complex, such an efficient mechanism. It is beautiful. It can be used; you can enjoy using it.

But from where have you got the idea that you are in it? It seems to be just a false teaching. You may not be aware that in old Japan, and still old people in Japan, if you ask them: Where do you think from? they will point to their belly, because in Japan it was taught that the belly is the center of thinking. So when for the first time Europeans reached Japan, they couldn’t believe that a whole country thinks that the head is in the belly not in the head.

This is just a Western attitude that you are in the head. In old Japan thinking from the belly really worked, but now they are shifting from the belly to the head. There have been other traditions that have thought from other parts of the body. Lao Tzu says you think from the soles of your feet. So there are techniques in Taoist yoga to get out of the soles of your feet – because there the thinking is going on.

What is the reality? The reality is: you are beyond. But you can get attached to any part of the body – the head is a Western obsession; the belly was the Eastern obsession. You must have heard about D.H. Lawrence. He used to think that one thinks from the sex center, that that is the real thinking center, nowhere else.

And all are equal – equally wrong or equally right. There is nothing to choose because the witness is beyond. It is all around the body and beyond the body. You can get attached to any part of the body and start thinking that this is the part.

There is no need to come out because you have never been in. The goose is out – already out!

Watch . . . and when you watch you have to remember that while watching, don’t judge. If you judge, watching is lost. While watching, don’t evaluate. If you evaluate, watching is lost. While watching, don’t comment. If you comment, you have missed the point.

While watching just watch . . . a river flowing, the stream of consciousness flowing, atomic thoughts floating like bubbles, and you sitting on the bank watching. The stream goes on and on and on. You don’t say this is good, you don’t say this is bad, and you don’t say this should not have been, and you don’t say this should have been. You don’t say anything – you simply watch. You are not asked to comment. You are not a judge – just a watcher.

Then see what happens. Watching the river, suddenly you will be beyond . . . and the goose will be out. And once you know this, that you are out, you can remain out. And then you can move on this earth without a head.

So, this is the way to cut the head. Everybody is interested in cutting others’ heads – that won’t help. You have already done that too much. Cut your own. To be headless is to be in deep meditation.

-Osho

From My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, Discourse #3

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My Way the Way of the White CloudsAn 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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