Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness # 1 Silence, the Pull of the Innermost Zero

Why do you call your religion the first and the last religion?

It is a little difficult for me to speak again. It has been difficult always, because I have been trying to speak the unspeakable. Now it is even more so.

After one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days of silence, it feels as if I am coming to you from a totally different world. In fact it is so. The world of words, language, concepts, and the world of silence are so diametrically opposite to each other, they don’t meet anywhere. They can’t meet by their very nature. Silence means a state of wordlessness; and to speak now, it is as if to learn language again from abc. But this is not a new experience for me; it has happened before too.

For thirty years I have been speaking continuously. It was such a tension because my whole being was pulled toward silence, and I was pulling myself toward words, language, concepts, philosophies. There was no other way to convey, and I had a tremendously important message to convey; there was no way to shirk the responsibility. I had tried it. The day I realized my own being, it was such a fulfillment that I became silent. There was nothing left to be asked.

One of my professors at university, who was a world renowned man, Dr. S.K.Saxena – he had been a professor of philosophy in America for many years – again and again used to ask me to ask him some question. And those were the days when I was so fulfilled and so content, there was no question, no quest left.

So I used to say to him, “I have answers; I don’t have any questions.”

He used to laugh and say that I am crazy: “How can you have answers without questions?”

I insisted to him, “While you have questions you will never have answers. Unless your questioning drops away you will not find the answer. And it does not come in the form of an answer, but it answers all; not answering any particular question but simply answering all questions – possible, impossible, probable, improbable.”

After my enlightenment, for exactly one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days I tried to remain silent – as much as it was possible in those conditions. For a few things I had to speak, but my speaking was telegraphic. My father was very angry with me. He loved me so much that he had every right to be angry. The day he sent me to the university he had taken a promise from me that I would write at least one letter every week. When I became silent I wrote him the last letter and told him, “I am happy, immensely happy, ultimately happy, and I know from my very depth of being that I will remain so now forever, whether in the body or not in the body. This bliss is something of the eternal. So now, every week, if you insist, I can write the same again and again. That will not look okay, but I have promised, so I will drop a card every week with the word ditto Please forgive me, and when you receive my letter with the word ditto you read this letter.”

He thought I had gone completely mad. He immediately rushed from the village, came to the university and asked me, “What has happened to you? Seeing your letter and your idea of this ditto, I thought you were mad. But looking at you, it seems I am mad; the whole world is mad. I take back the promise and the word that you gave to me. There is no need now to write every week. I will continue to read your last letter.” And he kept it to the very last day he died; it was under his pillow.

The man who forced me to speak – for one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days I had remained silent – was also a very strange man. He himself had remained silent his whole life. Nobody had heard about him; nobody knew about him. And he was the most precious man I have come across in this, or any of my lives in the past. His name was Magga Baba. It is not much of a name; magga simply means a jug. He used to carry a jug – that was his only possession, a plastic jug. From the same jug he would drink, he would ask for food with it. People would drop anything in the jug: money, food, water. And that was all he had. Anybody who wanted to take from his jug was also allowed to; so people would take out money, or food – children, particularly…beggars. He neither prevented anybody from dropping, nor did he prevent anybody from taking. And he was absolutely silent, so nobody had any idea even of his name, because he had never said what his name was. They simply started calling him Magga Baba because of the jug.

But deep in the night, once in a while when there was nobody, I used to visit him. It was very difficult to find a time when nobody was there, because he attracted strange types of people. He was not speaking, so of course intellectuals were not going to him – just simple people. And what could you do with him? In India, to go to a man who has realized is called seva. Literally it means service, but it would not be justified because that word seva has a sacredness about it which service has not. When you go to a realized man what else can you do than serve him? So people would come and massage his feet and somebody would massage his head, and he would not say anything to anybody. He would neither say yes, nor would he say no. Sometimes they wouldn’t allow him even to sleep, because four or five people were massaging him; they were doing seva. Many times I had to throw people out. He was just living on a porch of a bungalow, open from all sides. Once in a while, particularly on cold winter nights, I used to find him alone; then he would say something to me.

He forced me to speak. He said, “Look, I have remained silent my whole life, but they do not hear, they do not listen. They cannot understand it; it is beyond them. I have failed. I have not been able to convey what I have been carrying within me, and now there is not much time left for me. You are so young, you have a long life before you: please don’t stop speaking. Start!”

It is a difficult, almost impossible job to convey things in words, because they are experienced in a wordless state of consciousness. How to convert that silence into sound? There seems to be no way. And there is none.

But I understood Magga Baba’s point. He was very old, and he was saying to me, “You will be in the same position. If you don’t start soon, the inner silence, the vacuum, the innermost zero, will go on pulling you inward. And then there comes a time when you cannot come out. You are drowned in it. You are utterly blissful, but the whole world is full of misery. You could have shown the way. Perhaps somebody may have heard, perhaps somebody may have walked on the path. At least you would not feel that you have not done what was expected of you by existence itself. Yes, it is a responsibility.”

I promised him, “I will do my best.” And for thirty years continuously I went on and on talking on every subject under the stars. But I came to a point which Magga Baba had not come to. He saved me from his disappointment; but I came to a new realization, a new point. I had thrown my net far and wide to catch as many people as have the potential to blossom. But then I felt that words are not enough.

Now I have found my people and I have to arrange a silent communion, which will help in two ways: those who cannot understand silence will drop out. That will be good. That will be a good weeding; otherwise they will go on clinging around me because of the words, because their intellect feels satisfied. And I am not here to satisfy their intellect. My purpose is far, far deeper, of a different dimension.

So these days of silence have helped those who were just intellectually curious, rationally interested in me, to turn their back on me. And secondly, it has helped me to find my real, authentic people who are not in need of words to be with me. They can be with me without words. That’s the difference between communication and communion.

Communication is through words, and communion is through silence.

So these days of silence have been immensely fruitful. Now only those are left for whom my presence is enough, my being is enough, for whom just the gesture of my hand is enough, for whom my eyes are enough – for whom language is no more a need.

But today I have suddenly decided to speak again – again after one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days – for the simple reason that the picture that I have been painting all my life needs a few touches here and there to complete it, because that day when I became silent, everything was left incomplete. Before I depart from you as far as my physical body is concerned, I would like to complete it.

I have been speaking to Hindus, to Christians, to Jews, to Mohammedans, to Jainas, to Buddhists, to Sikhs, to people belonging to almost all the so-called religions. This is for the first time that I am speaking to my own people: not to Hindus, not to Mohammedans, not to Christians, not to Jews. It makes a lot of difference, and only because of that difference can I give the finishing touch to the picture that I have been painting. What difference does it make? To you I can speak directly, immediately. To the Hindus I had to speak through Krishna, and I was not happy about it. But there was no other way, it was a necessary evil. To Christians I could speak only through Jesus. I was not at ease about it, but there was no other way. So one has to choose the least evil. Let me explain to you….

I do not agree with Jesus on all points. In fact, there are many questions which I have left unanswered, because even to touch them would have been destructive to those Christians who had come to me. Now they are clean. People say that I am brainwashing people. No, I am not brainwashing people. I am certainly washing their brains – and I believe in dry cleaning! So I can say to you now exactly what I feel; otherwise, it was a burden on me.

To speak on Mahavira was necessary because without that it was impossible to get any Jainas to hear me. And with Mahavira I do not agree on all points. In fact, my disagreement is on more points than my agreement. So I had to do a strange job: I had to choose those points on which I could agree, and not talk at all about those points which I was absolutely against. And even on the points on which I have a certain agreement, I had to manage another thing: that was to give new meanings to their words, to give my meaning to their words. It was not their meaning. If Mahavira comes he will be angry; if Jesus comes he will be angry. If this whole crowd of Jesus, Mahavira, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu meets me somewhere, they will all be mad at me because I have made them say things they would never have dreamed of. They could not. Sometimes I have even put meanings into their words which go basically against them. But there was no other way.

The whole world is divided. You can’t find a single man who is clean. Either he is a Christian – he is carrying one kind of dirt; or he is a Hindu – he is carrying another kind of dirt. Now it is possible for me to say exactly and directly things which may even sound bitter.

You have asked why I call my religion the first and perhaps the last religion.

Yes, I call it the first religion, because religion is the highest flowering of consciousness. Up to now, man was not capable of conceiving of it. Even now, only one percent of humanity is barely able to conceive of it. The masses are still living in the past, burdened with the past, conditioned by the past. Barely one percent of mankind is in a state now to conceive of religion. All the old religions are based on fear. Now, a real religion destroys fear. It is not based on fear.

The concept of God in all the old religions is nothing but out of fear, a consolation; otherwise there is no validity, no evidence, no proof for the existence of God. The people who believe in God are really people who cannot trust in themselves. They need a father figure, a big daddy. They are still childish. Their mental age is nearabout twelve years, not more than that. They need somebody to give them courage, to guide them, to protect them. They are simply afraid to be left alone. They are afraid of death, which is coming closer every day. They need somebody to protect them from death. It is a projection of your fear. The moment your fear disappears you will find there is no God. The moment you are able to trust in yourself, to be yourself, there will be no God. You will laugh at the whole concept of God.

Now, Jesus is praying to God, continually raising his hands toward the sky, as if God is there above, in the heavens. And not only is he praying, he is receiving answers too – he is hearing voices! Now, these are symptoms of neurosis. To tell you the truth, Jesus is a mental case. He is a nice fellow, he is a good person, but the way he behaves proves many things. He is a fanatic. He carries the same kind of mind as Adolf Hitler. He is a fascist. He thinks that only those who follow him will be saved; anybody who does not follow him is going to fall into eternal hell. Now, only a simpleton can say such a thing. Who is he to save anybody? But he says he is “the only begotten son of God.” And he truly believes it. It is not only that he says it, he truly believes it!

Until the crucifixion, he truly believes it. It is only the crucifixion which brings a little sense to this insane man. Only at the crucifixion, he cries, “Why have you forsaken me?” He was certainly waiting for a miracle to happen. He is the only son of God, and God doesn’t come. And if he doesn’t come at the crucifixion, then when? And if even Jesus is not being saved, what is the guarantee that those who are going to follow Jesus will be saved? And the fools still believe that they will be saved if they follow Jesus. Even Jesus is not saved. And he knew it. He waited for a time for the miracle to happen – but it didn’t happen.

Miracles don’t happen at all. They have never happened. They are only wish fulfillments of people who are dreaming and hallucinating. They are not realities. If you believe in them, they may appear to you almost real, perhaps more than real. It is your belief that creates the hallucination; otherwise there is nothing – no miracle. But Jesus believed that he himself was doing miracles; and he was waiting for the miracle. These are all very childish qualities.

He is a little bit schizophrenic, too. He goes on saying, “Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” But he is not a meek person. He is very arrogant. If you are burdened with Christian conditioning you may not be able to see that he is very arrogant. But once you are clean you can see it clearly. He enters the temple, the great temple of the Jews, and throws out the money changers, turns over their tables, hits them, beats them – and he is talking of meekness, humbleness!

He and his followers are hungry and they have been refused food in a village. He is very angry. They come to a fig tree; it is not the season for figs, so of course there are no figs on the tree. And he becomes so mad at the fig tree and curses it: “You are also against us; you will not provide figs for us.” Now, a person cursing an out of season fig tree – what do you call such a person? And it is not only me. His own master…Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist was imprisoned, and when he heard these things about Jesus, even he became doubtful about whether he was worthy to be accepted as a disciple or not. He sent a message from the jail to Jesus: “Do you think you are really the messiah for whom the Jews have been waiting?” Because he became suspicious – the things that Jesus was saying and doing were contradictory, and the way he was behaving was not the way of a religious man. He was behaving very irreligiously.

A religious man cannot take the standpoint that, “I am special, the only begotten son of God.” A religious man comes to know that he is as ordinary as every ordinary thing. He is just like the blades of grass or the stars or the mountains. He is not special in any way. The idea of specialness, of being extraordinary, superior, is nothing but the game of the ego, which creates all kinds of arrogance.

The same was the situation with other religions. I have spoken on Mahavira, but I cannot agree with the man’s behavior, nor can I agree with the ideology and the guidelines that he gives to his disciples. They are absolutely against nature.

Mahavira lived naked. Now, it is not accidental that man has invented clothes. It is absolutely a natural need – because other animals grow hair all over the body and they are protected from winter and cold. Man has not that capacity. Even if he grows hair, it is not as thick as on an animal who lives in the snows. He will not survive, he will die. He has to protect his body. He is not cold-blooded, like cold-blooded fishes which live in the Arctic. Their blood is cold, ice cold, and it has a certain chemical that keeps it from freezing. The outside, to us, is freezing cold; for those fishes it is not. Man is a hot-blooded animal. He needs protection. Now, to make him go naked is absolutely idiotic. And Mahavira prescribes that you should not use any kinds of instruments – even simple instruments like a razor blade, which is not a big machine or big technology. If you want to cut your hair you have to pull your hair out. So Jaina monks pull out their hair every year. This is so stupid, so ugly, so unnatural – and for what?

The whole reasoning is that if you do these things you earn virtue and you will be in heaven. On the one hand he says, “Don’t be greedy, greed is sin,” and on the other hand, he is teaching nothing but greed, greed in the other world. That seems to be far more greedy even than the ordinary greed of this world: having money or a good house seems to be nothing compared to eternal pleasures in heaven. And Jainas have seven heavens, so the more you torture yourself the higher you reach. So it seems there is certainly an element of masochism in Mahavira. But I could not say this to the Jainas.

So I have been carrying a heavy weight on me, on my heart. My health has been destroyed for many reasons; the most important is this, that I have been speaking on people with whom I do not agree at all. I disagree – not only disagree, but I find them basically psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, anti-life. All these religions in the past are anti-life. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.

Hence, I say my religion is the first religion which takes man in his totality, in his naturalness, accepts man’s whole, as he is. And that’s what holy means to me – not something sacred, but something accepted in its wholeness. Perhaps things are a little bit upside down and you have to put them in place; just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to put them in place. And then out of that wholeness arises religious consciousness.

I have spoken more on Buddha than on anybody else. But he is as much anti-life as anyone else: “This life has to be used just to reach the real life which is after death.” Now, nobody has returned after death. Not a single proof exists of anybody returning after death and telling you that there is life there. And all these religions are based on this assumption, that there is a life after death; sacrifice this for that. And I am saying, “Sacrifice that for this!” – because this is all that you have got: herenow. And if there is any life after death, you will be there and then it will be “here and now.” Once you know how to live here and now, you will be able to live there too. So I teach you how to live here and now.

This is the first religion which does not reject anything from your life. It accepts you totally, as you are, and finds methods and ways of how to make a more harmonious whole. You have all the ingredients; everything that is needed is within you – perhaps not in the right places. It has to be put in its right place. And once everything is put in its right place – that I call virtue. Then the man of character, the man whom I can call a moral man, a religious man, arises out of you.

All the old religions are based on certain belief systems. Those beliefs are not to be questioned because they are all fictions – beautiful fictions, but fictions all the same.

You cannot ask, “How do you know God created the world?” There was not a single eyewitness – there cannot be by the very nature of it – because if there was an eyewitness already there, then this was not the beginning of the world. You will have to go back, before that eyewitness. The world was already there; the eyewitness was there. That eyewitness is enough to prove that the world had already been in existence. So there cannot be any eyewitness for God creating the world. But all the religions accept it, and you are not allowed to ask or question because to doubt is to be on the blacklist.

Then there are seven hells waiting for you, with all the tortures that any Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong can conceive. These religious people have conceived them a long time before – all kinds of tortures. And not for a few days – Christianity throws you in hell for eternity. Such an absurd assumption!

Christianity accepts only one life. In one life how many sins can you commit? If you continuously commit sins day and night for seventy years, from the first day to the last you go on like a chain-sinner, then too eternal punishment cannot be justified. Eternal punishment…forever? There will be no end to it! And I don’t think you commit sins continuously every moment. A man may commit a few sins…may go to a jail for four years, five years; it may be justified. But eternal hell? So they are exploiting your fear: fear of hell and greed for pleasure in heaven. That has been their total pattern of working on the human mind. I want to say to you that they are only so-called religions. They are not religions at all.

This is the first religion. I don’t promise you any heaven, and I don’t make you afraid of any hell; there is none. I don’t say, “You have to follow me, then only can you be saved.” That is absolutely egoistic. Jesus says, “Come, follow me.” Even my book on Jesus is titled Come, Follow Me – that is not my statement, it is Jesus’ statement. If you ask me I will say, “Never! Don’t follow me, because I myself am lost. Unless you choose to be lost forever like me…then it is okay.” To me, anybody claiming any kind of superiority that you have to follow him – it is a fascist attitude.

My sannyasins are not my followers but my fellow-travelers, my friends, my lovers.

They have seen something in me the way you see something in a mirror. You are not a follower of your mirror – but in the mirror you can see your face. The master is a mirror. You are not to follow him. You have to see your face in his mirror – and that’s all. And remember one thing: the mirror does not do anything at all. When you are facing the mirror, you are doing something; you are facing the mirror. The mirror is not bothered whether you are facing it or not. And the mirror does not do a single thing while you are facing the mirror; it simply mirrors you. That is its nature, that is why we call it a mirror. It simply mirrors, reflects. It is not a doing, it is its being.

The master does not do anything at all. It is his being, it is his presence that becomes a source of reflection. Slowly, slowly, you start seeing yourself in a new light, in a new way, from a new aspect, in a new dimension.

The old religions are based on belief systems. My religion is absolutely scientific. It is not a belief, it is not a faith – it is pure science. The word science means knowing. Of course, it is a different science than the science that is being taught in the universities. That is objective science; this is subjective science.

Sometimes words are tremendously significant. Have you ever thought about the word object? It simply means that which obstructs you, objects to you, comes in your way, hinders you. Science is trying to observe the objects that surround you. They should not hinder you, they should not come in your way. On the contrary, they should become your way; they should become stepping stones, they should be used. They should not remain enemies surrounding you. So the whole effort of science is to transform the objects into friends, so they no longer object to you, but allow you, give a welcome sign.

And when I say religion, my religion, is a science, that means the way science observes objects, religion observes subjectivity. Subjectivity is just the opposite of objectivity: the very diametrically opposite. The object obstructs you; subjectivity is just an abysmal depth. There is nothing to object to you. Once you let go, you start falling into a fathomless abyss; you never come to the end. But you don’t want to come to the end either. Just that eternal falling is so tremendously ecstatic that to think that it will end is not possible; it is unending.

Objects begin and end; subjectivity begins but never ends. Science uses observation as its method; religion also uses observation as its method, but it calls it meditation. It is observation, pure observation, of your own subjectivity. Science calls its work experiment; religion calls its work experience. They both start from the same point but they move in opposite directions. Science goes outward; religion goes inward. Hence, I have not given you any belief; I have only given you methods. I have only explained to you my experience, and I have told you the way I experienced it.

Once I experienced it, I tried all the ways – whether they all reach to it or not. And I found there are one hundred and twelve ways which can reach to the same point. And once you reach by one method, the one hundred and eleven are very simple because you know the point, you have reached it already. Now you can reach from anywhere. So I have been teaching one hundred and twelve methods of meditation – but no belief system. Hence, I call it science.

And I have said perhaps it may be the last religion too, for the simple reason that I have not given you anything which can be argued against. I can argue against Jesus, I can argue against Mahavira, I can argue against Lao Tzu, I can argue against Buddha. Nobody can argue against me, because in the first place I have not given you any dogma which can be argued against. I have given you only methods. Methods you can try or you may not try, but you cannot argue against a method. If you try, I know it will succeed. I know by my own experience that will succeed – there is no question. If you don’t try, you have no right to say anything about it.

And because I have taken the whole personality of man into it, nothing has been left out. All the religions have been leaving things out, so there was the possibility of another religion taking something in. For example, Buddhism will not allow alcohol; Christianity allows it.

I have not given you anything that is not rooted in reason, in logic, in experiment, in experience, so a person can be against me only if he does not know me. If he knows me, there is no way to be against me. I don’t give you any point to be against me.

And I can say it is the last religion because I have not claimed infallibility like the foolish popes of the Vatican go on doing – only an idiot can say that he is infallible, and for two thousand years these popes have been claiming they are infallible….

And it is such a beautiful and strange story: that one pope has to correct another pope, who was also infallible! One infallible pope burned Joan of Arc alive because she was rebellious and she was a heretic, and she was not following orders from the pope. After three hundred years, as people became more and more aware of Joan of Arc, her life, her story, the pope who had butchered her became more and more condemned in people’s eyes. After three hundred years it became necessary for another pope to declare Joan of Arc a saint. Now she is Saint Joan of Arc! And her bones were dragged out from the grave and worshipped. Someday some other pope may find that it is not right: she was a witch – they will drag her bones out from the grave again and curse them, and spit on them, and drag them into the filth, and do whatsoever he can do. What kind of stupidity is this? These infallible people! And strange that even in this century….

That’s why I say only one percent at the most have barely touched the point at which an authentic religion can become possible. The ninety-nine percent are still under “infallible popes.” They may be Hindus, then the shankaracharya is infallible.

You may be surprised. I used to know one shankaracharya – I used to know many, but one I was very much interested in because he belonged to the same place to which I belonged, and I knew him and he knew me from childhood. And I was interested in the man because before the public he would not accept anything from me, but in private he was absolutely in agreement with me. And he said, “You can call me a hypocrite – I am. But I am holding such a position that in public I cannot say you are right. You are right; as far as I am concerned I follow you and I try your methods and I read your books.” This was an infallible shankaracharya. Before the public he has not even the guts to say that what he is doing is wrong. And what he is doing in private is totally different and against what he is doing in public.

The man died. He wrote two wills. Perhaps one he wrote at one time, for somebody he thought was very much capable of being a shankaracharya…and forgot about the will. And when he was dying he wrote another will, for another man. Now those two are fighting in the courts about who is the real shankaracharya. These are infallible people! Now the court has locked the temple and it will not be opened till the court decides who is the real shankaracharya. And it is very difficult to decide because both the wills are written by the same man, signed by the same man, so for almost twenty years the case has been pending. Many judges have changed, but nobody can decide. How to decide it? They are simply waiting for one of the two to die so that a decision will happen; otherwise, legally there is no possibility. Both have equally valid grounds.

These infallible shankaracharyas, infallible popes, imams, caliphs…they can be proved very easily wrong in a thousand and one ways. I am not infallible. So what I am giving to you is an open religion. They have given you a closed system. A closed system is always afraid of any new truth, because the new truth will disturb the whole system. You will have to arrange it again.

You know the story…. When Galileo found that it is not the sun that goes around the earth, but the earth that goes around the sun, the infallible pope immediately called him to his court and said, “You have to change it, because the Bible says that the sun goes around the earth, and the Bible cannot be wrong because it is written by God.” And if one statement is wrong, then all other statements become doubtful.

Galileo was a very intelligent man; I love that man. Very few people have praised that man – even a man like Bertrand Russell has condemned him as a coward. I don’t think Russell understood Galileo’s point, because Galileo went to the court and kneeled down before the pope – he was old, seventy-five, dying; from his death bed he had been forced and dragged to the court – and he asked, “What do you want from me?”

The pope said, “You simply state in your book that the sun goes around the earth, and the previous statement you cancel.”

He said, “Perfectly right: I will write in my book that the sun goes round the earth. But, dear sir, one thing you should remember: neither the sun nor the earth listen to me. Still the earth will continue to go around the sun. I cannot do anything about it. I will change it in my book – the book is mine and I have every right to change it – but the universe…I cannot do anything about it.”

I think he was a man of immense humor and not a coward at all. And he did the right thing – why unnecessarily quarrel with these idiots? He said, “Okay. But remember, don’t think that this is going to change the fact. The fact remains in its place.”

Now, the Bible is a closed system. What I have given to you is not a closed system, it is an open experiment. Any truth that may come later on can be absorbed by this system without any conflict, because I have told you again and again that there are no contradictions in life; all contradictions are complementaries. So even something contradicting any statement of mine can be absorbed in the religion without any fear, because this is my position: every contradiction is a complementary. Just as day and night are complementary, life and death are complementary, all contradictions are complementary, so you can absorb even the most contradictory truth that ever comes in the future and it will be part of my system.

Hence, I say this is the first and the last religion. There will be no need for any other religion.

From Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, Chapter 1 

http://oshoite.blogspot.it/2015/12/osho-from-unconsciousness-to.html 

Osho, Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language # THE RADICAL REVOLUTION Question 4

 

Osho,

Is it possible for two people in a relationship to be bad
for each other? Does it happen that two people’s energy just does not mix? How
to know the difference between the thorns of a healthy relationship and an
unhealthy relationship?

I have never come across a single individual who is bad, but
I have come across couples - thousands and thousands of couples - who are bad.
In fact I have never come across a couple who is not bad. Persons are beautiful
and couples are ugly. Something goes wrong somewhere. It should not be so but
it is so.

The way love has been understood has been wrong. What you
call love is not love; it is something else. Sometimes you are alone and you
cannot tolerate your loneliness, and just to fill the gap, the inner hole, you
find somebody. It is not love. And of course things are going to be bad. From
the very beginning the very basis is wrong. 

Love is a sharing of two
individuals. And I call a person individual when he is happy with his
aloneness. Otherwise he is not an individual, if he cannot be happy alone. Just
think. If you cannot be happy alone, how can you be happy together? Two persons
are unhappy separately, and you think there is going to be a miracle? - two
unhappy persons together and suddenly happiness arises? Unhappiness is doubled
- not only doubled, multiplied.

Out of your unhappiness you seek the other; then the
relationship is going to be wrong. Seek the other out of happiness, and then
the relationship will never be wrong. Seek out of happiness.

First meditate, first feel your own being, first pray. First
grow into love; otherwise what are you going to do when you have found the
lover? Then you don’t know what to do.

An anecdote:

His friend was a shy one, but after being told that if he
went to the dance all he would have to do would be stand in the corner, he went.
The friend shoved him immediately into the arms of a pretty girl on the dance
floor.

For an hour or so he lost track of his shy friend, but then
spotted him standing happily next to the girl he had been shoved upon. What is
more, he had his arm around her waist and she was looking up at him with
adoring eyes.

“We are engaged,” the shy one told his friend.

“Good heavens!” said the friend. “How did that happen?”

“Well,” said the shy one, “I danced with her six times and I
just could not think of anything else to ask her.”

Your love affairs are so stupid. And then you are waiting
for something great to happen out of them. In the first place you don’t have
any love in your heart. That’s why everybody wants to be loved. You want to be
loved; your woman also wants to be loved. 

Naturally there is conflict: both are
ready to take and nobody is ready to give. And how to give? You don’t have it
in the first place. Only a loving person - one who is already loving - can find
the right partner.

This is my observation. If you are unhappy you will find
somebody who is unhappy. Unhappy people are attracted toward unhappy people.
And it is good, it is natural. It is good that the unhappy people are not
attracted towards happy people, otherwise they will destroy their happiness. It
is perfectly okay. Only happy people are attracted towards happy people. The
same attracts the same. 

Intelligent people are attracted towards intelligent
people, stupid people are attracted towards stupid people.

You can watch it. In Pune there are thousands of people, but
only a few people will be attracted toward me - only those who are really
concerned with knowing who they are. Others won’t be attracted. Even my
neighbors, just the next-door neighbors. They have not come to listen. In fact
they are very worried.

It happened.

I lived in one town for ten years, and a person used to live
just over my head, but he never came to see me. Thousands of people would come
and go, but he never came. He was simply puzzled as to why people came to me.

Then he was transferred - he was a principal in a college -
he was transferred to another town. I visited the other town. I was invited to
his college to speak to the students; then he heard me for the first time. He
had to because he was the principal. Then he became more puzzled. He said, “For
ten years I lived just on top of you, and I missed, I never came. And I never
knew that you had something to share, that you had something to give to us.” He
started crying.

I said, “Don’t be worried. Just tell me, during these two
years you have not been in that town, what has happened?”

He said, “My wife died and I became very miserable. Then I
started meditating, thinking maybe it will help. Then something really started
happening in me and I started feeling very happy. I was worried I would not be
able to be alone without my wife, but now I am so happy that I don’t want to
get entangled with anybody.”

I told him, “Maybe that’s why you could understand me. The
meditation that you tried, the happiness that you are feeling - then there is a
possibility to have contact with me. Before you were on a different plane.”

You meet people of the same plane. So the first thing to
remember is: a relationship is bound to be bitter if it has grown out of
unhappiness. First be happy, be joyful, be celebrating, and then you will find
some other soul celebrating and there will be a meeting of two dancing souls
and a great dance will arise out of it.

Don’t ask for a relationship out of loneliness, no. Then you
are moving in a wrong direction, then the other will be used as a means and the
other will use you as a means. And nobody wants to be used as a means. Every
single individual is an end unto himself. It is immoral to use anybody as a
means. First learn how to be alone. Meditation is a way of being alone.

And if you can be happy when you are alone, you have learned
the secret of being happy. Now you can be happy together. If you are happy,
then you have something to share, to give. And when you give you get; it is not
the other way. Then a need arises to love somebody. Ordinarily the need is to
be loved by somebody. It is a wrong need. It is a childish need; you are not
mature. It is a child’s attitude.

A child is born. Of course, the child cannot love the
mother; he does not know what love is and he does not know who the mother is
and who the father is. He is totally helpless. His being has still to be
integrated; he is not one piece, he is not together yet. He is just a
possibility. The mother has to love, the father has to love, the family has to
shower love on the child. Now he learns one thing: that everybody has to love
him. And he never learns that he has to love. 

Now the child will grow, and if
he remains stuck with this attitude that everybody has to love him, he will
suffer his whole life. His body has grown, but his mind has remained immature.

A mature person is one who comes to know the other need:
that now I have to love somebody. The need to be loved is childish, immature.
The need to love is mature. And when you are ready to love somebody, a
beautiful relationship will arise; otherwise not.

“Is it possible for two people in a relationship to be bad
for each other?” Yes, that’s what is happening all over the world. To be good
is very difficult. You are not good even to yourself. How can you be good to
somebody else? You don’t even love yourself - how can you love somebody else?
Love yourself, be good to yourself.

And your so-called religious saints have been teaching you
never to love yourself, never to be good to yourself - be hard on yourself!
They have been teaching you to be soft toward others and hard toward yourself.
This is absurd.

I teach you the first and foremost thing is to be loving
toward yourself. Don’t be hard, be soft. Care about yourself. Learn how to forgive
yourself again and again and again - seven times, seventy-seven times, seven
hundred and seventy-seven times. 

Learn how to forgive yourself. Don’t be hard,
don’t be antagonistic toward yourself. Then you will flower.

And in that flowering you will attract some other flower. It
is natural. Stones attract stones, flowers attract flowers. And then there is a
relationship which has grace, which has beauty, which has a benediction in it.
And if you can find such a relationship, your relationship will grow into
prayerfulness, your love will become an ecstasy, and through love you will know
what God is.

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language

Arancione: Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language # THE RADICAL...

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language # THE RADICAL REVOLUTION Question 3

Osho,

What is the meaning of surrender? How is surrender?

There are a few things - you have to do them if you want to know them. There is no way to tell anything about them. And surrender is one of those things. It is a dimension of love, let-go.

If you ask me what is surrender and what is the meaning of surrender, yes, something can be told to you, but that won’t carry any meaning. You have to taste it. It is a taste. If you taste it you know it. If you don’t taste it, I can talk about it, but you will not know it. Without your own experience, whatsoever I say will be a tautology. You ask, “What is surrender?” I say surrender is a let-go. 

But what am I saying? You will ask, “What is a let-go?” It is a tautology; I have not answered you. I say a let-go is falling in love. It is a tautology again. I am not saying anything. You will say, “What is falling in love then?” The question remains the same, and all answers will go round and round and round.

I have heard about a prudish, tight-lipped old maid who would not even allow her pet cat out of the house after dark. Headed for New York on one of her infrequent outings, she paused to remind the maid about locking up that cat each evening.

This time in New York, however, the old maid encountered a handsome old rogue who swept her off her feet. After four nights of blissful romancing she wired her maid, “Having the time of my life. Let the cat out too! Let the cat out!”

Let the cat out! When you know what love is, only then you know. There is no other way to know it.

I am creating a situation here for you to surrender. Don’t ask for the meaning. Do it. Be courageous. Let it be an experience. Accept my invitation. My doors are open; enter and be my guest. Surrender.

By surrender, in the West, a very wrong idea arises - as if you will be dominated by somebody - because surrender has a very wrong association. It has become almost a political word in the West. The Nazis surrendered: that’s how it has become associated with politics. A surrendered one is the one who is defeated. In the East we have a totally different meaning for the term. It has nothing to do with war and nothing to do with defeat. 

Have you not heard the proverb that in love defeat is the only victory? If you are defeated in love you have become victorious. Yes, that’s how it is in surrender. It has nothing to do with defeat. It is not that you are being dominated by somebody. It is not that now somebody else is going to oppress you, exploit you; that you are becoming a slave. 

No, it is nothing of the sort. Surrender in the East is used as a technique.

And the surrender has to be made only to a person who is no more, so he cannot dominate you. So this has to be remembered: don’t surrender to a person who is still there, otherwise he will dominate you and he will give you a discipline and he will start forcing you to do this and not to do that and he will create a prison around you.

That’s why I don’t give you any discipline. Even if you ask, I don’t give. You ask continuously because you want to depend, because you want to be a slave, because you don’t want to take your own responsibility. You want to throw the responsibility on somebody else. You are in search of a father figure. You want somebody to lead you.

But I am not going to give you any discipline and I am not going to give you any clear-cut direction to do this and don’t do that. All that I am going to do is to share my awareness with you so you can become a little more aware, to share my love with you so you can become a little more loving. It has nothing to do with any discipline.

Coming closer to me, you will be able to imbibe my spirit. That is the meaning of surrender: that you are ready to come close to me, that you are not afraid, that you will not protect yourself against me, that you will not be defensive, that simply you are ready to come closer to me, that you are attracted, that you have listened to my call, that something has clicked in your heart and you will try to know who this man really is, what manner of man. You would like to enter into my emptiness and be surrounded by my emptiness.

Sannyas is the visible effort of surrender. Many people come to me and they say, “We don’t take sannyas. Can’t you help us?” I say, “I will try my best, but it won’t be of much help because you will continuously protect yourself. You will be defensive.” Sannyas is just a gesture, that “Now I drop my defenses and I am ready to go with you.”

Of course, it is risky. You don’t know me yet. How can you know? If you surrender you will know; you cannot know beforehand. So it is only for very courageous people. The daredevils - it is only for them. And I exist for daredevils, those who are ready to risk their lives and to go into the unknown and to see if something happens.

If you are ready to go, it is going to happen; and then you will know the meaning. Then too you will not be able to tell somebody else what the meaning is. The meaning is in the taste, in the experience.

And you ask, “How is surrender?” Apparently, sannyas is the “how,” obviously. The deeper “how” will open its doors when you have entered the porch. Sannyas is the porch; once you enter the porch - you have accepted me and I have accepted you - then there is a deep agreement, that you trust me. Now I can invite you to deeper realms of my being. You become an initiate.

The second thing happens someday. Sometimes it happens with the sannyas itself. If you are totally surrendered, then the first moment of contact with me and it happens - you become an initiate. 

Sometimes it takes time. The outward sannyas happens first; then you wait, then you watch, then you see things, then slowly, slowly you relax, inch by inch, you drop your ego, and more and more I penetrate in you. Then one day, without any warning, suddenly it has happened - you suddenly become aware it has happened. Now my light exists in you and my heart beats in you. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes days, sometimes minutes, sometimes not a single minute. It depends on you, how much courage you have.

And of course, Westerners are gaining much more from me than the Easterners, because the East has become very cowardly. So by and by you will see more and more Western people around here. The East is very cowardly. They have become almost corpses. They don’t have the spirit - the spirit that Kabir calls the spirit for the quest of truth - they don’t have it. Either they believe they already know what truth is or they think there is enough time and there is no hurry - if not in this life, then in the next life.

And for them, to be religious has become more a way of being respectable, and of course my sannyas will not appeal to them because if they are respectable, by becoming my sannyasin they will lose all respect. They will not become respectable through my sannyas. Through my sannyas they will become rebellious; they will start falling out of society. People will start avoiding them. People will start feeling they are dangerous and infectious, and people will think that they have gone mad or something.

But in the West something new is happening - a new courage, a new spirit of inquiry. It always comes whenever a country becomes materially rich. It always happens. When a country becomes materially poor, it loses spirit. It becomes very poor, not only outwardly. It becomes inwardly poor. It loses confidence, it loses courage, it loses potentiality. It starts dragging. In the West people have become materially rich: they are well-fed, science has come to a certain point from where religion can be contacted, and people have seen material affluence. Now they would like to see something beyond it. It is not enough.

So if you are ready, don’t ask how is surrender? Surrender.

Once it happened, Jesus was staying with his friends in a house, and the friends said, “Tell us how to pray.”

Jesus said, “But how to say how to pray? I will pray, and if you are ready you can participate.”

And Jesus started praying. Now the others were standing there and they couldn’t see what to do. He started moving into some unknown realm. They watched and he prayed; and when he came back from the world of his prayer, they said again, “But tell us how to pray.”

He said, “I showed you how to pray, and you ask how to pray!”

Remember, maybe the question arises out of your cowardliness. Maybe you want to be certain about everything, what it is, whether it is worth it or not.

I am here, surrendered. I am here in prayerfulness. I am here in godliness. Come closer to me.

And I have made it easier than it has ever been, because I am not putting any conditions on you. I accept you as you are. It has never been done before. I accept you as you are - I have no condemnation, no evaluation, no judgment. If you are a drunkard, good. If you are a gambler, good, exactly right - because this is a sort of gamble and this is a way of becoming drunk. Whatsoever you are, you are accepted.

Come closer.

Sannyas will be a visible thing for you to do, and leave the next thing to me. I will do it. You do one thing, I will do the other. There is a saying in Arabian countries, “If you walk one foot towards God, he walks one thousand one feet towards you.” You walk one foot towards me; I will walk one thousand and one feet towards you. You do the first, the second I will do.

But you come and ask, “But sannyas.just by changing the clothes. It is too outward. Tell us something inward.” You are not even ready to do the outward and you ask for the inward. And you are an outwardly-oriented man. That’s why I am talking about the outward sannyas - that’s where you are. That’s from where the journey has to start. You are yet outside yourself; from there the journey has to start. The inward can happen only later on, not right now.

Osho: 

Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language

http://oshoite.blogspot.it/2016/04/osho-ecstasy-forgotten-language-radical.html 

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language # 2 THE RADICAL REVOLUTION Question 2

Osho,

Sometimes listening to you, an overwhelming feeling comes over me of how absurd and ridiculous we all are and yet at the same time how incredibly beautiful life is. I feel there is so much I want to say to you, but it can’t be put into words, and I would like to just run up and hug you.

Good idea - but don’t do it. Because even then you will not be able to say what you want to say, even by a hug. You will be able to show your helplessness, but nothing will be said.

When something overwhelming is happening, it cannot be expressed. It is inexpressible by its very nature. It is intrinsically inexpressible, ineffable. So whenever it happens a very deep helplessness arises. Words seem to be futile, meaningless, trivial, and then one would like to say it in some other way. One would like to hug or kiss or hold the hand - but even then nothing is said. Only your helplessness is shown. One would like to cry or weep, but then too nothing is said. Only your helplessness is expressed.

Rather than trying to express it, my suggestion is, when this happens, remain with it. Don’t make any effort to express or not to express - because if you become occupied with expression, you will miss it. You are already diverted, distracted. That’s why I say the idea is good but don’t try to do it.

If you feel the benediction around you, the greater, the vaster surrounding you, the infinite just around you, rather than trying to express it, get lost in it - because now the ego is trying another way, now the ego wants to express it. And if you become too interested in expressing it, you may become a painter, because the painter is trying to express the inexpressible through colors on the canvas, but who has been able to express it? Or you may become a poet. The poet is trying to express the inexpressible in words, but who has ever been able to express it?

9

This is the difference between art and religion. When the vast surrounds you, the artist starts making efforts to express it, and the mystic simply gets lost in it. And the mystic comes to know it. The artist misses at the very last moment.

It will be happening to more and more people around here. This is a very crazy place to be. It is really far out. To more and more people it is going to happen, so keep it as a deep remembrance that whenever you feel that something unknown has knocked on your doors, don’t be worried about expression, don’t start thinking how to say it or how to write it. Let it be. Go into it. Be drowned in it. Be drunk with it. Don’t make any effort.

These are the two efforts. First, people try - how to achieve it? They miss. I don’t teach you any “how.” Then when it happens they start thinking how to express it; again the “how” comes from the back door. Again I would like to remind you, don’t bring the “how.” It is good as it is. Unexpressed, what is wrong in it? Let it be so. Amen. Let it be so.

“Sometimes listening to you, an overwhelming feeling comes over me of how absurd and ridiculous we all are, and yet at the same time how incredibly beautiful life is.” There is no contradiction in the absurd and the beautiful. In fact the absurd is the beautiful and the beautiful is always absurd. Don’t see any contradiction.

The mind is always very tempted to see contradictions because the mind has been trained in a certain logic which does not allow contradictions to be together. The mind has been trained by Aristotelian philosophy, all over the world. Aristotle says A is A and never not A. This is the whole logic of the mind: A is A and never not A; A is A and never B. How can A be B? But in reality A is B and C and D - and the whole alphabet. In reality things have multidimensional qualities.

You see a man is loving. When the man is loving you think, “Yes, how beautiful a man.” But the next moment he is angry; then there is a contradiction. You say, “This man deceived me. Has this man not heard of Aristotle yet? A is A and never B. You are a loving man. Don’t be angry!” But man is man. He is angry and loving and jealous and possessive, and sometimes so sharing, and sometimes so mean. Have you not watched it? Sometimes your friend is so sharing and sometimes so mean. This is how reality is. Reality contains all contradictions.

You say, “.how absurd and ridiculous we all are and yet how incredibly beautiful life is.” Nothing is contradictory in it. If you were all very, very consistent, life would not be so rich. It would be stale and gray. Life is rich because it is a rainbow, it is psychedelic. It has so many colors and so many changing colors. And it is so unpredictable - that’s why it is absurd.

10

Why do you call it absurd? - because you cannot contain it in your logic. Your logic falls short; it is bigger than your logic. It destroys your logic. Somehow you make a small part of your mind clear, and life comes and destroys everything.

Have you not seen somebody who for forty years has been absolutely logical and has never allowed anything in his life which is illogical, has said God does not exist because he is not visible, has said prayer is foolish and love is not possible? Then one day he comes across a beautiful woman and falls in love. Forty years’ training and logic, and all gone to the dogs within a single moment! Life is absurd.

But by absurd you simply say one thing: that it is not logical. But why should it be logical? It has no obligation to be logical. It has never pretended to be logical. It is man’s mediocre mind that has been trying to fix it somehow so you can be secure about it. No, it cannot be fixed. It is a constant flux.

And it is ridiculous, yes, because it is not serious. It is ridiculous because it is a play. In India we call it leela; it is a play.

God loves children. Can’t you see it? Every day old people are taken away, and he goes on sending babies. How absurd. A person has been trained his whole life, for seventy years. He has become a great philosopher, a professor, a scholar - so many PhDs and DLitts and the DD - and now suddenly this mad God takes him away. What type of economics is this? And instead sends a baby, crying and howling. Again train him, send him to the school and the college and the university. And by the time he is ready and looks of any use, here comes God and takes him away. It is absurd.

God loves the absurdity. God is not a utilitarian. He does not believe in utility, he believes in play. The moment you become too serious, he says, “Now it is time. Please come back home. I will dismantle you and send you again. Now you need a mind wash: you have become too trained, too disciplined, too much of a commodity. You are no longer a freedom.” That’s why old people are taken away. He destroys them, again creates small babies, and sends them; and again they are there with all the nonsense. And again we are after them to teach them. Neither do we learn anything nor does God learn anything. It goes on.

It is ridiculous, but that’s why it is so beautiful. If God was a mathematician as Vinoba Bhave says. He says that God is a mathematician. Now this seems to be the most sacrilegious statement ever made. God a mathematician? No, he is not, not at all. The mathematician is an ugly thing. The mathematician is a computer. The mathematician is clever and cunning, but mechanical. Mathematics has no poetry in it. Mathematics is the only absolutely fictitious science created by man. In the room you say there are six chairs. There are chairs - but not six. Six is man’s concept. If you go out of the room, chairs will be there, but six has disappeared. Mathematical concepts are human creations. God is not a mathematician, otherwise such beautiful play will become impossible.

11

Don’t you see, sometimes there are many things man is destroying, thinking that by destroying them the world will be better? God has never destroyed them. Trees have existed. Sometimes you think what is the point of a tree? You make furniture, cut it; make doors and furniture and then it is useful. Hills are there, the Himalayas are there, and the virgin snow on their tops, which nobody has walked on it. For what? What is the point of them? Why are the Himalayas needed? Make them a plain so people can live there and townships can grow. That’s how man has destroyed the whole of nature.

God is very playful. There are many absurd things. So many stars - for what? They go on moving. It is not a mathematical arrangement. God is very luxurious. He does not believe in necessity. He is a spendthrift; he is not a miser. He goes on throwing his energy - it is playful energy, it is just like a child splashing in water. Don’t ask why. He will not be able to answer. But he is enjoying it. It has no economical value, but life is not economics, nor is it politics. It is poetry, and poetry is by its very nature, by its very definition, illogical. Poetry is beautiful because there are sudden leaps and jumps. Prose is not so beautiful, because there are no sudden jumps and leaps. Prose moves on plain ground, in a logical sequence.

Sooner or later, when you are ready, I am going to drop talking in a sequential way. Sooner or later, when my sannyasins are ready, my talks will be more like a collage. You will have to find out what I mean. You will have to find out your own meaning. I will say a few things, but I will go on jumping and I will not connect as I connect right now. Once you are ready - more attentive, more aware, more alert - I will not connect with logic, I will drop the logic. The unity will be there, but not on the surface. The unity will be there because they will all be my statements - the unity will consist in me. And the unity will be there because they are to be understood by your awareness - the unity will come in your awareness. But taken directly, if a visitor comes, he will think this man is mad. Right now I connect, I connect because I know you will not be able to understand the absurd yet. I am waiting for the day you are ready, so I can be as absurd as God is.

Have you seen anywhere any symmetry in nature? It is not. Man makes things in a symmetrical way. If he makes a house he makes it symmetrical. But in nature there is no symmetry. A great pine tree, and just by the side a small rosebush. And you cannot ask what the connection is between the rosebush and the pine tree. God will laugh. He will say, “Who said that there is any need for a connection? The rosebush is a rosebush and the pine is a pine - and both are happy. There is no need to bridge them.”

Sooner or later I am going to become just like God. I will say something and then I will forget about it and I will tell a joke which is completely unrelated. Then it is for you to work it out. Then it will be more beautiful, certainly more beautiful, because it will be more playful. That is the meaning of a collage - so many fragments from so many dimensions together. On the surface, no unity, but if you look deep there is an organic unity. That unity exists in the painter, not in the painting.

12
If you really want to know the meaning of poetry, you will have to go deep into the heart of the poet. For prose you need not go into the heart. Prose is plain, prose is worldly, prose is of the marketplace, prose is human. Poetry is divine. That’s why all the great scriptures of the world are in poetry - the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Koran, the Dhammapada. They are all poetry, beautiful poetry, outpourings of a singing heart. Logic, there is none. Love, there is much.

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language

Osho Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language CHAPTER 2: THE RADICAL REVOLUTION

                                                                       

The first question:

Osho,

What I mean by sannyas is a spiritual discipline, so that one becomes a religious person. But it is not happening to me. What to do?

My sannyas is not a discipline. My sannyas is freedom, freedom from all control - even from self-control. A controlled man is a dead man. Whether you are controlled by others or by yourself does not make much difference.

My sannyas is spontaneity, living moment to moment without any prefabricated discipline, living with the unknown, not exactly knowing where you are going - because if you know already where you are going you are dead. Then life runs in a mechanical way. A life should be a flow from the known toward the unknown. One should be dying each moment to the known so the unknown can penetrate you. And only the unknown liberates.

Discipline can never be of the unknown. Discipline has to be of the mind. The mind is your past. All that you have learned, all that you have been conditioned for, all that you have experienced, all that you have thought about - this is your mind. Out of this mind comes planning for the future. That planning for the future will be nothing but a repetition of the past. It comes out of the past; it cannot be anything else. Maybe a little modified here and there, decorated here and there, but there will be no radical revolution in it.

My sannyas is a radical revolution. By giving you sannyas, I give you freedom. I give you courage to live without any planning, to live without mind, to live without past. Of course it is dangerous, but life is dangerous. Only when you are dead, then there is no danger, then you are safe - safe in your grave. Safety never exists before that. If you want to be safe and secure and perfectly protected, insured against all dangers, then don’t enter into sannyas. Enter into your grave. Then don’t breathe, because breathing is dangerous. One day breathing is going to bring death to you. Breathing is dangerous.

Life exists in danger, pulsates in danger. Life exists in the ocean of death. It has to be dangerous; it cannot be safe and secure. You are not a rock. You are a flower; fragile, you are - in the morning laughing with the sun; by the evening, you are gone. How can life be secure? In its frailty, in its fragility, how can you even conceive of insurance? No, there is no insurance, there cannot be.

And one should not live by the philosophy the insurance companies go on propagating. One should live with the danger, with death hand in hand. Then tremendous dimensions open before you. Then God is revealed.

God is very dangerous. There exists no other dangerous word comparable to God. God means to live a life of spontaneity, of nature. Don’t try to corrupt your future. Let it be. Don’t try to corrupt it, don’t try to manage it. Don’t give it a mold and a form and a pattern.

Of course, if you live the way I teach, many things will disappear from your life. The first thing will be the security - and it is a false thing. Only the false disappears with sannyas, not the real. The real starts appearing. Security will disappear, marriage will disappear. Love will remain; love is real.

Let it be more clear: love can exist with sannyas, but not marriage, because marriage is an effort to give a pattern to love, to give a discipline to love, to give it a legal, social form. But what are you doing? How can you manage that which has not come yet? You can love a woman or a man, and you can feel in this moment that you will love her always and always, but this is just a feeling of this moment. How can you promise?

An authentic man will never promise. How can you promise for the future? How can you say really you will be able to love tomorrow too? If love disappears what will you do? And it appeared on its own accord - you have not brought it in - so when it disappears what will you do? It comes and goes, it happens and disappears. It is not within your power. It is bigger than you.

So when you say, “I will love you tomorrow too,” what are you going to do? If love disappears you will pretend, you will substitute. That’s what happens in a marriage. Then two dead persons living in a dead relationship go on quarreling, fighting, nagging each other, trying to dominate, manipulate, exploit, destroy. Marriage is an ugly thing. Love is tremendously beautiful.

My sannyas is like love; the older sannyas was more like marriage. My sannyas is simply a courage to face whatsoever is going to happen, without any rehearsal for it.

How can you prepare? The tomorrow is not known at all. Whatsoever you prepare is going to hinder. It will become a screen on your eyes and you will not be able to see what is. All preparation is dangerous. Remain unprepared. Then you will be excited, then each moment will be a joy and a wonder, and each moment will bring something new to you which has never happened, and you will never be bored.

The life of marriage, the life of all discipline, is the life of boredom - monotonous. Monogamy is monotony. You have to repeat the same. You are not free to explore new ways of being. You are not free to see new things. You are not free to experience new beauty, new truth. If you are disciplined, what does it mean? It simply means now you have a particular standpoint, your eyes are no longer open. You are a Christian; then you have a discipline. You are a Hindu; then you have a discipline and a dogma, and your eyes are completely full of that dogma. Then you cannot see that which is.

I would like you to be totally uncontrolled. I would like you to be absolutely a chaos, with no order whatsoever.

And please don’t misunderstand me. There is every possibility because when I say something I have to use words, and words have been very corrupted - corrupted by you, corrupted by usage - for centuries. When I say chaos, you become afraid. But you don’t know the beauty of chaos, and you don’t know the spontaneous order of a chaos. You don’t know the order that comes out of freedom. Not enforced by your mind, not by your past, but just by your being aware, alert, free, responsive, an order arises. I don’t call it order, because it goes on changing every moment. I don’t call it a discipline, because it has nothing to do with you. In the chaos you are no more, the ego has disappeared.

Who is going to discipline? The ego. The ego says, “Become a better man, improve yourself! You are a sinner, become a saint; you are violent, become nonviolent; you are angry, become more loving.” But who is going to do it, and who is this who is hankering for improvement? The ego wants a few more decorations, wants to become more respectable, wants to become more certain, wants to have a better grounding in the world, wants to feel more solid, wants to become somebody in particular, wants to become special.

No, my sannyas is not going to give you anything of this sort. I don’t deal in dead things. That is not my business. My whole effort here is to give you a taste of freedom. Once you have known the taste, you will never settle for anything else. If it is a question of settling somewhere, you are wrong. My sannyas is a wandering; it is not a settlement. In my sannyas you can rest, but in the morning you have to go. It is a constant flow, river-like unless the ocean is achieved. But the ocean comes naturally out of the flowing of the river: there is no plan to reach the ocean, the river does not know. Maps of where the ocean is don’t exist for a river.

And the river has no discipline. Sometimes it goes to the south and sometimes it starts moving to the north, and sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another direction. Have you ever seen the zigzag path of a river? It is not straight. It is not economical. It is not mathematical. It is not the shortest cut at all, but very zigzag. It just goes on, not knowing where it is going. It just goes on because the energy is there to go. And one day the river reaches. If the river were planning, then it would find the shortest route, then it would move in a straight line, then it would never deviate, then it would be very consistent. But then it would not be a river - maybe a canal, a manmade canal, but it would not be a river. It wouldn’t have any freedom.

I don’t want you to be canals. Canals are ugly. I want you to be rivers.

And life is a hilly track. Move in freedom, move in total freedom, and each moment remember to drop the past. It accumulates like dust. Each moment you have experienced something, and then it goes on accumulating. Don’t accumulate it. Just go on ceasing as far as the past is concerned, dying as far as the past is concerned, so you are totally alive, throbbing, pulsating, streaming, and, whatsoever comes, you face it with awareness.

You must have a wrong notion about my sannyas. You say, “What I mean by sannyas is a spiritual discipline.” Then your meaning is different from my meaning. No, it has nothing to do with discipline, and it has nothing to do with spirituality.

When Bodhidharma reached China and the emperor received him, the emperor asked one thing: “I have done many meritorious acts. I have made many Buddhist monasteries, thousands of Buddhist monks are fed from my treasure, millions of Chinese have been converted to Buddhism, thousands of temples have been raised for Buddha. What is going to be my merit for all this doing?”

Bodhidharma was very ferocious and he looked into the emperor’s eyes and said, “Your Majesty, there is no merit in it.”

The emperor was very shocked, because many Buddhists had come before - monks and missionaries - and they had all said to him, “This will be your merit: you will reach to the seventh paradise. Do more virtuous acts, donate more, make more monasteries, temples, Buddha statues; convert the whole country to Buddhism. Your merit is going to be great, Your Majesty.” And now here comes this Bodhidharma and he says no merit at all!

But the emperor was a very cultured man. He changed the subject, he dropped the subject before so many people. And this man looked dangerous. The emperor said, “Then tell me something about the holy truth of Buddha.”

And Bodhidharma said, “Nothing can be said about it because it is vast and, remember, there is nothing holy in it. Holy, unholy, is part of a dual mind. There is nothing holy, nothing unholy. It simply is.”

Now this was too much. The emperor was very offended. Bodhidarma is denying even Buddha’s truth and saying nothing is holy in it. The emperor became angry. For a moment he forgot all his courteous manner, courtly manner and politeness, and he said, “Then who is this fellow who is standing before me?”

And Bodhidharma bowed down and said, “Your Majesty, I don’t know.”

My sannyas is not spiritual, because I don’t divide the world into the material and the spiritual. It is nothing holy, because I don’t divide the world into the unholy and the holy. By becoming a sannyasin you have not become a saint, because I don’t divide people into sinners and saints. People are people. All are beautiful - sinners and saints and all.

In fact, if there are only saints in the world and no sinners, the world would not be worth living in. Just think of a world which consists only of holy saints. Can you conceive of any worse world than that? No, it cannot be of much value. The sinner and the saint, they are the warp and woof, they are together, they are one - the dark and the light. Death and life are meeting every moment.

So I don’t call it spiritual, because I have no condemnation for matter. In the very word spiritual you have denied something, you have condemned something, you have judged. You have already declared that “The material is wrong and I want to be spiritual.”

Can’t you see a simple fact that you exist in the body as the body? Have you ever seen any soul without a body, unembodied? Or have you seen any body alive without a soul? The bifurcation is stupid. The soul is nothing but the dynamism of your body and the body is nothing but the materialization of your soul. The body is your visible soul and the soul is your invisible body.

And I would like you to be as much a materialist as a spiritualist. I don’t make the division. I don’t want to create any split in you. You are already split. Your so-called religions have already done much damage to you. They have created a schizophrenic world in which everybody is split. And of course then there is tension, anxiety, anguish, because you become two. By just calling yourself a spiritual being, you are condemning your body and you are creating a rift between the body and the soul, between God and the world.

You say God created the world? You state it in a very wrong way. I say God is the world. God has not created it, because he has never been able to become separate from it. It is not like a painter, that he paints something and then he is free of the painting and the painting becomes separate - the painter can die but the painting will live. No, God is not like that. God is more like a dancer. Hence I have so much love for dance. God is more like a dancer. You cannot separate the dancer from the dance. He is Nataraj: the dancer of all the dancers, the master of all the dancers. He is dancing in the leaf, in the flower, in the raindrops, in the river, in the peacock. All over is his dance.

He has not created the world; he is the world. The world is his dance, and the separation does not exist. If the world were not there, he would not be a dancer at all. If the dancer were not there, the world could not exist. They are not separate, they are inseparably together. In fact to say “together” is not right, because they are not two; how can they be together? They are one.

And I would like you to remember this unity always and always because you are prone to forget it. Your minds have been conditioned by dualists: matter and mind, body and soul, God and the world, samsara and nirvana.

My sannyasin is the unity, is the bridge between all duality. That’s why I have not told you to renounce the world, because it is God’s dance. Where are you going to renounce it? Have you gone mad? It is his market, it is his world. The noise is his. Once you recognize it, the noise turns into beautiful music. In all these relationships only he is there. In your wife he is, in you he is, in your children too. In your friends he is, in your enemies too. Only he is.

So don’t go anywhere, don’t renounce. Live it as totally as possible - and live it as an integrated being. My emphasis is for an integrated being. You are not in the body: you are the body. Drop that nonsense of “I am in the body.” From the very beginning that nonsense makes a distinction, and then you are very far away from the body and a conflict arises. You start manipulating your body, you start controlling your body, you start doing things to your body. You become destructive, you become violent.

Your so-called saints are all violent. Howsoever they talk about nonviolence, howsoever much, it makes no difference. They are violent people.

There are two types of violent people. The first type is violent with others; the other type is violent with himself. There are sadists and masochists. The sadists torture others; they become Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao. Then there are masochists, they torture themselves; they become Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Lanza del Vasto, and so on, so forth. But both are violent people. One tortures himself, another tortures others.

My sannyasin has to drop torturing. So it is not a discipline and it has nothing to do with spirituality: “Yes, Your Majesty, there is nothing holy in it!” And don’t get angry with me, and don’t ask who is this fellow sitting here and talking with you. I don’t know.

You say, “What I mean by sannyas is a spiritual discipline, and through this discipline one becomes a religious man.” If you become a religious man by discipline, you will be a bogus religious man. What does discipline have to do with religion? If you practice religion you will be false. Ordinarily it has been told to you, whatsoever you preach, practice it. And I say to you, if you practice it, you will become false, because practice means you are creating character armor around you. Now you will be living according to a certain ideology, and that ideology will function as a barrier. It will become your prejudice.

A religious man is absolutely unprejudiced. He has no outlook, he has no philosophy, he has no ideology. He is very, very natural. He is more like animals, more like small babies, more like trees and rocks - and yet, very, very different from them. But the difference comes from his awareness.

You say if we practice a certain discipline we will become religious, as if religiousness is something like a goal in the future: you have to practice today so tomorrow you become religious. No, religiousness is your nature. You are already that. No practice is needed for it.

The Indian term for religion is very, very beautiful. The Indian term is dharma. Dharma means your intrinsic nature. Whatsoever you want to become, in fact, you are already. It is already the case. It is not a question that you have to practice something and then as a result, as a reward, you become religious. No, you become religious if you just become aware. This very moment you become religious.

Sometimes, even without knowing it, you become religious. Whenever you are alert, silent, peaceful, you are religious. Whenever you are unalert, tense, worried, you are irreligious. Religion and irreligion continuously change. Sometimes sitting with your friends, listening to music, you are so quiet and so happy, for no reason at all, just feeling joyful. You are religious; you are in tune with your nature. You may not even be conscious of the fact that in this moment you are religious.

You have gone for a morning walk, the sun is rising and it is beautiful all around. The air is cool and fragrant and the birds have started singing, and there are a few white clouds floating in the sky. Suddenly you are no longer the ordinary, miserable person. You feel good. Suddenly you feel turned on. The vast sky and the clouds and the birds and the morning breeze and the sun rising slowly - something rises in you too, something becomes alert. You have a dance to your feet and a song arises. You would like to sit under a tree and sing a song. You are religious.

When you are in love you are religious. Holding the hand of your friend or your woman or your man, not doing anything, just sitting silently, looking at the stars, you are religious.

Religion is not a result of something that you practice. Religion enters in you any moment you relax. Religion is a flowering of relaxation, not a result of practicing. Remember the difference because when you practice you become more tense.

You can see the people who practice. They are very tense because every moment they are fighting. How can they relax? Have you seen a saint relaxing? Impossible! A saint cannot relax, because if he relaxes he is afraid of becoming a sinner. He has to be constantly on guard. He sits upright because deep inside he is uptight. You can go and you can see these saints in India. They are on exhibition everywhere. Upright they sit, with their backbone straight, in a dead yoga posture like statues. They can’t relax.

Saints cannot laugh, because if they laugh there is danger. If you laugh you become ordinary, just an ordinary human being. They have to remain serious, and they have to be continuously on guard. You don’t understand their misery. They are imprisoned, and their imprisonment is such that they are the prisoner and they are the jailer too. So a prisoner can escape from the prison, there is a possibility, because the jailer is a different person; you can deceive him. But a saint cannot, because he himself is the jailer. He goes on whipping himself, torturing, starving himself. He is very nasty with his body. But you say, “He is a great ascetic” - these nasty people, horrible and hideous! But then they are also waiting: in some future there is going to be a result.

No, I don’t teach you result-oriented life at all. I teach you the relaxed way of life. Here and now you can be religious. You are, this moment, if you are relaxing with me.

Those who have come to feel me, understand me. Those who have come to have a taste of my presence, relax. They are not here for any gain, they are not here for any greed, they are not here to attain something in future life. They are just here to be with me - to laugh a little with me, to have a little fun, to joke a little. Then you are religious. In that moment, if you allow a little relaxation, you are religious, because religion is your innermost nature. Whenever you are not tense, it is there. When you become tense, you lose contact with it.

And now you ask, “But it is not happening to me. What to do?” If it had happened it would have surprised me. That’s what I am saying: it cannot happen that way. If you want to become a pseudo-religious person, then it is okay, that’s your choice. But never blame me. That is your responsibility. If you want to be a pseudo-religious person, you can become one - you can practice.

Truth cannot be practiced. You have to dissolve yourself into it. Truth can never become something that you can hold in your hand. It is vast. How can you hold it in your hand? It can never become your property. You have to relax into it, dissolve into it.

When you dissolve into it, it is there, and it takes and possesses your whole being. And then it lives through you. That is what I call a religious life: when truth starts living through you, when God starts dancing through you and you don’t create any barrier for him and you don’t say no. You become a yea-sayer and you say yes, and your yes is total and your yes is unconditional; then God is very happy in you. And when God is happy in you, suddenly you will find he is happy all around you. Then you are blessed. And then you can bless the whole of existence.

Osho: Ecstasy: The Forgotten Language

http://oshoite.blogspot.it/2016/04/osho-ecstasy-forgotten-language-chapter.html