Tag: Mind

Entering Into Your Veryness – Osho

Is this just my refusal to grow up? Am I fooling myself? Are we all to embrace the Zen Manifesto no matter what ‘type’ we feel we are?

There is no question of type. All types are just superficial. At the innermost core there is only one existence. The Zen Manifesto is not for a particular type, it is for all – for men and for women, and for black and white, and for Hindu and Mohammedan, and for Christian and Buddhist. It does not matter what kind of conditioning you have been brought up in, Zen is simply a technique of entering into your veryness. The entrance is so deep that nothing remains, and all is found.

Gurdjieff has written a book, All and Nothing. I would like to withdraw the word ‘and’, because all is nothing; there is no question of ‘and’. Whatever type you are – introvert, extrovert – it does not matter, you are all part of the same existence. And when you relax into existence, all your differences disappear; only oneness remains. You can call that oneness whatever you like, but basically it is nothingness. You can give it any color; you can call it by any name, but don’t start calling it by another name from the beginning, because that can take you astray. Somebody may think that he can call it God, then he will start worshipping a God which is man manufactured.

For the beginner, “nothing” is the most secure path to avoid the mind playing games. “Nothing” is beyond the reaches of the mind, so it cannot play games with it. But anything else you name it, mind is capable of playing games with it.

The whole effort of meditation is not to allow the mind to play games. It has been playing games for centuries. One has to come to the point of seeing all the games of the mind: all the gods, all the messiahs, all the prophets, all the religions, all the philosophies.

Existence is available to a silent being, not to the learned, not to the well informed, not to the scholar. It is available to the innocent, and meditation is a way of becoming innocent again. Getting back your childhood, being reborn, knowing nothing, a silence, a joy, a blissfulness arises which is indestructible, which is eternal.

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom from Oneself, Discourse #7    The Zen Manifesto

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.

Thinking No Thing – Osho

Thinking no thing
will limited-self unlimit.

That’s what I was saying. If there is no object to your attention, you are nowhere; or, you are everywhere, you are free. You have become freedom. This second sutra says: Thinking no thing – or, thinking nothing – will limited-self unlimit.

If you are not thinking, you are unlimited. Thinking gives you a limit, and there are many types of limits. You are a Hindu – it gives a limit. Hindu, to be a Hindu, is to be attached to a thought, to a system, to a pattern. You are a Christian – then again you are limited. A religious man cannot be a Hindu or a Christian. And if someone is a Hindu or a Christian, he is not religious – impossible – because these are thoughts. A religious man means not thinking thoughts; not limited by any thought, by any system, by any pattern – not limited by the mind, living in the unlimited.

When you have a certain thought, that thought becomes your barrier. It may be a beautiful thought – still it is a barrier. A beautiful prison is still a prison. It may be a golden thought, but it makes no difference, it imprisons you all the same. And whenever you have a thought and you are attached to it, you are always against someone, because barriers cannot exist if you are not against someone. A thought is always a prejudice; it is always for and against.

I have heard about a very religious Christian man who was a poor farmer. He belonged to the Society of Friends; he was a Quaker. Quakers are non-violent; they believe in love, in friendship. He was coming from the city to his village on his mule cart, and suddenly, apparently without any cause, the mule stopped, and he would not budge. He tried, he persuaded the mule in Christian ways, he persuaded the mule in a very friendly way, a non-violent way. He was a Quaker: he couldn’t beat the mule, he couldn’t use strong words, he couldn’t abuse, scold, but he was filled with anger. But how to beat the mule?

He wanted to beat him, so he said to the mule, “Behave rightly, because I am a Quaker – I cannot beat you, I cannot scold you, I cannot be violent – but remember, mule, that I can sell you to someone who is not a Christian!”

The Christian has his own world, and the non-Christian is opposite. The Christian cannot conceive that the non-Christian can reach the kingdom of God. A Hindu cannot conceive, a Jain cannot conceive, that others can enter into that realm of bliss – impossible. Thought creates a limitation, a barrier, a boundary, and all those who are not for are taken to be against. One who is not in agreement with me is against me.

How can you be everywhere? You can be with the Christian; you cannot be with the non-Christian. You can be with the Hindu, but you cannot be with the non-Hindu, with the Mohammedan. Thought is bound to be somewhere against – against someone or something. It cannot be total. Remember: thought cannot be total; only no-thought can be total.

Secondly: thought is always from the mind; it is always a by-product of the mind. It is your attitude, your speculation, your prejudice; it is your reaction, your formulation, your concept, your philosophy, but it is not existence itself. It is something about the existence; it is not existence itself.

A flower is there. You can say something about it; that is a thought. You can say it is beautiful, you can say it is ugly, you can say it is sacred, but whatsoever you say about the flower is not the flower. The flower exists without your thoughts, and whenever you are thinking about the flower, you are creating a barrier between you and the flower.

The flower doesn’t need your thoughts. It exists. Drop your thoughts, and then you can drop yourself into the flower. Whatsoever you say about a rose is meaningless, howsoever meaningful it appears, it is meaningless. What you say is not needed. It is not giving any existence to the flower. It is creating a film between you and the flower; it is creating a limitation. So whenever there is thought, you are debarred; the door is closed to existence.

This sutra says:

Thinking no thing
will limited-self unlimit.

If you don’t think, if you simply are, fully alert, aware, but without any clouds of thought, you are unlimited. The body is not the only body – a deeper body is the mind. Body consists of matter; mind also consists of matter – subtle, more refined. Body is the outer layer, mind is the inner layer. And it is easy to be detached from the body. It is more difficult to be detached from the mind, because with the mind you feel you are more yourself.

If someone says that your body looks ill, you don’t feel offended. You are not so attached; it is a little away from you. But if someone says your mind seems to be pathological, ill, you feel offended. He has insulted you. With the mind you are nearer. If someone says something about your body, you can tolerate it. If someone says something about your mind, it is impossible to tolerate it, because he has hit deeper.

The mind is the inner layer of the body. Mind and body are not two: the outer layer of your body is the body and the inner layer is the mind. Just as if you have a house: you can see the house from the outside, and you can see the house from the inside. From the outside the outer layer of the walls will be seen; from the inside the inner layer. The mind is your inner layer. It is nearer to you, but it is still a body.

In death your outer body drops, but you carry the inner, subtle layer with you. You are so attached to it that even death cannot separate you from your mind. Mind continues. That’s why your past births can be known, because you are still carrying all the minds that you ever had. They are there. If you were a dog once, the dog mind is still with you. If you were a tree once, the tree mind is still with you. If you once were a woman or a man, you carry those minds. All the minds are carried by you. You are so attached to them that you never lose the grip.

In death the outer dissolves but the inner is carried. It is a very subtle material thing. Really, just vibrations of energy, thought vibrations. You carry them, and according to your thought pattern that you carry, you enter a new body. According to the thought pattern, the desire pattern, the mind, you again create a new body for yourself. The blueprint is in the mind, and the outer layer is again accumulated.

The first sutra is to put aside the body. The second sutra is to put aside the mind, the inner body. Even death cannot separate you – only meditation can separate. That’s why meditation is a greater death; it is a deeper surgery – deeper than death itself. That’s why so much fear. People go on talking about meditation but they will never do it. They will talk, they can write about it, they can preach about it, but they will never do it. A deep fear exists about meditation, and the fear is of death.

Those who do meditation, they come one day or another to the point where they are scared, thrown back. They come to me, and they say, “Now we cannot enter more. It is impossible.” A point comes where one feels that one is dying. And that point is of a deeper death than any death, because now the innermost is being separated; the most inner identity is being shattered. One feels one is dying; one feels now one is moving into non-existence. A deep abyss opens, infinite emptiness opens. One is scared, runs back to cling to the body so that one is not thrown, because the earth beneath is moving, is being removed. A valley is opening, a nothingness.

So people, even if they try, they always try superficially; they play with meditation. They are unconsciously aware that if they move deep they will be no more. And that’s right, the fear is true – you will not be yourself again. Once you have known that abyss, that shunya, the void, you will not be the same again.

You come back, but you are resurrected, a new man. The old has disappeared. You cannot find even a trace of it, of where it has gone. The old was the identity with the mind. Now you cannot be identified with the mind. Now you can use the mind, you can use the body, but they have become instruments; you are above them. Whatsoever you do, you can do, but you are not one with them. This gives freedom. But this can happen only when Thinking no thing.

Hmm – this is very paradoxical – Thinking no thing. You can think about things. How can you think about no thing? What does this “no thing” mean? And how can you think about it? Whenever you think about something it becomes a thing, it becomes an object, it becomes a thought, and thoughts are things. How can you think no thing? You cannot, but in the very effort – the effort to think no thing – thinking will be lost, thinking will be dissolved.

You may have heard about Zen koans. Zen masters give an absurd puzzle to the seeker to think about – and it is something which cannot be thought. It is given knowingly just to stop thinking. For example, they say to the seeker: “Go and find out what your original face is: the face you had when you were not born. Don’t think about this face which you have got; think of the face you had before birth.”

How can you think about it? There was no face before birth; the face comes with the birth. The face is part of the body. You have no face; only the body has a face. Close your eyes and you have no face. You know about your face through the mirror. You have not seen it yourself, and you cannot see it, so how can one think about the original face? But one can try; the very effort will help.

The seeker will try and try – and it is impossible. He will come to the master again and again, asking, “Is this the original face?” And before he says it to the master, the master says, “It is wrong. Whatsoever you bring is going to be wrong.”

For months together the seeker comes again and again. He finds something, imagines something, and he sees the face – “The original face is like this?” And the master says, “No.” And every time this “No, no,” and by and by he becomes more and more puzzled. He cannot think. He tries and tries and tries and fails – that failure is the basic thing. One day he comes to a total failure. All thinking stops in that total failure, and he comes to realize that the original face cannot be thought. Thinking stops.

And whenever this last time happens to a seeker, when he comes to the master, the master says, “Now there is no need. I see the original face.” The eyes have become vacant. The seeker has come not to say something, but just to be near the master. He has not found any answer. There was none. He has come for the first time without the answer. There is no answer to it. He comes silently.

Every time he had come, he had some answer. The mind was there, the thought was there – he was limited by that thought. He had found or imagined some face – he was limited by that face. Now he has become original; now there is no limit. Now he has got no face, no idea, no thought. He has come without any mind. This is the state of no-mind.

In this state of no-mind, the limited-self unlimits. The limits are dissolved. Suddenly you are everywhere, suddenly you are everyone. Suddenly you are in the tree and in the stone and in the sky and in the friend and in the enemy – suddenly you are everywhere. The whole existence has become just a mirror – you are everywhere, mirrored. This state is the state of bliss. Now nothing can disturb you, because nothing exists except you. Now nothing can destroy you; nothing exists except you. Now there is no death, because even in death you are. Now nothing is opposed to you. Alone, you exist.

This aloneness Mahavir has called kaivalya, total aloneness. Why alone? – Because everything is involved, absorbed, has become you. You can express this state in two ways. You can say, “Only I am. Aham Brahmasmi – I am the God, the divine, the total. Everything has come unto me; all the rivers have dissolved into my ocean. Alone I exist. Nothing else exists.” Sufi mystics say this, and Mohammedans could never understand why Sufis say such things. A Sufi says, “There is no God. Alone I exist.” Or, “I am the God.” This is a positive way of saying that now no separation is there. Buddha uses a negative way. He says, “I am no more. Nothing exists.”

Both are true, because when everything is included in me, there is no sense in calling [naming] myself. The I is always opposed to the you; I is always opposed to thou. In relation to you it is meaningful. When there is no you, I becomes meaningless. So Buddha says there is no I, nothing exists. Either everything has become you, or you have become a non-being and you dissolve into everything.

Both the expressions are true. Of course, no expression can be totally true, that’s why the opposite expression is always also true. Every expression is partial, part; that’s why the opposite expression is also true – that too is part of it. Remember this. Whatsoever you express may be true and the opposite also may be true – the very opposite. Really, it is bound to be true, because every expression is only a part.

And there are two types of expression: you can choose the positive or you can choose the negative. If you choose the positive, the negative seems to be untrue. It is not; it is complementary. It is not really opposed to it. So whether you say Brahma – the total – or you say nirvana – the nothingness – it is the same. Both connote the same experience, and the experience is this – thinking no thing, you come to know it.

Some basic things have to be understood about this technique. One: thinking, you are separated from existence. Thinking is not a relation, it is not a bridge, it is not a communication – it is a barrier. Non-thinking, you are related, bridged; you are in communion. When you are talking to someone, you are not related. The very talk becomes a barrier. The more you talk, the further away you move.  If you are with someone in silence, you are related. If the silence is really deep and there are no thoughts in your mind and both the minds are totally silent, you are one.

Two zeros cannot be two. Two zeros become one. If you add two zeros they don’t become two, they become a bigger zero – one. And, really, a zero cannot be bigger – more big or less big. A zero is simply a zero. You cannot add something to it, you cannot deduct something from it. A zero is whole. Whenever you are silent with someone, you are one. When you are silent with existence, you are one with it.

This technique says be silent with existence and then you will know what God is. There is only one dialogue with existence and that is in silence. If you talk with existence, you miss. Then you are enveloped in your own thoughts.

Try this as an experiment. Try it with anything as an experiment – even with a rock. Be silent with it – take it in your hand and be silent – and there will be a communion. You will move deep into the rock and the rock will move deep into you. Your secrets will be revealed to the rock and the rock will reveal its secrets to you. But you cannot use language with it. The rock doesn’t know any language. Because you use language, you cannot be related to it.

And man has lost silence completely. When you are not doing anything, then too you are not silent; the mind goes on doing something or other. Because of this constant inner talk, this continuous inner chattering, you are not related to anything. Not even to your beloved ones are you related, because this chattering goes on.

You may be sitting with your wife: you are chattering in your own mind; she is chattering in her own mind. Both are chattering. They are far away from each other, poles away. It is as if one is on one star, and the other on another star, and there is infinite space between them. Then they feel that the intimacy is not there, and then they blame each other – “You don’t love me.”

This is not the question really. Love is not possible. Love is a flower of silence. It flowers only in silence because it flowers in communion. If you cannot be without thoughts, you cannot be in love.

And then to be in prayer is impossible – but even if we do prayer we chatter. To us, prayer is just chattering with God.

We have become so conditioned to chattering that even if we go to the church or to the temple we continue chattering there also. We chatter with God; we talk with God. This is absolute nonsense. God, existence, cannot understand your language. Existence understands only one language – that is of silence. And silence is neither Sanskrit nor Arabic nor English nor Hindi. Silence is universal; it doesn’t belong to anyone.

There are at least four thousand languages on earth, and everyone is enclosed in his own language. If you don’t know his language you cannot be related to him. You cannot be related. If I don’t understand your language and you don’t understand my language, we cannot be related. We are strangers. We cannot penetrate each other, we cannot understand, we cannot love. This is happening only because we don’t know a basic universal language – that is silence.

Really only through silence is one related. And if you know the language of silence then you can be related to anything, because rocks are silent, trees are silent, the sky is silent – it is existential. It is not only human; it is existential. Everything knows what silence is; everything exists in silence.

If a rock is there in your hand, the rock is not chattering within itself, and you are chattering – that’s why you cannot be related to the rock. And the rock is open, vulnerable, inviting. The rock will welcome you, but you are chattering, and the rock cannot understand the chattering – that becomes the barrier. So even with human beings you cannot be in a deep relationship; there can be no intimacy. Language, words, destroy everything.

Meditation means silence: not thinking about anything. Not thinking at all, just being – open, ready, eager to meet, welcoming, receptive, loving, but not thinking at all. Then infinite love will happen to you, and you will never say that no one loves you. You will never say it, you will never feel it. Now, whatsoever you do, you will say this, and you will feel this. You may not even say it. You may pretend that someone loves you, but deep down you know.

Even lovers go on asking each other, “Do you love me?” In so many ways they go on enquiring continuously. Everyone is afraid, uncertain, insecure. In many ways they try to find out whether really the lover loves them. And they can never be certain, because the lover can say, “Yes, I love you,” but it will not give any guarantee. How can you be at ease? How can you know whether he is deceiving you or not? He can argue, he can convince you. He can convince you intellectually, but the heart will not be convinced. So lovers are always in agony. They cannot be convinced of the fact that the other loves. How can you be convinced?

Really there is no way to convince through language. And you are asking through language, and while the lover is there you are chattering in the mind, questioning, arguing. You will never be convinced, and you will always feel that you have not been loved, and this becomes the deepest misery. And this is happening not because someone is not loving you. This is happening because you are closed in a wall. You are closed within your thoughts; nothing can penetrate. The thoughts cannot be penetrated unless you drop them. If you drop them the whole existence penetrates you.

This sutra says:

Thinking no thing
will limited- self unlimit.

You will become unlimited. You will become whole. You will become universal. You will be everywhere. And then you are joy. Now you are nothing but misery. Those who are cunning, they go on deceiving themselves that they are not miserable, or they go on hoping that something will change, something will happen, and they will achieve at the end of life – but you are miserable. You can create faces, deceptions, false faces; you can go on smiling continuously, but deep down you know you are in misery. That is natural. Confined in thoughts you will be in misery. Unconfined, beyond thoughts – alert, conscious, aware, but unclouded by thoughts – you will be joy, you will be bliss.

-Osho

From The Book of Secrets, Discourse #57

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

Here you can listen to the discourse excerpt Thinking No Thing.

Osho Tantra and the Secrets of Meditation

Osho’s Book of Secrets Meditations

All 112 of Shiva’s meditation techniques (Vigyan Bhairava Tantra)

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

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

The Lion’s Roar – Osho

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

It is like water and ice:

Apart from water, no ice,

Outside living beings, no Buddhas.

Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar.

What a pity!

It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;

It is like the child of a rich house

who has strayed away among the poor.

The cause of our circling through the six worlds

Is that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.

Dark path upon dark path treading,

When shall we escape from birth-and-death?

The Zen meditation of the Mahayana

Is beyond all our praise.

Giving and morality and the other perfections,

Taking of the name, repentance, discipline,

And the many other right actions,

All come back to the practice of meditation.

By the merit of a single sitting

He destroys innumerable accumulated sins.

How should there be wrong paths for him?

MY BELOVED ONES: I love you. Love is my message – let it be your message too. Love is my color and my climate. To me, love is the only religion. All else is just rubbish, all else is nothing but mind-churning dreams. Love is the only substantial thing in life, all else is illusion. Let love grow in you and God will be growing on its own accord. If you miss love you will miss God and all.

There is no way to God without love. God can be forgotten – if love is remembered, God will happen as a consequence. It happens as a consequence. It is the fragrance of love and nothing else. In fact there is no God but only godliness. There is no person like God anywhere. Drop all childish attitudes, don’t go on searching for a father. Divineness is, God is not. When I say divineness is, I mean whatsoever is, is full of God. The green of the trees, and the red and the golden – all is divine. This crow crying, and a bird on the wing. and a child giggling, and a dog barking – all is divine. Nothing else exists.

The moment you ask ‘Where is God?’ you have raised a wrong question. Because God cannot be indicated anywhere. He is not in a particular direction, He is not a particular thing, He is not a particular being. God is universality. Ask where God is not, then you have asked the right question. But for that right question you will have to prepare the soil of your heart. That’s what I mean by love – preparing the soil of your heart. If you are full of love, the world is full of God – they go parallel, they are part of one symphony.

God is the echo from the universe. When you are in love, the echo is there. When you are not in love, how can there be an echo? It is only you who are reflected again and again in millions of ways, it is you who are thrown back to yourself again and again. If you are in love, God is. If you are not in love, then what to say about God? – even you are not.

I was thinking what should I give to you today? Because this is my birthday, I was incarnated into this body on this day. This is the day I saw for the first time the green of the trees and the blue of the skies. This was the day I for the first time opened my eyes and saw God all around. Of course the word ‘God’ didn’t exist at that moment, but what I saw was God. I was thinking what should I give to you today? Then I remembered a saying of Buddha: sabba danam dhamma danana jnati – the gift of truth excels all other gifts. And my truth is love.

The word ‘truth’ looks to me a little too dry and desert-like. I am not in much tune with the word ‘truth’ – it looks too logical, it looks too ‘heady’. It gives you the feeling of philosophy, not of religion. It gives you the idea as if you have concluded – that you have come to a conclusion, that there has been a syllogism behind it, argumentation and logic and reasoning. No, ‘truth’ is not my word, ‘love’ is my word. Love is of the heart. Truth is partial, only your head is involved. In love you are involved as a totality – your body, your mind, your soul, all are involved.

Love makes you a unity – and not a union, remember, but a unity. Because in a union those who join together remain separate. In a unity they dissolve, they become one, they melt into each other. And that moment I call the moment of truth, when love has given you unity. First, love gives you unity in your innermost core. Then you are no more a body, no more a mind, no more a soul. You are simply one – unnamed, undefined, unclassified. No more determinate, definable, no more comprehensible. A mystery, a joy, a surprise, a jubilation, a great celebration.

First, love gives you an inner unity. And when the inner unity has happened the second happens on its own – you are not to do anything for it. Then you start falling in unity with the whole beyond you. Then the drop disappears in the ocean and the ocean disappears into the drop. That moment, that moment of orgasm between you and the whole, is where you become a Buddha. That moment is the moment Buddhahood is imparted to you. Or, better, revealed to you – you have always been that, unaware.

My word is love. So I say: My beloved ones, I love you, and I would like you to fill the whole world with love. Let that be our religion. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Islam, not Jainism, not Buddhism, but love. Love without any adjective to it. Not Christian love – because how can love be Christian? It is so stupid. How can love be Hindu? It is ridiculous. Love is simply love. In love you can be a Christ, in love you can be a Buddha – but there is no Buddhist love and there is no Christian love.

In love you disappear, your mind disappears. In love you come to an utter relaxation. That’s my teaching to you, I teach love. And there is nothing higher than love.

Then I thought I should give you something beautiful on this day. And I remembered Hakuin’s Song of Meditation. It is a very small song, but a great gift. Hakuin is one of the greatest Zen masters. His song contains all: all the Bibles and all the Korans and all the Vedas. A small song of few lines, but it is like a seed – very small, but if you allow passage to it to your heart, it can become a great tree. It can become a Bodhi tree – it will have great foliage and much shade and thousands of people can sit and rest underneath it. It will have big branches and many birds can come and have their nests on it.

See: I have become a tree. You are the people who have come to make their nests on my tree. You can also become this. Everybody should become this – because unless you become this you will go on missing your fulfillment. Unless you become a great tree which has come to its foliage, flowers and fruits – which is fulfilled – you will remain in discontent. Anguish will go on gnawing in your heart, misery will linger around you. Bliss will be only a word, signifying nothing. God will be just gibberish.

When you have fulfillment then there is grace and then there is God. In your fulfillment you come to realize the benediction of existence. This is a song of meditation. Hakuin has called it ‘song’ – yes, it is a song. If meditation is without a song it is do and dead – it does not beat it does not breathe. It is a song and a dance: sing it and dance it. Just don’t think upon it – then you will miss the messages you will miss its content. You will find this song and its meaning only when you are singing and dancing. When the music of life has overtaken you, has possessed you.

Hakuin’s song is so small and yet so vast, it is unbelievable. How can a man condense so much truth and so much love and so much insight into so few words? But Hakuin was a man of few words, a man of silence. For years he would not speak at all, and then he would speak a word or two.

Once the Emperor of Japan invited him to deliver a sermon in the palace. And the queen and the king and the prime minister and the ministers and the high officials and the generals, they all had gathered with great respect to listen. Hakuin came, stood there for a single moment, looked around, and left the hall. The king was puzzled. He asked his prime minister, ‘What is the Matter with this man? We had come to listen.’ The old prime minister said, ‘This is the greatest sermon that I have ever heard. He has said it! You had asked him to come and teach you about silence. He has taught it! He stood there in silence, he was silence. What more do you ask? What more do you demand? He was pure silence, standing there for those few seconds. He was utter silence. He was silence, throbbing, pulsating. But you were looking to hear some words.’

But about silence nothing can be said. And all that is said about silence will be wrong. How can you say anything about silence? To say something will be falsifying it. That’s why Lao Tzu says: Nothing can be said about Tao – and if something is said, in the very saying of it, it has become untrue. Tao is silent. But that silence is not the silence of a cemetery. It is the silence of a garden where trees are alive breathing and yet there is utter silence. It is not a dead silence, it is an alive silence. Hence he has called it ’The Song of Meditation’.

Buddha says: My approach to reality is not of belief but of seeing. His religion has been qualified as ‘Ihi passika: Come and see.’ Not as ‘Come and believe.’ Buddha says ‘Come and see: Ihi passika.’ It is here, present – you just come and see. He does not require you to believe. He is the only great teacher in the world who dropped belief – and with dropping belief he transformed religion from a very low childish stature to a very mature thing. With Buddha religion became young. Otherwise it was childish. It was a kind of belief – belief is superstition, belief is out of fear. And belief is blind. Buddha has given eyes to religion. He says: See, and there is no need to believe. And when you have seen then it will not be a belief, it will be knowing.

In this song of Hakuin you will see the way of seeing – how to open the eyes. Because truth is always there, has been always there. It is not that the truth has to be produced. Buddha says: Yatha bhutam – It is! It is already there, it is confronting you! It is in the east, it is in the west, it is in the north, it is in the south. It surrounds you – it is without and it is within. But you will have to see it: Ihi passika. Your eyes are closed, you have forgotten how to open them.

Meditation is nothing but the art of opening your eyes. The art of cleansing your eyes. the art of dropping the dust that has gathered on the mirror of your consciousness. It is natural, dust gathers. Man has been traveling and traveling for thousands of lives – dust gathers. We are all travelers, much dust has gathered – so much so that the mirror has completely disappeared. There is only dust upon dust, layers and layers of dust, and you cannot see the mirror. But the mirror is still there – it cannot be lost, because it is your very nature. If it can be lost then it will not be your nature. It is not that you have a mirror: you ARE the mirror. The traveler is the mirror – he cannot lose it, he can only forget it. At the most, forgetfulness.

You have not lost your Buddhahood. Buddha hood means the mirror clean of dust. The mirror again fresh, again reflecting, again functioning – that’s what Buddhahood is. Buddha hood means a consciousness which has become awakened. The sleep is no more and the dreams are no more and the desires have disappeared. The dust gathers, it is natural. But you cling to the dust – your desire functions like a glue.

And what is your desire? That has to be understood. If you have understood your desire you have understood all. Because in the understanding of desire, desire ceases. And when desire ceases, suddenly you have a totally new feel of your being; you are no more the old. What is the desire? What are you searching? What are you seeking?

Happiness. Bliss. Joy. That’s what you are seeking. And you have been seeking for millennia, and you have not found it yet. It is time, the right time, to think again, to meditate again. You have been seeking so hard, you have been trying so hard – perhaps you are missing just because you are trying? Maybe it is trying that keeps you away from happiness? Let us think over it, brood over it. Give a little pause to your search, recapitulate.

You have been searching for many lives. You don’t remember other lives, no need – but in this life you have been searching, that will do. And you have not found it. And nobody has ever found it by searching. Something is wrong in the very search. In the search naturally you forget yourself; you start looking everywhere, everywhere else. You look to the north and to the east and to the west and to the south, and in the sky and underneath the seas, and you go on searching everywhere. And the search becomes more and more desperate, because the more and more you search and you don’t find, great anxiety arises – ‘Am I going to make it this time, or am I again going to miss it?’

More and more desperation, more and more misery, more and more madness. You go nuts. And the happiness remains as far away as ever – in fact it recedes farther away from you. The more you search, the less is the possibility to get it. Because it is inside you.

Happiness is the function of your consciousness when it is awake. Unhappiness is the function of your consciousness when it is asleep. Unconsciousness is your mirror burdened with great dust and luggage and past. Happiness is when the burden has been dropped and the mirror has been found again. And again your mirror can reflect the trees and the sun and the sand and the sea and the stars. When you have again become innocent, when you again have again become innocent, when you again have the eyes of a child – in that clarity you are happy.

I was reading a few lines of Michael Adam. They are beautiful.

‘Perhaps trying even makes for unhappiness. Perhaps all the din of my desiring has kept the strange bird from my shoulder. I have tried so long and so loud after happiness. I have looked so far and wide. I have always imagined that happiness was an island in the river. Perhaps it is the river. I have thought happiness to be the name of an inn at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the road. I have believed that happiness was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps it is now. I have looked everywhere else.

‘So: here and now.

‘But here and now is clearly unhappiness. Perhaps then no such thing as happiness. Perhaps happiness exists not, it is just a dream created by an unhappy mind. Certainly it cannot be as

I unhappily imagine it. Here and now there is not happiness. So happiness is not. I need not therefore waste myself on what is not. I can forget about happiness then; I can cease to care and instead concern myself with something that I do know, can feel and fully experience. Happiness is an idle dream: now it is morning. I can awaken and stay with unhappiness, with what is real under the sun this moment. And now I see how much of my unhappiness came from trying to be happy; even I can see that trying is unhappiness. Happiness does not try….

‘At last I am here and now. At last I am what I am. I am unpretending, at ease. I am unhappy – so what?. . . But is THIS what I ran from? Is this really unhappiness?. . .’

Think over it, meditate over it.

‘And when I cease to try to be happy or anything else, when I do not seek anymore, when I do not care to go anywhere, get anything, then it seems I am already arrived in a strange place: I am here and now. When I see that I can do nothing, that all my doing is the same dream, in the moment that I see this, my mind the old dreamer and wanderer is for the moment still and present.’

Naturally. If you are not searching, not seeking, not desiring, not dreaming, for a moment the mind falls into a silence. It is still. There is nothing to hanker about, nothing to make a fuss about, nothing to expect and nothing to be frustrated about. For a moment the mind stops its constant chasing. In that moment of stillness you are in a strange place, you are in a strange space, unknown, never known before. A new door has opened. For the moment the mind is still and present.

‘For the moment, here and now, the real world shows, and see: here and now is already and always all that I had sought and striven after elsewhere and apart. More than that: I have hunted after shadows; the reality is here in this sunlit place, in this bird-call now. It was my seeking aster reality that took me from it; desire deafened me. The bird was singing here all the while. . . .

‘If I am still and careless to find happiness, then happiness it seems is able to find me. It is, if I am truly still, as still as death – if I am thoroughly dead, here and now.’

Happiness suddenly jumps upon you. When desire disappears, happiness appears. When the striving is no more, for the first time you see who you are. That knowing is what Buddha means:

Come and see – Ihi passika. From where is he calling you: ‘Come and see’? He is calling you from your desires. You have gone far away from your home, you have lost your home base. You are not where you appear to be. Your dream has taken you to faraway worlds – imaginary; illusory, your own creation.

Zen people have a special word for meditation, they call it ‘fu-sho’. Fu-sho means ‘unproduced’.

You cannot produce it, you cannot do anything to bring it. You have to be passive, in a state of non-doing – then it comes. Then it comes suddenly, from nowhere, from the blue. And in that coming, in that shower of silence and stillness, is the transformation. It is nothing special, Zen people say. How can it be special? It is everybody’s nature, so how can it be special? It is utterly ordinary, everybody has it. You may know, you may not know – that is a different thing – but you have it. Not for a single moment have you missed it. Not for a single moment has it been taken away from you. It has been there, lying and lying and waiting for you to come back home.

Another word Zen people use for meditation is ‘wu-shi’. It means ‘nothing special’ or ‘no fuss’.

Now this song of Hakuin.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

This one sentence is enough. It is the beginning and the middle and the end. It is all. The alpha and the omega.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

You are Buddhas. Never for a single moment have you been otherwise. You cannot. You cannot really go away from your Buddhahood, you can only dream. You can only dream that you have gone away, but while dreaming you will still remain here now. This is impossible, to lose your Buddhahood, because God is involved in every thing and every being. And when Hakuin says, ‘All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas,’ don’t think that he is talking only of human beings. Animals are included, so are included the birds and the trees and the rocks. All that is, is included.

The English word ‘being’ comes from a Sanskrit root ‘bhu’. Bhu means ‘that which grows’. All that grows is God. The trees grow, the birds grow, the rocks grow. All that grows is God. And everything grows in its own pace. Remember, the root of ’being’, the word ’being’, is BHU. It simply means that which breathes, that which grows, that which has life – howsoever rudimentary, howsoever primitive. All is included.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

And what is the meaning of a Buddha? ‘Buddha’ means a consciousness that has come back to itself – is no more wandering in dreams, is no more thinking of the future, is no more thinking of the past. A consciousness that is not possessed by memories or possessed by imagination. A consciousness that has got rid of the past and rid of the future, a consciousness that has only present. A consciousness that lives in the moment, utterly here now. Alert, awake, radiant.

All beings are Buddhas. Zen people call this single sentence ‘The Lion’s Roar’. It is. In a single stroke Hakuin has delivered you, has saved you from yourself. There is no more salvation needed. A single statement is enough to release you from all bondage. You are a Buddha. But remember you are not a Buddha in any special sense. Everybody is – your dog and your cow and your buffalo and your donkey, everybody is! So don’t take it in an egoistic sense, that ‘I am a Buddha’. Don’t make it ambitious, don’t go on an ambition trip. ALL is Buddha. Life is Buddha, being is Buddhahood, existence is Buddhahood.

Just think of it. One of the greatest statements ever made:

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

Hakuin has finished in one sentence. The remaining song will be a repetition, really. The remaining song will be for those who cannot understand the first statement. It is said, when Hakuin was writing this song and he wrote his first sentence – ‘All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas’ – one of his disciples was sitting there and he said, ’Stop now. Now there is no more to say.’ He left the room, the disciple left the room. He said, ‘Now there is no point. You have finished in the first sentence – this should be the LAST sentence!’

But still the song is beautiful. It will help you from different directions to come to the same truth. It will help you to see the point from different vantage points, from different windows. You will see the same Buddha sitting, from every window of the temple. But it is good, because from some window there may be more light falling on the Buddha, from some window the green of the trees may be reflected in the Buddha’s face, from some other window a star may be looking at the Buddha, from some other window something else – a bird may be sitting and singing a song.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

The universe is made of the stuff called ‘God’ . So God is not in the end. God is in the beginning, in the middle, and the end. Only God is. But let me remind you, when I use the word ‘God’ I mean godliness.

It is like water and ice:

Apart from water, no ice,

Outside living beings, no buddhas.

Hakuin says: It is like water and ice. There is no difference between water and ice, and yet a sort of difference. If you have gone to the market to purchase ice, you will not purchase water. You will purchase ice – you will insist. If somebody says, ‘Take this water,’ you will say, ‘I have come for the ice.’ There is a sort of difference. But not much, not really – only on the surface. The ice will melt and will become water, and the water can become frozen and can be turned into ice. They are two phases of one phenomenon.

You are like ice and Buddha is like water. You are frozen, he has melted. And let me repeat: There is no other alchemy then love to help you melt. Love melts, because love is warmth. People melt only in love. When they are not in love they become cold, and in the cold they freeze. And you must have watched it, even in your small ways. When you are loving you are flowing. When you are flowing you are glowing. When you are loving you expand. When you are not loving you shrink. When you are loving you have warmth around you. When you are not loving you are surrounded by a cold wind – you are freezing, and anybody who comes close to you will freeze.

There are people, if they look at you with their cold eyes you will feel a shivering. And there are people, when they look at you with their warmth, with their love, you suddenly feel this is your home. There are eyes which give you the feeling of being at home, and there are eyes which stare at you and make you aware that you are a stranger here.

Apart from water, no ice,

Outside living beings, no Buddhas.

So Buddha hood is nothing but a state of merger. Frozen Ness is gone. Your definition has disappeared. You are no more limited, you are no more confined. At the deepest core, you are no more. Because if you are then there will be some kind of frozenness in you. If you are then you cannot be flowing – something will be hindering and something will be stuck and something will be obstructing. When you are not at all…. That’s why when two lovers are in deep embrace there are not two persons. There is only one energy, revolving. When two lovers are really in deep embrace there comes a moment, the woman forgets whether she is woman or man and the man forgets whether he is man or woman. If that moment has not come then you have not loved.

In deep love you disappear. Still something is there, a kind of presence – but nobody is present.

There is no center as frozen ice, there is no self. That’s why Buddha has very much insisted that your self is the root cause which is hindering you from being a Buddha. The feeling that ’I am’ makes you ice, icy and cold. If this feeling ’I am’ disappears, there is no problem. Ice will melt.

It is like water and ice:

Apart from water, no ice,

Outside living beings, no buddhas.

The Buddhist doctrine talks about Buddha’s three bodies. They have to be understood. The first body is called the body of truth, the universal body, the divine body. You can call it God. The second body is called the bliss body – the bridge between the first and the third. You can call it the soul. And the third body is the physical body.

You know only your physical body. You have not known your second body, the bliss body. And unless you know the second body you will not be able to know the third, the deepest – your universal body, your cosmic body, your Buddha body.

This is the Buddhist trinity – the father, the son and the holy ghost. Or, this is the Buddhist triburti – the three faces of God. Buddha says everybody has these three bodies. The first, the physical, is very frozen. The second is in a state of liquidity. And the third is vaporous. First the ice has to melt into water and then the water has to evaporate. Have you watched? The ice has definition, boundaries; the water has no definition, no boundaries. You pour the water into any jug, into any pot, it takes the shape of the pot. It is non-resistant, it is non-aggressive, it does not fight. It is liquid, it adjusts.

The man of compassion and love is like water, he adjusts. He has no resistance, he does not enforce his form on anybody. He accommodates, he is accommodative, he is spacious.

And then the third, when the water has evaporated and has disappeared and become invisible. Now you cannot even pour it into a pot. It has become part of the sky, it has moved into the eternal, into the infinite.

These are the three states of water, and these are the three states of consciousness too. You have become too gross because you have become too much identified with your first body. As if a man has be fooled himself in believing that the walls of his house are his house. The walls of the house are not the house, you have to go a little in. You have to find the innermost core of your being – and that innermost core is invisible. That innermost core is almost like emptiness.

The first body is essence, the second body is form, the third body is action. People who live only in the physical body live only in doings – what to do, what not to do. Their whole life is just swerving, swaying, between this and that. Their life consists of doing; they don’t know anything else.

The second body is of form. A man starts seeing glimpses of non-action. That’s what happens in meditation – when you are sitting silently doing nothing, great joy arises. From nowhere, for no cause. You don’t know from where it is coming but great joy arises, as if out of nothing. Miraculously, magically. This is the second, the form. The joy takes form.

And then there is the third. If you go on following and go on moving inwards, one day you reach to the essence. That, Buddha calls the body of truth. There, no action and no no-action. All has disappeared, the whole duality has disappeared, you have come to the very essence of existence. That essence is liberating. That essence is nirvana. And you are not to go anywhere to find it, you are carrying it all along.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.

It is like water and ice:

Apart from water, no ice,

Outside living beings, no buddhas.

Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!

And if you go on seeking afar for that which is near, you will go on missing. Nobody is at fault. Before you go into the four comers of the world to search for it, first go into yourself. If you don’t find it there, then you can go anywhere you like. But people don’t go within, they start by without. And the without is vast – you can go on and on, you can search all over the earth. And people are searching. People come to me and they say, ‘We have been searching for our whole lives. And we have been to here and there, and we have been to Japan and to Ceylon and to Burma and to Thailand, and we have travelled all over the East. And we have not found it yet.’

The East is within you! It is not in Thailand, it is not in India. And you will not find it anywhere. At the most, if you accidentally come across an enlightened man, he will throw you to yourself. Not that he will give it to you. Nobody can give it to you. It is already there; there is no need to give it.

And because in the modern world communication has become easy, traveling has become easy, people are becoming even more mad. They go jumping from one city to another, from one airport to another airport. They are driving themselves crazy. And to reach home you need not enter into any airplane, into any train, into any car. You only need to enter into yourself. And ticket less – no ticket is needed. And nobody is there to debar you; it is your territory.

I have heard:

A party of Americans happened to arrive at Mount Vesuvius during one of its more spectacular eruptions. ‘Say!’ exclaimed one of the Yanks in an awed tone, ‘doesn’t that beat all Hell!’

‘Sapristi!’ said the Italian guide. ‘How you Americans-a travel!’

Now even Hell is in danger, afraid of the tourists.

People go on searching and seeking for something which needs no search, which can be found only when search stops. And I am not saying that you strive to stop it – then again you have started it. If you strive to stop it, then you have missed the point. You have just to see the point of it, that striving will take you away from you, that striving will create more and more tension. Seeing the fact – Ihi passika. Seeing this, striving disappears and there is suddenly a stillness. In that stillness the first glimpse will come of bliss. You will enter into your second body. And when you have entered into the second body then it will be more and more easy, very lucid, to slip into the central most core – the essential body, the body of truth.

Once you have tasted something of your inner bliss then you have the vision where to really search for, where to go now. Disappear into your innermost being and you will find it. Seek, and you will miss. Don’t seek, and find.

Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar. What a pity!

It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;

It is like the child of a rich house

who has strayed away among the poor.

And has forgotten that he is rich – may have become a beggar. You are rich, infinitely rich. You are all emperors and empresses, gods and godesses. Just recognize. Don’t get too much into begging – and desire creates the beggar. Even a man like Alexander is a beggar, because the desire is there. A man like Napoleon is a beggar, because the desire is there. See the richest people of this earth and you will see just beggars and nothing else. And sometimes it happens, you come across a beggar and you see the emperor sitting there under the tree – having nothing, trot possessing anything.

Just possess yourself and you have possessed all. Be the master of yourself and you have become the master of all. Possessing things, you will remain a beggar. And people go on changing but not really transforming. You possess one thing, then you start possessing another thing, then you possess a third thing. Sometimes you start possessing other-worldly things, but nothing changes. Just form changes. Somebody possesses money and somebody starts possessing virtue. Now it is the same, not much difference.

I have heard:

Early one Sunday morning, Farmer Giles looked out to see a flock of large black crows devouring his field of prize spring-cabbage.

In red anger he rushed out and began charging up and down the field manically, shaking his fists, tearing his hair, foaming at the mouth and screaming abuse of every known kind at the gouging birds.

The Reverend Goodbody, passing on his bicycle, was surprised by the sight and shocked to hear loud and violent cries of ‘Piss off, you thieving bastards! Piss off, you greedy black bastards!’ He stopped immediately and beckoned to the angry farmer.

Embarrassed and red-faced, Giles shuffled up with a humble ‘Good morning, Reverend.’

‘Now, this really won’t do, Giles,’ said the good vicar. ‘So early on the Sabbath, there might be ladies present. These fowl too are God’s creatures. If you wish them to vacate your property, do it with love and compassion. Say ”Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo,” then the greedy black bastards will piss off!’

But what difference does it make? You and your priests, you and your so-called religious people, are all in the same boat.

I am not saying start striving to stop striving, otherwise you will simply change the name of your madness and you will remain the same. You will just change the label of your neurosis. There are people who are greedy for money and there are people who are greedy for God. It makes no difference at all, they are the same people. Greed is greed. It makes no difference about what greed is, for what greed is. Greed is greed.

Just see the point that striving is meaningless, that going anywhere is meaningless. Not because I am saying it – you have to see it: Ihi passika. You have to see it, you are not to believe it. Believing won’t help; believing is just a whitewash on the surface. Seeing brings transformation.

It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst . . .

Hakuin says: You are crying for happiness, and you are like a fish in the water crying for water and crying, ‘I am thirsty.’ You have it! And you are begging everywhere.

It is like the child of a rich house

who has strayed away among the poor.

The cause of our circling through the six worlds

Is that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.

Dark path upon dark path treading,

When shall we escape from birth-and-death?

What is the dark path of ignorance? Looking outward. The farther you look, the more darkness. Because the light burns inside you. Looking closer and closer, and there is more light. That’s why we call a Buddha ‘enlightened’ – he has come to know and realize his light. It is a perpetual light – without any fuel it is there, it cannot be exhausted. Suns will be exhausted and the moons will be exhausted and the stars will be exhausted. But the light that burns inside you as consciousness is inexhaustible. It is eternal.

Once upon a time there dwelt an old king in a palace. In the center of a golden table in the main hall, there shone a large and magnificent jewel. Each day of the king’s life, the stone sparkled more resplendently.

One day a thief stole the jewel and ran from the palace, hiding in the forest. As he stared with deep joy at the stone, to his amazement the image of the king appeared in it.

‘I have come to thank you,’ said the king. ‘You have released me from my attachment to Earth. I

thought I was freed when I acquired this jewel, but then I learned that I would be released only when I passed it on, with a pure heart, to another.

‘Each day of my life I polished that stone, until finally this day arrived when the jewel became so beautiful that you stole it, and I have passed it on, and am released.

‘The jewel you hold is Understanding. You cannot add to its beauty by hiding it and hinting that you have it, nor yet by wearing it with vanity. Its beauty comes of the consciousness that others have of it. Honour that which gives it beauty.’

That’s why Buddhas go on giving you whatsoever they have attained, go on shaking. Because the beauty of it is in sharing. That’s why Hakuin has sung this song. That’s why I am here, sharing my being with you, my joy with you, my celebration with you. It is something that has to be shared to keep it alive. It is something that has to be given. The more you give it, the more you have of it.

Never be a miser in your love and in your understanding. Share it. And you will have more and more of it. Don’t hoard it, otherwise you will miss it. One day you will find it has disappeared and there is nothing but stink left. Instead of fragrance there will be stinking. Share your love with everybody and anybody. Don’t make conditions to your love. And the best way to share is to share your understanding, to share your meditation.

Hakuin is doing that in this song. He’s sharing his Buddhahood. What he has known, he is singing about it, he is praising it. He is making it clear to people who have not yet attained but can attain. Maybe somebody hears the song, somebody is struck by it, stabbed in the very heart by it. It is a lion’s roar: somebody may be awakened out of his sleep.

The cause of our circling through the six worlds

Is that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.

Dark path upon dark path treading,

When shall we escape from birth-and-death?

Birth means getting attached to the physical body. Death means the frustration of that attachment to the body. Getting free of birth and death means getting free of the physical body. But how can you be free from the physical body? Unless you know the second body you will not be free from the physical body. So it is not a question of being free from the physical body; the basic question is how to enter into the second body. Once you are in the second you are free from the first. And once you are in the third you are free from the second too.

That’s why you don’t see Buddha laughing. Not that he didn’t laugh, but he has not been shown as laughing. Because in the third body, the body of truth, even bliss is meaningless. First, the body, the physical body, is the body of misery. Attached to the physical body you remain miserable. The second body is the body of bliss. Once you reach to it, all misery disappears, you are blissful. But bliss is the opposite of misery – part of duality. The body of truth goes beyond both, it is transcendental. Misery has disappeared, so what is the point of keeping bliss? When there is no misery, there is no point in bliss. When poverty has disappeared what is the point of holding richness? Even that can be dispossessed.

When all duality disappears – pleasure and pain, happiness, unhappiness, day and night, life and death – then for the first time you are in God.

The Zen meditation of the Mahayana

Is beyond all our praises.

Giving and morality and the other perfections,

Taking of the name, repentance, discipline,

And the many other right actions,

All come back to the practice of meditation.

Hakuin says: All that has been done in the name of religion down the ages, can be reduced to one single thing, and that is meditation – dhyana. And what is dhyana? Becoming aware of your physical body – the first dhyana, the first step of meditation. Becoming watchful of your physical body. Watch yourself walking, watch yourself eating, watch yourself running, talking, listening. Watch. And through watching you will see you are different from the physical body. Because the watcher cannot be the watched, the observer cannot be the observed, the seer cannot be the seen, the knower cannot be the known.

Watch the physical body, and the second body will arise. It is there – but you will start feeling. You will start recognizing it, it will start penetrating you. This is the first step of meditation: watch the physical body. Then the second step, and the last, is: watch the bliss body. Watch your ecstasy. And then you will suddenly see, the watcher cannot be the watched. ‘Ecstasy is there, but I am far away from it. Bliss is there, but I am the knower of it.’

Then you start getting into the third body, the body of truth. Then you become a pure witness – sakshin. And that is liberation. Hakuin says it happens through meditation that you discover, or rediscover, your Buddhahood.

By the merit of a single sitting

He destroys innumerable accumulated sins.

How should there be wrong paths for him?

And just in a single sitting it can happen. Hakuin does not preach the gradual path, Hakuin preaches the sudden path. It can happen in a single moment. It can happen now. You need not postpone it for tomorrow. Who knows? Tomorrow may never come. It never comes, really. It can happen this very moment. If your awareness is lucid, if your awareness is there, clear, crystal-clear, it can happen this very moment. This very sitting, and you can become a Buddha. And nobody is hindering the path except yourself. Nobody is the enemy except yourself, and nobody is the friend either.

By the merit of a single sitting

He destroys innumerable accumulated sins.

Hakuin says: Don’t be worried about sins and your past karma. In a single sitting of meditation, all that can be burnt. The fire of meditation is so potential, it can burn your whole past in a single moment. There is no need to be worried about past karma – ‘I have done some bad, so I have to suffer. I have done something, so I have to go to Hell.’ If you want to go, you will have to go! But these are all rationalizations that you are trying to find. If you wish, it is your wish – it will be fulfilled. This existence is very obliging. It goes on obliging – if you want to go to Hell, it supports. It says, ‘Go! I am all with you.’

But if you decide that ‘Enough is enough, and I have suffered enough,’ a single moment of meditativeness is enough to burn all your millions of past lives and millions of future lives too. You are released.

Start meditating. First on the body. Then on your inner feelings of bliss, joy. And go moving inwards. And one day the song of Hakuin will burst forth in you too. You will flower. And unless you flower you have not lived, or lived in vain. You are here to bloom. And unless you bear much fruit and many flowers you will go on missing the meaning of life.

People come to me and they ask, ‘What is the meaning of life’ As if meaning is there somewhere sold in the market. As if meaning is a commodity. Meaning has to be created. There is no meaning in life. Meaning is not a given thing, it has to be created. It has to become your inner work. Then there is meaning – and there is great meaning.

Love and meditate and you will attain to meaning. And you will attain to life, and abundant life.

-Osho

From This Very Body the Buddha, Discourse #1

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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The Vital Balance – Osho

Dr. Henrotte:

There is a problem with people like me, in our civilization and especially in our profession. We make too much use of our intelligence, so much so, that we tend to view life through the intellect only, thus negating all other means of doing so. This tends to make life boring and dull and robs it of its lustre.

Acharya Rajneesh:

No one can use his intellect too much. It is such a great force, with so much potentiality that you cannot use it too much. Not only too much, we never even use it totally – never. Ordinarily, we do not use more than 10 to 15% of the total potentiality. Another thing, when you do intellectual work, it does not necessarily mean you are using your intelligence. Intellectual work too, is mechanical. It does not require any intelligence at all! Once you get the know-how, no intelligence is required at all. Then the mind works just like a computer.

The real problem is, not the use of too much of intelligence, but the non-use of emotion. Emotion is completely discarded in our civilization and the balance is lost. Our whole civilization is anti-emotional. So a lopsided personality develops. If emotion is also used then there is no imbalance. An emotion-intellect balance must be maintained in the proper ratio; otherwise, the whole personality gets diseased. It is just like using your one leg only. You may keep on using it but you reach nowhere. You will simply tire yourself. The other leg must be used. Emotion and intellect are two legs – they are like two wings. When we use only one wing, the only outcome will be frustration and then the Bliss that comes by using both the wings, simultaneously, in balance and in harmony is never attained.

So do not fear to use intellect. Only when intelligence is used, then you touch the depths. You are stimulated in your potentiality. Intellectual work is merely superficial. No depth is touched, nothing is challenged. That gives rise to boredom. That creates lustreless work – work without enjoyment. Enjoyment always comes – when your individuality is challenged and you have to prove yourself or when you have to respond to a challenge, intelligence or emotion when challenged create their own bliss.

A person becomes schizophrenic if only one part of his personality is working and the other is dead. Then even the part that is working will not be really working well due to overwork. It cannot work because personality is a totality, it is not divided – it has no division at all. Actually the whole personality is a flowing energy. When energy is used logically, it becomes intelligence and when used, not logically but emotionally, it becomes the heart. These are not two separate things but the same energy is challenged through different channels.

When there is no heart but only intellect, then you can never relax. For relaxation means the same energy working in a different channel. Relaxation is never no-work. It is work in another dimension, so that the dimension which is already overtaxed relaxes. So a person, who follows an intellectual pursuit continuously, never relaxes. He has not diverted his energy to other dimensions, thus causing the mind to go on working unnecessarily in one direction only. This creates boredom. The thoughts just come and go and energy is diffused, wasted. You cannot enjoy it. On the contrary, you will be disappointed and disgusted with this unnecessary burden. However, the mind or the intellect is not at fault, because an alternate dimension has not been provided. The energy is veritably ruined, and it keeps circling round and round, as no other door is open to it. Energy can never be stagnant. Energy means – that which is not stagnant – that which is always flowing. So relaxation does not mean energy-stagnant or energy asleep. Relaxation scientifically means energy in another channel, another dimension, in another room.

Even if the room is different but not the very opposite, the mind will not relax. You work on a scientific problem, and then you can relax by reading a novel. The work is different. As to deal with a scientific problem is to be active – a very masculine trait – to read a novel is to be passive – an absolutely feminine trait. The work is different, and although the mind is used, all the same you will be at ease, as another and opposite pole of the mind is used. You are not solving anything, you are not active. You are just a receptor – receiving something. The dimension is the same, only emotion – the opposite polarity is brought into use. Similarly when we love, the intellect does not come into play at all. Rather, quite the opposite; the irrational part of your personality comes into action.

Intelligence must be balanced by love. But ordinarily this balance is not found anywhere. If someone is loving and he is not intelligent this too becomes a case of boredom. Even love becomes a tension if it is a twenty-four hour business. It will create its own boredom. Once the challenge is lost, the enjoyment too will be lost. The ‘play’ will be lost and it will become – just work. The same happens with the intellectual. These two parts, two polarities of the human individuality must be in balance.  Only then the integrated and individuated being is born.  Otherwise, it is the same disease; whether from the part of emotion, or from the part of the intellect.

The East became warped with the heart. Now the West has tried the other polarity. Both have achieved disastrous results. There is rebellion in the West’s new generation against intellect, against reason. The whole mind of the new generation is leaning towards the irrational. Nature takes its own revenge – always. Nature is very revengeful. It never pardons, it never forgets. If some part of it remains suppressed or unfulfilled, it will have its revenge. So the irrational in the West is taking its revenge. In the East, the rational has got the appeal, the scientific has got the appeal and communism has got the appeal. Religion has lost – it no longer appeals to the East, as reason has been all along suppressed.

So to me, neither a human being nor a human culture can be healthy without an inner balance between the rational and the irrational. I do not take these two as two different parts; I take them as the two poles existing in the same energy. All energy exists between two opposite poles. Otherwise, it can never exist. Energy requires an inner tension to create itself – to be. It could be the negative and the positive, as in electricity. It could be one pole and another, as in magnetism. It could be the male and the female, as in biology. Energy cannot exist in one pole. The other – the opposite is needed to challenge, to stimulate, to create the necessary tension. But in the human society, the other is always suppressed – either the intellect or the emotion. Therefore, the total culture has not come into existence yet. There has only been civilization either of the intellect or of the emotion. Culture as such is yet unborn. Culture means the polarities functioning simultaneously.

So always balance one by the other. The more the other is put to use, the more the one for which it proves to be a relaxation brightens, is illumined. So the mind must be capable of changing poles, just as easily as waking and sleeping. One must be able to close one dimension and open another. When this happens, life is no longer dull. It becomes bliss. Unfortunately we become addicted to one polarity. Why this addiction to one?

We become addicted to one, because the one which is in use, and for which we are trained, is easier to do. You can do it without any conscious effort. Consciousness is not required. When you change the pole, when you change the total perspective, you become an amateur. Then you are not an expert in this realm. You are not trained in it. So, you try to escape from it. Then in the realm in which you are proficient you tend to overdo. This over-doing is the problem. One must not be an expert all the twenty-four hours! One must also do something in which one is ‘no-one’. One must also do something about which one knows nothing. One must be a child, sometimes playing, immature, unknowing and ignorant; and that will be a help to the expert part of the mind.

So every genius has the child in him. No genius can exist without the child in him. And the child is the source of all his energy. He can, in moments, be a novice. He can, in moments, be totally ignorant. He can touch realms of which he knows nothing. A mathematician turning to poetry is never the loser. He comes back to his mathematics with a purer mind, with new experiences unknown to the mathematical realms.

All that has been invented and discovered has never been done by the professional. It is always the outsider, because he comes with the mind of a child. Only a child is inventive – never an old man, for he is an expert! But he cannot invent. He will go on repeating the same thing – doing it, and over-doing it. He will make it more perfect but never new. So a professional cannot contribute anything new to knowledge. He knows too much. He cannot touch anything which is new. So persons who know, who are professionals, are always orthodox. They are never revolutionaries. They cannot be. Their very being is heavy. They cannot see the new. They are always oblivious of the new.

So whenever it happens that a scientist turns to poetry; or a poet turns to mathematics, or a businessman turns to painting; or a painter comes to be a sannyasin, then something new is born. And to give birth to something new is blissful. Otherwise, your every work will be dull and boring.

Man cannot work like a machine. He cannot just go on producing the same things mechanically, repeating the same routine endlessly. If he goes on doing this, he will be completely dead, long before he dies. He will only know that he has been alive when death comes. In a mechanical routine, there is every danger of the human machines being replaced by `machine-humans’. These human machines can be replaced because whatsoever they can do, can be more efficiently done by a mechanical device. One can never be at ease if one has just turned into a mechanical device.

Society does not need individuality, it needs efficiency. So the more a person becomes a person, the less useful he becomes to the society – and more dangerous. So the whole pattern of our civilization, and in fact of all civilizations that have existed in this world, is to turn the human being into an automaton. Then he is obedient, efficient, and, not dangerous! Otherwise, a mind which is inventive, inquiring, searching for the new, seeking the new and always trying to give birth to something unknown is bound to create disturbances. The establishments cannot be at ease with him. So they begin to kill individuality as soon as a child is born. Before he is seven they kill his individuality completely. If by chance they are not successful in doing this, then only a person becomes his own individual self. But this is rare.

Every type of social institution is a means to kill the individual and convert him into a machine. All our universities are factories to kill the spontaneous – to kill the spark, to kill the spirit and change man into a machine. Then the society feels at ease with him. He can be relied upon. He knows what he can do, what he will do. He can be predicted. Man becomes predictable as soon as he be-comes a machine. We can predict a husband, a wife, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist. We know who they are and how they will react. We can be at ease with them.

But with a person who is living, spontaneous, it is impossible to be at ease. Because we do not know what he will do! He is unpredictable; and unpredictability is always a source of insecurity. A wife will not be at ease with a husband who is unpredictable. The moment he is unpredictable, he is unmanageable. He cannot be managed, he cannot be manipulated. No one is at ease with an unpredictable person. Not even a father with an unpredictable son. And only the unpredictable can feel happiness – can feel life, no one else. Life itself is unpredictable, unmanageable. Life as such is from moment to moment – towards the unknown. It is an opening into the unknown – nothing more, nothing else.

So if you are open, just like life itself, then you necessarily live in all your dimensions – the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual. Then you live totally. Then there is no bifurcation, no division. Your energy flows as if from one room to the other, and then to another. There is no barrier to your energy. It is not pulled from anywhere. It is a flowing river. You have just to switch on to any realm. You are always fresh and relaxed. And, whenever you return to your particular field of work, you approach it with newness, a freshness that comes only from relaxing in the opposite fields.

So the problem as I see it is not excessive intellectual work, but too little or no work in the other dimensions – specifically the emotional. Reason is balanced by emotion. If you can do an exercise in logic but cannot weep, then you are bound to be in trouble. If you can only argue and not laugh, you are inviting trouble. But whenever a person appears, whose life is like a flowing river, it is difficult to understand him, because he cannot be categorized.

There is a Zen story. A famous monk died, he was a great teacher. He was well known, however, because of his chief disciple. Thousands of people came to pay homage to this monk. To their amazement, they found the chief disciple weeping. They were at a loss to understand him. An unattached person should not weep, especially he, who had always said that the spirit never dies! One comes and asks, “Why do you weep?” The monk replied, “I cannot live with the ‘Why’ always. There are moments when there is no ‘why’. I am weeping and that is all.” They still insisted, “You always say that the soul is immortal. Then why do you weep?” He replied, “I still maintain that the soul is immortal. But that does not check me from weeping”! This sounds illogical – ‘the soul is immortal so one must not weep’. But the monk says, “The soul itself is weeping and I cannot do anything about it. I have never done anything myself. Whatsoever comes to me, I am with it. Tears are coming and I am one with them.” This attitude cannot be categorized.

We can understand someone weeping if he believes the soul to be mortal. If one believes the soul to be immortal and does not weep, that too is understandable. It is alright. The soul is immortal, for whom to weep? No one has died; but this man says that the soul is immortal and yet he weeps. There is no ‘why’. The tears just flow. They ask, “Then do you weep for the body?” The Monk says, “Yes, it must be for the body that I weep. The body too was beautiful and it will never be seen again. I weep for the body.” “But you are a spiritualist,” they say. And so the arguments go on. They accuse him of confusing them. “I myself am confused – Life is such. The soul is important but so also are the tears! Such is Life – so contradictory! It exists in contradictions. I myself am confused. But I am at ease with my confusions. I am at ease with my contradictions. So I am not tense. See my tears! See me weeping, I am at ease; I am relaxed. I am blissful.”

The other part must not be denied. The more you use reasons, the more you must use the irrational to balance it. The moment it is balanced, you become weightless. You feel free. The weight of one is set off by the weight of the other. The balance is achieved. You are free. Otherwise you will feel the burden, the weight, more till a moment comes when there is only burden and you are no more! You will feel only the burden; that is the only reality you will be conscious of. This burden will be so much with you always that you cannot conceive, what it is to be without it.

No one is without burden. But burden can be balanced by another burden – from the opposite pole. When the two burdens are balanced, there is no burden. Thus a mind which has no burden is not a mind without burden. Rather, it is a mind with balanced burdens. So I am in favour of reason and ‘no-reason’ at the same time and I advise a perpetual balance between the two. As soon as the burden is felt, you should know that the balance is lost. You must set about to restore it, by adding the necessary weight, wherever it is required. If the intellect is heavy, do something irrational – meditate. Meditation is not reason. It is irrational. So when someone asks me to explain meditation, I am at a loss! Simply because you cannot understand meditation. You can do it and know it. It is not at all concerned with logic, reason, arguments and understanding.

There are people who have been studying meditation all their lives, and still not understood it. They cannot. Krishnamurti talks about understanding it and makes understanding equivalent to meditation, as if meditation is something to be understood! Rather, understanding must be balanced by meditation. It is the opposite pole. So, once you try not to understand meditation you can do it. If one goes on trying to understand meditation, there is less possibility of practising it. And because understanding is intellectual, there are people who say they understand Krishnamurti perfectly. Intellectually we understand him. And even though he says intellectual understanding will not do, he still equates understanding with meditation. If intellectual understanding will not do, then I say a non-intellectual JUMP will do. There is no understanding which is not intellectual. Whenever you go into meditation, it is less like understanding and more like feeling. It is felt. It is never understood.

Philosophy and science are intellectual processes. Religion and art are non-intellectual processes. Philosophy must be balanced by religion and science must be balanced by art. Otherwise, a topsy-turvy, lopsided world is created in which everyone is diseased. I have not come across a single individual who is at ease. Something or the other is always disturbing him. It does not matter what! All that matters is that he is disturbed. Everyone is disturbed. Then there must be something in our very conception of a human being which has gone wrong. In the very structure of our society something has gone wrong. Therefore, persons who are diseased in the mind are only symptomatic.

There is a very surprising fact. In the 30’s, all the mental patients who visited the psychoanalysts were basically disturbed by violence. Then came the Second World War. The same thing happened in the early 19th century and this was followed by the First World War. So as I see it, the mental patients are the forerunners of us all. They herald that which is to come. In a way they are more sensitive. They perceive things beforehand.

The same happens with the artist. Everything that is to happen first happens in poetry, painting, music, etc. If we look deep in the art of Picasso we will find the indication of a diseased civilization. In his painting ‘Guernica’, or for that matter in any of his other works, he never portrays a human figure as it is. He never paints all his parts together, nor in the right context. The head will be in one place and the neck somewhere else. The eyes are under the head. Such is his painting – schizophrenic, schizoid! He is an extra sensitive person who sees the shape of things to come, the plight of the human being in time to come.

A society basically philosophic only, will be lacking in religion. A society basically scientific only, will be lacking in aesthetic art. Art will become ugly. Thus the whole Western art has become ugly. Rather, the grotesque and the absurd has become the criterion. Ugliness is appreciated as greatness in art. The uglier a painting, the more distorted, the better it is appreciated. There should be no harmony, no rhythm, no music – everything should be deranged and decayed like the present human mind.

These are indications and symptoms. They are symbolic expressions. The other part of the human mind is taking revenge. It is demanding attention. When a society becomes less and less religious, religion takes its revenge. It will become ugly, ritualistic. Priesthood will come up, religion will go down. The Church will come up. The Church is religion turned ugly. The priest is the revenge of the prophet. The prophet has no place, so the priest comes in. He fills the vacuum.

We have not yet even conceived a total culture, a total personality, a total mind. The totality is the sum total of both the opposite polarities. Therefore, a totally consistent personality is an imperfect and partial personality, and is in a way on the path to madness. This is dangerous. The part that has been denied expression, denied attention, because of a consistent mind, will take its revenge. The irrational will become aggressive. It will come with a revengeful force and shatter all reason.

You must not only understand, but also feel this. This is not difficult to understand intellectually. The problem comes only with the question of feeling. You must also feel it. This can only be possible when you do something irrational. Just jump and dance for an hour and see how relaxed and refreshed you feel – and how bright! The mind gets purified because the irrational is satisfied. Now reason can work freely without any enemy behind. There is now a freedom in its working. Thus give an opportunity to both sides of the mind to express freely.

Always balance the two. Live in these two complementary compartments. They are not contradictory. They look so, because we have been living only in one and become fixed in it.

When you dream, you do not feel the contradiction, the inconsistency of the dream. You see a friend approaching. Suddenly he turns into something else. But you take this as a fact in the dream. You feel no inconsistency, no contradiction. You do not ask how man can change into an animal. This is because a dream has no logic. Dream has still to know its Aristotle. In a dream you cannot say that, if A is A, then he cannot be B. If A is A, he cannot be ‘not-A’. In a dream, A can be ‘not-A’ and ‘not-A’ can be A. No logic is taken into account, nor is any contradiction imposed. So there are realms totally lacking in logic. All the same they are part of you. Rather, you are part of them, for they are greater.

If this balance is achieved between the rational and the irrational, boredom vanishes. There is moment to moment bliss. Then every moment comes with bliss of its own. Otherwise, life becomes a burden. But life is not responsible for this. We alone are responsible, for the choice lies with us.

Dr. Henrotte:

If one tries to balance oneself, he will not fit into a category. Then he will be rejected by society. He will become redundant.

Acharya Rajneesh:

It is better to be rejected by society than to be rejected by life!

-Osho

From an interview with Acharya Rajneesh by Dr. Jean Georges Henrotte, on Jan 6th, 1971, Bombay, India published in The Vital Balance

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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.

One Step Away – Osho

Professor Coleman Barks has asked a question:

I feel very grateful for your enlightenment, your wisdom, your daring experiments, your life.

Thank you!

Rumi said, “I want burning, burning . . .” What is that burning? Shams said, “I am fire.” Do you have any word on Shams? From Shams? What do the burning and the fire have to do with my own enlightenment?

Coleman, you have asked a very dangerous question! – Because burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. On the path of enlightenment there is no question of burning. But because you are in love with Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi . . . I also love the man. But you have to understand that Sufism still depends on a hypothetical God. It is not free from the hypothesis of God. And particularly Sufism has the concept of God as a woman. Love is their method – love God as totally as possible. Now you are loving an impossible hypothesis, and totality is asked. You will feel the same kind of burning, in a more intensive way, as lovers feel on a smaller scale.

Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible; your object of love is hypothetical. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved.

The mind has the capacity to imagine anything and also has the capacity to hypnotize itself. After long repetition you can even see God, just the way you imagined. It is a by-product of your mind. It will make you very happy, you will dance with joy.

I have been with Sufis and I have loved those people. But they are still one step away from being a buddha. Even though their poetry is beautiful – it has to be, because it is coming out of their love – their experience is a hallucination created by their own mind. In Sufism, mind is stretched to the point that you become almost mad for the beloved. Those days of separation from the beloved create the sensation of burning.

On the path of dhyan, or Zen, there is no burning at all because there is no hypothesis, no God. And it is not a question of love. A man of Zen is very loving, but he has not practiced love; it has come as a by-product of his realization. He has simply realized his own buddhahood. There is no question of another, a God somewhere else in heaven. He has simply reached his own center of life, and being there he explodes into love, into compassion. His love comes after his enlightenment; it is not a method for enlightenment.

But for Sufis, love is the method. Because love is the method, it remains part of the mind.

The effort on the path of Zen is to go beyond mind, to attain no-mind, to be utterly empty of all thoughts, love included. Zen is the path of emptiness – no God, no love, nothing is to be allowed; just a pure nothingness in which you also disappear.

Who is there to feel the burning? Who is there to feel the fire?

So although I love Sufis . . . I don’t want, Coleman, to hurt your feelings, but I would certainly say that you will have one day to change from Sufis to Zen. Sufis are still living in imagination; they have not known the state of no-mind. And because they have not known the state of no-mind, however beautiful their personalities may become, they are still just close to enlightenment but not enlightened. Remember, even to be very close is not to be enlightened.

And the reason is clear: Sufism is a branch, an offshoot of Mohammedanism. It carries almost all that is good in Mohammedanism. But Mohammedanism is the lowest kind of religion. Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity – all are hypothetical.

There have been only two religions which are not hypothetical, Buddhism and Taoism. Zen is a crossbreed of these two, and the crossbreed is always better than both the parents. It is the meeting of Buddha and Lao Tzu; out of this meeting is born Zen. It is not Buddhism, it is not Taoism; it has its own individuality. It carries everything beautiful that comes from Buddha and everything great that comes from Lao Tzu. It is the highest peak that man has ever reached.

Hinduism is a mess: thirty-three million gods! – What do you expect? Hinduism has remained a philosophical, controversial, hypothetical religion. It has not been able to reach the heights of Buddha. Buddha was born a Hindu but revolted against this mess, searched alone rather than believing. That is one of the most important things to remember. Any religion that begins with belief is going to give you an auto-hypnotic experience.

Only Taoism and Buddhism don’t start with a belief. Their whole effort is that you should enter yourself without any concept of what you are going to find there. Just being open, available, without any prejudice, without any philosophy and scripture – just go in, open-hearted, and when you reach to the point where mind is silent, not a single thought moving . . .

According to Tao and Buddha, even God is a thought. When there is no thought, you reach the highest Everest of consciousness. At that point you know that every living being has the potentiality of being a god.

Buddha is reported to have said, “The moment I became enlightened, I was surprised: the whole of existence is enlightened; only people don’t understand. They are carrying their enlightenment within themselves and they don’t look at it.”

Buddha has reported his past lives’ experiences. When he was not an enlightened man but was just a seeker, he heard about a man who had become enlightened, so he went to see him. He had no idea of what enlightenment is, and he had not come with any prejudice for or against. But as he came close to the man, he found himself bowing down and touching the man’s feet. He was surprised! He had not decided to do it – in spite of himself he was touching the man’s feet. That was one surprise. And as he stood up, the second surprise was even bigger: the enlightened man touched his feet. He said, “What are you doing? You are enlightened, it is perfectly right for me to touch your feet. But why are you touching my feet?”

And that man laughed. He said, “Sometime before, I was unenlightened. Now I am enlightened.”

You are unenlightened now. Someday you will become enlightened. So it is only a question of time. As far as I am concerned, you may not know it but I can see your hidden treasure.”

So everybody is a buddha, either aware of it or unaware of it. No hypothesis comes into the path of Zen.

What Rumi is saying – “I want burning, burning . . .” – is the mind focused on a hypothetical beloved, and the burning desire to meet him, to melt in him. But it is an objective god – it may be woman or man; it does not matter.

In Bengal, in India, there is a small sect which believes that only Krishna is male and everybody else is female. Because everybody is female and there is a great burning to meet the lover, the god, they sleep with a statue of Krishna in their bed.

But these are all mind games. Except for Gautam Buddha and Lao Tzu, and the people who became enlightened from their lineages, the whole of humanity is living in hypotheses. I appreciate the poetry of Rumi, I appreciate the beauty of many Sufi mystics, but I cannot say that they are enlightened. They are still groping, and their groping will stop only when they drop this hypothesis of God.

The search has to be inwards, not outwards. Any search that is outwards is going to change your personality. It can make it more beautiful, more loving, but it is just imagination.

It happened that one Sufi master who was very much loved . . . his disciples used to come to me and say, “When our master comes, we want you both to meet.”

I said, “On one condition: your master should be my guest for just three days, and you have not to come for three days.”

So the master came, as he used to come every year for a month or two to that place. He was a lovely man, very fragrant, very radiant, very joyful. He used to dance and sing and play on instruments. When he came to my house, I closed the door and told the disciples, “Now you disappear, and for three days leave him with me.”

The master said, “What do you want?”

I said, “You put your instruments away, and for three days don’t think about your beloved God.”

He said, “What is the purpose of this?”

I said, “The purpose will be known after three days. Just for three days be normal. You are abnormal.”

He said, “You are a strange fellow! I am abnormal?”

I said, “Just drop this idea of a hypothetical God. Have you seen God?”

He said, “I see God everywhere.”

I said, “When did it start happening?”

He said, “It took twenty years for me to see God in everyone. Finally, I started seeing.”

I said, “That’s why I am saying that for three days; don’t do anything you have been doing. For these three days take a holiday from your practice of seeing God in everyone.”

Just in one day it was finished! The next day he was very angry with me. He said, “Just let me go. You have destroyed my twenty years’ effort. For just one night I followed your idea, and now in the morning I don’t see any God anywhere.”

I said, “A God that you have been seeing for twenty years disappears within a single night – what is it worth? Can’t you see that it is a hypothesis that you have imposed? And twenty years are not needed for such programming – such programming can be done within hours.”

A person can be hypnotized just for seven days continually and told he will see God everywhere, in everyone, and he will be very joyful, very loving. Within seven days the person can be programmed just like a computer, and he will start seeing God. But this is not the way of truth.

Coleman, it is perfectly good: enjoy Rumi’s beautiful poems, enjoy beautiful Sufi stories. I have enjoyed them. But I warn you, don’t get lost into them. They are just a game of the mind, a strategy of self-hypnosis.

I said that you have asked a dangerous question. I don’t want to hurt your feelings and your love, but I have to say the truth even if it hurts. One day you will feel grateful to me.

Sufism is nothing. You can find good poetry anywhere. And if you want, bring any Sufi to me and I will take away all his experience within one hour. These are abnormal people, hypnotizing themselves.

The real thing is to come to a point of de-hypnotizing yourself, because every society has already hypnotized you. A Hindu thinks Krishna is a god, and never bothers that Krishna stole sixteen thousand women from different people. He was married only to one woman. But sixteen thousand women – any beautiful woman, and his soldiers would catch hold of her; he just had to make a sign that they should take her to the palace.

Krishna behaved with women like they were cattle, and he never thought that they have children, they have husbands, they have their old parents, or their husband’s parents, and he is destroying their whole family life. And what is he going to do with sixteen thousand women? He is not a bull. Even a bull will be tired. Sixteen thousand – it is a record. Still, no Hindu will question the point.

Rama is God to the Hindus, and nobody questions that he killed one poor untouchable, a young man, just because he heard somebody reciting the Vedas. The Hindu society has maintained the caste system for five thousand years, and the untouchable, the sudra, the last, is not allowed to read any religious scripture. He is not allowed to be educated either. Untouchables are not allowed to live in the city; they have to live outside the city. They do all the dirty work of the city and they live the poorest life in the world. Their whole dignity and manhood is taken away.

And this young man had not read anything, he simply heard some brahmin reciting the Rigveda. Just hiding behind the trees out of curiosity, he was caught hold of, and when he was brought to Rama because he had committed this great crime, Rama told his people, “Melt some lead and pour it into both his ears, because he has heard the Veda, which is prohibited.”

The man certainly died. When you pour burning lead into the ears, you cannot expect the man to remain alive. He fell dead then and there. And no Hindu questions it. Even people like Mahatma Gandhi just go on repeating the name of Rama; he is a god. And this is the situation all over the world, with every religion. I have looked in all nooks and corners, and except Zen I don’t find any religious phenomenon which is absolutely pure and which has not committed a single crime against humanity. It has only contributed more beauty and more grace and more love and more meditativeness.

So it is perfectly good, Coleman; enjoy the poetry, but don’t think that these poetries are coming out of enlightenment. They have not even heard the word enlightenment. No word exists in Persian, in Urdu, in Arabic, equivalent to enlightenment. They have “God realization,” realization of the beloved – but the beloved is separate from you.

The whole point is that even if you find a god which is separate from you, millions of others must have found him before. You will be in a crowd. And what are you going to do when you meet God? – say, “Hello, how are you”? There is nothing much in just meeting – you will look embarrassed, and God will look embarrassed: Now what to do with this Professor Coleman?” It was very good . . . you were doing good translations, but why have you come here?”

Now don’t do any such thing, creating any embarrassment for God. There exists no God. What exists is godliness, and that godliness surrounds you. We are all in the same ocean.

An ancient story is: A young, very philosophical-minded fish asked other fish, “We have heard so much about the ocean; where is it? I want to meet the ocean.”

Everybody shrugged their shoulders; they said, “We have also heard about the ocean, but we don’t know where it is.”

An old fish took the boy aside and told him, “There is no other ocean anywhere. We are in it. We are born in it, we live in it, we die in it. This is the ocean.”

And I say unto you, the same is true with us. We are born in godliness, we live in godliness, we die in godliness. Just one thing has to be remembered: either you can pass through this tremendous experience of life asleep, or fully awakened.

Meditation is the only way to make you aware. And once you are fully aware, all around is the ocean of godliness. The very life, the very consciousness is divine. It expresses in all the forms – in the roses and in the lotuses and in the birds and in the trees. Wherever life is, it is nothing but godliness. We are living in the ocean of godliness. So don’t search anywhere. Just look within, because that is the closest point you can find.

Sufism is beautiful but is not the ultimate answer, and you should not stop at Sufism. It is a good training to begin with. End up with Zen.

And it is a great, surprising thing, that from the peaks of Zen you will be able to understand Sufism more than you can understand by living in the Sufi circles. Some distance is needed, and Zen gives you the distance. From that distance you can witness all the religions. What are they doing? – playing games, beautiful games, but games are games after all.

You are asking, “What do the burning and the fire have to do with my own enlightenment?” Nothing at all. You are enlightened in this very moment; just enter silently into your own being. Find the center of your being and you have found the center of the whole universe. We are separate on the periphery but we are one at the center. I call this the buddha experience.

Unless you become a buddha – and remember, it is the poverty of language that I have to say “Unless you become . . .” You already are. So I have to say, unless you recognize, unless you remember what you have forgotten . . .

Every child in its innocence knows, and every child goes astray because of so much knowledge being poured in by the parents, by the priests, by the teachers. Soon the child’s innocence is completely covered with all kinds of bullshit.

The whole effort of meditation is to cut through all the dust that society has poured upon you and just to find that small buddha-nature you were born with. The day you find the buddha-nature you were born with, the circle is complete. You have again become innocent.

Socrates in his last days said, “When I was young I thought I knew much. As I became older I started thinking I knew everything. But as I became still older and my consciousness became sharper, I suddenly realized I don’t know anything.”

It is a beautiful story that in Greece there is – used to be, now it is ruins – the temple of Delphi. And the oracle of the temple of Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in the whole world. The people who had known Socrates rushed to tell him, “The oracle has declared you the wisest man in the world!”

Socrates said, “The oracle for the first time is wrong. I know nothing.”

The people were very much in a puzzle. They went back to Delphi and told the oracle, “You say he is the wisest man and he says he knows nothing.”

The oracle said, “That’s why he is the wisest man in the world. He has again become a child. He has come back home.”

Maneesha has also asked a question:

Our Beloved Master,
You have been speaking on the empty heart of Zen. Last night we spent an evening listening to Rumi’s expression of the Sufi heart.

Could you talk of the difference between the two?

 The reality is that what the Sufis call the heart is just part of their mind. The mind has many capacities: thinking, feeling, imagination, dreaming, self-hypnosis – these are all qualities of the mind. In fact, there is no heart as such; everything is being done by the mind.

We have lived with this traditional division, that imagination and feeling and emotions and sentiments are of the heart. But your heart is just a pumping system. Everything that you think or imagine or feel is confined into the mind. Your mind has seven hundred centers and they control everything.

When Zen says empty heart it simply means empty mind. To Zen, heart or mind are synonymous. The emphasis is on emptiness. A mind that is empty becomes the door to the divine that is all around – but first it has to be empty.

Sufism is a beautiful imagination. Zen has nothing to do with imagination. Everything has to be emptied out. The name of Rumi is beautiful in a sense: not in Persian but in English, ‘roomy’ means empty. The room either can be full of furniture or it can be without furniture, simply a room. That empty room contains the whole space, the whole existence.

-Osho

From Rinzai: Master of the Irrational, Discourse #2

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.

Here you can listen to the discourse excerpt One Step Away. In an interview that Coleman Barks did with Michael Toms of New Dimensions Radio on December 12, 2010, Coleman Barks spoke of asking Osho the above question. Here is the excerpt.

Coleman Barks wrote the following introduction to Osho’s book, Just Like That (Penguin Books India), which is from a series of discourses Osho gave on Sufi stories:

It seems important to me that Osho be known to an audience wider than his beautiful community, and that this book in particular find new readers.

I am very grateful for his amazing talking, his daring experiments with community and transformation, his enlightenment and his jokes! (Did you get the satire of American consumerism with the ninety-seven Rolls Royces? Some people missed that.)

The humor always bubbles close, no matter what’s being discussed. The lack of a 13th floor in American hotels, the responsibilities of being awake, a dog jumping in a river, Gurdjieff’s non-identification, the prodigal son, meditation, the aggression of science, Shibli and his three teachers—there’s great generosity of detail here, and his joy is primary.

It’s all one thing, really, these morning talks. Reading them, you’ll taste a fresh spring water from those days. The catalyst for each is part of a Sufi story, brilliantly interpreted. But don’t come with your intellectual acumen drawn. Or do—He will meet you however you approach. This is a profound form of play. Osho improvises the jazz discourses of the century. Better than Gurdjieff. What am I doing in the front of this book? I got asked because of my work on Rumi, and also perhaps because I visited the commune in Pune in October 1988 and felt very at home there. Maybe I’m what he called in the early 80’s a shravakar.

Here’s a Sufi story that he doesn’t discuss in this book:

Ibn Khafif Shirazi once said, ‘I heard that there were two great masters in Egypt so I hurried to reach their presence. When I arrived I saw two magnificent teachers meditating. I greeted them three times, but they did not answer. I meditated with them for four days. Each day I would beg them to talk with me, since I had come such a long way.

Finally the younger one opened his eyes. “Ibn Khafif, life is short. Use the portion that’s left to deepen yourself. Don’t waste time greeting people!” I asked him to give me some advice. “Stay in the presence of those who remind you of your lord, who not only speak wisdom, but are that.” Then he went back into meditation.’

I feel like that man, Ibn Khafif. At Osho’s level of being, introductions are unnecessary and serve mostly as puffery for the introducer. Let the music begin.

Wake Up Here Now – Osho

The Ancients said:

“(Self)-cultivation takes an unimaginable time (while) Enlightenment in an instant is attained.”

Enlightenment is attained in a single moment. Why? — because you are already enlightened. You have simply forgotten it. You have to be reminded, that’s all.

The function of the Master is to remind you, not to give you a path but to give you a remembrance; not to give you methods of cultivation, not to give you a character, virtue, but only awareness, intelligence, awakening.

In a single moment it can be attained because you have never lost it in the first place. You are dreaming that you are unenlightened. You can dream you are in heaven; you can dream you are in hell. And you know! – you dream sometimes you are in heaven and sometimes in hell. In the morning you can be in heaven and by the evening you can be in hell. One moment you can be in heaven, another moment you can be in hell. It all depends on you. It is something to do with your psyche; it is not something outside you.

A man died, arrived at the Pearly Gates, and was shown by St. Peter to a waiting room. He sat there, naturally anxious to know whether he would be sent to Heaven or to Hell. The door opened and a famous saint walked in.

The man rejoiced, “I must be in Heaven!”

Just then the door opened again and a famous prostitute walked in. The man was confused. “In that case I must be in Hell!” he thought.

While he was still wondering, the saint grabbed the prostitute and started making love to her. The man, flabbergasted, ran to St. Peter and asked, “You must tell me: is this Heaven or Hell?”

“Can’t you see?” answered St. Peter. “It is Heaven for him and Hell for her!”

Heaven and hell are not geographical; they are not something outside you, they are something that belongs to your interiority. If you are awake, then you are in a totally different universe; it is as if in your awakening the whole existence becomes awakened. It takes a new color, a new flavor, a new fragrance. When you are asleep, the whole existence sleeps with you. It all depends on you.

So the question is not of cultivating any character, of becoming virtuous, of becoming a saint. The question is how to come out of dreams, how to come out of the past and the future, how to be just here now.

That’s what enlightenment is . . . “Ah, This!”

When Alice was at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she noticed that no jam was available. She asked for jam, and the Mad Hatter said, “Jam is served every other day.”

Alice protested, “But there was no jam yesterday either!”

“That’s right,” said the Mad Hatter. “The rule is: always jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, never jam today . . . because today is not every other day!”

And that’s how you are living: jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today. And that’s where jam is! So you only imagine; you go on in a drugged, sleepy state.

You have forgotten completely that this moment is the only real moment there is. And if you want to have any contact with reality, wake up here now!

-Osho

From Ah This, Discourse #7

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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

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

The One Observer of All – Osho

Today’s first sutra says: “You are the one observer of all, and in reality always free.”

The individual is the observer, not the observed.

There are three types of people. Those who have become objects to be seen, performers – they are in the deepest darkness…. Second are those who have become spectators. They are a little better than the first, but there is not much difference. Third are those who have become the observer. It is good to understand these three distinctly.

When you become the observed, you become a thing; you have lost your soul. It is difficult to find a soul in a political leader. It is difficult to find a soul in an actor. He has become an object to be seen, he lives to be an object to be seen. His whole effort is to impress people: how to look good, how to look beautiful, how to look the best. It is not an effort to be the best, but an effort to appear the best. One who becomes the observed becomes a hypocrite. He covers his face with a mask. He presents a good outward show but is rotting inside.

Second are those who have become spectators. They are the vast crowd. Naturally the first type of people needs the second type; otherwise, how can people become performers? Someone becomes a politician; he gets a crowd to clap for him. There is great harmony between them. A leader needs followers. If someone is dancing, spectators are needed. If someone sings, listeners are needed; hence some busy themselves as performers and some remain spectators. Spectators are the vast crowd.

Western psychologists are very worried because people are becoming mere spectators. They go to the movies, switch on the radio, or sit in front of the television for hours. In America the average person spends about six hours a day watching television. If there is a football game, they watch it; a wrestling match, they watch it; a baseball game or the Olympics, they watch that. Now they have become mere spectators, spectators standing at the side of the road: the procession of life passes and you go on watching.

There are some who have joined the procession. That is harder. There is much competition. To join the procession is not so easy. A lot of fighting and aggression are required. But spectators are also needed to watch the procession. They stand on the sides and watch. If they are not there, the procession too will disappear.

Imagine, if followers did not come, what would happen to the leaders? Alone shouting, “Let our flag fly high!” they would look like great idiots, they would look insane. But spectators are needed, a crowd is needed; then even madness looks right. Imagine a cricket match is going on and no one comes to watch it. The match will be dead. The juice in the match is not in the match itself, it is in the thousands of people who gather to watch it.

Man is wonderful! He even goes to see horse races. The whole of Koregaon Park is full of horserace enthusiasts. It is very strange – no horse would go to watch men run. Horses run and men come to see it. Man has fallen even below horses.

Life is spent watching, just watching. Spectators…. You do not love, you watch love-making in films. You do not dance, you watch someone else dance. You do not sing, you listen to someone else sing. Is it surprising if your life becomes impotent, if all life-energy is lost? There is no movement, no flow of energy in your life. You sit like a corpse. Your sole function is to go on watching. Someone goes on showing, you go on watching. These two types are abundant in the world, one bound to the other.

Psychologists say there are two poles to each illness. There are people psychologists call masochists; they torture themselves. And there is another type which psychologists call sadists; they take delight in torturing others. Both are needed. So, when these two get together, it becomes a scene of great merriment.

Psychologists say you can’t find a better couple than where the husband is a sadist and the wife a masochist. The woman enjoys torturing herself, the husband enjoys torturing others – a wedding made in heaven! One is blind, the other a leper – well suited, a perfect fit. Every illness has two polarities. The performer and the spectator are two poles of the same disease. Usually women like to be watched and men like to be spectators. In the language of psychology women are exhibitionists. Their whole interest is in ostentatious display.

Once Mulla Nasruddin was swatting flies. There were too many around and his wife had asked him to get rid of them. He was standing near the mirror swatting them. He said, “Look at these two she-flies sitting here.”

The wife remarked, “This is too much! – how do you know whether they are male or female?”

He replied, “They have been on the mirror for the last hour – they must be female. What would  a male do on the mirror?”

Women cannot live without a mirror. When they see a mirror it pulls them like a magnet. Their whole life is spent in front of it: trying on clothes and dresses, trying on jewelry and adorning themselves. And the surprising thing is that when the woman goes out, totally dressed up, if someone pinches her she becomes angry! If no one harasses her then too she is unhappy – because so much preparation was made to be provocative, to provoke harassment. Otherwise, what was the need? Women do not bother to dress up in front their husbands. They remain perfect hags in front of their husbands because with him, chasing and seduction have long stopped. But if she has to go out, she will take a lot of time to prepare. She will have spectators, she will be on stage.

Psychologists say man is a voyeur. His whole focus is in viewing; his whole interest is to see.

Woman is not interested in seeing, she is interested in exhibiting herself. That is why a man-woman pair fit each other. Both sides of the illness are there simultaneously. And both states are unhealthy.

Ashtavakra says man’s nature is to be a seer, an observer; it is neither to be a performer nor a spectator.

Never confuse these two again. Many times I have seen people make this mistake: they think they have become the observer when they have become a spectator. There is a very fundamental distinction between these two words. The dictionary may not show the difference. There spectator and observer may have the same meaning. But in the dictionary of life there is a great difference.

A spectator is one whose eyes are on others.

And the observer is one whose eyes are on himself.

When the eyes are on the object you are a spectator, when the eyes are on the seer you are an observer. It is a revolutionary distinction, very fundamental. When your eyes stop on the object and you forget yourself, then you are a spectator. When all objects of vision have departed, when you, and only you, are there – only awakening remains, only alertness remains – then you are an observer.

When you are a spectator, you become completely oblivious. You forget yourself completely; your attention gets stuck there. You go to the movies and for three hours you forget yourself, you don’t even remember who you are. You forget all worries and anxieties. This is why crowds rush there. There is so much worry, anxiety, trouble in living – a method of forgetting is needed. People become completely one pointed. Only at the movies is their total attention is focused. They see… actually there is nothing on the screen, just shadows go on flickering, but people are all attention. They forget their illness, their anxieties, their old age, and even if death comes they will forget that.

But remember, you have not become an observer in the theater; you have become a spectator.

You have forgotten yourself; you have no memory of who you are. You have lost all memory of the energy of seeing which is within you. You have stopped at the object in front of you, you are totally drowned in it.

To be a spectator is a kind of self-forgetting. And to be an observer means now all objects of observation have disappeared. The screen is empty, now no film moves on it. No thoughts remain, no words remain; the screen becomes absolutely empty, blank and shining, white. Nothing left to see, only the seer remains. And now you take a plunge into the seer. You become the observer.

Performers and spectators: humanity is divided between these two. Very rarely an observer is born – an Ashtavakra, a Krishna, a Mahavir, a Buddha…. Very rarely someone is awakened and becomes the observer.

“You are the one observer of all….”

And the beauty of this sutra is that no sooner do you become an observer than you know that the observer is only one, not many. Objects are many, spectators are many. It is the nature of objects and spectators to be many: it is a web of lies. The observer is only one. For instance the moon is out, a full moon. In rivers and puddles, in pools and ponds, in the ocean, in streams – everywhere it is reflected. If you wander the earth counting all the reflections there will be trillions. The moon is one, reflections innumerable. The observer is one, performers are many, spectators are many. They are only reflections, they are shadows.

When a person becomes free from being a performer or a spectator, has no desire to exhibit and be seen, and has no desire to see, when he knows that the trap of seeing and showing is false – no longer interested he attains nonattachment, freedom from desire. Now there is no desire for anyone to say you are beautiful, you are good, you are virtuous. Even if you inwardly wish people to think you virtuous, then know that you are still caught in the same old web. If you wish in your heart that people know you are religious, then you are still caught in the same web. The world is still with you. It has assumed another shape, taken a new mode, but the same old trap continues. The same old pattern continues.

What will you get by seeing? You have seen so much. What did you get? What will you get by exhibiting? Who can give you something real for your display?

Putting aside these two, putting aside this duality and plunging into the observer, one finds that there is only one. This full moon is only one. In these pools, puddles, ponds, lakes it looked numerous. They were separate mirrors, so there seemed to be many moons.

I have heard that a king built a whole palace with mirrors. He put mirror after mirror inside and it became a looking-glass palace. Once, a dog – the king’s own dog – was shut in at night. He was left inside by mistake. You can understand that dog’s condition – it is the same as man’s condition. He looked all around and saw nothing but dogs. A dog in every mirror. He barked – he freaked out!

When a man is afraid he wants to make others afraid. He thinks perhaps his fear will be less if others are also frightened.

The dog barked, but naturally as there were only mirrors there, in mirror after mirror dogs barked back. The sound returned to him – it was his own echo. He barked all night, ran, charged the mirrors, and became covered in his own blood. No one else was there, he was alone. He was found dead in the morning. There were blood stains all over the place. His story is the story of man.

There is no other here. The other does not exist.

Whoever is is unique.

Here one is. But this will not be understood until you have caught hold of that one within you.

“You are the one observer of all, and in reality you are always free.” Ashtavakra says: “… in reality free.” Do not think this just a fantasy. Man is very strange: he thinks the world is real and these statements of truth, just fantasies. He considers unhappiness to be real, and if a ray of happiness descends he considers it a dream, a deception.

People come to me and they say, “We feel great joy, but the doubt arises that perhaps it is an illusion.” They have lived in misery for so many lives that they have lost the confidence that there can also be joy. Joy begins to seem impossible. They are so used to weeping, so used to unhappiness, so familiar with the thorns of life that they do not trust their eyes when they see flowers. They think, “This must be a dream – an unreal sky flower; it cannot be, it should not exist.”

That is why Ashtavakra says: “… in reality free.” One is not bound. Bondage is impossible, because only God is, only one is. There is nothing that binds, nor anything to be bound. “… In reality always free.” This is why a man like Ashtavakra says, if you wish you can be free this very moment – because you are already free. There is nothing preventing freedom, there was never any bondage – you only believed you were bound.

-Osho

Excerpt from Enlightenment: The Only Revolution, Discourse #3

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

You can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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

The Power of Emptiness – Ilie Cioara

The “void” or “psychological emptiness” is a strange phenomenon,
It appears spontaneously, in the pause between two thoughts;
As the old thought ends its course and disappears,
Its end is the gate, natural silence ensues.

Insist in being with it, as much as you can,
The mind is completely silent, we are attentive – a clear consciousness,
All meanings, boundaries disappear – us and the Infinite are “One”;
Practically, we have a new mind – always fresh.

Being in the pause – I become infinite!
It separates two worlds. I leave the limited world
And enter Boundlessness, through total melting;
The whole being is calm – a constant sparkle.

There is no time, no space – just everlasting Eternity;
I move in direct contact with life, in a permanent present.
I am Pure Energy, without motivations,
The simplicity of existence integrates us completely.

We really encounter Life only through this “now”,
Free from the old, we are able to embrace the new.
All this beauty vanishes, when another thought appears,
It comes from the knowing mind – an old recording.

Let it play its game, do not oppose any resistance,
Encounter it as it is, without any purpose;
It will certainly disappear, and “emptiness” ensues again,
Another opportunity to encounter it practically.

We find the real meaning of Life through this “void”,
It is a boundary line between the two worlds:
On the one side the limited, where the “ego” is the master;
On the other, the Infinite, where Love is the master.

Emptiness also separates Light from the darkness,
The permanent chaos through struggle, contradictions and conflicts,
From the harmonious being, equilibrium and joy;
The whole egocentrism perishes, by encountering the void.

Peace, divine order becomes our nature;
It changes our way of being, without effort or will,
Only through this psychological void, we become honest and humane,
The Purity of the Energy – makes titans out of pygmies.

Let this “psychological emptiness” be your guide
In everything you encounter on your spiritual path.
If it is not the starting point, we easily get deceived,
Only through emptiness – we become Love!

The “void” or “psychological emptiness” is a strange phenomenon, which appears spontaneously in the pause between two thoughts. First, the old thought ends its course and disappears. At its end lies the gate, where natural silence ensues.

Persistently try to identify with this “emptiness” and dwell in it for as long as possible, by becoming one with it. In this circumstance, the mind is completely silent. In a state of Attention, we are pure Consciousness. When we have no motivations or meanings, there are no limits. The Infinite and us are melting into “One”. In this state we have a new, fresh mind, which has no connection to the old mind.

In this state of “emptiness” or “psychological void” we notice that the whole being is perfectly calm and united with the Endless – manifesting itself as a spontaneous flash. Living in a real way outside time and space, we are constant Eternity, moving in direct contact with the movement of Life, in a perpetual present. By simply “being”, we attain “wholeness”; we have a pure Energy, without motivations.

The real encounter with Life can only happen in this perpetual “now”. When the old man disappears, we acquire the capacity to embrace the new, brought forth by the movement of Aliveness.

Life’s beauty disappears instantaneously the moment another thought, as a reaction of the mind, invades this present and muddles its meaning. In this case, allow the intruder to follow its course. Do not oppose any resistance. We are just a luminous dot – a simple witness on the screen of consciousness – in stillness, we just watch what is happening, without any purpose, goal or ideal.  When we encounter the intruder-thought in this manner, it disappears spontaneously, leaving the path open for the next moment.

The real meaning of Life is revealed to us only in the context of this “emptiness”, as a boundary line between the two dimensions. On the one side lies the limited world, where the personal “ego” is the master, on the other lies the Infinite, where Love and Beauty create a climate of boundless Happiness.

Similarly, this “emptiness” separates Light from the darkness. The chaos we frequently encounter within the limited mind, caused by disputes, contradictions and conflicting states, is replaced by a perfectly harmonious being, manifesting itself as Joy and unlimited Happiness. Only in this circumstance, egocentrism disappears by simply becoming conscious of it.

This “psychological nothingness” makes us honest and humane. It radically changes our whole being, without efforts, desires or imaginary states.  It represents the abyss, the tomb, where all the fragmented energies of the egoistic, obsessive and possessive structure disappear irreversibly.

Therefore, let us use it as starting point in each of our spiritual investigations. When “emptiness” is missing, any attempt of psychological progress can only result in deceitful imaginary states.

Let us remember that this attentive and lucid passiveness of the mind gives us the opportunity to encounter true Love and to identify with Divinity.

Each meeting with this “psychological Nothingness” is a true hammer blow to the structure of the “ego”, whose author and prisoner we are. Depending on the frequency of these blows, we will, one day, experience the phenomenon of Liberation.

This fortunate event appears as a complete surprise. It cannot be desired, imagined, nor expected as a result or merit of a psychosomatic activity pursuing a goal or an ideal.

-Ilie Cioara

From The Silence of the Mind.

This book is available from Amazon.

There are more postings from Ilie Cioara here.

You can read an interview about  the Romanian Sage, Ilie Cioara here.

Empty Yourself of Everything – Lao Tzu

Empty yourself of everything.

Let the mind become still.

The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.

They grow and flourish and then return to the source.

Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.

The way of nature is unchanging.

Knowing constancy is insight.

Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.

Knowing constancy, the mind is open.

With an open mind, you will be openhearted.

Being openhearted, you will act royally.

Being royal, you will attain the divine.

Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.

Being at one with the Tao is eternal.

And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.

 

-Lao Tzu

From Tao Te Ching

Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

Touchstone of Truth – Osho

Through studying texts like Vedanta and the Ashtavakra Geeta, I have learnt that whatever is worth attaining has already been attained. Making efforts for it is going astray. I have deepened this conviction, so why has self-realization not happened? Please show me the path.

Never think that what you understand from scriptures is your own understanding. Never think what you understand from words has become your own experience.

Hearing Ashtavakra, many people will feel, “Far out, everything is already attained.” But it is not attained this way. What connection is there between your listening to Ashtavakra and attaining? It has already happened: this must be your own experience. The recognition, the blessing, must be yours; it is not an intellectual conclusion. Intellect will quickly accept it. What could be easier than, “It has already happened. Good, our troubles are over. Now there is no need to search, no need to meditate, no need to worship or pray – it has already happened.”

Intellect is ready to accept – not because it has grasped the truth. It accepts because the difficulties of the path can be dropped, efforts of sadhana dropped, and the need to continue meditating is dropped. Soon you look around and find that you have not attained. If it could happen merely by the intellect grasping it, there could be spiritual universities. There is no university of spiritual study. It is not attained from scriptures; it is attained by your own spontaneous inspired wisdom.

Listen to Ashtavakra, but don’t be in a hurry to believe. Your greed makes you hurry. Your greed will tell you, “This is very handy. We already have the treasure, so the whole botheration of attaining is over. Now there is nowhere to go, now there is nothing to do.”

You always wanted to attain without effort. But remember the desire to attain is still there behind all this: attain without doing! Previously you thought of striving to attain; now you think of attaining without exertion – but the desire to attain is still there. This is why the question arises of why self-realization has not yet happened.

For one who has understood: “Forget about self-realization, what’s the use?” If you had understood Ashtavakra, no other question could arise. The question “Self-realization has not happened” indicates that while accepting what Ashtavakra says, you are watching from the corner of your eye: is it attained yet or not? Your eye is still focused on attaining.

People come to me and I tell them, “Meditation cannot go deep as long as you continue desiring. As long as you expect to attain something – bliss, God, atma – meditation will not go deep, because thinking of attaining is greed. It is ambition, it is politics. It is not yet religion.” They say, “Okay, we’ll meditate without thinking about it, but we will attain, won’t we?”

There is no difference. They are ready to stop desiring because, “You say this is the way to attain, so we won’t think of it – but still, we will attain it, won’t we?”

You are not able to rid yourself of greed. Hearing Ashtavakra many people will very quickly accept that it has happened. If it could happen so quickly… and it is not that there is any barrier to it happening. The barrier is the foolishness of your desiring. The happening is so near!

Ashtavakra is right – it has already happened. But only when all desire for attaining disappears then this, “It has happened already,” will be understood. Then you will know from your totality that it is attained. But at the moment it is just an intellectual diversion: “If a great master like Ashtavakra said it, it must be right.” You are hurrying to believe. Your belief is impotent. Without doubting you have quickly accepted it.

In this country the habit has disappeared of doubting anything stated in scriptures. If it is in the scriptures it must be right.

One day Mulla Nasruddin came carrying a very handsome umbrella. I asked him, “Where did you get it? Such fine umbrellas are not made here.”

He said, “My sister sent a gift.”

I said, “Nasruddin! You have always said that you don’t have any sisters.”

He replied, “It is true.”

Then I said, “Yet this gift is sent by your sister…?”

He said, “If you don’t believe me: here, it is written on the handle, ‘A gift for my beloved brother, from your sister.’ I was coming out of a restaurant and these letters on the umbrella – I thought it seems I do have a sister. When it is written it has to be believed. And perhaps there is some sister or cousin…. And religious people have always said you should take every woman except your wife as your mother or sister.”

When something is published – and in the scriptures… belief in the written word is very strong.
When you tell someone something, he asks where it was this published. If you say where he will believe what you said. It is as if there is some power in writing. Say how ancient it is – people will accept it. It is as if truth is somehow related to age. Who said it? Ashtavakra? Buddha? Mahavir? – then it must be right.

From your side you haven’t made any effort to wake up – not a tiny bit. Someone said it, you believed it – and such convenience: you have attained without doing anything!

Krishnamurti’s followers have been listening for forty years – exactly the same people more or less. They have attained nothing. Sometimes one of them comes to me saying, “I know that everything is already attained, but why hasn’t it happened? I listen to Krishnamurti, I understand that everything is already attained.”

These people are greedy. They hoped that instead of having to make any effort they should get it free. They have not heard Krishnamurti nor understood Ashtavakra. They have heard their greed. They have heard through their greed. Then they interpret in their own way.

A friend has asked, “Doing meditations seems irrelevant now. Five meditations a day – and this lecture series on Ashtavakra going on…. It seems stupid.”

It is so easy to drop meditation – so hard to do it. What Ashtavakra attained was not attained through doing, and yet it was not attained without doing anything.

Try to understand. This is a subtle point.

I have told you Buddha attained when he dropped all doing. But first he did everything. Six years of untiring effort, he gave everything to it. By giving everything, he experienced that nothing can be attained by doing. It wasn’t by reading Ashtavakra… even though the Ashtavakra Gita was available in Buddha’s time. He could have studied it – there was no need for six years of effort. He made an untiring effort for six years, and in the midst of this effort he found out it is not attained by effort. He didn’t leave a single stone unturned, proving to himself that it couldn’t be attained by inner effort. There was no desire left inside. He did everything, and he saw that he didn’t attain. His effort became so crystallized that in this crystallization, doing dropped. Then it happened.

I say unto you, the state of non-doing will come when you have done everything. Don’t hurry, otherwise what little meditation you are already doing will be lost, what little prayer you are doing will be lost. Ashtavakra remains far away and the little progress you were making on the journey will stop too.

Before stopping one needs to run totally. Though one does not attain by running, this knowing will be crystallized by it. One day effort will drop, but not from mere intellectual understanding. When every cell, every atom understands it is useless – this is the moment it happens.

Ashtavakra is right in saying that practice is bondage.

But only one who practices will find out.

I am telling you this because I have practiced and found it is a dead end. I am telling you this because I have practiced sadhana and found that no sadhana leads one to the sadhya, to the goal. I meditated and found that no meditation brings one to samadhi.

When this becomes your deep experience, and one day that moment comes when it boils at one hundred degrees, when you have given everything…. Holding back nothing – you have thrown yourself totally into the fire, the effort has become total, the inner fire is total, the sadhana is total; now existence cannot tell you that you have held anything back, all is given – that day, in that crystallization, in that state of ignited consciousness suddenly everything is burnt to ash. All sadhana, all practices, all meditation, all renunciation – suddenly you wake up and find, “Oh! What I was seeking was already attained!”

But if it could happen just by reading Ashtavakra then it would be very convenient. What is hard about reading Ashtavakra? The sutra is so clear and simple. Remember, to understand simple things is the most difficult thing in the world. And the difficulty comes from within you. You hope you won’t have to do anything. It is very hard for people to accept the need to meditate.

This is the acid test – the Ashtavakra Gita. Those who hear Ashtavakra and continue meditating have understood. Those who hear Ashtavakra and stop meditating have not understood Ashtavakra and they lose their meditation too.

Practice and you will find out that practice is a dead end. This is the final phase of practicing. Don’t be in too much of a hurry.

“Through the study of texts like Vedanta and the Ashtavakra Geeta, I have learnt….” Has anyone ever known through study? Has anyone known through memorizing texts? Has anyone ever known through learning scriptures, learning words? This is not knowing; it is information, knowing about. You can say this information is known: “What is worth attaining is already attained.” But when you realize it, everything is finished.

You were informed, you got excited, and it sprouted in greed! Your greed said, “Look, I have been meaninglessly making efforts. Ashtavakra says ‘without doing anything,’ so I will sit without doing anything.” So you sit doing nothing. After a while you observe, “The happening has not happened yet. Why this delay? And Ashtavakra said right now!” You sit looking at the clock, “Five seconds have past, five minutes have past, an hour is almost over – and Ashtavakra said immediately! Right now! There is no need for even a second to pass!” You start thinking he was lying, your trust is broken.

This is not knowing, it is information. Always remember the difference between information and knowing. Information means borrowed. Someone else has known, and listening to him you have become informed. This is information. Knowing is an experience. No one else can know for you; it cannot be borrowed.

I have known – your knowing will not happen from this. My knowing will be mine; your knowing will be yours. Yes, if you collect my words it will be information. Through information one can become a scholar but not a wise man. Knowledge about wisdom can be collected, but not the liberation of wisdom. A whole system of words can be created, but not the beauty of truth. The words will hem you in more, will enslave you more. So you will find scholars very restricted. Where is the open sky? Knowing that what is worth attaining is already attained – if you know it then what is left to ask?

“… Making efforts is going astray.” If you know this then what else is there to ask? ”I have deepened this conviction.” Either there is conviction or there is not; there is no way to deepen it. How can you deepen it? If there is faith there is faith; if there isn’t there isn’t – how will you deepen it? What method is there for making faith deepen? Will you suppress your doubts? Will you sit on top of your doubts? What will you do? Will you falsify your doubts? When the mind raises questions will you ignore them?

Inside, the worm of doubt will be gnawing. It will say, “Now listen, is anything attained without doing anything? Has anything ever happened just by sitting? Things happen by doing; does anything happen by sitting idle? Can you get anything for free? What nonsense are you getting into? What illusion are you suffering from? Get up, move, run; otherwise life will run out – life is already running out! Don’t waste time sitting here like an idiot.”

These doubts will arise: what will you do with them? Will you suppress them? Will you falsify them? Will you say you don’t want to hear about it? Will you throw them into the unconscious? Will you hide them inside, in your basement? Will you avoid looking them in the face?

What will you do to deepen your faith? You will do something like this – you will repress in some way. This faith will be false; disbelief will be smoldering beneath it. This faith is superficial. Above is a threadbare covering; underneath, the coals of disbelief, of doubt. Soon they will burn up your faith. This faith is of no use, you cannot deepen it. Faith is, or faith is not.

It is like someone drawing a circle. If he draws half a circle will you call it a circle? Can half a circle be called a circle? It is an arc, not a circle. It can be called a circle only if it is complete. An incomplete circle is not a circle. Incomplete trust is not trust, because incomplete trust means that distrust is also present. In the empty arc, what will happen? There will be doubt. Doubt and trust cannot move together. It would be like one foot going east, the other foot going west – you won’t get anywhere. It would be like riding in two boats, one going to this shore and one going to that shore – where will you go?

The journeys of doubt and trust are quite separate. You are riding in two boats. What is the meaning of incomplete trust? Does half faith mean half disbelief is also present? If trust exists it is complete, otherwise it exists not.

And remember one important fact: whenever the higher is mixed with the lower, the lower does not lose anything, but the higher does. When you mix the higher with the lower there is no harm to the lower, but the higher is harmed.

A feast is prepared, fine foods are set out. Throw just a small handful of dirt on it. You could say it is a vast feast, what can a small handful of dirt do? But a small handful of dirt destroys the whole feast. The whole feast cannot destroy even this small handful of dirt.

Throw a rock at a flower and nothing happens to the rock, but the flower will be destroyed. The rock is lower, lifeless. The flower is glorious, full of life. The flower is of the sky, the rock is of the earth. The flower is the poetry of life. When the flower and rock collide the flower is completely crushed, the rocked completely unscratched.

One drop of poison is enough. Remember, doubt is lower. If the rock of doubt falls on the flower of trust, the flower will be flattened and die, the flower will be murdered. Do not think that trust will transform the rock. The rock will destroy the flower.

Either faith is or it is not – there are not two possibilities. When faith exists, it encompasses your whole life, it spreads into every cell. Faith is expansive. But such a faith does not come from the scriptures, it cannot come. Such a faith comes from live experience. It comes when you read the scripture of life, not from reading Ashtavakra.

Understand Ashtavakra, but don’t think this understanding is wisdom. Understand Ashtavakra and preserve this inside yourself, put it away. You have received a touchstone. You didn’t receive wisdom, but an analyst’s experience. And when you do attain wisdom, you can easily test it with the touchstone of Ashtavakra.

The touchstone is not gold. When you go to a goldsmith you see he has a black testing stone. This black stone is not gold. When he receives gold, the goldsmith rubs it on this black stone to find out if it is gold or not.

When you have understood Ashtavakra’s words carefully keep them, pack them away and when your experience of life comes you can test it. Ashtavakra’s touchstone will be helpful then. You will be able to know what has happened. You will have the language to understand it. You will have a method to understand it. Ashtavakra will be your witness.

This is the way I take the scriptures. The scriptures are witnesses. The path of truth is unknown.
You need witnesses on that unknown path. When you first come face to face with truth, truth will be so vast that you will tremble; you will be unable to grasp it. You will shake to your very roots. There will be fear that you could go mad.

Imagine what will happen to a man who has been searching for a treasure for lifetimes and suddenly he finds that the treasure is buried where he is standing – won’t he go mad? ”This seeking for many lives was a waste! The treasure is buried right under my feet!”

Just imagine. It will be a tremendous shock for this man: “So many years I have wasted! This whole time has been a meaningless effort, a nightmare. What I have been seeking was waiting inside.” Won’t a man go mad from such a shock? At that time Ashtavakra’s sweet words will soothe you. At that time the Vedanta, Buddha, the Upanishads, the Bible, the Koran, Buddha, will stand as your witnesses. In that situation you will be unable to comprehend the new experiences that are happening to you. In aloneness it is very difficult.

I am speaking on the scriptures – not because by hearing the scriptures you will become wise. I am speaking on them so that as you move on the path of meditation – if not today, then tomorrow it will happen, it has to happen – when the happening takes place it need not be that gold is in front of you and you cannot comprehend.

I am giving you a touchstone.

Test your experiences on these touchstones.

Ashtavakra is the most precise touchstone. Don’t have faith in Ashtavakra, use Ashtavakra as a touchstone for your own experiences. Make Ashtavakra a witness.

Jesus said to his disciples, “I will be your witness when you arrive.” But his disciples misunderstood. The disciples understood that when they died and reach God’s heaven, then Jesus would bear witness that they were his disciples; “Let them come in – these are mine, they are Christians. Be especially compassionate to them. Let more blessings shower on them.”

But what Jesus meant is something completely different. Jesus said, “when you arrive I will be your witness” – this did not mean that Jesus would be standing there, but that what Jesus had said would be there as a touchstone. When your experience happens, immediately you can test it and unravel the knot. As it is, you have wandered around for so long in untruth, your eyes have become used to it. The shock of truth should not break you apart, should not drive you insane.

Remember, many seekers of truth have gone mad. Many seekers of truth have gone mad just as they neared the stage of becoming enlightened, they became deranged, because the happening is so vast, it is inconceivable, unbelievable. It is as if the whole sky has crashed on you.

Your pot is small and the infinite is raining in your pot. You will be shattered – you won’t be able to contain it. You are face to face with the sun and your eyes will be dazzled and then go dark. The sun is before you and all is darkness, your eyes will shut. At that moment you can use Ashtavakra’s statements to understand the sun. At that time, the voice of Ashtavakra that has been lying in your unconscious will immediately speak. The sutras of the Upanishads will start resounding, the Gita will echo, the Koran will echo – its verses will come forth! Their fragrance will assure you that you have come home, there is nothing to freak out about; this vastness is you.

Ashtavakra says that you are expansive, you are vast. You are omnipresent. You are void of action, uncorrupted. You are the ultimate reality. These statements will immediately give an explanation.

Merely having faith in them, merely holding on to them, will lead you nowhere. And greed is waiting within you, saying self-realization has not happened.

“To control desire, a continuous stream spreads out from the snake charmer’s pipe. Dense, impenetrable desire quivers in response….”

Listen to it again: “To control desire, a continuous stream spreads out from the snake charmer’s pipe. Dense, impenetrable desire quivers in response like a cobra whose coil is motionless, while the hood dances to and fro.”

You want to become free of desire, but still you spread out a net of desire. You want to be completely clean and pure but still you do it by means of greed, still desire goes on quivering.

See how an alone, uncrowded desire quivers. The snake’s coil is motionless, now only the hood dances to and fro. You have gone to attain God, but your way of attaining is the same as for attaining money. You go to seek God but your desire, your passion is the same as the one who is after material things. Your madness is the same as the madness of one who wants to attain the world. The object of desire has changed, but the desire has not changed.

Listening to Ashtavakra your desire says: “Wow, this is great! I never knew that what I am seeking is already attained. So now I will just sit.” Then you will wait: “Did it happen yet? Did it happen yet? Did it happen yet?…” Desire goes on quivering. “Did it happen yet?” – You haven’t understood.

Listen to Ashtavakra again. Ashtavakra says it is already attained. But how can you hear it, how can you understand it? – Your desire goes on quivering. Until you have chased after your desires, until you have seen the worthlessness of chasing after them, run and fallen down and scraped yourself, you won’t be able to understand. Only through the experience of desire does desire become worthless. Exhausted it falls down broken – in this moment of desirelessness you will understand that what you have been seeking has already happened.

Otherwise you repeat like a parrot. It doesn’t make the slightest difference if you are a Hindu parrot or a Muslim parrot or a Jaina, a Christian, a Buddhist – a parrot is a parrot. A parrot may recite The Bible, a parrot may recite the Koran. A parrot is a parrot, he will go on repeating.

“Inside the temple all bathed and rubbed down, in full voice, engrossed, throats open in loud tones, extremely well practiced they go on chanting Ram-Ram. Inside themselves they are all deaf-mutes, repeating meaninglessly without understanding, dwarfs. But outside the most childish, the most loudmouthed.”

Look in the temples! “Inside the temple, all bathed and rubbed down, in full voice, engrossed….” People seem so innocent in the temples. Look in the market at the same faces that you see in the temples. Their coverings appeared different in the temples. ”… Throats open in loud tones, extremely well practiced….” You must have seen people taking up a rosary and chanting. Wrapped in a blanket printed with Ram-ram, with sandal paste on the forehead – what a spotless, radiant image! When you meet the same man in the market, in the crowds, you won’t be able to recognize him. People have different faces: they wear one face in the market, they wear another face in the temple.

“… Engrossed, throats open in loud tones, extremely well practiced they go on chanting Ram-Ram. Inside themselves they are all deaf-mutes, repeating meaninglessly without understanding, dwarfs. But outside the most childish, the most loudmouthed.” Information can make you a parrot, can give you a big mouth. It can give you the illusion of being religious, can give deceptions. But don’t think it is wisdom. And on the basis of information the conviction that you put forward will be sitting on doubt, riding on the shoulders of doubt. This conviction cannot take you to the door of truth. Don’t put much faith in this conviction – it is worthless.

Faith must come from your own experience. Faith must come from the pure formlessness of your own meditation.

-Osho
From Enlightenment: The Only Revolution, Discourse #6   Enlightenment- The Only Revolution

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