You can start by simply watching the thoughts that cross your mind… just sit back and watch the thoughts come and go. You will be surprised that most of the thoughts that keep your mind occupied are useless and have no relation to reality; to the present. You will either be making castles in the air of a future that hasn’t even come, a future that is unpredictable which we cannot steer even if we wanted to. OR, it will be dwelling in the past which has already passed now, and we couldn’t re-live it even if we wanted to.

Another starter would be to watch your breathing. Become aware of each breath you take; watch it all the way in, and all the way out(closing your eyes would help still your mind all the more). We normally breathe unconsciously; the very root of our existence, and we are not even aware of it.

Whatever you do, try to be conscious of your actions. Many a tasks we do absent mindedly which proves that the mind has wandered off elsewhere, and is not present with us in what we are doing.

YOU HAVE TOLD US THAT THE MIND BECOMES MORE AND MORE QUIET IF WE MEDITATE REGULARLY. LAST YEAR, WHEN I WAS LIVING IN EUROPE OUTSIDE OF A COMMUNE, THOUGHTS BECAME STRONGER AND STRONGER DURING MY MEDITATIONS UNTIL I BEGAN TO DREAD SITTING.

NOW THAT I AM WITH YOU AGAIN, THIS PROBLEM HAS GONE AWAY. BUT I WONDERED: HOW CAN ONE BE A SANNYASIN FOR TEN YEARS, MEDITATING EVERY DAY, AND HAVE A MIND WHICH BECOMES MORE AND MORE NOISY?

Sagarpriya, the question you have asked has many implications. First, one has to understand that your mind is very ancient — twelve years are nothing compared to the mind’s history; it is the history of the whole universe from the very beginning.

It has been working so long, so efficiently that scientists say they have not yet been able to create a computer which can compete with human mind. And human mind is placed in a small space, in your skull; their computers are placed in big rooms. One scientist has calculated that it would need almost a one square mile space for a computer comparable to the human mind. Human mind is a miracle.

Sitting with me, you are sitting with a greater miracle. You are sitting with no-mind. Naturally, silence becomes easier; meditation comes on its own, just like a cool breeze. When you are left alone, your mind is all that you have. Unless your meditation goes to such depths that you have something more valuable than the mind, this problem will continue to happen.

With me you can have a glimpse, just for a moment. And that glimpse creates the longing to have that moment stretched to eternity. It is so peaceful, so cool, so calm, who would not like it?

But as you go back into the world, there are just computers walking all around; you have to communicate with computers. One physiologist has defined man’s body as nothing but a mechanism to facilitate the mind’s functioning. You think you are carrying the mind. The physiologist is saying just the opposite: it is the mind that is carrying you; your whole body is functioning just for the mind’s sake.

So the moment you go into the world — this is not part of the world; we have been trying to create small islands where mind as a computer is no longer required. But in the world you will need the mind. And the problem will continue, Sagarpriya, until you have something more than mind. Just having a glimpse of silence is not enough.

You need a centering, you need a realization, you need exactly enlightenment — only then can you remain in the world, without your mind functioning unless you want to use it.

Mind is a tremendously valuable mechanism, one of the greatest miracles in biology, in the evolution of man. Mind is simply unbelievable, the way it works… because you don’t know anything about it, although it is your mind. You don’t know how it accumulates millions of memories.

The scientists have calculated that a single man’s mind can contain all the libraries of the world. He can memorize everything that has been ever written, down the ages. That is the capacity; you may use it, you may not use it.

And you don’t know about the libraries. Just the British Museum Library has enough books that if you go on putting one book by the side of the other, just as you put them on the book shelf in the library, it will take three rounds of the whole world. And that is only one library! Moscow has perhaps a bigger library, and all the big universities of the world have similar libraries. Just India has one hundred universities with tremendously big libraries.

And the very idea that a single human mind has the capacity to memorize all that is written in all the books that are in existence in the whole world… it simply baffles, it looks unbelievable.

You don’t know what your mind is doing for you. Your mind is regulating everything in your body. Otherwise, how do you think that for seventy or eighty years, or even a hundred years — and there are people who have even passed that; they have reached their one hundred and fiftieth birthday, and there are a few hundred people in the Soviet Union who have passed the age of one hundred and eighty.

Scientists say there is no reason for the body to die for at least three hundred years. It is just an old hypnosis, autohypnosis, which has made the idea prevalent that you have only seventy years to live. It goes so deep in your consciousness that by the seventieth year you start thinking you are sinking, you are gone.

And anyway by the time you are retired at the age of sixty there is nothing to do. Death seems to be a relief, not a danger. We have not been capable enough and human enough to provide a situation where our old people can have some dignity, some self-respect, some pride. We have not been able to find dimensions where they can contribute to the world. And they are experienced and certainly capable of contributing enough — enough for their self-respect, enough for them to live and not to feel like a burden.

When George Bernard Shaw became seventy years old, he started taking trips to small villages around London. His friends were surprised, “What are you doing? For days you disappear. In this old age you should rest.”

He said, “I am searching for the place to rest in this old age.”

They said, “What do you mean? You have a beautiful house, you have everything that you need.”

He said, “You don’t understand. I am going around all these villages looking in their cemeteries, at the gravestones, in search of a place where many people have lived at least a hundred years.”

And finally he found a village where on a gravestone was the inscription, “This man died at the untimely age of one hundred and twenty.” He said, “This is the village worth living in, where people think that at the age of one hundred and twenty it is an untimely death.” He lived in that village, and he lived beyond a hundred years.

Perhaps it has some significance… not just accidental. He was a man of tremendous wisdom; and if the villagers believe it then the atmosphere is bound to change his own conditioning.

In Pakistan there is a part of Kashmir which belonged to to India; Pakistan has occupied it for forty years. Perhaps that part, because of its secludedness, hidden behind the mountains, has not come in contact with people who die at the age of seventy. They are uneducated people; in fact they cannot count when they are seventy, so how to die at seventy? They don’t have a calendar. They don’t know when they were born; they don’t know how old they are.

They are the most primitive people who have been found living behind the Himalayan peaks, in a valley — in a beautiful valley, self-sufficient, and they have never gone out. And there have been people found, according to the doctors, who are two hundred years old. And they are young; they are working in the fields, in the gardens, in the orchards, and when you ask them about their age they say, “We don’t know. Nobody here knows; there is no school here.”

And now Pakistan is opening schools and hospitals and you can be certain that soon people will start dying exactly at the age of seventy. Those people have just forgotten to die, because they don’t remember when they were born, and they cannot count.

Scientists say that man’s body has the capacity at least — that is the minimum — to live three hundred years. But why does man not live so long? Perhaps man does not know how to live; perhaps man does not know how to use his body, how to use his mind.

Sagarpriya, you have to understand two things very clearly: first, mind is a great miracle.

Existence has not been able to create anything higher than your mind. Its function is so complex that it baffles the greatest scientists. It manages your whole body, and it is such a complex system. Who manages that a certain part of your blood should go to the brain? Who manages that only a certain amount of oxygen should reach to the brain? Who manages what part of your food should become bones, should become blood, should become skin? Who manages that part of your skin should become nails and part of your skin should become eyes and part of your skin should become ears?

Certainly you are not managing it, and I don’t see any other manager around. So first you have to be grateful to the mind. That is a first step to go beyond mind, not as an enemy but as a friend. Listening to me continually saying that you have to go beyond mind, you can fall into a misunderstanding. I have tremendous respect for mind. We are obliged so much by the mind, there is no way to return our gratitude.

So the first thing is: meditation is not against mind, it is beyond mind. And beyond is not equivalent to against.

That misunderstanding spreads the more people talk about meditation, particularly people who don’t understand meditation — those who have read about it, those who have heard about it, those who know the techniques… And techniques are simple; they are available in many scriptures, you can read them. And now there are books on how to do anything — car mechanics, electric engineering, anything — you ask, and the bookseller is ready to give you a book about how to do it.

My people in Europe have been thinking to make a book with a cassette. The book will give all the background of the meditation and the cassette will give all the instructions, so you need not go anywhere. Just sitting in your room with your tape recorder and you have a master! Gautam Buddha is no longer needed….

A master will never become irrelevant for a simple reason: who will teach you to love the mind and yet go beyond it? to love your body, to respect your body? to have gratitude towards your mind, its tremendous, miraculous functioning? That will make a great friendship, a bridge between you and the mind.

With this friendship deepening, whenever you are meditating, the mind will not disturb because your meditation is not against it. It is in fact its own fulfillment, it is its own ultimate flowering. Going beyond it is not an antagonistic attitude, but a friendly evolution.

So this should be the background of all meditators: not to be a fighter. If you fight you may be able to make the mind quiet for some time, but it is not your victory. The mind will come back, you will need it. You cannot live without it; you cannot exist in the world without it.

And if you can create a friendly relationship with the mind, a loving bridge, rather than being a hindrance to meditation it starts becoming a help. It protects your silence because that silence is also its own treasure, it is not just yours. It becomes a soil in which the roses of meditation will blossom, and the soil will be as happy as the roses. When the roses will be dancing in the sun, in the rain, in the wind, the soil will also rejoice.

My approach is totally different from the approach that has been taken up to now. For thousands of years, all the religions have been teaching something against body, against mind.

And just today I came to know that there are even idiots who are teaching against meditation. The parliament of Israel has passed a law that meditation in private or in public is a criminal act. You cannot believe it!

And these politicians don’t know even the ABC of the mind, what to say about meditation. But why are they so much worried? One of their worries is me, because out of my sannyasins fifty percent are Jews. Sooner or later I am going to take over Israel, there is no problem about it — before the Palestinians take it over, I am going to take over.

Why should the politicians be concerned? And if they are concerned they should consult people who know what meditation is. To make it a criminal act is an unbelievable thing; nowhere ever…

Religions have taught against the body. That was so ridiculous — you have to live in the body, you have to nourish the body; you have to keep it healthy, it is your home. They have been talking against mind. Now this is the latest thing — Israel has done a pioneer work! The parliament of Israel seems to be consisting of really first-class idiots.

I don’t think they know even anything about meditation, but the fear…. Jews are afraid, Mohammedans are afraid, Hindus are afraid, Jainas are afraid — they are all afraid of meditation. Even though they talk about meditation they are afraid of it. They talk because without talking about meditation their religion seems to be incomplete, but they are basically against it because a man who becomes a meditator simply slips out of any organized religion. He is no more a Hindu and he is no more a Jew and he is no more a Mohammedan. He cannot go on believing in all kinds of superstitions and stupidities that every religion is full of.

Jews think that they are the chosen people of God. Now, no meditator can do that. To think that “Only we, the Jews, are the chosen people of God, and the whole humanity is in some way inferior to us”… But it was not only the Jews who have committed that sin. They have suffered much for it; they are still suffering. They will continue to suffer, because the very idea is so stupid that it creates antagonism, particularly in a world where Nordic Germans think that they are the chosen people, where Hindus think that they are the chosen people, because their holy book is the most ancient and first God-written holy scripture. They cannot tolerate any ideas like Moses telling his people that “You are the chosen people of God; you have a basic right to be superior to everybody else.” Who can tolerate it? Hindus think they are superior to everybody.

Jews and Hindus are the only two religions in the world which don’t believe in conversion, because how to convert inferior people into a higher religion? And because they cannot convert, they are absolutely against Christianity, Mohammedanism, who are after converts continuously.

Now, because of the fear that the number of Mohammedans and Christians goes on growing and Jews and Hindus go on shrinking, there are small trends among Jews… and there is a small group of Hindus called the Arya Samaj, who have introduced conversion. But it remains a very half-hearted thing. Deep down they know what they are doing: they are bringing inferior people into their fold. It is just out of sheer necessity; otherwise those inferior people will outnumber — they have already — the superior people.

Now Christians have the greatest numbers in the world; second are the Mohammedans — and these two are the converting religions.

The fear of meditation has roots. In the law passed by the Israeli parliament it has become exposed, but it is there in every religious mind: if people start meditating, if people start loving their bodies, loving their minds, and out of love peacefully transcending towards a state of no-mind, they will not belong to any stupid ideology.

And all ideologies are so full of stupid things that it is almost impossible to count how many superstitions, and what a variety of superstitions. Some day when humanity has become one, we will need great museums to collect all the superstitions to remember our forefathers by. Just the way Darwin thought of monkeys as his forefathers, the coming generations of man will remember you and your forefathers in the same category.

I would like you to be reminded of a few superstitions… just samples, because the whole lot is too much.

Jainas think that unless your earlobes touch your shoulders you cannot become enlightened. Now I cannot see what the relationship can be between the earlobes, which are almost dead parts of your body… have you ever noticed? Can you do anything with your earlobes? Can you wave them? They are just hanging there, not doing anything. You cannot do anything with them because there is no nervous system; they are just pieces of flesh without nerves, pure flesh. And without nerves you cannot turn them up or down, here and there.

I have come across only one person — and I have been around the world — and strangely enough he was my classmate in first grade when I entered school. Now he is a doctor in the same town. He is the only man… some freak! He can make his earlobes move this way, that way, back, forward. He was a miracle; for some accidental reason his earlobes have grown nerves inside. Just as a few people are born with six fingers, a few people are born with three eyes, a few people are born with two heads — just freaks — he has really big earlobes.

I have been watching to see when he becomes enlightened. He is just a poor doctor — he knows nothing about meditation, nothing about enlightenment. And because he is an ayurvedic doctor, patients don’t come to him. Only his children go on growing, and he goes on growing poorer and poorer. Each time I have seen him I have seen him reduced, thinner, more worried. I said, “What is the matter? You are supposed to be enlightened!”

But stupid ideas… and it is not one religion but every religion. And they cannot tolerate each other.

Mohammed went to heaven sitting on his horse; the horse also went — without wings. Neither Mohammed had wings nor the horse, but they flew to heaven. This was happening for the first time. Jesus left his donkey here, Francis left his donkey here; only Mohammed was able to take his horse. Mohammedans think it was because he was the real prophet….

Now everybody is claiming — Mohammedans claim that the KORAN, their holy book, is the only authentic, God-written book; all other books are man-written. And the KORAN is not even worth being considered as literature; it is just third-class. Because Mohammed was uneducated, he did not write it; whatever he was saying has been collected by people, but every sentence shows his uneducatedness, his unculturedness.

But Mohammed claims to be the last prophet of God: after him there will be no prophet because God has sent his final message through him, and that is the KORAN. All old messages are canceled — THE BIBLE, the VEDAS, are all canceled, because when the new message has arrived it cancels all the old. It is the most developed, the most evolved message; it is so perfect that there is no need of anybody else to bring a message to the world.

Now, all these religions are claiming such things. Mohammedans say that when Mohammed used to move in Arabia — which is a desert and really becomes burning hot when the sun comes to the middle of the sky — God used to send a beautiful white cloud which used to move just over Mohammed’s head, keeping him under shadow… a divine umbrella!

If meditation becomes more prevalent, then you will get free from all these prejudices; hence no religion wants meditation, although they may talk about it.

To me, neither God is important nor heaven nor hell nor angels — all those are just hypothetical. To me, meditation is the very soul of religion. But it can be attained only if you move rightly. Just a single step in a wrong direction… And you are always moving on a razor’s edge!

Begin with love of the body, which is your outermost part. Start loving your mind — and if you love your mind you will decorate it, just the way you decorate your body. You keep it clean, you keep it fresh; you don’t want your body to smell horrible to people, you want your body to be loved and respected by others. Your presence should not be simply tolerated but welcomed.

You have to decorate your mind with poetry, with music, with art, with great literature. Your trouble is, your mind is filled only with trivia. Such third-rate things go on through your mind that you cannot love it. You think of nothing which is great. Make it more in tune with the greatest poets; make it in tune with people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Turgenev, Rabindranath, Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy; make it filled with the greatest heights that mind has reached.

Then you will not be unfriendly to the mind. Then you will rejoice in the mind; even if mind is there in your silence, it will have a poetry and a music of its own, and to transcend such a refined mind is very easy. It is a friendly step towards higher peaks: poetry turning into mysticism, great literature turning into great insights into existence, music turning into silence.

And as these things start turning into higher peaks, beyond mind, you will be discovering new worlds, new universes which we don’t even have a name for. We can say blissfulness, ecstasy, enlightenment, but no word really describes it. It is simply outside the power of language to reduce it into explanations, into theories, into philosophies. It is simply beyond… but mind rejoices in its transcendence.

That’s what my unique contribution is to you. With absolute humbleness I want to tell you that I am far ahead of even Gautam Buddha, for the simple reason that he is still fighting with the mind. I have loved my mind, and through love I have transcended it.

It is a totally new beginning. Naturally I have to be condemned; my people will be condemned. Many will come to me but will not be able to walk along with me even for a few steps, because soon they will find that their prejudices are preventing them from going with me.

Their prejudices are ancient, and naturally — I can understand — they cannot think that anybody can go beyond Gautam Buddha, just as the contemporaries of Gautam Buddha could not believe that he has gone beyond the VEDAS and beyond the seers of the UPANISHADS, just as contemporaries of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu could not believe that they have gone far beyond Confucius.

And if just out of humbleness I don’t say the truth, I will be committing a crime against truth. I don’t care about such humbleness; I want exactly what is the case to be explained to you.

My approach towards meditation is absolutely new, absolutely fresh, because it depends on love — not on fight, not on war. Mahavira I have left twenty-five centuries behind. His name was not Mahavira — mahavira means `the great warrior’. His name was Vardhamana, but people changed his name because he was a great warrior. A warrior against whom? — against his body, against his mind. And I don’t think that anybody who is against his body and against his mind is capable of reaching the beyond.

Only love is the path.

Sagarpriya, make your mind as beautiful as possible. Decorate it with flowers. I am really very sad when I see that people don’t know THE BOOK OF MIRDAD, that they have never looked into the absurd stories of Chuang Tzu, that they have never bothered to understand the absolutely irrational stories of Zen.

I cannot conceive of how you can live beautifully if you don’t know Dostoevsky’s books… BROTHERS KARAMAZOV to me is more important than any BIBLE. It has such great insights, that THE BIBLE should not be counted at all, even for comparison. But THE BIBLE will be read — and who is going to bother about BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, in which Dostoevsky has poured his whole soul? or ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy, or FATHERS AND SONS by Turgenev, or OFFERING OF SONGS by Rabindranath?And these are only a few names; there are thousands who have reached the finest flowering of mind.

First let your mind be decorated. Only beyond this perfumed garden of the mind will you be able to go silently, without any fight; mind will be a help, not a hindrance. I have not found it to be a hindrance; hence I can say with absolute authority: it is not a hindrance. You just don’t know how to use it.

It is beautiful, Sagarpriya, that when you come here you feel meditative. At least these few gaps, these few days, will slowly start becoming stronger, deeper. One day you will be gone and these moments will be with you even in the marketplace, and that will be a day of great rejoicing.

But it takes time. I have to say to people that it can happen instantly. Not that it is untrue — it can happen instantly, but where to find the genius who can understand it instantly?

When I say it can happen instantly, people simply think, “This is impossible for us.” If I say to them it can happen in a few lives’ time, they feel, “That seems to be perfect,” because that gives them the time to do all their stupid things meanwhile. It is a question of a few lives, so what is the hurry? First take care of your boyfriend, your girlfriend; first go to see all kinds of ruins in Rome, in Greece, in India; first do every foolish thing that is expected of you by the whole crowd. And as far as enlightenment is concerned it is not going to happen now, it will take many lives, so what is the hurry? You can go on postponing.

That’s why people love all these religions which talk about many lives — not because they understand the significance of it, but because they want to use that as an excuse.

It can happen this very moment, but it will not happen. The reason is not in its nature; the reason is you. It will not happen because you don’t want it to happen right now.

Just think for a moment: if I were going to make you enlightened this very moment, you would start thinking, “But I have not asked my husband. What about my children? I have to get my daughter married. And I have just met my girlfriend, my god! and this is going to happen just now? he cannot wait? — just let me finish my honeymoon.” Thousands of thoughts will arise in your mind: “My god, I have started a new business, invested everything in it. If he had told me before, I would not have got involved in all this mess.” Everybody, without exception….

I have told you the story of a great Ceylonese master who had millions of disciples, and who had been telling them for nearabout fifty years only one thing: Meditate. The day of his death came and he announced, “After seven days I am going to leave my body, so let all my disciples gather so that I can see them one time more, because I will not be coming back again.”

So all the disciples gathered; it was a great gathering. And before dying, the old man said, “I have always told you to meditate, but you have not listened. I give you another chance. This time you have not to do anything. I am going to die, I can take you with me. Is anybody ready to come with me?”

Everybody looked at each other: “You have been long enough with him, you can go.” People looked at each other, whispered, “What are you doing? All your children are married, everything is finished, nobody needs you….” But nobody was standing up.

He said, “Just stand up, and I will take you with me.”

There was great silence and people were looking downwards — how to face this old man? It is so embarrassing. But they were all unmoving, because he may misunderstand even the movement — he may see that somebody is moving and say, “Get up!”

Finally one man raised his hand. He said, “First please understand this: I am not standing, I am just raising my hand to ask you a question.”

The old man said, “Fifty years I have been answering your questions and still you are asking questions? And this time I am giving you the opportunity to come with me.”

He said, “I’m sorry. Some day I will come. Just tell me the secret of how to come and find you.”

He said, “What have I been telling you for fifty years?”

The man said, “Just one time more…”

It is possible in this very moment to drop all your prejudices, cleanse your mind. It simply needs absolute decisiveness, ultimate trust, and a love that knows no bounds.

But if it cannot happen this moment, I don’t want anybody to become sad and fall into a state of despair. It can happen tomorrow. You can relax, there is no hurry. But please understand the process clearly: Love your body — against all the religions. Love your mind, refine your mind — against all the religions.

And I say to you that fight is not the way; love is the way. Love your body, love your mind, and that very love will create the energy, the atmosphere to transcend the mind, to create what I call meditation or the state of no-mind. It will come. It has to come. Nobody has to go from this temple empty-handed.

But you will have to understand one thing: that I don’t represent any old tradition, I don’t represent any old religion; I don’t represent any Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Mohammed or Jesus or Moses — I simply represent myself.

And if you can love and trust a stranger who does not belong to any orthodox organization, then with me, meditation will be happening… and soon, without me also it will be happening. It will take a little time. It will take a little time because it needs to grow roots.

So, Sagarpriya, whenever you can find time, come. And don’t be concerned with what happens outside; that is just rubbish. What happens here, count only that as your real life. The moments that you are with me will be with you even after your death, and the moments you are wasting in the world are simply gone down the drain.

But there is no need to be worried. If even a few moments of meditation start becoming seeds in you, start growing roots in you, the day is not very far away when you will have the first flowers of your consciousness growing within you.

And I understand you, Sagarpriya; I understand you and your trust and your love. Very few people have that much love and that much trust.

But drop all antagonism towards the mind. There is some streak of fighting with the mind, maybe unconscious — mind is just a poor and beautiful thing….

Modern police departments are beginning to use computers to help fight crime. One night a man telephoned the police and said, “Police, come quick! There is a burglar downstairs and he is putting all our valuables in a sack.”

The voice on the other end said, “Keep calm. Keep calm, sir, hang up the phone, stay where you are and a police car will be right over… right over… right over….”

A computer can go wrong any moment. And mind is nothing but a computer, but created with such perfection by nature. But you have not valued it at all.

The enormous computer took up all of the huge room, completely dwarfing the two tiny mathematicians standing before it. A sliver of paper had emerged from the computer and one mathematician, after studying it gravely, turned to the other and said, “Do you realize that it would take four hundred ordinary mathematicians two hundred and fifty years to make a mistake this big?”

There are many people in the world who are becoming interested in meditation, but ninety-nine percent are in the wrong hands, and if you say this it hurts them.

Just today I have received a letter. The letter says, “The other night you spoke of Goenka’s Vipassana. You blamed Goenka for being a businessman and professionalist of Vipassana. Osho, I have experienced Vipassana here at the Poona ashram, and also Goenka’s Dhammpeeth at Igatpuri. I think your comment is wrong.”

And this is from a man, Anand Piyoosh, who has just become a sannyasin two days ago. In another letter before this, he says, “Due to uncertainty and indecisiveness of mind I have taken sannyas after twelve years. Due to this inability of mine I have suffered much. How can I get freed from it permanently? — Anand Piyoosh.”

It took him twelve years to decide to take sannyas, and it took him only twelve hours to find that I am wrong in what I have said about Goenka — no indecisiveness about this. And if Goenka was right, then what is the need of coming here? If Goenka can teach you meditation, then why are you wasting your time here, and my time and my people’s time? And if you have such an understanding that you can simply call me wrong, then this is not the place for you.

What do you understand about meditation?

The difference between Goenka’s meditation and the meditation that is happening here is immense, and for you it will take at least twelve lives to understand the difference!

Goenka is only a technician. I am not a technician. I have never followed anybody, I have simply searched on my own. It was difficult, it was dangerous, but I went on searching my path alone, finding my own ways to reach to my being.

Goenka is just a poor follower of a twenty-five hundred year old tradition of Gautam Buddha. In twenty-five hundred years — carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies! Do you want to compare me with these carbon copies?

And if Goenka had understood meditation, he would have come here. His meditation would have shown him that something far higher than Gautam Buddha is in existence. Igatpuri is not far away from here… but the coward has no guts.

And if you are so clear about my statement being wrong, then you don’t understand anything of what is happening here.

Here, all the meditations are just preparing the ground, just taking out the weeds, the grass roots, the wild growth, the stones — just cleaning the garden for me to sow the seeds. The people who are teaching meditation here, different kinds of meditation, are just preparing the ground. I am the gardener.

Goenka can prepare the ground, but from where is he going to find the rosebushes? He does not have the experience: he is not enlightened or awakened even in the ancient sense of Gautam Buddha. Just go to him and ask — has he the courage to say that he has the same consciousness as Gautam Buddha? And I say to you that I have left Gautam Buddha twenty-five centuries back.

My therapists, my people who are preparing meditations for you, are just doing the primary groundwork. They are just preparing the ground. The ultimate and final touch I have to give.

I have my own ways to sow the seeds in you: through my words, through my silences, through my eyes, through my gestures — just through my silence, just through my presence; it has a living field of energy.

And unless you have a living awakened being amongst you, all your therapies and all your meditations are just futile exercises; they won’t help much.

For Piyoosh I would like to say, Go back to Goenka. This is not the place for you. And you have to leave right now. I am tired of idiots of all kinds. For thirty years I have suffered from idiots and I have tolerated them, but now I have decided no idiot will be allowed here.

You took twelve years to decide to take sannyas; I don’t need even twelve seconds to take it away. You are no more a sannyasin. Return your sannyas papers, and you perfectly know the door. Just get out this very night, and never come here again. Go to hell — with anybody, Goenka, or find some other idiot. There are many in India.

I exist only for those who can understand me and who can be totally with me. A man who knows nothing about me, who just within twelve hours of his sannyas starts finding that what I am saying is wrong, certainly cannot be allowed to be here. A single rotten fish can destroy the whole lake. So you will be very compassionate to all these people by leaving this place forever.

And I am always surprised… if you have found Goenka to be right, then why are you here? When somebody finds something that is helping his growth, he remains there. And if you have found Goenka to be right and still you have not remained with him, how are you going to remain with me, whom you find wrong just within twelve hours?

No, don’t waste time. I am not interested in collecting crowds and retarded people. Just go to Goenka and tell him everything that I have said. And if he has guts, bring him here, so I can show you that he knows nothing about meditation as far as experience is concerned, that he knows nothing at all of what enlightenment is. All that he knows is a poor technique. But a technician is a totally different thing.

A technician can work with electricity, but that does not mean that he is Edison, that he has discovered electricity. Don’t ask the poor technician about electricity — don’t ask any question about its intrinsic character; don’t ask of what it consists — he is not an Edison. But he can do perfectly well: you don’t need Edison when one of your bulbs goes out; just any idiot can do that.

The same is the situation about meditation. There are technicians and there are realized people. Unless you find a realized being, all your efforts are in vain.

Three French youngsters, respectively six, seven and eight years old, were skipping along the street.

The six year old who was in front, looked in through an open window he was passing, stopped, and waved excitedly to the others: “Come, come quickly,” he said. “A man and a woman are fighting in there.”

The seven year old, coming up, looked in and said, “No, you fool, they are making love.”

The eight year old came up, looked in and said, “Yes, and what a terrible technique.”

… Feel this peace, absorb that silence. And as you absorb it, it becomes deeper… it starts touching your heart.

There is no movement, but you will feel a dance.

There is no word, but you will feel a song.

It is as if there is nobody, but a tremendous oneness… all personalities gone and only one consciousness, throbbing in synchronicity with each other.

Just to end up this beautiful moment…. I always like to leave you laughing, singing, dancing. This is just an indication that the day when I ultimately leave you, I would like you to sing, dance and celebrate.

In fact, no man in the whole of history would have received such a celebration when he dies as I am going to receive. A few have received celebration only from enemies, because when one dies, enemies celebrate. The friends mourn.

I am the only person… in my death my friends will celebrate, my enemies will celebrate. In my death they will come together in celebration. There has never been such a man before.

A black lady in New York received a phone call from the school that her little boy Leroy attended. The head teacher wanted to see her as soon as possible about her son’s behavior.

“Your boy, Leroy,” began the teacher, “is a disruptive influence.”

“Just like his father,” said the black lady.

“He steals from other children,” continued the teacher.

“Just like his father,” said the mother.

“He is always getting into fights,” continued the teacher.

“Just like his father,” replied the mother.

“He chases the little girls and makes them cry,” said the teacher.

“Just like his father,” said the black lady, “and, Lordy, am I glad I never married the man!”

Source: The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here
Chapter 13 – Human mind is a miracle (12 September 1987 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium)

Emotions: Freedom from Anger, Jealousy & Fear

By Osho, Osho International Foundation

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Help in Understanding the Emotion:

Strong emotions that we don’t know how to handle effectively lie at the core of so many difficulties in the life of the individual. They can affect our relationships with loved ones, and how we function in our work. They play a profound role in how we feel about ourselves, and can even affect our physical health. And we are too often trapped in the dilemma of “expression” versus “repression.” Expressing our emotions can often hurt others, but by repressing them – even in the benevolent guise of “self-control” – we risk hurting ourselves.

Osho offers a third alternative, which is to understand the roots of our emotions and to develop the knack of watching them and learning from them as they arise, rather than being “taken over” by them. Eventually we find that even the most challenging and difficult situations no longer have the power to provoke us and cause us pain.

Osho’s unique insights goe far beyond the understandings of conventional psychology.
Includes video excerpts from OSHO Talks: – Nobody Teaches You About Hate
- If Somebody Creates Anger In You
- How Best to Deal With Fear
- Love and Hate Are One
- Life is a Very Mysterious Phenomenon

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You should find a place which enhances meditation. For example, sitting under a tree will help, rather than going and sitting in front of a movie house or going to the railway station and sitting on the platform; going to nature, to the mountains, to the trees, to the rivers where Tao is still flowing, vibrating, pulsating, streaming all around. Trees are in constant meditation. Silent, unconscious, is that meditation. I’m not saying to become a tree; you have to become a buddha! But Buddha has one thing in common with the tree: he’s as green as a tree, as full of juice as a tree, as celebrating as a tree, of course with a difference — he is conscious, and the tree is unconscious. The tree is unconsciously in Tao, a Buddha is consciously in Tao. And that is a great difference, the difference between the earth and the sky.

But if you sit by the side of a tree surrounded by beautiful birds singing, or a peacock dancing, or just a river flowing, and the sound of the running water, or by the side of a waterfall, and the great music of it…

Find a place where nature has not yet been disturbed, polluted. If you cannot find such a place then just close your doors and sit in your own room. If it is possible have a special room for meditation in your house. Just a small corner will do, but especially for meditation. Why especially? — because every kind of act creates its own vibration. If you simply meditate in that place, that place becomes meditative. Every day you meditate it absorbs your vibrations when you are in meditation. Next day when you come, those vibrations start falling back on you. They help, they reciprocate, they respond.

That’s the idea behind temples and churches and mosques; the idea is beautiful. The idea is that it may not be possible for everybody to have a special room for prayer or meditation, but we can have a special place for the whole village — a temple surrounded by trees on the bank of a river where crowds don’t gather, where mundane affairs are not done. When one wants to meditate one can go to the temple. And everybody knows that he is in the temple, he is not to be disturbed.

A sacred place is nothing but a right space for meditation and right conditions. If you are feeling very angry, that is not the time to meditate: it will be going against the flow. If you are feeling very greedy this is not the time to meditate, you will not find it easy. But there are moments when you are easily available to meditation: the sun is rising and you have seen the sun rising, and suddenly all is silent within you, you are not yet part of the marketplace — this is the moment to meditate. You have been feeling good, healthy, you have not been fighting with anybody today — this is the time to meditate. A friend has come and you are full of love — this is the time to meditate. You are with your woman and you both are feeling tremendously happy — sit together and meditate, and you will find the greatest joy of your life happening if you can meditate with your beloved, with your friend.

Find the right conditions, and they are always available. There is not a single man who cannot find right conditions. In twenty-four hours’ time many moments come which can be transformed into meditation very easily, because in those moments you are naturally going inwards. The night is full of stars: lie down on the ground, look at the stars, feel in tune, and then meditate. Sometimes it is good to go for a holiday into the mountains — but don’t take your radio with you, otherwise you are taking the whole nonsense with you. And when you go to the mountains don’t give your address and your phone number to anybody, otherwise there is no need to go anywhere. When you go to the mountains forget all about the world for a few days. That is the meaning of a holiday: it has to be holy, only then is it a holiday. If it is not holy, if it is not in tune with the sacred, it is not a holiday. People carry their world with them.

Once I went to the Himalayas with a few friends, and then I had to ask them to leave me because they had brought their transistor sets and their newspapers and magazines, and the novels that they were reading. And they were constantly talking, talking about things that they had always been talking about. So I told them, “Why have you come to the Himalayas? You were saying these things at your home perfectly well, and again you are talking the same things, the same gossipping, the same rumors.”

And whenever they would go with me to some beautiful spot they would take their cameras, they would take pictures. I told them, “You have come here to see. You have not brought your camera to see the Himalayas!”

But they said, “We shall make beautiful albums, and later on we will see what beautiful places we had visited.” And right there they were not there, they were just clicking their cameras. This stupidity has to be left behind.

And it is good once in a while to go to the mountains. And

I am not saying to start living there; that is not good, because then you become addicted to the mountains and you become afraid of coming back to the world. The holiday has to be just a holiday: then come back into the world and bring all the peace and the silence and the experience of the sacred with you. Bring it with you, make an effort so that it remains with you in the marketplace.

These suggestions are for the beginners. When a person has really become a meditator, he can meditate sitting before a picture house, he can meditate on the railway platform.

For fifteen years I was continuously travelling around the country, continuously travelling — day in, day out, day in, day out, year in, year out — always on the train, on the plane, in the car. That makes no difference. Once you have become really ROOTED in your being, nothing makes a difference. But this is not for the beginner.

When the tree has become rooted, let winds come and let rains come and let clouds thunder; it is all good. It gives integrity to the tree. But when the tree is small, tender, then even a small child is dangerous enough or just a cow passing by — such a holy animal — but that is enough to destroy it.

When you are beginning, remember, Lu-tsu’s suggestions are of immense importance.

THAT IS TO SAY, THE MIND MUST BE FREE OF VAIN PREOCCUPATIONS. ALL ENTANGLEMENTS MUST BE PUT ASIDE. ONE MUST BE DETACHED AND INDEPENDENT.

When you are trying to meditate, put the phone off the hook, disengage yourself. Put a notice on the door that for one hour nobody should knock, that you are meditating. And when you move into the meditation room take your shoes off, because you are walking on sacred ground. And not only take your shoes off, but everything that you are preoccupied with. Consciously leave everything with the shoes. Go inside unoccupied. One can take one hour out of twenty-four hours. Give twenty-three hours for your occupations, desires, thoughts, ambitions, projections. Take one hour out of all this, and in the end you will find that only that one hour has been the real hour of your life; those twenty-three hours have been a sheer wastage. Only that one hour has been saved and all else has gone down the drain.

NOR MUST THE THOUGHT BE CONCENTRATED UPON THE RIGHT PROCEDURE.

And the second thing to be remembered: don’t become too preoccupied with the right procedure, otherwise that becomes a preoccupation — that one should sit in a certain posture. If you can sit, good, but if it becomes an unnecessary preoccupation, drop it. For example, if you cannot sit in a full lotus posture — which is difficult for people who have been sitting for their whole lives on chairs; it is difficult because their musculature has developed in a certain way — then your Legs will not feel good. They will go to sleep or they will start creating trouble for you. They will constantly hanker for attention, so there is no need to force a lotus posture. A lotus posture, if easy, is good. Otherwise any posture is a lotus posture.

If you cannot sit on the ground, if it is difficult, sit on the chair. Meditation is not afraid of chairs; it can happen anywhere.

Just the other day Renu had asked one question: “Can enlightenment happen on a rocking horse?” It can happen. It can even happen to the rocking horse! You need not be worried about it.

So, Lu-tsu says: NOR MUST THE THOUGHT BE CONCENTRATED UPON THE RIGHT PROCEDURE.

Just take a little care, that’s all, but don’t become too worried about it — whether the spine is absolutely erect or not, whether your head is in line with the spine or not, whether your eyes are exactly as Lu-tsu wants them. Now you have a different kind of eyes than Lu-tsu; you know the Chinese and their eyes. In fact they always seem to look at the tip of the nose. Their eyes are only half-open. When I give sannyas to a Chinese, then I have much difficulty looking into their eyes.

You have different kinds of eyes. Everybody has different kinds of eyes and different kinds of noses, so don’t become too occupied with these minor things. They are just indications. Understand them, absorb them, and go on your way. Find out your own way. The basic note to be remembered is: you have to be comfortable and relaxed.

THIS DANGER ARISES IF TOO MUCH TROUBLE IS TAKEN. I DO NOT MEAN THAT NO TROUBLE IS TO BE TAKEN, BUT THE CORRECT WAY LIES IN KEEPING EQUAL DISTANCE BETWEEN BEING AND NOT BEING.

One has to be exactly in the middle. People either become too active or become too inactive. If they become too active, anxiety is created, a kind of rush, hurry, speed, restlessness; if they become too inactive, sleep, a kind of lethargy, indolence. Be in the middle. This being in the middle is a criterion to be used always. Don’t eat too much, don’t starve too much. Don’t sleep too much, don’t sleep less than needed. Remember always to be in the middle. Excess is prohibited. All kinds of extremes have to be dropped, because only in the middle is there a relaxed state of mind.

IF ONE CAN ATTAIN PURPOSELESSNESS THROUGH PURPOSE, THEN THE THING HAS BEEN GRASPED.

If one can attain this kind of balance, between effort and effortlessness, between purpose and purposelessness, between being and no-being, between mind and no-mind, between action and no-action…

… IF ONE CAN ATTAIN PURPOSELESSNESS THROUGH PURPOSE effortlessness through effort, inactivity through action — THEN THE THING HAS BEEN GRASPED. NOW ONE CAN LET ONESELF GO, DETACHED AND WITHOUT CONFUSION, IN AN INDEPENDENT WAY.

This is the basic: then one can allow oneself to flow with the flow of things. One can let oneself go.

FURTHERMORE, ONE MUST NOT FALL VICTIM TO THE ENSNARING WORLD. THE ENSNARING WORLD IS WHERE THE FIVE KINDS OF DARK DEMONS DISPORT THEMSELVES. THIS IS THE CASE, FOR EXAMPLE, WHEN AFTER FIXATION ONE HAS CHIEFLY THOUGHTS OF DRY WOOD AND DEAD ASHES AND FEW THOUGHTS OF THE BRIGHT SPRING ON THE GREAT EARTH.

Remember, the greatest problem for a religious person is not to be too serious; the greatest problem for the religious person is not to be sad; the greatest problem for the religious person is not to be negative, because ordinarily that happens — religious persons become very sad, very serious, very life-negative. They forget all about spring, they only think of dry wood and dead ashes. They have lost balance. A few thoughts of the bright spring on the great earth have to be remembered.

The really religious person is one who knows the sense of humor. The really religious person is sincere but never serious, utterly devoted to his work but never with that attitude of ‘holier-than-thou’, NEVER; never feeling any superiority because of it, but humble. The really religious person is one who can dance with the wind and the rains, who can smile and giggle with children, who can feel at ease with all kinds of situations in life. That is freedom, that is freedom from the ego. Ego makes one serious.

IN THIS WAY ONE SINKS INTO THE WORLD OF THE DARK.

If you become too serious you will sink into the world of the dark, into the negative world.

THE ENERGY IS COLD THERE, BREATHING IS ROUGH, AND MANY IMAGES OF COLDNESS AND DECAY PRESENT THEMSELVES.

Remember, you are not to become cold. You will find your so-called saints very cold: they have misunderstood the whole point. Become cool, but never become cold — and there is a lot of difference between the two, and a very deep paradox is there. I call it ‘cool’: compared to the heated state of passion, it is cool; it is warm compared to the coldness of death. It is warm compared to the coldness of death and it is cool compared to the passionate lust for life. It is warm and cool both. A really religious person is cool because he has no lust, and he is warm because he is not sad, he is not serious.

IF ONE TARRIES THERE LONG, ONE ENTERS THE WORLD OF PLANTS AND STONES.

And if you become too cold, sooner or later you will become a rock, you will become unconscious. You will fall from humanity. Many of your saints, in my observation, are people who have fallen from humanity. They have not become superhuman, they have become sub-human. They belong to the worlds of rocks and stones.

NOR MUST A MAN BE LED ASTRAY BY THE TEN THOUSAND ENSNAREMENTS. THIS HAPPENS IF AFTER THE QUIET STATE HAS BEGUN, ONE AFTER ANOTHER ALL SORTS OF TIES SUDDENLY APPEAR. ONE WANTS TO BREAK THROUGH AND CANNOT. ONE FOLLOWS THEM AND FEELS AS IF RELIEVED BY THIS.

This is where psychoanalysis has gone wrong. Psychoanalysis has become the method of free association of thoughts. You can go on and on. One thought leads to another, ad infinitum. One should remain detached from the procession of thoughts. They will come, they will surround you from everywhere. They will be like clouds; even the little bit of sky will be lost. And when there are too many thoughts, the natural instinct is to fight with them, because you have read that meditation means thoughtlessness. But by fighting one never become. thoughtless. If you fight, you will be defeated. The very fight becomes the cause for your defeat. You cannot fight with shadows, otherwise you will be defeated. Try fighting with your own shadow and you will be defeated — not that the shadow is very powerful, but because the shadow is NOT. And fighting with something which is not, how can you win? Thoughts are shadows, don’t fight with them.

And if you don’t fight then the other alternative opals up — that’s what psychoanalysis has chosen: then move with them, then let them move wherever they move — free association of thoughts. Then one thought is tied with another and with another and with another, and it goes on and on ad infinitum, ad nauseam. This will feel like a kind of relaxation. That’s why out of psychoanalysis PEOPLE feel helped, saved. They are not saved, they are not helped; just the fight disappears. Because you fight you become tense. When you don’t fight the tension disappears — and that disappearance of the tension gives you the feeling as if you are saved.

Mulla Nasruddin uses very tight shoes, two sizes less than he needs. The whole day he complains, and the whole day he is angry with the shoes.

I asked him one day, “Why don’t you change these shoes? Why do you go on complaining? Who is forcing you to wear these shoes? You can purchase another pair.”

He said, “That I cannot do! Never!”

I said, “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “this is my only solace. When after the whole day’s struggle with the shoes I come home and throw these shoes away and lie down on my bed, it feels so good!”

It will feel good. When you fight with your thoughts and you cannot win, then you drop fighting and you allow the thoughts to move and you start moving with them, it feels good. That’s what the whole secret of psychoanalysis is. Psychoanalysis does not help at all: it simply makes you feel good because it helps you to drop fighting.

Lu-tsu says, “Both are not right. There is no need to fight, there is no need to allow the thoughts and become a follower of them. You remain a watcher, a witness.”

THIS MEANS THE MASTER HAS BECOME THE SERVANT.

If you follow the thoughts, the master has become the servant.

IF A MAN TARRIES IN THIS STAGE LONG, HE ENTERS THE WORLD OF ILLUSORY DESIRES._

The master has to be claimed back. You have to be the master, not the servant. And what is mastery? — to be a witness is to be a master. Just watch those thoughts; utterly calm and quiet, watch. Let them come, let them go, let them arise, let them disappear. You simply take note — the thought is arising, the thought is there, the thought is gone — and soon you will come to a point where they arise less and less and less; and then one day, the gap… all thoughts have disappeared. In that gap, the first experience of God.

AT BEST ONE FINDS ONESELF IN HEAVEN, AT THE WORST, AMONG THE FOX-SPIRITS. SUCH A FOX-SPIRIT, IT IS TRUE, MAY BE ABLE TO ROAM IN THE FAMOUS MOUNTAINS, ENJOYING THE WIND AND THE MOON, THE FLOWERS AND FRUITS, AND TAKING HIS PLEASURE IN CORAL TREES AND JEWELLED GRASS. BUT AFTER HAVING DONE THIS, HIS REWARD IS OVER AND HE IS BORN AGAIN INTO THE WORLD OF TURMOIL.

If you succeed in meditation you are born in heaven, in eternal bliss. If you don’t succeed, if you go astray… That going astray in Taoism is called: “At worst, one is born among the fox-spirits.”

A fox-spirit is the spirit of a poet. The fox-spirit is the spirit of imagination. Even if you fail in your meditations something will be gained. This will be your gain: you will enjoy the trees more and the flowers more, and the world and the beauty more. But sooner or later the energy that had been created by meditation will disappear and you will have to fall back again to the old turmoil.

Remember, if you succeed in meditation the joy is eternally yours. But even if you fail you will find a few moments of beautiful joy and poetry. Those who fail in meditation become poets, those who succeed become seers. Seers are poets of the eternal, poets are the poets of the momentary.

That’s why sometimes it happens: a little bit of meditation and you feel so good that you stop meditating. You think all is attained. Trees are greener, roses are rosier, love is going beautifully, things have started happening — why bother? But soon the energy that had been created will disappear: you have become a fox-spirit. That’s what is happening through drugs all over the world: drugs only create fox-spirits. But meditation, if not completed, can also do the same.

Once the decision has been taken, then it is a commitment: YOU HAVE to go to the very end of it. It is a challenge. Accept this challenge and go for this most beautiful journey of your inner search. And never stop in the middle anywhere unless you have arrived, unless you have arrived to the center of the cyclone.

Source: OSHO

Children, as they are, are never focused; their consciousness is open from all sides. Everything is coming in, nothing is being excluded. The child is open to every sensation, every sensation is included in his consciousness.

And so much is coming in! That is why he is so wavering, so unstable. A child’s unconditioned mind is a flux–a flux of sensations–but he will not be able to survive with this type of mind. He must learn how to narrow his mind, to concentrate.

The moment you narrow the mind you become particularly conscious of one thing and simultaneously unconscious of so many other things. The more narrowed the mind is, the more successful it will be. You will become a specialist, you will become an expert, but the whole thing will consist of knowing more and more about less and less.

The narrowing is an existential necessity; no one is responsible for it. As life exists, it is needed, but it is not enough. It is utilitarian, but just to survive is not enough; just to be utilitarian is not enough. So when you become utilitarian and the consciousness is narrowed, you deny your mind much of which it was capable. You are not using the total mind, you are using a very small part of it.

And the remaining — the major portion — will become unconscious.

In fact, there is no boundary between conscious and unconscious. These are not two minds. “Conscious mind” means that part of the mind that has been used in the narrowing process. “Unconscious mind” means that portion that has been neglected, ignored, closed. This creates a division, a split. The greater portion of your mind becomes alien to you. You become alienated from your own self; you become a stranger to your own totality.

A small part is being identified as your self and the rest is lost. But the remaining unconscious part is always there as unused potentiality, unused possibilities, unlived adventures. This unconscious mind–this potential, this unused mind–will always be in a fight with the conscious mind; that is why there is always a conflict within.

Everyone is in conflict because of this split between the unconscious and the conscious. But only if the potential, the unconscious, is allowed to flower can you feel the bliss of existence; otherwise not.

If the major portion of your potentialities remains unfulfilled, your life will be a frustration. That is why the more utilitarian a person is, the less he is fulfilled, the less he is blissful. The more utilitarian the approach– the more one is in business life–the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. The part of the mind that cannot be made useful in the utilitarian world has been denied.

The utilitarian life is necessary but at a great cost: you have lost the festivity of life. Life becomes a festivity, a celebration, if all your potentialities come to a flowering; then life is a ceremony. That is why I always say that religion means transforming life into a celebration. The dimension of religion is the dimension of the festive, the nonutilitarian.

The utilitarian mind must not be taken as the whole. The remaining, the greater–the whole mind–should not be sacrificed to it. The utilitarian mind must not become the end. It will have to remain there, but as a means. The other–the remaining, the greater, the potential–must become the end. That is what I mean by a religious approach.

With a nonreligious approach, the businesslike mind, the utilitarian, becomes the end. When this becomes the end, there is no possibility of the unconscious actualizing the potential; the unconscious will be denied. If the utilitarian becomes the end, it means that the servant is playing the role of the master.

Intelligence, the narrowing of the mind, is a means toward survival, but not toward life. Survival is not life.

Survival is a necessity–to exist in the material world is a necessity–but the end is always to come to a flowering of the potential, of all that is meant by you. If you are fulfilled completely, if nothing remains inside in seed form, if everything becomes actual, if you are a flowering, then and only then can you feel the bliss, the ecstasy of life.

The denied part of you, the unconscious part, can become active and creative only if you add a new dimension to your life–the dimension of the festive, the dimension of play.

So meditation is not a work, it is a play. Praying is not a business, it is a play. Meditation is not something to be done to achieve some goal–peace, bliss–but something to be enjoyed as an end in itself.

The festive dimension is the most important thing to be understood–and we have lost it totally. By festive, I mean the capacity to enjoy, moment to moment, all that comes to you.

We have become so conditioned and habits have become so mechanical that even when there is no business to be done, our minds are businesslike. When no narrowing is needed, you are narrowed. Even when you are playing, you are not playing, you are not enjoying it. Even when you are playing cards, you are not enjoying it. You play for the victory and then the play becomes a work; then what is going on is not important, only the result.

In business the result is important. In festivity, the act is important. If you can make any act significant in itself, then you become festive and you can celebrate it.

Whenever you are in celebration, the limits, the narrowing limits are broken. They are not needed, they are thrown. You come out of your straitjacket, the narrowing jacket of concentration. Now you are not choosing; everything that comes, you allow. And the moment you allow the total existence to come in, you become one with it. There is a communion.

This communion–this celebration, this choiceless awareness, this nonbusinesslike attitude–I call meditation.

The festivity is in the moment, in the act, not in the bothering about the results, not in achieving something.

There is nothing to be achieved, so you can enjoy that which is here and now.

You can explain it in this way: I am talking to you; if I am concerned about the result, then the talk becomes a business, it becomes a work. But if I talk to you without any expectations, without any desire about the result, then the talk becomes a play. The very act, in itself, is the end. Then narrowing is not needed. I can play with the words, I can play with the thoughts. I can play with your question, I can play with my answer; then it is not serious, then it is lighthearted.

And if you are listening to me without thinking about getting something out of it, then you can be relaxed; then you can allow me to be in communion with you and your consciousness will not be narrowed. Then it is open– playing, enjoying.

Any moment can be a business moment, any moment can be a meditative moment; the difference is in the attitude. If it is choiceless, if you are playing with it, it is meditative.

There are social needs and there are existential needs that are to be fulfilled. I will not say, “Do not condition children.” If you leave them totally unconditioned, they will be barbaric. They will not be able to exist. Survival needs conditioning but survival is not the end, so you must be able to put your conditioning on and take it off–just like clothes. You can put them on, go out and do your business, and then come home and take them off. Then you are.

Source: OSHO

I had struggled for it for many lives—it had been the only target for many many lives. And I had done everything that is possible to do to attain it, but I had always failed. It was bound to be so—because it cannot be an attainment. It is your nature, so how can it be your attainment? It cannot be made an ambition.
Mind is ambitious—ambitious for money, for power, for prestige. And then one day, when it gets fed up with all these extrovert activities, it becomes ambitious for enlightenment, for liberation, for nirvana, for God. But the same ambition has come back; only the object he changed. First the object was outside, now the object is inside. But your attitude, your approach has not changed; you are the same person in the same rut, in the same routine.
“The day I became enlightened” simply means the day I realized that there is nothing to achieve, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be done. We are already divine and we are already perfect—as we are. No improvement is needed, no improvement at all. God never creates anybody imperfect. Even if you come across an imperfect man, you will see that his imperfection is perfect. God never creates any imperfect thing.
I have heard about a Zen Master Bokuju who was telling this truth to his disciples, that all is perfect. A man stood up—very old, a hunchback—and he said, “What about me? I am a hunchback. What do you say about me?” Bokuju said, “I have never seen such a perfect hunchback in my life.”
When I say “the day I achieved enlightenment,” I am using wrong language—because there is no other language, because our language is created by us. It consists of the words “achievement,” “attainment,” “goals,” “improvement” “progress,” “evolution.” Our languages are not created by the enlightened people; and in fact they cannot create it even if they want to because enlightenment happens in silence. How can you bring that silence into words? And whatsoever you do, the words are going to destroy something of that silence.
Lao Tzu says: The moment truth is asserted it becomes false. There is no way to communicate truth. But language has to be used; there is no other way. So we always have to use the language with the condition that it cannot be adequate to the experience. Hence I say “the day I achieved my enlightenment.” It is neither an achievement nor mine.
[At this point there is a brief power failure: no light, no sound.]
Yes, it happens like that! Out of nowhere suddenly the darkness, suddenly the light, and you cannot do anything. You can just watch.

I laughed that day because of all my stupid ridiculous efforts to attain it. I laughed on that day at myself, and I laughed on that day at the whole of humanity, because everybody is trying to achieve, everybody is trying to reach, everybody is trying to improve.
To me it happened in a state of total relaxation—it always happens in that state. I had tried everything. And then, seeing the futility of all effort, I dropped…I dropped the whole project, I forgot all about it. For seven days I lived as ordinarily as possible.
The people I used to live with were very much surprised, because this was the first time they had seen me live just an ordinary life. Otherwise my whole life was a perfect discipline.
For two years I had lived with that family, and they had known that I would get up at three o’clock in the morning, then I would go for a long four- or five-mile walk or run, and then I would take a bath in the river. Everything was absolutely routine. Even if I had a fever or I was ill, there was no difference: I would simply go on the same way.
They had known me to sit in meditation for hours. Up to that day I had not eaten many things. I would not drink tea, coffee, I had a strict discipline about what to eat, what not to eat. And exactly at nine o’clock I would go to bed. Even if somebody was sitting there, I would simply say “Goodbye” and I would go to my bed. The family with whom I used to live, they would inform the person that “Now you can go. He has gone to sleep.” I would not even waste a single moment in saying, “Now it is time for me to go to sleep.”
When I relaxed for seven days, when I dropped the whole thing and when on the first day I drank tea in the morning and woke up at nine o’clock in the morning, the family was puzzled. They said, “What has happened? Have you fallen?” They used to think of me as a great yogi.
One picture of those days still exists. I used to use only one single piece of cloth and that was all. In the day I would cover my body with it, in the night I would use it as a blanket to cover myself. I slept on a bamboo mat. That was my whole comfort—that blanket, that bamboo mat. I had nothing—no other possessions.
They were puzzled when I woke up at nine. They said, “Something is wrong. Are you very ill, seriously ill?”
I said, “No, I am not seriously ill. I have been ill for many years, now I am perfectly healthy. Now I will wake up only when sleep leaves me, and I will go to sleep only when sleep comes to me. I am no longer going to be a slave to the clock. I will eat whatsoever my body feels like eating, and I will drink whatsoever I feel like drinking.”
They could not believe it. They said, “Can you even drink beer?” I said, “Bring it!”
That was the first day I tasted beer. They could not believe their eyes. They said, “You have completely gone down. You have become completely unspiritual. What are you doing?”
I said, “Enough is enough.” And in seven days I completely forgot the whole project, and I forgot it forever.
And the seventh day it happened—it happened just out of nowhere. Suddenly all was light; and I was not doing anything, I was just sitting under a tree resting, enjoying. And when I laughed, the gardener heard the laughter. He used to think that I was a little bit crazy, but he had never seen me laugh in that way. He came running. He said, “What is the matter?”
I said, “Don’t be worried. You know I am crazy—now I have gone completely crazy! I am laughing at myself. Don’t feel offended. Just go to sleep.” theolo09

I am reminded of the fateful day of twenty-first March, 1953. For many lives I had been working—working upon myself, struggling, doing whatsoever can be done—and nothing was happening.
Now I understand why nothing was happening. The very effort was the barrier, the very ladder was preventing, the very urge to seek was the obstacle. Not that one can reach without seeking. Seeking is needed, but then comes a point when seeking has to be dropped. The boat is needed to cross the river but then comes a moment when you have to get out of the boat and forget all about it and leave it behind. Effort is needed, without effort nothing is possible. And also only with effort, nothing is possible.
Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search.
And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose—out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air—it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.
Just because I was seeking I had become incapable of seeing the near. Seeking is always for the far, seeking is always for the distant—and it was not distant. I had become far-sighted, I had lost the near-sightedness. The eyes had become focussed on the far away, the horizon, and they had lost the quality to see that which is just close, surrounding you.
The day effort ceased, I also ceased. Because you cannot exist without effort, and you cannot exist without desire, and you cannot exist without striving.
The phenomenon of the ego, of the self, is not a thing, it is a process. It is not a substance sitting there inside you; you have to create it each moment. It is like pedalling bicycle. If you pedal it goes on and on, if you don’t pedal it stops. It may go a little because of the past momentum, but the moment you stop pedalling, in fact the bicycle starts stopping. It has no more energy, no more power to go anywhere. It is going to fall and collapse.
The ego exists because we go on pedalling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves. That is the very phenomenon of the ego—the jump ahead of yourself, the jump in the future, the jump in the tomorrow. The jump in the non-existential creates the ego. Because it comes out of the non-existential it is like a mirage. It consists only of desire and nothing else. It consists only of thirst and nothing else.
The ego is not in the present, it is in the future. If you are in the future, then ego seems to be very substantial. If you are in the present the ego is a mirage, it starts disappearing.
The day I stopped seeking…and it is not right to say that I stopped seeking, better will be to say the day seeking stopped. Let me repeat it: the better way to say it is the day the seeking stopped. Because if I stop it then I am there again. Now stopping becomes my effort, now stopping becomes my desire, and desire goes on existing in a very subtle way.
You cannot stop desire; you can only understand it. In the very understanding is the stopping of it. Remember, nobody can stop desiring, and the reality happens only when desire stops.
So this is the dilemma. What to do? Desire is there and Buddhas go on saying desire has to be stopped, and they go on saying in the next breath that you cannot stop desire. So what to do? You put people in a dilemma. They are in desire, certainly. You say it has to be stopped—okay. And then you say it cannot be stopped. Then what is to be done?
The desire has to be understood. You can understand it, you can just see the futility of it. A direct perception is needed, an immediate penetration is needed. Look into desire, just see what it is, and you will see the falsity of it, and you will see it is non-existential. And desire drops and something drops simultaneously within you.
Desire and the ego exist in cooperation, they coordinate. The ego cannot exist without desire, the desire cannot exist without the ego. Desire is projected ego, ego is introjected desire. They are together, two aspects of one phenomenon.
The day desiring stopped, I felt very hopeless and helpless. No hope because no future. Nothing to hope because all hoping has proved futile, it leads nowhere. You go in rounds. It goes on dangling in front of you, it goes on creating new mirages, it goes on calling you, ‘Come on, run fast, you will reach.’ But howsoever fast you run you never reach.
That’s why Buddha calls it a mirage. It is like the horizon that you see around the earth. It appears but it is not there. If you go it goes on running from you. The faster you run, the faster it moves away. The slower you go, the slower it moves away. But one thing is certain—the distance between you and the horizon remains absolutely the same. Not even a single inch can you reduce the distance between you and the horizon.
You cannot reduce the distance between you and your hope. Hope is horizon. You try to bridge yourself with the horizon, with the hope, with a projected desire. The desire is a bridge, a dream bridge—because the horizon exists not, so you cannot make a bridge towards it, you can only dream about the bridge. You cannot be joined with the non-existential.
The day the desire stopped, the day I looked and realized into it, it simply was futile. I was helpless and hopeless. But that very moment something started happening. The same started happening for which for many lives I was working and it was not happening.
In your hopelessness is the only hope, and in your desirelessness is your only fulfillment, and in your tremendous helplessness suddenly the whole existence starts helping you.
It is waiting. When it sees that you are working on your own, it does not interfere. It waits. It can wait infinitely because there is no hurry for it. It is eternity. The moment you are not on your own, the moment you drop, the moment you disappear, the whole existence rushes towards you, enters you. And for the first time things start happening.
Seven days I lived in a very hopeless and helpless state, but at the same time something was arising. When I say hopeless I don’t mean what you mean by the word hopeless. I simply mean there was no hope in me. Hope was absent. I am not saying that I was hopeless and sad. I was happy in fact, I was very tranquil, calm and collected and centered. Hopeless, but in a totally new meaning. There was no hope, so how could there be hopelessness. Both had disappeared.
The hopelessness was absolute and total. Hope had disappeared and with it its counterpart, hopelessness, had also disappeared. It was a totally new experience—of being without hope. It was not a negative state. I have to use words—but it was not a negative state. It was absolutely positive. It was not just absence, a presence was felt. Something was overflowing in me, overflooding me.
And when I say I was helpless, I don’t mean the word in the dictionary-sense. I simply say I was selfless. That’s what I mean when I say helpless. I have recognized the fact that I am not, so I cannot depend on myself, so I cannot stand on my own ground—there was no ground underneath. I was in an abyss…bottomless abyss. But there was no fear because there was nothing to protect. There was no fear because there was nobody to be afraid.
Those seven days were of tremendous transformation, total transformation. And the last day the presence of a totally new energy, a new light and new delight, became so intense that it was almost unbearable—as if I was exploding, as if I was going mad with blissfulness. The new generation in the West has the right word for it—I was blissed out, stoned.
It was impossible to make any sense out of it, what was happening. It was a very non-sense world—difficult to figure it out, difficult to manage in categories, difficult to use words, languages, explanations. All scriptures appeared dead and all the words that have been used for this experience looked very pale, anaemic. This was so alive. It was like a tidal wave of bliss.
The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else’s story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.
Mind was disappearing; it was millions of miles away. It was difficult to catch hold of it, it was rushing farther and farther away, and there was no urge to keep it close. I was simply indifferent about it all. It was okay. There was no urge to remain continuous with the past.
By the evening it became so difficult to bear it—it was hurting, it was painful. It was like when a woman goes into labour when a child is to be born, and the woman suffers tremendous pain—the birth pangs.
I used to go to sleep in those days near about twelve or one in the night, but that day it was impossible to remain awake. My eyes were closing, it was difficult to keep them open. Something was very imminent, something was going to happen. It was difficult to say what it was—maybe it is going to be my death—but there was no fear. I was ready for it. Those seven days had been so beautiful that I was ready to die, nothing more was needed. They had been so tremendously blissful, I was so contented, that if death was coming, it was welcome.
But something was going to happen—something like death, something very drastic, something which will be either a death or a new birth, a crucifixion or a resurrection—but something of tremendous import was around just by the corner. And it was impossible to keep my eyes open. I was drugged.
I went to sleep near about eight. It was not like sleep. Now I can understand what Patanjali means when he says that sleep and samadhi are similar. Only with one difference—that in samadhi you are fully awake and asleep also. Asleep and awake together, the whole body relaxed, every cell of the body totally relaxed, all functioning relaxed, and yet a light of awareness burns within you…clear, smokeless. You remain alert and yet relaxed, loose but fully awake. The body is in the deepest sleep possible and your consciousness is at its peak. The peak of consciousness and the valley of the body meet.
I went to sleep. It was a very strange sleep. The body was asleep, I was awake. It was so strange—as if one was torn apart into two directions, two dimensions; as if the polarity has become completely focused, as if I was both the polarities together…the positive and negative were meeting, sleep and awareness were meeting, death and life were meeting. That is the moment when you can say ‘the creator and the creation meet.’
It was weird. For the first time it shocks you to the very roots, it shakes your foundations. You can never be the same after that experience; it brings a new vision to your life, a new quality.
Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened—I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration—almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it.
It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.
That’s why when Buddha and Shankara say the world is maya, a mirage, it is difficult for us to understand. Because we know only this world, we don’t have any comparison. This is the only reality we know. What are these people talking about—this is maya, illusion? This is the only reality. Unless you come to know the really real, their words cannot be understood, their words remain theoretical. They look like hypotheses. Maybe this man is propounding a philosophy—’The world is unreal’.
When Berkley in the West said that the world is unreal, he was walking with one of his friends, a very logical man; the friend was almost a skeptic. He took a stone from the road and hit Berkley’s feet hard. Berkley screamed, blood rushed out, and the skeptic said, ‘Now, the world is unreal? You say the world is unreal?—then why did you scream? This stone is unreal?—then why did you scream? Then why are you holding your leg and why are you showing so much pain and anguish on your face. Stop this? It is all unreal.
Now this type of man cannot understand what Buddha means when he says the world is a mirage. He does not mean that you can pass through the wall. He is not saying this—that you can eat stones and it will make no difference whether you eat bread or stones. He is not saying that.
He is saying that there is a reality. Once you come to know it, this so-called reality simply pales out, simply becomes unreal. With a higher reality in vision the comparison arises, not otherwise.
In the dream; the dream is real. You dream every night. Dream is one of the greatest activities that you go on doing. If you live sixty years, twenty years you will sleep and almost ten years you will dream. Ten years in a life—nothing else do you do so much. Ten years of continuous dreaming—just think about it. And every night…. And every morning you say it was unreal, and again in the night when you dream, dream becomes real.
In a dream it is so difficult to remember that this is a dream. But in the morning it is so easy. What happens? You are the same person. In the dream there is only one reality. How to compare? How to say it is unreal? Compared to what? It is the only reality. Everything is as unreal as everything else so there is no comparison. In the morning when you open your eyes another reality is there. Now you can say it was all unreal. Compared to this reality, dream becomes unreal.
There is an awakening—compared to that reality of that awakening, this whole reality becomes unreal.
That night for the first time I understood the meaning of the word maya. Not that I had not known the word before, not that I was not aware of the meaning of the word. As you are aware, I was also aware of the meaning—but I had never understood it before. How can you understand without experience?
That night another reality opened its door, another dimension became available. Suddenly it was there, the other reality, the separate reality, the really real, or whatsoever you want to call it—call it god, call it truth, call it dhamma, call it tao, or whatsoever you will. It was nameless. But it was there—so opaque, so transparent, and yet so solid one could have touched it. It was almost suffocating me in that room. It was too much and I was not yet capable of absorbing it.
A deep urge arose in me to rush out of the room, to go under the sky—it was suffocating me. It was too much! It will kill me! If I had remained a few moments more, it would have suffocated me—it looked like that.
I rushed out of the room, came out in the street. A great urge was there just to be under the sky with the stars, with the trees, with the earth…to be with nature. And immediately as I came out, the feeling of being suffocated disappeared. It was too small a place for such a big phenomenon. Even the sky is a small place for that big phenomenon. It is bigger than the sky. Even the sky is not the limit for it. But then I felt more at ease.
I walked towards the nearest garden. It was a totally new walk, as if gravitation had disappeared. I was walking, or I was running, or I was simply flying; it was difficult to decide. There was no gravitation, I was feeling weightless—as if some energy was taking me. I was in the hands of some other energy.
For the first time I was not alone, for the first time I was no more an individual, for the first time the drop has come and fallen into the ocean. Now the whole ocean was mine, I was the ocean. There was no limitation. A tremendous power arose as if I could do anything whatsoever. I was not there, only the power was there.
I reached to the garden where I used to go every day. The garden was closed, closed for the night. It was too late, it was almost one o’clock in the night. The gardeners were fast asleep. I had to enter the garden like a thief, I had to climb the gate. But something was pulling me towards the garden. It was not within my capacity to prevent myself. I was just floating.
That’s what I mean when I say again and again ‘float with the river, don’t push the river’. I was relaxed, I was in a let-go. I was not there. it was there, call it god—god was there.
I would like to call it it, because god is too human a word, and has become too dirty by too much use, has become too polluted by so many people. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, priests and politicians—they all have corrupted the beauty of the word. So let me call it it. It was there and I was just carried away…carried by a tidal wave.
The moment I entered the garden everything became luminous, it was all over the place—the benediction, the blessedness. I could see the trees for the first time—their green, their life, their very sap running. The whole garden was asleep, the trees were asleep. But I could see the whole garden alive, even the small grass leaves were so beautiful.
I looked around. One tree was tremendously luminous—the maulshree tree. It attracted me, it pulled me towards itself. I had not chosen it, god himself has chosen it. I went to the tree, I sat under the tree. As I sat there things started settling. The whole universe became a benediction.
It is difficult to say how long I was in that state. When I went back home it was four o’clock in the morning, so I must have been there by clock time at least three hours—but it was infinity. It had nothing to do with clock time. It was timeless.
Those three hours became the whole eternity, endless eternity. There was no time, there was no passage of time; it was the virgin reality—uncorrupted, untouchable, unmeasurable.
And that day something happened that has continued—not as a continuity—but it has still continued as an undercurrent. Not as a permanency—each moment it has been happening again and again. It has been a miracle each moment.
That night…and since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it. I became tremendously powerful and at the same time very fragile. I became very strong, but that strength is not the strength of a Mohammed Ali. That strength is not the strength of a rock, that strength is the strength of a rose flower—so fragile in his strength…so fragile, so sensitive, so delicate.
The rock will be there, the flower can go any moment, but still the flower is stronger than the rock because it is more alive. Or, the strength of a dewdrop on a leaf of grass just shining; in the morning sun—so beautiful, so precious, and yet can slip any moment. So incomparable in its grace, but a small breeze can come and the dewdrop can slip and be lost forever.
Buddhas have a strength which is not of this world. Their strength is totally of love…Like a rose flower or a dewdrop. Their strength is very fragile, vulnerable. Their strength is the strength of life not of death. Their power is not of that which kills; their power is of that which creates. Their power is not of violence, aggression; their power is that of compassion.
But I have never been in the body again, I am just hovering around the body. And that’s why I say it has been a tremendous miracle. Each moment I am surprised I am still here, I should not be. I should have left any moment, still I am here. Every morning I open my eyes and I say, ‘So, again I am still here?’ Because it seems almost impossible. The miracle has been a continuity.
Just the other day somebody asked a question—’Osho, you are getting so fragile and delicate and so sensitive to the smells of hair oils and shampoos that it seems we will not be able to see you unless we all go bald.’ By the way, nothing is wrong with being bald—bald is beautiful. Just as ‘black is beautiful’, so ‘bald is beautiful’. But that is true and you have to be careful about it.
I am fragile, delicate and sensitive. That is my strength. If you throw a rock at a flower nothing will happen to the rock, the flower will be gone. But still you cannot say that the rock is more powerful than the flower. The flower will be gone because the flower was alive. And the rock—nothing will happen to it because it is dead. The flower will be gone because the flower has no strength to destroy. The flower will simply disappear and give way to the rock. The rock has a power to destroy because the rock is dead.
Remember, since that day I have never been in the body really; just a delicate thread joins me with the body. And I am continuously surprised that somehow the whole must be willing me to be here, because I am no more here with my own strength, I am no more here on my own. It must be the will of the whole to keep me here, to allow me to linger a little more on this shore. Maybe the whole wants to share something with you through me.
Since that day the world is unreal. Another world has been revealed. When I say the world is unreal I don’t mean that these trees are unreal. These trees are absolutely real—but the way you see these trees is unreal. These trees are not unreal in themselves—they exist in god, they exist in absolute reality—but the way you see them you never see them; you are seeing something else, a mirage.
You create your own dream around you and unless you become awake you will continue to dream. The world is unreal because the world that you know is the world of your dreams. When dreams drop and you simply encounter the world that is there, then the real world.
There are not two things, god and the world. God is the world if you have eyes, clear eyes, without any dreams, without any dust of the dreams, without any haze of sleep; if you have clear eyes, clarity, perceptiveness, there is only god.
Then somewhere god is a green tree, and somewhere else god is a shining star, and somewhere else god is a cuckoo, and somewhere else god is a flower, and somewhere else a child and somewhere else a river—then only god is. The moment you start seeing, only god is.
But right now whatsoever you see is not the truth, it is a projected lie. That is the meaning of a mirage. And once you see, even for a single split moment, if you can see, if you can allow yourself to see, you will find immense benediction present all over, everywhere—in the clouds, in the sun, on the earth.
This is a beautiful world. But I am not talking about your world, I am talking about my world. Your world is very ugly, your world is your world created by a self, your world is a projected world. You are using the real world as a screen and projecting your own ideas on it.
When I say the world is real, the world is tremendously beautiful, the world is luminous with infinity, the world is light and delight, it is a celebration, I mean my world—or your world if you drop your dreams.
When you drop your dreams you see the same world as any Buddha has ever seen. When you dream you dream privately. Have you watched it?—that dreams are private. You cannot share them even with your beloved. You cannot invite your wife to your dream—or your husband, or your friend. You cannot say, ‘Now, please come tonight in my dream. I would like to see the dream together.’ It is not possible. Dream is a private thing, hence it is illusory, it has no objective reality.
God is a universal thing. Once you come out of your private dreams, it is there. It has been always there. Once your eyes are clear, a sudden illumination—suddenly you are overflooded with beauty, grandeur and grace. That is the goal, that is the destiny.
Let me repeat. Without effort you will never reach it, with effort nobody has ever reached it. You will need great effort, and only then there comes a moment when effort becomes futile. But it becomes futile only when you have come to the very peak of it, never before it. When you have come to the very pinnacle of your effort—all that you can do you have done—then suddenly there is no need to do anything any more. You drop the effort.
But nobody can drop it in the middle, it can be dropped only at the extreme end. So go to the extreme end if you want to drop it. Hence I go on insisting: make as much effort as you can, put your whole energy and total heart in it, so that one day you can see—now effort is not going to lead me anywhere. And that day it will not be you who will drop the effort, it drops on its own accord. And when it drops on its own accord, meditation happens.
Meditation is not a result of your efforts, meditation is a happening. When your efforts drop, suddenly meditation is there…the benediction of it, the blessedness of it, the glory of it. It is there like a presence…luminous, surrounding you and surrounding everything. It fills the whole earth and the whole sky.
That meditation cannot be created by human effort. Human effort is too limited. That blessedness is so infinite. You cannot manipulate it. It can happen only when you are in a tremendous surrender. When you are not there only then it can happen. When you are a no-self—no desire, not going anywhere—when you are just herenow, not doing anything in particular, just being, it happens. And it comes in waves and the waves become tidal. It comes like a storm, and takes you away into a totally new reality.
But first you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.
Your meditation that you create by chanting a mantra or by sitting quiet and still and forcing yourself, is a very mediocre meditation. It is created by you, it cannot be bigger than you. It is homemade, and the maker is always bigger than the made. You have made it by sitting, forcing in a yoga posture, chanting ‘rama, rama, rama’ or anything—’blah, blah, blah’—anything. You have forced the mind to become still.
It is a forced stillness. It is not that quiet that comes when you are not there. It is not that silence which comes when you are almost non-existential. It is not that beautitude which descends on you like a dove.
It is said when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, god descended in him, or the holy ghost descended in him like a dove. Yes, that is exactly so. When you are not there peace descends in you…fluttering like a dove…reaches in your heart and abides there and abides there forever.
You are your undoing, you are the barrier. Meditation is when the meditator is not. When the mind ceases with all its activities—seeing that they are futile—then the unknown penetrates you, overwhelms you.
The mind must cease for god to be. Knowledge must cease for knowing to be. You must disappear, you must give way. You must become empty, then only you can be full.
That night I became empty and became full. I became non-existential and became existence. That night I died and was reborn. But the one that was reborn has nothing to do with that which died, it is a discontinuous thing. On the surface it looks continuous but it is discontinuous. The one who died, died totally; nothing of him has remained.
Believe me, nothing of him has remained, not even a shadow. It died totally, utterly. It is not that I am just a modified rup, transformed, modified form, transformed form of the old. No, there has been no continuity. That day of March twenty-first, the person who had lived for many many lives, for millennia, simply died. Another being, absolutely new, not connected at all with the old, started to exist.
Religion just gives you a total death. Maybe that’s why the whole day previous to that happening I was feeling some urgency like death, as if I am going to die—and I really died. I have known many other deaths but they were nothing compared to it, they were partial deaths.
Sometimes the body died, sometimes a part of the mind died, sometimes a part of the ego died, but as far as the person was concerned, it remained. Renovated many times, decorated many times, changed a little bit here and there, but it remained, the continuity remained.
That night the death was total. It was a date with death and god simultaneously.

Source: OSHO

http://www.oshofragrance.com/2010/06/oshos-enlightenment.html

Listen to your body. Yes, there are days when the body says, “Go on a fast!” — then go. But there is no need to listen to the scriptures. The man who wrote that scripture has not written it with you in his mind, not at all. He could not have conceived of you. You were not present to him, he was not writing about you. It is as if you fall ill and you go to a dead doctor’s house and look into his prescriptions, and find a prescription and start following the prescription. That prescription was made for somebody else, for some other disease, in some other situation.

Remember to trust your own organism. When you feel that the body is saying don’t eat, stop immediately. When the body is saying eat, then don’t bother whether the scriptures say to fast or not. If your body says eat three times a day, perfectly good. If it says eat one time a day, perfectly good.

Start learning how to listen to your body, because it is your body.

You are in it; you have to respect it, and you have to trust it.

It is your temple; it is sacrilegious to impose things on your body. For no other motive should anything be imposed! And this will not only teach you trust in your body, this will teach you, by and by, a trust in existence too — because your body is part of existence. Then your trust will grow, and you will trust the trees and the stars and the moon and the sun and the oceans: you will trust people.

But the beginning of the trust has to be trust in your own organism.

Trust your heart.

A sannyasin is one who trusts in his own organism, and that trust helps him to relax into his being, and helps him to relax into the totality of existence. It brings a general acceptance of oneself and others.

Trust gives a kind of rootedness, centering. Then there is great strength and power, because you are centered in your own body, in your own being. You have roots in the soil.

Otherwise you see people uprooted, like trees that have been pulled up from the soil. They are simply dying, they are not living. That’s why there is not much joy in life. You don’t see the quality of laughter; the celebration is missing.

In your very body, in your very being, this very moment, the divine is there — and you have not celebrated it. You cannot celebrate.

Celebration has to happen first in your own home, at close quarters.

Then it becomes a great tidal wave and spreads all over existence.

The Heart Sutra

Confronting oneself in aloneness is fearful and it is painful, and one has to suffer it. Nothing should be done to avoid it, nothing should be done to divert the mind and nothing should be done to escape from it. One has to suffer it and go through it. This suffering and this pain is just a good sign that you are near a new birth, because every birth is preceded by pain. It cannot be avoided and it should not be avoided because it is part of your growth.

But why is this pain there?

This should be understood because understanding will help you to go through it, and if you go through it knowingly you will come out of it more easily and sooner.

Why is there pain when you are alone? The first thing is that your ego gets ill. Your ego can exist only with others. It has grown in relationship, it cannot exist alone. So if the situation is one in which it can exist no more, it feels suffocated; it feels just on the verge of death. This is the deepest suffering. You feel as if you are dying. But it is not you who is dying, only the ego, which you have taken to be yourself, with which you have become identified. It cannot exist because it has been given to you by others. It is a contribution. When you leave others you cannot carry it with you.

So in aloneness all that you know about yourself will fall; by and by it will disappear. You can prolong your ego for a certain period — and that too you will have to do through imagination — but you cannot prolong it for long. Without society you are uprooted; the soil is not there from where to get food. This is the basic pain.

You are no longer sure who you are: you are just a dispersing personality, a dissolving personality. But this is good, because unless this false you disappears the real cannot emerge. Unless you are completely washed and become clean again the real cannot emerge.

This false you is occupying the throne. It must be dethroned. By living in solitude all that is false can go. And all that is given by society is false. Really, all that is given is false; all that is born with you is real. All that is you by yourself, not contributed by someone else, is real, authentic. But the false must go and the false is a great investment. You have invested so much in it; you have been looking after it so much; all your hopes hang on it. So when it starts dissolving you will feel fearful, afraid and trembling: “What are you doing to yourself? You are destroying your whole life, the whole structure.”

There will be fear. But you have to go through this fear; only then will you become fearless. I don’t say you will become brave, no. I say you will become fearless.

Bravery is just part of fear. Howsoever brave you are, the fear is hidden behind. I say “fearless.” You will not be brave; there is no need to be brave when there is no fear. Both bravery and fear become irrelevant. They are aspects of the same coin. So your brave men are nothing but you standing on your head. Your bravery is hidden within you and your fear is on the surface; their fear is hidden within and their bravery is on the surface. So when you are alone you are very brave. When you think about something you are very brave, but when a real situation comes you are fearful.

One becomes fearless only when one has gone through the deepest fear of all — that is the dissolving of the ego, the dissolving of the image and the dissolving of the personality.

This is death because you don’t know if a new life is going to emerge from it. During the process you will know only death. Only when you are dead as you are, as the false entity, only then will you know that death was just a door to immortality. But that will be at the end; during the process you are simply dying.

Everything that you cherished so much is being taken away from you — your personality, your ideas, all that you thought was beautiful. All is leaving you. You are being denuded. All the roles and robes are being taken away. In the process fear will be there, but this fear is basic, necessary and inevitable — one has to pass through it. You should understand it but don’t try to avoid it, don’t try to escape from it because every escape will bring you back again. You will move back into the personality.

Those who go into deep silence and solitude, they always ask me, “There will be fear, so what to do?” I tell them not to do anything, just to live the fear.

If trembling comes, tremble. Why prevent it? If an inner fear is there and you are shaking with it, shake with it. Don’t do anything. Allow it to happen. It will go by itself. If you avoid it …and you can avoid it. You can start chanting “Ram, Ram, Ram”; you can cling to a mantra so that your mind is diverted. You will be pacified and the fear will not be there; you have pushed it into the unconscious. It was coming out — which was good, you were going to be free from it — it was leaving you and when it leaves you, you will tremble.

That is natural because from every cell of the body and of the mind, some energy that has always been there pushed down is leaving. There will be a shaking and a trembling; it will be just like an earthquake. The whole soul will be disturbed by it. But let it be. Don’t do anything. That is my advice. Don’t even chant. Don’t try to do anything with it because all that you can do will again be suppression. Just by allowing it to be, by letting it be, it will leave you — and when it has left, you will be altogether a different man.

Source: The Book of Secrets , OSHO

If just for three months you can be in total solitude, in total silence, not fighting with anything, allowing everything to be, whatsoever it is, within three months the old will be gone and the new will be there. But the secret is allowing it to be…howsoever fearful and painful, howsoever apparently dangerous and deathlike.

Many moments will come when you will feel as if you will go mad if you don’t do something and involuntarily you will start to do something. You may know that nothing can be done, but you will not be in control and you will start to do something.

It is just as if you are moving through a dark street in the night, at midnight, and you feel fear because there is no one around and the night is dark and the street is unknown — so you start whistling. What can whistling do? You know it can do nothing. Then you start singing a song. You know nothing can be done by singing a song — the darkness cannot be dispelled, you will remain alone — but still it diverts the mind. If you start whistling, just by whistling you gain confidence and you forget the darkness. Your mind moves into whistling and you start feeling good.

Nothing has happened. The street is the same, the darkness is the same the danger, if there is any, is there, but now you feel more protected. All is the same, but now you are doing something. You can start chanting a name, a mantra: that will be a sort of whistling. It will give you strength but that strength is dangerous, that strength will again become a problem, because that strength is going to be your old ego. You are reviving it.

Remain a witness and allow whatsoever happens to happen.

Fear has to be faced to go beyond it.

Anguish has to be faced to transcend it. And the more authentic the encounter, the more looking at it face to face, the more looking at things as they are, the sooner the happening will be there.

It takes time only because your authenticity is not intense.

So you may take three days, three months or three lives; it depends on the intensity. Really, three minutes can also do, three seconds can also do. But then you will have to pass through a tremendous hell with such intensity that you may not be able to bear it, to tolerate it. If one can face whatsoever is hidden in oneself, it passes, and when it has gone you are different because all that has left you was part of you before and now it is no longer a part.

So don’t ask what to do. There is no need to do anything. Non-doing, witnessing, effortlessly facing whatsoever is, not even making a slight effort, just allowing it to be….

Remain passive and let it pass. It always passes. When you do something, that is the undoing because then you interfere.

And who will interfere? Who is afraid? The same that is the disease will interfere. The same ego that has to be left behind will interfere. I told you that the ego is part of the society. You left the society but you don’t want to leave the part that society has given to you. It is rooted in society; it cannot live without society. So either you have to leave it or you have to create a new society in which it can live.

To be solitary means not to create an alternative society. Just move out of society, and then whatsoever society has given you will leave you. You will have to drop it. It will be painful because you are so adjusted to it, everything is so arranged. It has become such a comfort to be adjusted, where everything is convenient.

When you change and move alone, you are leaving all comforts, all conveniences, all that society can give — and when society gives something to you, it also takes something from you: your liberty, your soul.

So it is an exchange — and when you are trying to get to your soul in its purity you have to stop the bargaining.

It will be painful, but if you can pass through it, the highest bliss is just near. Society is not as painful as loneliness. Society is tranquilizing, society is convenient and comfortable but it gives you a sort of sleep. If you move out of it inconvenience is bound to be there. All types of inconveniences will be there. Those inconveniences have to be suffered with the understanding that they are part of solitude and part of regaining yourself.

You will come out of it new, with a new glory and dignity, a new purity and innocence.

Source: The Book of Secrets, OSHO

Children, as they are, are never focused; their consciousness is open from all sides. Everything is coming in, nothing is being excluded. The child is open to every sensation, every sensation is included in his consciousness.

And so much is coming in! That is why he is so wavering, so unstable. A child’s unconditioned mind is a flux–a flux of sensations–but he will not be able to survive with this type of mind. He must learn how to narrow his mind, to concentrate.

The moment you narrow the mind you become particularly conscious of one thing and simultaneously unconscious of so many other things. The more narrowed the mind is, the more successful it will be. You will become a specialist, you will become an expert, but the whole thing will consist of knowing more and more about less and less.

The narrowing is an existential necessity; no one is responsible for it. As life exists, it is needed, but it is not enough. It is utilitarian, but just to survive is not enough; just to be utilitarian is not enough. So when you become utilitarian and the consciousness is narrowed, you deny your mind much of which it was capable. You are not using the total mind, you are using a very small part of it.

And the remaining — the major portion — will become unconscious.

In fact, there is no boundary between conscious and unconscious. These are not two minds. “Conscious mind” means that part of the mind that has been used in the narrowing process. “Unconscious mind” means that portion that has been neglected, ignored, closed. This creates a division, a split. The greater portion of your mind becomes alien to you. You become alienated from your own self; you become a stranger to your own totality.

A small part is being identified as your self and the rest is lost. But the remaining unconscious part is always there as unused potentiality, unused possibilities, unlived adventures. This unconscious mind–this potential, this unused mind–will always be in a fight with the conscious mind; that is why there is always a conflict within.

Everyone is in conflict because of this split between the unconscious and the conscious. But only if the potential, the unconscious, is allowed to flower can you feel the bliss of existence; otherwise not.

If the major portion of your potentialities remains unfulfilled, your life will be a frustration. That is why the more utilitarian a person is, the less he is fulfilled, the less he is blissful. The more utilitarian the approach– the more one is in business life–the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. The part of the mind that cannot be made useful in the utilitarian world has been denied.

The utilitarian life is necessary but at a great cost: you have lost the festivity of life. Life becomes a festivity, a celebration, if all your potentialities come to a flowering; then life is a ceremony. That is why I always say that religion means transforming life into a celebration. The dimension of religion is the dimension of the festive, the nonutilitarian.

The utilitarian mind must not be taken as the whole. The remaining, the greater–the whole mind–should not be sacrificed to it. The utilitarian mind must not become the end. It will have to remain there, but as a means. The other–the remaining, the greater, the potential–must become the end. That is what I mean by a religious approach.

With a nonreligious approach, the businesslike mind, the utilitarian, becomes the end. When this becomes the end, there is no possibility of the unconscious actualizing the potential; the unconscious will be denied. If the utilitarian becomes the end, it means that the servant is playing the role of the master.

Intelligence, the narrowing of the mind, is a means toward survival, but not toward life. Survival is not life.

Survival is a necessity–to exist in the material world is a necessity–but the end is always to come to a flowering of the potential, of all that is meant by you. If you are fulfilled completely, if nothing remains inside in seed form, if everything becomes actual, if you are a flowering, then and only then can you feel the bliss, the ecstasy of life.

The denied part of you, the unconscious part, can become active and creative only if you add a new dimension to your life–the dimension of the festive, the dimension of play.

So meditation is not a work, it is a play. Praying is not a business, it is a play. Meditation is not something to be done to achieve some goal–peace, bliss–but something to be enjoyed as an end in itself.

Source: Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy
Chapter 1 – Meditation: The Art of Celebration ()