Osho,
Today is my eighth sannyas birthday. Isn't eight years a very long time to miss the obvious?
The obvious has been missed for hundreds of lives, so no time is long enough to miss it. On the other hand, even a single minute is enough to recognize it.
In fact, it is a nontemporal phenomenon; time has no concern with it. If you think in terms of years, if you have missed it in the moment when it was possible to get it, you will go on missing. Time cannot help; on the contrary, the longer you have missed it the more is the possibility to miss it again when the moment comes to recognize it.
The question is from Devaraj. He should not be worried, because he has not missed it. And it is not the time of eight years that has helped him not to miss. It is his love – not the length of time but the depth of love that he did not miss it.
He has loved me immensely and in a very difficult situation. He is my personal physician, and anybody in that situation will be in a very difficult situation. I am a difficult patient. I don’t listen to him or to anybody; I simply tell him to do what he should tell me to do. And he has to manage somehow to do it – and to do it rightly, because he has to take care of medical science and he has to take care of a madman.
I won’t listen because I understand my body and its ways. Whatever he, or any doctor in the world has learned about bodies and ways, they have learned about corpses, not real bodies; they have been dissecting dead bodies. Sooner or later medical science will have to accept the fact that their understanding is basically wrong, because a living body functions totally differently; the dead body does not function at all. You study the dead body and you apply your conclusions to the living body. That is one of the greatest flaws in modern medical science.
But with me the difficulty is even more; it is not only a question of a living body. Modern medical science has no understanding of a body in which enlightenment has happened – that its functioning changes absolutely, totally.
But Devaraj has been able to understand for the simple reason that he has been able to love. His science, his experience, and my body’s different functioning may have created a great problem for him to understand – but love solves everything. He has followed my understanding of my body and its wisdom, still keeping in tune with his scientific medical knowledge and not going against it either. He has done something which has never been done before, and he has done it successfully.
He need not worry: eight years or eighty years make no difference. The first moment he saw me the obvious became a reality to him, and not for a single moment has he lost sight of it; otherwise you can live with an awakened person for your whole life and still not see what awakening is, what illumination is.
So remember, it is not the length of time but the depth of love that makes the obvious understood. In that very understanding a tremendous transformation takes place. Only such people know intimacy with a master.

Osho,
What is the nature of this chatterbox mind of mine? It has been going on and on now for as long as I can remember. What are its origins? Is its source somewhere in the vast silence it dissolves into when I am in your presence?
The mind is simply a biocomputer. When the child is born he has no mind; there is no chattering going on in him. It takes almost three to four years for his mechanism to start functioning. And you will see that girls start talking earlier than boys. They are bigger chatterboxes. They have a better quality biocomputer.
It needs information to be fed into it; that’s why if you try to remember your life backward, you will get stuck somewhere at the age of four if you are a man, or at the age of three if you are a woman. Beyond that is a blank. You were there; many things must have happened, many incidents must have occurred, but there seems to be no memory recorded, so you cannot remember. But you can remember back to the age of four or three very clearly.
Mind collects its data from the parents, from the school, from other children, neighbors, relatives, society, churches; all around there are sources. You must have seen little children: when for the first time they start speaking, they will repeat the same word many times. The joy! – a new mechanism has started functioning in them.
When they can make sentences they will make sentences so joyously, again and again. When they can start asking questions, then they will ask about each and everything. They are not interested in your answers, remember! Watch a child when he asks a question; he is not interested in your answer, so please don’t give him a long answer from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The child is not interested in your answer; the child is simply enjoying that he can question. A new faculty has come into being in him.
This is how he goes on collecting. Then he will start reading and collect more words. In this society, silence does not pay; words pay, and the more articulate you are, the more you will be paid.
What are your leaders? What are your politicians? What are your professors? What are your priests, theologians, philosophers, condensed to one thing? They are very articulate. They know how to use words meaningfully, significantly, consistently, so that they can impress people.
It is rarely taken note of that our whole society is dominated by verbally articulate people. They may not know anything; they may not be wise, they may not even be intelligent. But one thing is certain: they know how to play with words. It is a game, and they have learned it. It pays in respectability, in money, in power – in every way. So, everybody tries, and the mind becomes filled with many words, many thoughts.
You can turn any computer on or off, but you cannot turn the mind off. The switch does not exist. There is no reference about it, that when God made the world, when he made man, he made a switch for the mind so that you could turn it on or turn it off. There is no switch, so from birth to death it continues.
You will be surprised that the people who understand computers and who understand the human brain have a very strange idea. If we take out the brain from the skull of a human being and keep it alive mechanically, it goes on chattering in the same way. It does not matter to it that it is now no longer connected to the poor person who was suffering from it; it still dreams. Now that it is connected to machines, it still dreams, it still imagines, it still fears, it still projects, hopes, tries to be this or that. It is completely unaware that now it can do nothing; the person it used to be attached to is no longer there.
You can keep this brain alive for thousands of years attached to mechanical devices, and it will go on chattering, round and round, the same things, because we have not yet been able to teach it new things. Once we can teach it new things, it will repeat new things.
There is an idea prevalent in scientific circles: it is a great wastage that when a man like Albert Einstein dies, his brain also dies with him. If we could save the brain, implant the brain into somebody else’s body, then the brain would go on functioning. It doesn’t matter whether Albert Einstein is alive or not; that brain will continue to think about the theory of relativity, about stars and about theories. The idea is that just as people donate blood and people donate eyes before they die, people should start donating their brains too so that they can be kept. If we feel that they are special brains, very qualified and it is sheer wastage to let them die, then we can move them to another body.
Some idiot can be made an Albert Einstein, and the idiot will never know – because inside the skull of man there is no sensitivity; you can change anything and the person will never know. Just make the person unconscious and change anything you want to change in his brain: you can change the whole brain, and he will wake up with the new chattering and not even suspect what has happened.
This chattering is our education, and it is basically wrong because it teaches you only half of the process – how to use the mind. It does not teach you how to stop it so that it can relax – because even when you are asleep it continues. It knows no sleep. Seventy years, eighty years, it works continuously.
If we can educate people, and that’s what I am trying to impress on you, that it is possible: it is possible to put a switch on the mind and turn it off when it is not needed – call it meditation. It is helpful in two ways. It will give you a peace, a silence, which you have never known before, and will give you an acquaintance of yourself which, because of the chattering mind has not been possible – it has always kept you engaged. Secondly, it will also give the mind rest. And if we can give the mind rest it will be more capable of doing things more efficiently, more intelligently.
So on both sides – on the side of mind and on the side of being – you will be benefited; you just have to learn how to stop the mind from functioning, how to say to it, “It is enough; now go to sleep. I am awake, don’t be worried.”
Use the mind when it is needed, and then it is fresh, young, full of energy and juice. Then whatever you say is not just dry bones; it is full of life, full of authority, full of truth, sincerity, and has tremendous meaning. You may be using the same words, but now the mind has collected so much power by resting that each word it uses becomes a fire, becomes power.
What is known in the world as charisma is nothing; it is simply a mind which knows how to relax and let energy collect, so when it speaks it is poetry, when it speaks it is gospel, when it speaks, it need not give any evidence or any logic – just its own energy is enough to influence people. And people have always known that there is something that they have called charisma, although they have never been able to exactly pinpoint what it is.
Perhaps for the first time I am telling you what charisma is, because I know it by my own experience. A mind that is working day and night is bound to become weak, dull, unimpressive, somehow dragging. At the most it is utilitarian; it is helpful when you go to purchase vegetables. But it has no more power than that. So, millions of people who could have been charismatic remain poor, unimpressive, without any authority and without any power.
If it is possible – and it is possible – to put the mind to silence and use it only when it is needed, then it comes with a rushing force. It has gathered so much energy that each word uttered goes directly to your heart. People think that those kinds of charismatic personalities are hypnotic; they are not. They are really so powerful, so fresh that it is always spring.
This is for the mind and for the being. The silence opens up a new universe of eternity, of deathlessness, of all that you can think of as blessing, as benediction; hence my insistence that meditation is the essential religion, the only religion. Nothing else is needed. Everything else is nonessential ritual. Meditation is just the essence, the very essence. You cannot cut anything out of it.
It gives you both worlds. It gives you the other world – the divine, the world of godliness – and it gives you this world too. Then you are not poor. You have a richness but not of money.
There are many kinds of richness, and the man who is rich because of money is the lowest as far as the categories of richness are concerned. Let me say it in this way: the man of wealth is the poorest rich man. Looked at from the side of the poor, he is the richest poor man. Looked at from the side of a creative artist, of a dancer, of a musician, of a scientist, he is the poorest rich man. And as far as the world of ultimate awakening is concerned he cannot even be called rich.
Meditation will make you ultimately rich by giving you the world of your innermost being and also relatively rich, because it will release your powers of mind into certain talents that you have. My own experience is that everybody is born with a certain talent, and unless he lives that talent to its fullest, something in him will remain missing. He will go on feeling that somehow something is not there that should be.
Give the mind a rest – it needs it! It is so simple: just become a witness to it and it will give you both things.
Slowly, slowly mind starts learning to be silent. Once it knows that by being silent it becomes powerful, then its words are not just words; they have a validity and a richness and a quality that they never had before – so much so that they go directly, like arrows. They bypass the logical barriers and reach to the very heart.
Then mind is a good servant of immense power in the hands of silence. Then the being is the master, and the master can use the mind whenever it is needed and can switch it off whenever it is not needed.

Osho,
I remember you once explaining that Tantra means expansion. My moments of greatest joy and my moments of greatest silence are invariably accompanied by an exquisite feeling of expanding. This feeling is also present in the urge to melt into someone or something – like a tree or a sunset – that I love.

Where does this desire come from? Is it an innate longing to be reunited with something of which we were once part?
Yes, it is not something coming from outside. It is your innate feeling to be one with something with which you were one – and with which you are still one, but you are unaware of it. So it is only a question of awareness, of remembrance. You have never gone anywhere. You are still here; it is just your mind that goes on moving to faraway spaces.
If the mind is silent, suddenly you discover this crystal clear moment, now and here, and the feeling of oneness with all. We are one. We cannot be otherwise. There is no other way. Life is one phenomenon, existence is undivided – but mind has the capacity to forget it.
The mind has the capacity to dream of faraway things. You sleep at night in your bedroom and you can dream of being on the moon. Do you think if you are suddenly awakened you will ask, “How to get home? – because I am on the moon.” If you are suddenly awakened you will not be on the moon, you will be in your bed. You have never been on the moon. Even when you were dreaming that you were on the moon, you were not on the moon. The moon was a dream, your being on it was a dream; you were on your bed, in your bedroom.
The mind has the capacity to go far away. So once in a while when it is not far away, when something very striking brings it back to herenow – a beautiful sunset, a beautiful painting, a great dance, anything that pulls it back because something so enchanting is happening here that it cannot wander out here and there, it has to rush home… That’s why at the moment of seeing a sunset or listening to music, you feel a certain oneness. It is so fulfilling, so satisfying that you would like it to persist every moment, forever. And the joke is that it persists every moment, eternally. You just go on, here and there, again and again forgetting about it. You have to be brought back.
Once you have understood the basic situation, then there is no need for anything. Just close your eyes and feel now and here, and suddenly existence opens its doors. You have always been part of it. You are part of it. You cannot be otherwise.

Osho,
All my life, including my years of being a sannyasin, I have never had a questioning attitude. This has not worried me up to date, but now since you have been inviting us to ask you questions, I wonder if it is okay that I am quite empty?
It is absolutely okay.

Osho,
My love for freedom makes me always give to my beloveds all the freedom I possibly can. So often, I put myself into an uncomfortable situation where I get hurt. Does this mean I don't love myself so much, and that's why I put myself second?
It may be much more complicated than you think.
First, the very idea that you give freedom to your beloved is wrong. Who are you to give freedom to your beloved? You can love, and your love implies freedom. It is not something that has to be given. If it has to be given, then there will be the problems that you are facing.
So in the first place you are doing something wrong. You really don’t want to give freedom; you would love that no such situation arises in which you have to give freedom. But you have heard me saying again and again that love gives freedom, so you force yourself unconsciously to give freedom, because otherwise your love is not love.
You are in a troubled situation: if you don’t give freedom you start suspecting your love, but you cannot give freedom. The ego is very jealous. It will raise a thousand and one questions: “Are you not enough for your lover or beloved, that she needs freedom – freedom from you to be with someone else?” It hurts, and that’s why you start feeling, “I am putting myself second.”
Giving freedom to her you have put somebody else first, and you have put yourself second. That is against the ego, and it is not going to help in any way, because you will take revenge for the freedom that you have given. You would like the same freedom to be given to you – whether you need it or not, is not the point – just to prove that you are not being cheated.
Secondly, because your beloved has been with someone else you will feel a little strange being with her. That stranger will stand between you and her. She has chosen someone else and dropped you; she has insulted you. And you have been doing so much; you have been so generous that you gave her freedom. Because you are feeling hurt, you are going to hurt her in some way or other.
But the whole thing arises from a misunderstanding. I have not said that if you love, then you have to give freedom. No, I have said that love is freedom. It is not a question of giving. If you have to give it, then it is better not to give it. Then remain the way everybody is. Why create unnecessary complications? – ordinarily, there are enough.
If your love itself has come to that quality that freedom is part of it, that your beloved need not even ask your permission… In fact, if I was in your place and the beloved was asking my permission, I would be hurt. That means she does not trust my love. My love is freedom. I have loved her; that does not mean that I should close all doors and windows so she cannot laugh with somebody else, dance with somebody else, love somebody else – because who are we?
That is the basic question that everyone has to ask: “Who are we?” We are all strangers, and on what grounds do we become so authoritative that we can say, “I will give you freedom,” or “I will not give you freedom,” or “If you love me, then you cannot love anybody else”? These are stupid assumptions, but they have dominated humankind since its very beginnings. We are still barbarous; we still don’t know what love is.
If I love someone I am grateful that that person allowed me, my love, and did not reject me. This is enough. But I don’t become an imprisonment to her: She loved me, and as a reward I am creating a prison around her; I loved her, and she, as a result, is creating a prison around me. Great rewards we are giving to each other!
If I love someone I am grateful and her freedom remains intact. It is not given by me. It is her birthright, and my love cannot take it away. How can love take somebody’s freedom away, particularly the person you love? It is her birthright. You cannot even say, “I give freedom to her.” Who are you in the first place? – just a stranger. You have met on the road, by the way, accidentally, and she was gracious to accept your love. Just be thankful, and let her live the way she wants to live, and live the way you yourself want to live. Your life-style should not be interfered with.
This is what freedom is. Then love will help you to be less tense, less full of anxieties, less in anguish, and more in joy. But what goes on happening in the world is just the opposite. Love creates so much misery, so much pain, that there are people who decide finally that it is better not to love anyone. They close the doors of their heart because it is simply hell and nothing else.
But closing the door to love is also closing the door to reality, to existence; hence I will not support it. I will say: change the whole pattern of love! You have forced love into an ugly situation – change the situation.
Let love become a help for your spiritual growth. Let love become a nourishment to your heart and a courage so that you can open your heart, not only to one individual but to the whole universe.

Osho,
Do we have to transcend sex before getting enlightened?
You don’t have to transcend anything. You have to live everything that is natural to you, and live it fully, without any inhibition – joyously, aesthetically. Transcendence will come just by living it deeply.
You are not to transcend anything. Remember my words. Transcendence will come by itself, and when it comes by itself it is such a release and such a freedom. If you try to transcend, you are going to repress, and repression is the sole reason why people cannot transcend; so you are getting into a vicious circle. You want to transcend, so you repress, and because you repress you cannot transcend, so you repress more. As you repress more, you become more incapable of transcendence.
Live it out fully, without any condemnation, without any religion interfering with your life. Live it out naturally, intensely, totally – and transcendence comes. It is not your doing, it is a happening. And when it comes by itself, there is no repression, there is no antagonism.
You are above all those things that you wanted to transcend – for example, sex. But a real transcendence does not mean that you cannot make love. Of course your love will have a totally different quality. It will not be sexual, it will not be a biological urge, it will not be animalistic; it will be simply a play between two human energies.
If transcendence comes by itself, then many things disappear, more or less. But you are not against anything that disappears. You can still enjoy it. For example, in a state of transcendence you are not a food addict, but that does not mean that you cannot enjoy, once in a while, going to a Chinese restaurant.
Transcendence makes you free; it does not give you a new bondage: first you were so addicted that you had to go, now you are so addicted that you cannot go. Transcendence means that now all this addiction is gone – you can go, you may not go. You are neither against nor for.
You may be smoking. Transcendence does not mean that once in a while with friends you cannot smoke a cigarette. I don’t think that a cigarette, once in a while, will destroy your spirituality. And if it destroys it, then that spirituality is not worthwhile.
I cannot smoke – not because of transcendence but because of my breathing trouble. Otherwise I have no antagonism against poor cigarettes; it is just the smell of tobacco I cannot tolerate, the smoke I cannot inhale. But that is a problem with my body; it is my allergy. But when I see somebody smoking I don’t feel that this man is condemned forever, is going to fall into hellfire.
No condemnation arises in me, because what he is doing is simply playing a game. Being alone, finding nothing else to do and being told continually by the parents and the society that it is better to do something rather than nothing, the poor man is doing something rather than nothing. He is at least smoking.
Transcendence is a very childlike state.

My grandfather used to smoke cigars and cheroots, and he would send me to get his cigar and lighter. Rather than bringing both, I would take the cigar in my mouth and light it and bring it to him. He said, “This is not right. I had asked you to bring the cigar and the lighter.”
I said, “When I can bring one, which does the work for both… I am not stupid.”
He said, “That I know. But remember, don’t learn this habit.”
I said, “Don’t be worried. Seeing you cough continually the whole night is enough. I don’t have to go through the experience to learn it. I learn from others’ experience too.”
His doctors were saying to him, “Drop those cigars.” But it was impossible for him after a whole life’s addiction. He was ready to suffer, to cough and not to sleep well.
I said, “Seeing you is enough prevention for me, and just that one puff that I take when I light your cigar brings tears to my eyes. It is enough just to experience what kind of enjoyment you must be having.”

The people you know as saints are not childlike. They are addicted as much as others; their addictions have just become reversed. Somebody is addicted to sex – they are addicted to no-sex. Somebody is addicted to smoking – they are addicted to no-smoking.
Transcendence is a state of no-addiction, just a childlike playfulness. There is no sin in sex. Just living it intensely, by and by you transcend, just the way you transcend playing tennis. One day you throw away the whole thing, “Enough is enough!” You transcend football, you transcend all kinds of things, and nobody calls you a saint.
To me transcendence comes out of your experience. You see the futility of something and the addiction drops. Then once in a while, just for a change, if you want to smoke I don’t see any harm; if you want to make love I don’t see any harm. The harm is in the addiction – the harm is not in the act. And transcendence is not concerned with the act; transcendence is concerned with the addiction. To be completely unaddicted gives an immense freedom.

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