Osho,
Is it not harmful to an individual and also to society to
live without the barriers of norms? If so, then why do you preach that your
sannyasins should live as they like? Mind always goes the wrong way if not
restricted.
And who is going to restrict the mind? The mind of the
society? Who is going to restrict the mind? The-mind of the dead people, the
dead moralists, the dead priests? Who is going to restrict the mind? You? Who
are you, except the mind?
The first thing to be understood: up to now humanity has
lived under a curse, and the curse is that we have never been allowed to trust
our nature. We have always been told, “Trust your nature and you will go
wrong.” Mistrust, restrict, control - don’t go according to your feelings. We
have been told that human nature is somehow basically evil. This is stupid,
this is foolish and poisonous. Human nature is not evil. Human nature is
divine. And if the evil has arisen, it has arisen because of restrictions. Now
let me explain it to you.
You never see animals going to war. Of course there are
fights sometimes, but they are individual fights - not world wars with all the
crows of the East fighting with all the crows of the West, or all the dogs of
India fighting all the dogs of Pakistan. Even dogs are not so foolish, neither
are crows! Yes, sometimes they fight, and there is nothing wrong in it. If
their freedom is violated, they fight, but the fight is individual. It is not a
world war.
Now what have you done? You have repressed humanity and you
have not allowed individuals to be angry sometimes - which is natural. The
ultimate total result is that everybody goes on gathering his anger, goes on
repressing the anger - then one day everybody is so full of poison that it
explodes in a world war. Every ten years a world war is needed. And who is
responsible for these wars? - your so-called saints and moralists, do-gooders,
the people who have never allowed you to be natural.
7
Have you ever seen any dog killing another dog? Yes, they
fight sometimes - but just fight. Never has a dog killed another dog. Man is
the only animal who kills another man. No crow has ever killed any other crow,
no lion has ever killed another lion. Man is the only species of animal who
kills its own kind. What has happened to man? Has he fallen lower than the
animals? Then who is responsible? Only one thing is missing from the animals:
they don’t have saints, moralists. Priests - Christian and Hindu and Mohammedan
and Jaina - they don’t have. They don’t have temples, mosques, Bibles and
Vedas, that’s all. That is the only difference.
There are still a few primitive societies where, down
through the ages, murder has never happened, because nobody has poisoned their
mind for morality, nobody has trained them to be moral. They are natural
people. When you are natural you function harmoniously. Sometimes you become
angry, but that is natural - and it is momentary.
A person who never becomes angry and goes on controlling his
anger is very dangerous. Beware of him, he can kill you! If your husband never
becomes angry, report him to the police. A husband who sometimes becomes angry
is just a natural human being, there is no fear about it. A husband who never
becomes angry will one day suddenly jump and suffocate you. And he will do it
as if he is possessed by something. Murderers have been telling the courts down
through the ages, “We committed the crime, but we were possessed.” Who
possessed them? Their own unconscious - repressed unconscious - exploded.
Have you watched a simple fact? If you have a picture of a
beautiful bitch and bring it to a dog, he will not be interested at all. Dogs
are not playboys. Not that they don’t love bitches, they love them
tremendously, but they will not be interested in a picture, in pornography -
because to create pornography you need saints. First repress the sexual
instinct, the natural instinct, and tell people that it is wrong and evil. When
they repress their sexual instinct, the repressed instinct finds outlets. Now it
is difficult to go and watch a beautiful woman passing by on the road. Then
what to do? Lock your room and look at the Playboy magazine. That is safer,
nobody comes to know. You can hide your Playboy magazine in the Bible and you
can pretend you are reading the Bible. Only man is pornographic. No other
animal is pornographic. These are simple facts.
Who has made man pornographic? Primitives are not - still
are not. Women are naked and move naked - and without any fear. And what type
of civilization do you say you are living in? A woman cannot pass through the
roads without being pinched on the bottom, without being treated inhumanely. A
woman cannot walk in the night alone - and this is civilization! And people are
just obsessed with sex twenty-four hours a day.
Who has given this obsession to man? Animals are sexual but
not obsessed; they are natural. When sex becomes an obsession, it takes
perverted forms; and these perverted forms are rooted in the moralizers and
their teachings.
8
The so-called religious people have never trusted human
nature. They talk about trust, but they have never trusted existence. They
trust rules, laws; they never trust love. They talk about God, but the talk is
just empty talk. They trust in the police, in the courts. They trust in
hellfire. They trust in creating fear and in creating greed. If you are saintly
and good and moral, you will have heaven and all the pleasures of paradise,
firdaus. Or, if you are not moral, then you will suffer hellfire - and
eternally, remember, forever and forever.
These are fear and greed. They have been manipulating the
human mind through fear and greed. And they want you to become free of fear and
greed - and their whole teaching is rooted in it. They don’t trust.
I trust you and I trust your nature. I trust animal nature.
If nature is allowed its own course, yes, there will be a little anger
sometimes and there will be a little flaring up too, but nothing is wrong in
it. It is human and it is beautiful. But there will be no war.
Psychologists say all your weapons are phallic. Because you
could not penetrate a woman’s body, you penetrate somebody’s body with a sword.
The sword is a phallic symbol. It is beautiful to love a woman, but to
penetrate somebody’s body with a sword is ugly. But this is how things have
been.
You ask me: “Is it not harmful to an individual and also to
society to live without the barriers of norms?” You have lived with barriers
and with norms. What has happened? Look at the state of humanity today: it is a
neurotic earth, a great madhouse. This is what has happened because of your
norms, idealism, perfectionism, morality; this has happened because of all your
commandments. The whole earth has turned into a neurotic camp, a big madhouse.
And still you are afraid, and still you go on. This is a vicious circle.
It is as if you make a person fast and when he fasts of
course he becomes hungry, and he starts looking obsessively for food. Then,
thinking and seeing that he has become obsessed with food, you put him in
chains, because otherwise he will break into somebody’s kitchen. Now you put
him in chains because you say that if he is not put in chains, he is dangerous
- he can break into somebody’s kitchen, he cannot be relied upon. Then you put
him in chains and you continue forcing him to fast. And then you become more
and more afraid because he is going mad. This is a vicious circle. In the first
place, why has he become so obsessed with food? Your disciplining him too much
with fasting has created this illness. Fasting is not natural.
Yes, sometimes it happens in animals, but they don’t believe
in fasting, they don’t have a philosophy of fasting. Sometimes it happens. One
day the dog feels sick and he will not eat. This is natural. He simply does not
eat because he does not feel like eating. He moves with his feeling, it is not
a rule. Nobody has taught him to fast. In fact he will go and eat grass and
vomit; the grass functions and helps him to vomit. He will vomit. Nobody has
taught him. And he will not eat unless the desire to eat arises again. He moves
with nature. When he feels like eating, he eats; when he does not feel like
eating, he does not eat. This is what I would call real life.
9
Sometimes when you feel like not eating, don’t eat. I am not
against fasting. I am against the philosophy of fasting. Don’t make a rule that
every Sunday you have to fast. That is foolish, because how can you decide that
every Sunday you will not feel like eating? Sometimes it may be Friday when you
don’t feel like eating. Then what will you do? You will force yourself to eat
because it is Friday. When you feel like eating, eat. When you don’t feel like
eating, don’t eat. Move with your feeling, and by and by you will be in tune
with your nature.
To me, to be in tune with nature is to be religious. My
definition of religion is to be in tune with nature. And that is the meaning of
the Indian word dharma; it means nature, intrinsic nature. Trust nature and
don’t violate it.
But you have been taught to violate it, so when people who
have lived starved lives come here, to this place - which is a totally
different phenomenon, they have never seen a place like this, no ashram like
this has ever existed - they are very surprised. They come here to see sad
people, dead people - dragging themselves around somehow, chanting mantras,
reading books - and when they see people dancing, men and women dancing
together, holding hands; people hugging each other, people so full of love and
joy, they say, “What type of religion is this? Religion has to be of the
cemetery, it cannot be of life. Religion has to be negative. Men and women
holding hands? This is dangerous. We cannot trust men, we cannot trust women.
This is dangerous; this is playing with fire. Create restrictions, make Great
Walls of China!”
No, I trust nature. I don’t trust your laws. Your laws have
corrupted the whole of humanity. Enough is enough! The time has come. Now all
the old, rotten religions have to be burned completely and a totally new
concept of religion has to arise - life-affirmative, a religion of love and not
of law, a religion of nature and not of discipline, a religion of totality and
not of perfection, a religion of feeling and not of thinking. The heart should
become the master, and then things settle on their own.
If you can trust nature, by and by you become quiet, silent,
happy, joyful, celebrating - because nature is celebrating. Nature is a
celebration. Look all around. Can you see any flower which looks like your
saints? Can you see any rainbow which looks like your saints - or any cloud, or
any bird singing, or the light reflecting in the river, or the stars? The world
is celebrating. The world is not sad. The world is a song, an utterly beautiful
song, and the dance continues. Become part of this dance and trust your nature.
If you trust your nature, by and by you will come closer to
the cosmic nature. That is the only way. You are part of the cosmic. When you
trust yourself, you have trusted the cosmic in you - through that goes the way.
From that small thread, you can reach to the very goal. Trusting yourself, you
have trusted existence which has made you. Not trusting yourself, you have
distrusted existence which has made you.
Who has given you sex? Of course existence has given you
sex. And who has taught you brahmacharya and celibacy? Your so-called saints.
Your saints are against existence. Who has given you hunger? Existence. And who
has taught you fasting? Your saints.
10
I am for life and against your saints because your saints
are against existence. I teach you to be natural, to be spontaneous. And I
don’t teach you repression, restriction. I teach you freedom. If you restrict
yourself too much and repress yourself too much, you will die before your
death, and then you will live a stale life.
Let me tell you one beautiful story:
They tell about a wise old rabbi in the heart of Russia
whose advice was slavishly followed by the members of his synagogue. One
morning he was cornered by a troubled follower who explained, “I invested all
my savings in two hundred chickens. When I went out to the coop this morning, a
hundred of them had died. What should I do?”
“It is the voice of the Lord,” quoth the rabbi. “Say a
prayer. Then double the sales price of the chickens you have left and you will
not have lost a single kopek.”
But the next morning the villager was back to report,
“Another fifty of my chickens perished last night.”
“The ways of the Lord are sometimes mysterious,” said the
rabbi. “The fifty chickens that have survived are obviously the finest and the
most valuable of the flock. Say another prayer of thanks and again double the
sales price and you will not have lost a single kopek.”
Alas! The next morning the last fifty chickens had bitten
the dust. “Now what should I do?” wailed the villager.
“My son,” quoth the rabbi, “I have lots more invaluable
advice I could give you, but what use would that be to you? You have no more
chickens.”
When I look at your so-called religious people, I see they
have no more life. No advice can be of any help to them. They are dead people.
They should really be in their graves. They are walking illegally. They are
ghosts; they are living a posthumous existence. They have committed suicide and
are still walking and moving. I feel sorry for them, but these people are
dangerous too because they go on doing the same to others that has been done to
them by others. They go on teaching the same nonsense to other people. They go
on crippling small children, paralyzing new life springs, poisoning new wells.
That’s what they can do. That’s all that they know. They have been unable to
live; they make others unable to live.
Watch. Never get into the trap of a man who is dead. It is
better to be irreligious. It is better not to believe in God and not to go to
the church and the mosque and the temple, but be alive - because life is the
real church of God. Forget all about God and nothing is lost, but start
destroying life and everything is lost - because life is God.
I teach you life, love, because that’s how I see God is.
And these bondages that have been created by religion are
just your idea. If you become aware, you can drop them immediately, instantly.
11
“How come,” the hostess of a kid’s birthday party asked a
little girl in attendance, “that your younger brother is so shy? He has not
moved from that corner all afternoon.”
“He is not shy at all,” answered the little girl. “He has
never had on a necktie before - and he thinks he is tied to something.”
All your religions are just neckties. You are not tied to
anything. It is just your idea that you are tied.
Drop all discipline and all ties and start moving - and let
God live through you, and let God live through you in freedom. Trust freedom
and trust God, and you will never be a loser.
I am not saying there will always be flowers and more
flowers in your life. No, there are thorns, but they too are good. And I am not
saying that your life will always be sweet. Many times it will be very, very
bitter, but that’s how life grows - through dialectics. I am not saying you
will always be good. Sometimes you will be very bad, but one thing will be
certain about you: when you are bad you will be authentically bad, when you are
good you will be authentically good. One can trust, one can rely upon you. When
you are angry, one can rely on it that your anger is not false, not cold; it is
hot and alive. And when you love, one can rely upon you that it is hot and
warm.
Remember, a person who cannot be angry cannot be loving. The
roses grow only with the thorns. If you cannot be hotly angry in some moment,
you cannot be hotly in love. Because you cannot be hot, you cannot be warm; you
remain frozen. And if you have repressed anger too much, you are always afraid
to move in love, because who knows?
A man came to me and he said he could not move into deep
orgasm while making love - a perfectly healthy young man. What has gone wrong
with him? He cannot move into orgasm, or at the most the orgasm remains only
local, it does not spread all over his body - and a local orgasm is not of much
significance. When the orgasm is total and every fiber of your being throbs
with new life - you are refreshed, rejuvenated - for one moment you become part
of existence, part of the tremendous creativity that surrounds you. You lose
yourself. You are no longer an ego, you melt. You don’t have any boundaries
then.
12
I inquired about his anger. He said, “But why are you asking
about anger, because my question is about love? I cannot love deeply.” I said,
“Forget about love because first we have to think about anger. Because if you
cannot love deeply, that means you cannot be angry deeply.” He was surprised,
but that’s how it turned out to be. From his very childhood, he had been
brought up in a very religious family and he had always been told not to be
angry, to control anger. He has learned to control. He has become so efficient
that he does not know that he controls. He has really become a controller. Now
the control has become unconscious. He is a very controlled person. Everybody
respects him; he will succeed everywhere in society. He is a success, but in
his inner life he is a failure - he cannot even love.
I told him, “Start by being angry, because my understanding
is that when you are coming to a peak in your orgasm, you cannot allow it,
because if you allow it, you are afraid that with it, maybe the anger - the
repressed anger - may also be allowed.”
He said, “What are you saying? I always dream that I have
killed my woman. And I always dream that I kill her, suffocate her, while
making love to her. And I am afraid that if I lose control I will not be able
to resist the temptation to suffocate and kill her.”
Now the anger has become a great force inside him. He is so
afraid to uncontrol, how can he love? It is impossible. And if you miss love,
you will miss prayerfulness and you will miss godliness too.
This repressive society, this repressive civilization has
failed utterly. Yet you are not aware.
I have heard a beautiful story:
In the days when Khrushchev - and somehow we miss him - was
Mr. Big in the Soviet Union, he often admitted that Stalin occasionally treated
him like a court jester or clown, and ordered him, “Dance the gopak!” “And,”
Khrushchev would add, “I danced.”
Somebody in the crowd would always cry out, “Why did you let
him make a fool of you?” and Khrushchev would demand sternly, “Who asked that
question? Stand up!”
Inevitably, nobody answered, and after the appropriate
pause, Khrushchev would conclude, “That, comrades, is why I danced.”
Just out of fear: Stalin can kill, Stalin is death. And your
priests have been death - representatives of death, not of God.
I represent life. Your priests have been in conspiracy with
death and they have crippled life. Your priests talk about God, but it seems
they are partners with the Devil. A great conspiracy.
And they have destroyed the whole human mind. They have
uprooted you from your feeling part; they have made you hung up in your head.
Now you don’t know how you feel; that’s why you cannot trust your feelings and
you always have to look to somebody to tell you what to do.
13
In childhood the parents go on telling you, “Do this” and
“Don’t do that.” Then in the school, you have the teacher; then in the
university, the professor; then in society, the boss, the politician, the
leader. Everywhere you are being told what to do and what not to do. And you
are always seeking somebody to dominate you so that you can become dependent -
because you don’t know how to get commandments from your own heart, from your
own being. You always depend on some authority outside. This is ugly, this is miserable,
this should not be.
I am not an authority here, at the most a midwife, but not
an authority. I can help you to be reborn, but I cannot dominate you, I cannot
dictate things to you. You hanker for it. People come to me and they say,
“Osho, tell us exactly what we have to do.” But why can’t you listen to your
own heart? You have life bubbling inside you. The spring is there, the source
is there. Go in. I can tell you how to go in, I can teach you the devices for
going in, but take your commandments from there. There is a Bible inside you -
the real book, the Veda, the real knowledge.
Get your instructions from there, and once you start getting
your instructions from your innermost core, you will be a free man and a happy
man. A free man is happy; an unfree man is never happy. You are not meant to be
slaves. You are meant to be masters. That’s why I call my sannyasins “swami.”
Swami means a master, one who has taken his reins in his own hands.
Osho, Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language
1. “Don’t be afraid to cry. It will free your mind of sorrowful thoughts.” – Hopi
7.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the
breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which
runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” – Blackfoot
14. “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.” – Navajo
Mayuri
is a trained professional accountant and worked for 28 years in various
accounting capacities. She took sannyas in Rajneeshpuram in 1985, and
subsequently plied her trade in the accounting department in Pune.
Through her international Logos of Money workshops she help people shift
their perceptions and attitudes about money so that it can become a
source of support rather than a stumbling block. She lives in Marin
County, CA, USA. 
In
Sanskrit, the word Lingam has a couple of meanings, which are deeply
symbolic: ‘Sign’ is one meaning, represented by the fact that an erect
penis is the sign that god is ready to create new life. Another meaning
is ‘Pillar of Light’, or ‘Wand of Light.’ A phallus becomes a ‘pillar of
light’ when a man has become conscious of his godliness. The way he
becomes conscious of his godliness is part of what Tantra is all about.
Tantra offers methods to help both men and women attain supreme
consciousness while in the act of love union. This is achieved by
bringing the potent and animalistic energy of sex into alignment with
spirit. When instinctual drive and energy merge with spiritual power and
energy a metamorphosis happens and it is in this metamorphosis that man
is reborn as god, a co-creator with the whole.
I
have been working with men for many years and having grown up with five
brothers, I feel an innate love and respect for the masculine. Many
times, it is sad for me to realise that men do not understand themselves
in the positive way that I see and experience them. Many forms of
conditioning have corrupted the sheer beauty and grandeur of the
masculine experience.
I
like to think of male and female together as a vast tree of life. The
tree grows from a single seed and then at six weeks in the womb, there
is a differentiation and the embryo either remains feminine (XX
chromosomes) or becomes masculine (XY chromosomes). If the embryo
remains feminine, the parts of the brain devoted to intuition, love and
artistic tendencies grow bigger, while the areas devoted to power,
competition, territorialness, and logic grow bigger in the male brain.
To imagine how this links up, imagine a rose bush. The magnificent rose,
so soft and vulnerable has a thorny stem, offering protection. In the
same way, the feminine who is asked by nature to nurture the child for a
long time, needs her masculine partner to protect her and take care
that she can be secure while tending to the task of childbirth and
rearing of children.
Part
of the warped scenario has been fuelled by ideologies, which harm the
masculine very profoundly. To teach a man that sex is bad, i.e. sin, is
to kill his spirit by cutting him off from his joy. A man is naturally
deeply centred in and around his sexual organs. He needs to be
worshipped there, rather than condemned. Just imagine the fact that in
one ejaculation, a man releases enough sperm to populate half the
planet! This is a tremendous power and energy! If he is told from an
early age that this energy is bad, you are literally telling him that he
is bad, that his very essence as a man should not exist. Naturally, as
he shuts down from himself and his reason for being, he will be quite
pissed off inside. He can then easily be manipulated into becoming a
soldier and going to kill others and himself. Life is not worth living
if you have been cut off from all joy and pleasure.
We
need to learn sexuality as an art form, playing with our desire and
mastering it as one would tame a horse in the wild. Beating a horse is
not the right way to tame it. The true masters of horse training are
those who understand the language of horses, the horse whisperers. A
whole new science is waiting to be born, that of ‘Lingam whispering’.
