JESUS
I Say Unto You Vol 2 06
Sixth Discourse from the series of 9 discourses - I Say Unto You Vol 2 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
Is God overhead in the sky, in heaven?
God is everywhere; God is everywhere-ness. God is not a person and you cannot locate him. He is the totality of all beings, of all things. Down the ages, man has looked for God in the sky overhead. The reason for this is not that God is overhead, but rather that to search for God, we have to go above our heads. We have to transcend ourselves, we have to look upward. Not that God is there, God is everywhere – below you, beside you, behind you, in front of you.
We look up because we are low. We are living in a dark valley and we look up. This is a kind of inner search. Just as the tree grows upward, man grows upward. Man is a kind of tree. But always remember, when the tree grows upward, its roots meanwhile are growing downward. If the tree only grows upward it will fall, it will not be able to remain rooted in the soil. The bigger the tree, the deeper, the lower, it has to go. The roots grow into the soil and the branches grow into the sky; there is a great balance. It is almost in proportion: the bigger tree will have bigger roots and the proportion of the two is almost the same. There is a balance.
If a tree only grows downward, it will be meaningless; if a tree only grows upward, it will not be able to exist. That’s what has happened to humanity. A few people live only downward – in sexuality, in food, in the body – in the lower centers. They go on spreading their roots. Their life becomes meaningless because meaning arises only when you start rising upward.
The higher you go, the more meaning, the more significance there is because there is more light. Clouds become available to you and the sun and the moon and the stars; life starts taking the shape of poetry. Life starts becoming a song. You can sway and dance in the sky; you can whisper with the stars; you can love the wind and the rain; you can have a dialogue with the sun – with the source of life and light. Roots remain dismal, sad, dark, lost in the soil. If a tree has only roots and no branches, no foliage, no leaves, no flowers, no fruits, how can it be meaningful? It cannot have fulfillment. Fulfillment comes only from fruition, flowering.
If a tree simply grows upward and forgets to grow its roots, it will fall down; it cannot grow very far. It will be at the most, seasonal. Flowers will come and within a few weeks they will be gone. It will be very tentative. There cannot be any eternal significance in it. It will be seasonal. To be really in existence and in God, one needs this proportion. I bring this proportion to you. That’s why I am not against the body because the body is your soil. I am not against sexuality because that is where your roots have to grow and become strong. It is there that your roots have to get nourishment, the waters of life. But to stop there is to commit suicide.
Take the nourishment from the soil, take the vitality from the body, from sexuality and use it for higher purposes, for higher rhythms, for higher harmony. Then bloom. Bloom in meditation, in love, in ecstasy. Let there be a great rejoicing and a dance. Only then are you a total man. A total man is a balanced man; he is not an extremist. So to look for God upward does not mean that God is overhead, it simply means that if we grow upward we will have a closer contact with God. Not that God is upward, God is downward too. But unless you are fulfilled, you will not have a closer contact with God. In your fulfillment is the experience of God.
Don’t seek God. Seek fulfillment and you will find God. If you seek God and forget fulfillment, you will not find God. God does not come as an accident, God comes as an inner growth. It is something that happens in your innermost core. But in the old days, this metaphor of looking overhead, praying to the sky became very rigid. People took it literally. They started thinking God is overhead. That is a natural fallacy. But times have changed; man has come of age. Man is more alert, man is no longer childish. Humanity has come a long way since the Vedas and the Talmud; humanity has passed through many stages. It is no longer needed to take God and the metaphors associated with him literally. Take them metaphorically. They are metaphors.
If you ask me, “Where is God – overhead?” I would like to tell you that the metaphor has become a little bit rotten. It has been used too much, misused – the associations have gone wrong. They have to be dropped. Instead of saying that God is overhead, it would be better to say that God is alongside. Let God become your “alongsided-ness.” Rather than thinking of God as a father figure, think of him as a beloved, as a friend and you will find the approach easier, you will find yourself more open.
Yes, one day it was so – to call God “the father” was to bring him very close. When Jesus called him abba he was speaking the language of his day. The father was immensely respected, the father was very deeply rooted in the child, in the psyche of the child. To call God “father” was valuable; it had much meaning. Now things have changed, utterly changed. Father is not a respectable word anymore. It smells of authority, authoritarianism. It smells of institutionalism. It smells of a power structure. The moment you say, “God is the father,” you fall apart rather than being joined by it. Father is no longer a hyphen between you and God. The word has fallen because the institution of fatherhood has deteriorated. You will have to find new words and new metaphors – a new language to relate. Let God be your beloved, let God be your friend.
If you are a woman, think of God as your lover. If you are a man, think of God as your beloved. This has also to be understood. There have been religions – for example, the Sufis – who call God “the Beloved.” But that is man-oriented. What is a Sufi woman going to call God? If God is taken to be a woman, what is a Sufi woman going to call her? It will be difficult. In the East the bhaktas have called God “the Lover.” But if the man has to call God “the Lover,” it becomes difficult; it does not sound right. Something seems to be missing.
There is no need for God to be a man or a woman. If you are a man, God is a woman; if you are a woman, God is a man. There is no need to have a fixed idea of God. Let the idea of God arise within your soul – whatsoever your need, let God be that. So I don’t say who God is – he or she, it depends on you. If you are a he, he is a she; if you are a she, she is a he. Let God become meaningful to you – personally meaningful, intimate – so that you can hug him, so that you can embrace him, so you can have a love affair with him. Without the love affair, you will never find him. So don’t say that God is overhead, it is no longer relevant. God is to be understood more as “alongsided-ness.”
Martin Buber calls the relationship between man and God an I-Thou relationship. It seems a little stiff. It is stuffy and churchy: I-Thou. Thou is no longer used in ordinary conversation. You don’t call your woman “thou,” you don’t call your lover “thou.” It is out of use. His understanding is right – man and God’s relationship is an I-Thou relationship; that’s how prayer arises.
But I would like to say to you, that let it be an I-You relationship rather than an I-Thou one. Let God come close. “Thou” keeps him far away. It is too respectful and respect is always less than love. When love is possible, forget about respect. When love is not possible, it is the second best. Let it be an I-You relationship, only then is a dialogue possible. Man and God can move hand in hand. Remember, words become useless after a certain time. They do not only become useless but sometimes dangerous, harmful. The same words which used to have much meaning become meaningless. The same words which were very significant become out-of-date after a time; they lose meaning. Words are also born and they die. The word, the metaphor: “God the Father” has died. “God the Beloved” can still ring bells in your heart.
Victor Hugo has said, “All the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The time has come for God to become your beloved, your lover. We have tried all other relationships with God. There have been religions which have called him “Mother”; there have been religions which have called him “Father”; there have been religions which have thought of God as their child. But man now knows that there is only one relationship that goes to the very core; all other relationships are secondary.
A child is born to you because you loved a woman or a man. The relationship of the mother or the father with the child is a secondary relationship. Somebody becomes your father because he loved a woman and somebody becomes your mother because she loved a man. All relationships revolve around the single relationship of love.
Love is the shrine, the innermost shrine of the whole temple of relationship.
Man has tried all other relationships. They did well for a time, but now only one relationship can be of any help. All other relationships look a little faint and dull. As man grows in understanding, in maturity, many things will happen that will go on changing his own world vision. For example, after Freud, it is very difficult to call God “the Mother,” because ninety-nine percent of mental problems exist because of the mother. Now, Freud has to be reckoned with, he has to be included. You cannot neglect him; he has happened.
Before Freud, “mother” was an absolutely pure concept. Nobody had ever thought that the world was neurotic because of the mother; nobody had ever gone into it. It was taken for granted that the relationship of the mother and the child was the most divine, spiritual relationship. “There is nothing like it. It is the purest love.” That was the thinking before Freud. After Freud, things became totally different. You cannot go on neglecting Freud because his work contains some truth; it is not just fiction. Man’s problems – almost ninety-nine percent – exist because of the mother. Now the mother has become the source of all neurosis, schizophrenia, psychosis, madness, suicide, murder. How can you call God “Mother” anymore? It will be difficult.
After Marx, Engels and others, “father” is no longer a natural relationship; it is institutional. The concept of “father” has come because of private property. It is economical, it has nothing to do with love. Once the economic structure of society changes, once there is no longer private property in the world, the father is going to disappear. You will be surprised to know that uncle is an older word than father. Uncle existed first, then father. And sooner or later uncle will exist again and father will disappear.
People will live in communes. The child will never know who his father is, but he will know that all the people who are of his father’s age are uncles. Haven’t you noticed? The relationship with an uncle is always lovely. It is never so lovely with the father. With the uncle, the child has a friendship. It is always beautiful. It is very difficult to find a bad relationship between the child and the uncle; it is always a happy relationship. What is the problem? In the relationship with the father, there is possessiveness and with the uncle, there is no possessiveness. The uncle cares, just like the father, but without possessing. He is not authoritative, friendship is possible. If the word father disappears, God will be called uncle for the first time. Nobody as yet has called him uncle, but things change.
To me, father is institutional because in nature he doesn’t exist. Mother exists, mother is more natural. So religions who call God “Mother,” are more natural religions. But that too is not possible because of Freud. Freud has looked deep into the mother and has found that all those fictions of the “spiritual relationship” and “pure love” etcetera are all nonsense. “Mother” has to be transformed and changed, otherwise the world will remain neurotic forever.
The mother goes on doing whatsoever she feels is right, but the question is: “Is what she feels to be right, right?” The mother cares about the child, but is the care unconditional, really unconditional, or are there hidden conditions in it? The mother brings up the child and sacrifices much for him, but that sacrifice takes its revenge on the child. It goes on taking revenge on him. The mother starts proving herself to be a kind of martyr – she has sacrificed for you, now you sacrifice for her. That demand is constantly there – deliberately made or not, but it is always there. “I have sacrificed my life for you.” Consciously, unconsciously, that is always the message. “I have destroyed my life, I have sacrificed my life for you – now what about you? I am getting old, now you sacrifice your life for me!”
And she really has done a lot, so the child feels guilty. Every child feels guilty. When a man falls in love with a woman he feels guilty. He feels he is doing something against his mother because he is moving toward another woman, he is betraying her. Mothers are never happy with the wives of their sons – never! There is a competition, conflict, continuous conflict – those other women have taken away their sons. If a son wants to live his life he has to go away, otherwise his mother will suffocate him. He feels grateful but that gratefulness does not mean that he has to remain hanging around her apron strings for his whole life. He has to go.
Every mother makes her child feel guilty. These things have to be transformed. God cannot be called “Mother”; God cannot be called “Father.” The father has always been the disciplinarian. It was perfectly okay for Moses to call God “Father” because the whole concept was legal. God was the super-disciplinarian. He was disciplining everybody – punishing those who were wrong, rewarding those who were following him. It was a kind of court. It was a continuous judgment. You cannot love your judge. You are afraid of the judge and you are always trembling before your judge.
It is not just accidental that this century has declared, “God is dead.” God as the judge is dead, certainly dead. I agree with it. God as the Father is dead. God as the authority is dead. Now God can be revived only as love – not the love of the mother toward the child, or the father toward the child, or the love of the child toward the mother or the father. There is only one natural love and that is between a couple. It is the only love that descends – one never knows from where. It is the only one that arises spontaneously.
Your love for your mother is not spontaneous, it is a conditional love. If you had been taken away the day you were born, and brought up by another woman who told you that she was your mother, you would have loved her. If you had met your real mother one day, after twenty years, you would not have recognized her at all. It’s a conditioning. It arises because you live in close contact with your mother, it is a kind of imprinting, continuous imprinting. She gives you milk, she gives you warmth, she gives you care. When you are ill, she serves you… She does so many things for you. She surrounds you from everywhere. Love arises, but this love is a liking rather than love; it has no madness in it. It is a liking. So is the case with the father. He protects you, he finances you – he sends you to school, to college and to university – he prepares you for your life. You feel obliged to him. You have a respect for him.
The only spontaneous love is between a man and a woman. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you come across a woman and something clicks. You come across a man and your heart starts beating in the same rhythm. You are possessed by something called love. It is very mysterious. There is no reason for it – the woman has never done anything for you, the man has never done anything for you. There is no past between you and there is no future. You don’t know this woman – what she will do to you in the future. You don’t know this man – how he will prove himself to you in the future. There is no past – you have met for the first time and there is no guarantee for the future.
Yet, the thing is so tremendous that you forget the past, you forget the future and you start moving in the present. This moment is so valuable in itself that for no other reason you are ready to sacrifice all and everything for it. It is foolish, it is mad – that’s why down the ages the so-called wise people have called love, mad. It is mad because it has no reason in it. But that is the beauty of it, that is the depth of it. It comes from somewhere beyond reason, beyond the mind. It has the same quality as God. That’s why Jesus says, “Love is God.” Now love is going to be the metaphor for the future. Let God be your boy-friend or your girl-friend. It will depend on you who he is, not on him. God has no fixed entity, he becomes what you need him to be. He is liquid.
The day for that idea has come. When the day for an idea comes, nothing is more powerful than that. And vice versa it is also true. When the day of an idea has gone, nothing is more impotent than that. God as Father is impotent, God as Mother is impotent. Those ideas will linger because a few people live in the past. You can’t help it. A few people always live backward; they only look in the rear-view mirror, they never look ahead. A few people have fixed minds about the past. They are so very afraid of the new that they don’t look ahead, they look backward.
All people are not contemporaries. For anybody who lived two thousand years ago, Jesus’ idea: “God is Father” would have been appealing. Anybody who lived beyond two thousand years ago, some other idea would have been appealing. But those who are contemporaries and those who are ahead of their time, for them a new metaphor is needed: the metaphor of love.
God as overhead is out-of-date.
A customs officer at Heathrow opened up the suitcase belonging to an attractive Frenchwoman and found six pairs of saucy panties. “What are these for?” he demanded.
“I tell you,” she replied. “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.”
“What about Saturday?” he asked.
“Saturday – oh, la, la.”
He chalked her case and off she went. Next in line was a stout, motherly party from Yorkshire. One of the party had twelve pairs of red flannel drawers in her case.
“What’s all this, Ma?” he asked.
She answered, “January, February, March, April…”
There are people who are not contemporaries. But remember to be a contemporary because life belongs to those who are contemporaries. The past is no more – don’t cling to it.
The second question:
Osho,
Have I come here to enjoy myself or get enlightened? Does one need to suffer to become enlightened? I seem to fluctuate between the two. I'm very confused.
It is very simple. There is no need to be confused about it. If you are searching for enlightenment here, you will never find it. If you search for enjoyment here, you will find enjoyment and enlightenment comes in its wake. Enlightenment happens only to a person who lives in immense enjoyment of life. Only he is worthy of it because enlightenment is a greater joy – the greatest, the highest. You have to train for it. You have to train for it by being happy, joyous, by being in tune with life, by being a celebrator.
Forget about enlightenment. You need not worry about it. It is useless to think about it. Just enjoy yourself. Get lost in enjoyment. It is the easiest and shortest way to lose your ego. Once the ego is lost and you are really enjoying life, you are delighted with it. A great gratitude arises of its own accord. Suddenly you start feeling that you are grateful to God; whosoever God may be, whatsoever it means – that doesn’t matter anymore. Your life is such a joy, how can you feel ungrateful? Your life is such a joy that it is not possible to complain.
The complaining mind is the root cause of the atheist’s mind. When you complain, when everything is wrong, you cannot believe in God. Even if you try to believe, that belief will just be pseudo. It won’t have any depth in you, it will be superficial. It maybe out of fear or it maybe just out of conditioning, but there is no reality in it for you.
When you are joyous, when you are enjoying your life – the ordinary life, because there is no other life, only this life; when you start enjoying it – your food, your sleep, your bath, your walk early in the morning, the song, the birds, the trees, the people; when you start enjoying all this, gratefulness arises. You start feeling very calm and quiet. You start feeling a kind of contentment descending on you, slowly, slowly. The contentment becomes part of your being. You become suffused with it, immersed in it. Every cell of your body starts falling into a harmony. In that harmony you will have the first glimpses of enlightenment, not otherwise.
So if you ask me, I will say: “Forget about enlightenment, otherwise the idea of enlightenment will make you more miserable.” You are already miserable. Everything is wrong, nothing is ever right. You are suffering. Now, you bring another misery – enlightenment; this is very difficult. The misery of not having enough money is not very big. Make a little effort and you can have it, if not legally then illegally – but you can have it and there are ways. You are not famous and you are suffering; you can become notorious – that too is a kind of fame. If people don’t know you as a mahatma, they can know you as a devil, but you can make yourself known.
There is not much difference between the mahatma and a devil and there is not much difference between the saint and the sinner. Both are after fame; the basic urge is the same. The saint is one who has made it legally. The sinner is one who could not make it legally – was not so clever, was not so intelligent – and had to find some illegal ways, some criminal ways. But the reason is the same. These things are easily possible, so there will not be much suffering. Now, enlightenment… You cannot make it legally, you cannot make it illegally; you cannot make it. You as you cannot make it because you are the problem. So there is no illegal way to enlightenment; there is not even a legal way to enlightenment. In fact, those who know say there is no path to it. It is a pathless path. There is no gate; it is a gateless gate. There is no method to it. When all methods disappear, it happens.
So once a person becomes interested in enlightenment, he will be getting into eternal trouble. Now, whatsoever he does is going to fail – whatsoever. His failure is predetermined, it is built-in. In the very effort is the failure. So you do this and you do that, and you go on failing. The more you fail, the more desperate, the more anguish you will feel and the more hopeless you will become.
You will feel more and more lost – more lost than ever before and you will feel that this idea of enlightenment has been a curse. It has taken your ordinary life from you. It won’t allow you any other life, it takes possession of you totally, utterly. The old life has gone and the new one hasn’t happened. You start hanging in limbo. You are neither here nor there; you become a question mark. Your whole life becomes split. So remember, never become desirous of enlightenment; it will give you a great hell.
This is my basic approach: that you should learn how to enjoy life. Enjoy it more and more, and as deeply as possible. Go into it. Small moments can be transformed into eternities of joy. Small things can become celebrations – very small things. Just an unknown flower – and if you sit by the side of it and you look at it and you are open to it, it will give you great ecstasy. You will start swaying and dancing, you will feel drunk. Any small thing is full of godliness. This ordinary reality is not just ordinary, it is carrying the extraordinary, the superb, the supreme-most.
So love this life and don’t think of enlightenment. It always brings misery because it brings conflict. Let it come through this – you love a woman, you love a man… Let God come through that love, let God center you when you are in a state of orgasm. Eat, enjoy food and let God come to you as a taste. Listen to music, get lost in it and let God come to you as sound, as harmony. Let God descend on you slowly, slowly, without any hankering to grasp him, without any effort to possess him in your hands.
Just open yourself as much as possible – to the trees, to the birds, to the rains, to the sun, to the sands. Open yourself wherever you are, absorb and gratitude will arise and that gratitude will become your prayer. You will not know toward whom this gratitude is arising. When you don’t know toward whom this gratitude is arising, it is toward God. When you know that it is toward God, you don’t know anything. Is it the Christian God, the Hindu God, or the Mohammedan God? All these are not God. God is basically hidden. Nobody knows his name.
The Jews were right never to spell his name. The name of Yahweh was not allowed to be pronounced: “How can we pronounce his name? We don’t know his name.” His whereabouts are unknown. Nobody has ever seen him. Whosoever has seen him, has gone into him and disappeared forever; nobody has come back. Nobody knows where he is, who he is. But still, when life is flowing, when life has a flow to it and a dance to it, one feels gratitude. Gratitude comes first and God comes second, not otherwise.
People are trying to put God first. First they create God and that is their created God, man-made, home-made, manufactured. They bow down to their own manufactured statues. This is utterly stupid – a man bowing down to a statue he has made himself, or has purchased from the market. God is not for sale anywhere. Nobody has seen his face and nobody can make his statue. Nobody knows where he is: overhead, behind, in front, right, left – nobody knows. But gratitude arises… Just as fragrance arises out of a flower and disperses, not knowing where, unaddressed; in the same way, gratitude arises unaddressed. It is prayer, real prayer and you start feeling God in your heart. Because of this gratitude and because of this prayerfulness and thankfulness, enlightenment is not far away. First, become joyous. Jesus goes on saying it, but nobody listens. He says again and again: “Rejoice! Rejoice! I say again rejoice!”
You have asked: “Have I come here to enjoy myself or get enlightened?” You have come here to get enlightened, as far as you are concerned. As far as I am concerned, you have come here to enjoy yourself. Through enjoyment comes enlightenment and through enlightenment comes just suffering. They are all ego trips. You have found beautiful names, that’s all, but they are all ego trips. Now, you want to become enlightened. Why? What for? Where did you get this idea of enlightenment? Now, you will be searching and this will create so much suffering for you. What to do? Stand on your head to become enlightened? Fast, to become enlightened? Go to the mountains and live in a cave? Become a masochist – torture yourself? Practice a thousand and one things – which will be of the mind and will not lead you beyond the mind?
Just go and look at the people. The East has been on this trip for a very long time. The West is new and unaware of the pitfalls. The East has been in it far too long. Just go and watch Eastern seekers going after enlightenment and you will find all kinds of pathologies. Someone has been fasting for months. His body has become just bones, with sunken eyes and all his energy gone. Torturing himself in the hope that this is the way – as if God were a sadist, and would like you to torture yourself. “The more you torture yourself the more valuable you will become.” This is something that has gone deep into the psychology of man.
The child learns this from his parents. Whenever the child is happy, the parents are not happy. Whenever the parents are happy, the child is not happy. The child learns one basic fundamental of life: “Parents can only be happy when I am not happy.” For example, the child is ready to go out. It is raining and the rains are calling him. It is so beautiful outside… And the sound of the rain… And it is so cool. He wants to go out and stand in the rain. But his mother is not prepared to let him to go, the father is not prepared to let him to go. They shout at him. He remains in the house. He looks out of the window with greedy eyes. It looks so beautiful out there and the trees look so happy and the trees are so moved by the rains.
He would like to go out into this world and he would like to stand like a tree, but he is not allowed to. The parents are happy if he doesn’t go, if he suffers. If he does go out, the parents suffer. When he comes back, he has been a nuisance, he will be punished. The parents will be angry for many days. Now, one thing the child goes on learning every day: “Whatsoever I feel as joyous is wrong and whatsoever I feel as painful, boring, is right.”
He is so full of energy that he wants to play with the dog outside, or he wants to go and run around the house – but the parents say, “Do your homework.” Now, he doesn’t like homework. He hates it. But the parents are only happy when he is in some kind of sad situation. So he has learned one thing: “God is father.” So the logic reaches easily to the conclusion that if you are enjoying food, God will be very angry with you, he will throw you into hell – God the father. If you are fasting and suffering, God will be very happy and he will send you to heaven.
If you love a woman and you’re feeling immensely happy, guilt arises. God must be watching. God seems to be continuously watching! That’s what people have been told, that he is a kind of Peeping Tom – whatsoever you are doing, wherever you are, he is watching. Just think of him – he must get tired of all this nonsense. Watching and watching and watching… He must have gone mad by now. Millions and millions of people have been doing things… How many things are people doing? And he is watching! He has nothing else to do, he is just a “watcher.”
You have been taught that he is watching you everywhere. Wherever you go he is there, following you – those two eyes, or, if you are a Hindu, three eyes, watching you. And continuous fear… You are happy and he is watching. You will suffer for it. Haven’t you noticed that whenever you are happy, you feel a certain kind of guilt arising in you? Every day someone or other comes to me and says, “Osho I am feeling very happy. But guilt arises in me – why?” It arises because of a wrong association. You have been taught a wrong philosophy of life. You have not been taught the grammar of joy, you have been taught the grammar of suffering. So you ask: “Does one need to suffer to become enlightened? I fluctuate between the two. I’m very confused.”
Naturally, you will be confused. You will have to drop one, otherwise you will continuously fluctuate. There is no enlightenment without enjoyment. Let this become your rule, the golden rule: God comes through joy; God comes only when you are happy, immensely happy; God flows only toward those hearts which are glad; God comes only to those who are dancing; God comes to you only when he hears your laughter, not your prayer but your laughter. Let your laughter be your only prayer. Let your joy be your only offering. Love life. Love small things. Don’t miss a single moment. Go on becoming more and more joyful and you will find God is coming to you more and more.
Hindus are right when they say that God is anand, bliss. It is true, it is his ultimate definition. So he can be attained only through bliss, not through suffering. The suffering will help your ego to become stronger, and the stronger the ego, the farther away you are from God. Only when you melt in happiness, you become liquid in happiness, you start flowing in happiness, you are no longer frozen… And when you are not frozen, where can you flow? There is only God all around you. Once you melt, you flow into him, when you flow, he flows into you. It is reciprocal.
God comes to you only in that proportion in which you go into him. A man who is trying to achieve God, enlightenment, nirvana, becomes more and more egoistic, becomes more and more self-centered. His whole effort is how to attain and possess God. But how can you possess God? You can only be possessed by him, you cannot possess him. He is not smaller than you, he is bigger. How can the river possess the ocean? The river can only disappear into the ocean. The ocean will possess the river and that is the only way for the river to possess the ocean. The man who is seeking enlightenment is trying to do the impossible. It is not possible in the very nature of things.
Here, being close to me, learn one thing, that is joy. Rejoice! Forget all about enlightenment, otherwise it will create a continuous suffering and anxiety in you. Naturally, enlightenment happens only in the future, so the future comes in. You start planning for it and you go on missing the present. Live the moment as if it is all and enlightenment will find you. You need not find it.
The third question:
Osho,
You said that love is more important than the person. Well, what about you? I love you!
If you think of me as a person, you have not seen me yet, you are missing. I am not a person. You can love me; I am love. There is nobody here. Or, only nobody is here. Look on me as love, not as a person. If you look at me as a person, you will become attached and attachment brings misery. If you look at me as love, you cannot be attached and if you look at me as love you can dissolve with me. You cannot dissolve with a person. You can only dissolve with an energy, not with a person. People collide, that is the misery of all the lovers in the world. People collide, because people are two egos. When two egos come close, sooner or later, the clash, the conflict comes because each of them wants to possess the other and the other doesn’t like it.
Nobody wants to be possessed. So the natural calamity of love arises because you have not understood love as energy. Don’t think of me as a person, otherwise you will start possessing me and there will be inner conflict. Think of me as love, as energy, as space: you can dissolve in me and you can allow me to dissolve in you. There will be no clash. That is the real relationship between a disciple and a master – a non-clashing relationship. There is no conflict, there is only harmony, attunement. They move on the same wave length. I am not a person. If you really love me, you will also become a non-person. And when you have also become a non-person there will be a meeting, not before it.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Did Jesus father any children?
I don’t think so because he would not go into that tedium. But there is a man… Just the other day I was reading about him, he lives in Srinagar, Kashmir and his name is Sahib Zadda Basarat Salim. He claims that he is the direct descendant of Jesus Christ. He has in his possession even today, a complete genealogical table which traces his direct ancestry from Jesus Christ. People go for nonessential things. Now this genealogy must be fictitious. It is true that Jesus lived in Kashmir for many years, but there is not any possibility of him fathering children because once a master starts creating disciples, they are his children. Giving birth to children will simply be a conflict. It will create problems, it will not help anybody.
The master is no longer interested in his physical persistence through children, his whole interest has moved to a higher plane. Now he would like to persist as a spiritual force through his disciples. They are his children, they are his real children – spiritual children. And when you can have spiritual children, who bothers having physical children? The disciple is the real child. Only the disciple can take the message of the master to the future. So I don’t think that Jesus fathered any children. My feeling is that the Bible is correct because it stops at Jesus, the son of Mariam. It starts from the very beginning: fourteen generations – it gives the chart and it stops at Jesus. It seems to be perfectly as it should be.
With Jesus, things have come to a climax. In Jesus, the revolution has happened; the body has disappeared into the soul. Now Jesus no longer functions like a body. To have children means that he still functions like a body. He functions as a spiritual force, as a spiritual magnetism. He functions as a soul, not as a body. The body is there but it is just the abode. The identity is no longer there and he does not think of himself as the body.
So, don’t get involved in such unnecessary things. They are unnecessary, they don’t lead you to any understanding.
The fifth question:
Osho,
Why does the Bible talk about man's state with metaphors such as: lameness, deafness, blindness, drunkenness, sleep and death?
You ask why? Just observe yourself and you will find all these things. Lameness… A man is lame if he has not yet reached God. What use are your legs if they have not led you to God? What use are they? – you are lame. A man is deaf if he has not yet heard the song, the music of God. It is all around and you have not heard it yet? Jesus had to say again and again, “If you have ears, listen! If you have eyes, see!” Whom is he talking to? To you! Don’t think that he is visiting some institution where only blind people live, or only deaf people live. He is talking to people just like you who have eyes and ears, but who have not seen the real and who have not heard the real. Who go on seeing dreams and who go on hearing whatsoever they want to hear, not that which is. Man is deaf, man is blind.
What have you seen? You have not seen the real, you have not seen the miraculous, the mysterious. The irony is that the mysterious surrounds you from everywhere – day in, day out, year in, year out. You live in the mysterious like a fish lives in the ocean and the fish has not seen the ocean yet!
Kabir says: “I wonder and I laugh why the fish is thirsty living in the ocean.”
There is an old Hindu parable that a fish became philosophic and started inquiring, “Where is the ocean?” And she swam in the ocean all the time. She went from one place to another in search of enlightenment. She wanted to know where the ocean was – because she had heard that we are born in the ocean and we disappear into the ocean and that the ocean is our source and our goal; that the ocean is God. So she started searching for the ocean and she asked many people and they said, “We have heard about it, but we also don’t know.” They were all living in the ocean, those philosophers, those professors – they were all fish. How do you know the ocean if you have never been out if it? To know, a little distance is needed.
Sometimes a fish comes to know, when she is thrown out of the ocean. When somebody catches her in a net and takes her onto the hot sands, then she knows what the ocean is. That is possible for a fish, but what about man? Man cannot be taken out of God. There is no place which is outside of God. We are born in him, we breathe in him. We breathe him, we eat him, we love him, we are loved by him; we fight with him, we quarrel with him; we are young in him and we become old in him. One day we die in him, as one day we were born in him. You must be blind because you don’t see him and you go on asking, “Where is God?”
You have asked: “Why does the Bible talk about man’s state with metaphors, such as: lameness, deafness, blindness, drunkenness, sleep and death?” This life is not life. It cannot be called life yet because joy hasn’t happened. What kind of life is this? – maybe just a preparation, a rehearsal for the real life. The real has not happened because it does not show in the glow of your being. That splendor is not there, present within you; that aura does not surround you. Yes, you go on dragging yourself, hoping that some day life will happen, but it has not happened yet. So Jesus is right, the Bible is right – you are dead, you are asleep.
Jesus goes on saying again and again, “Awake! Be wakeful because one never knows when the Beloved will come. Don’t fall asleep. He may come and you may be asleep.” But there is no need for you to fall asleep – people are asleep. Only with conscious meditation, only with awareness, living moment to moment with absolute alertness, does one come out of sleep.
You are drunk – drunk with money, drunk with the ego, drunk with power and prestige. There are a thousand kinds of alcoholic beverages available: money is alcohol, power is alcohol, politics is alcohol. Beware of these things. People are so clever that they can turn anything into alcohol. Work becomes alcohol. There are workaholics, who cannot remain without work. They have to do something. They feel good when they are involved in doing something. When they have a little gap and they don’t know what to do, they start going crazy. They have to do. They read the same newspaper that they have already read. They rush to the TV or the radio and listen to the same news that they have listened to before. Or they may go to see the same movie again. Or they start talking about the things that they have talked about a thousand and one times; nobody listens and they know it. They are bored, others are bored – but what to do? Workaholics…
A great organization is needed, greater than Alcoholics Anonymous: “Workaholics Anonymous.” Politicians will come, scientists will come, artists will come, millionaires will come – all kinds of people will come. Anything that possesses you so much that you cannot be without it is alcohol.
The mind is very cunning. Your mantra may become your alcohol, your TM may become your alcohol. Every morning you have to do your mantra for twenty minutes, you have to repeat it in a stupid way, “Ram, Ram, Ram.” If you repeat it, you don’t get anything; if you don’t repeat it, you feel lost. If you repeat it you know nothing is happening, but if you don’t repeat it you feel you are missing something. A great urge arises to repeat the mantra – the same kind of urge that a smoker experiences.
He knows that by smoking cigarettes he doesn’t get anything – there is no need to say that he doesn’t get anything. If he does get something, it is bad – maybe tuberculosis, asthma. He could get great things like that, otherwise he doesn’t get anything. He knows it also. But the problem is that if he doesn’t smoke, he starts feeling a great urge. That urge becomes more and more powerful; it possesses him. He has to smoke. He knows it isn’t good, he has decided not to smoke, he has taken a vow, but it doesn’t help. He has to go and smoke, otherwise he feels very nervous, tense. Smoking helps him. Just an old habit… Habits are very relaxing. You feel comfortable, cozy in them. Your mantra can become your alcohol. Beware. One has to be very conscious, otherwise anything can become your alcohol. And man is drunk.
Man is ordinarily like a person living in a trance induced by post-hypnotic suggestions. Jesus says that there is only one cure: metanoia – turning backward, turning into yourself, turning your consciousness toward your inner being. Unless you start looking into your being and become very alert… And you can. You know there are moments when you are more alert and there are moments when you are less alert. There is the key.
Why are you more alert in a certain moment? A beautiful woman passes by and you become more alert. What has happened? You really wanted to see her, you didn’t want to miss the opportunity – that’s why you became more alert. If you look at a tree in the same way… An opportunity may be missed – you may never come across this rosebush again. Who knows? The rosebush may not be there tomorrow, you may not be there tomorrow. Who knows? This may be your last meeting – the first and the last. Have a look, a total look at the rose and you will be alert. A bird is singing. This may be the last time. You may never listen to the song of a bird again, you may be lying down in your grave tomorrow. It is not worth missing. It is so precious. How can you not be alert? Be alert. A friend has come to your home. Be alert.
Each moment has to be taken as if it were the last. There is every possibility that this may be the last moment. So use it totally. Squeeze the juice out of it, totally. In that very totality, you will be alert and the drunkenness will be gone. This is what Jesus calls metanoia.
A drunk staggered up to a policeman, and said, “Officer, Officer, where am I?”
“You are in front of the Osho Ashram,” said the policeman. “It is Koregaon Park.”
“Never mind the details,” said the drunk. “What town am I in?”
A drunk is a drunk. He is not interested in details. He is not even aware what town he is in. Are you aware of where you are? Are you aware of what planet you are on? Are you aware of the life you have, which is slipping through your hands without being used at all? Are you aware of the opportunity? Are you aware of who you are? So if Jesus says that you are drunk, he is perfectly right. Don’t feel offended.
A fire engine, with its siren screaming, tore up St. Martin’s Lane toward New Oxford Street. At the same moment, a drunk staggered out of the Salisbury and immediately set off in hot pursuit. He was soon outdistanced and collapsed, panting on the pavement. As the fire engine receded into the distance, he shook his fist at it and shouted, “All right then! Keep your rotten old ice-cream!”
What are you running after? Please, first take a look, then start running. Your desire is not enough proof that things exist to satisfy your desires. They may not exist and your whole life will prove a futile effort, in vain. That’s how it proves to millions of people. Rarely does a man come to his fulfillment. You can also be that rare man. You can be a Jesus or a buddha, but that is possible only if you drop your drunkenness.
During the match, the batsman heard a cry from the crowd, “Smith! Smith! Your house is on fire!”
He dropped his bat and ran off the field, through the crowd and into the road. Breathlessly he pounded along and then stopped. “Why am I running?” he said. “My name is not Smith.”
Have a look again at who you are and why you are running. Is your house really on fire? Where are you going so fast? And people are going very fast. If they don’t reach their destination, they think they have not been fast enough. So they develop, invent faster ways, without knowing exactly where it is they want to reach to. Man uses more and more power to reach without knowing where he is going, without knowing where he really wants to reach.
Three drunks rushed onto the platform at Cannon Street Station just as the last train to Greenwich was pulling out. With great difficulty and with a lot pushing and shoving, two of them managed to get a door open and tumble in before the train picked up speed and disappeared. The man who was left behind collapsed on the platform and roared with laughter.
“Your friends just managed to catch the train, sir,” said a porter who was watching.
“Yes, they did,” said the drunk, still laughing. “And the funny thing is they came to see me off!”
And you ask why the Bible calls you drunk and asleep? You are, that’s why.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I have a question to the lecture on November 2nd. What did Jesus write in the sand?
In one of the ancient monastery papers, the following footnote is recorded just opposite the passage where Jesus said: “Let he among you who is without sin throw the first stone.” His mother, Mary, was also there in the crowd and he was afraid that she, being the Virgin, may throw the first stone. He actually saw the thought cross his mother’s mind. So he was writing again and again on the sand: “I really wish you wouldn’t do that, Mother!”
The seventh question:
Osho,
How do you always manage to find the appropriate jokes for your talks?
It is just the other way round.
Little Tom and his dad went to the circus. After the show, on the way home the father said to little Tom, “Wasn’t that clever to time the horses so finely with the music?”
“Yes indeed,” answered little Tom, yet not totally convinced.
Suddenly a few steps further, little Tom stops and facing his father, said in a confident voice, “What about timing the music with the horses?”
It can be the other way around, too. It seems natural for you, as it looked to the father, “Wasn’t that clever to time the horses so finely with the music?” But to little Tom, the horses were more important than the musicians. Little children live in a different world, their perspective is different. He was not totally convinced of it. He said, “What about timing the music with the horses?” Rather than the horses being timed with the music, it can be otherwise.
I love jokes. When I find a joke, I try to find a question for it. When I love a joke, sooner or later somebody or other is going to ask the question to which the joke is going to fit.
The eighth question:
Osho,
What is meditation?
Now this is strange. It reminds me of a story…
A cricket fan took his girlfriend out on a date – it was a full-moon night and the beach was silent. They were sitting on the beach and it was beautiful. They were holding hands and hugging each other. The cricket fan continued to talk about cricket for three hours. Suddenly he became aware that he must be boring the girl. Three hours is too long! So he said, “Sorry, forgive me. I have been talking for three hours about my hobby. I am a fan, I am mad about cricket. I must have bored you utterly?”
The girl said, “Not at all, not at all. But do tell me, what is cricket?”
Now you ask, “What is meditation?” And my whole life I have been talking about meditation. But still, I understand why the question has arisen. You listen, but you don’t get it. You understand intellectually what meditation is, but still it remains elusive. You cannot catch hold of it. And you cannot catch hold of it! It is not that something is wrong with you. Meditation cannot be caught hold of. You have to allow it to happen so that it can catch hold of you!
Meditation is not something that you have to do; meditation is something for which you have to wait. It is something that comes and comes on its own. It is like a breeze. It is not that you can pull in, manage and order. You cannot order anything that is valuable. Ordered things are ordered things. You cannot order God. So, meditation, satori, samadhi, enlightenment, nirvana and God cannot be ordered. The very idea is silly. You cannot order. You can receive. Certainly you can receive. You can invite, you can wait patiently. So whenever you are feeling happy, whenever you are feeling joyous, whenever you are feeling harmonious, in tune, just sit silently. Wait for it. Just wait for it. Nothing else is needed to be done.
Meditation is not an action. Just wait. Relax and wait. Lie down, sit or stand – as you feel good – and wait for it. Wait, alert and soon you will hear the whisperings, the silent steps of something which is coming closer to you. Soon you will see something entering into your heart, into your being. You cannot see it, but it is there. You can feel it. It is like a fragrance that fills your nostrils. It is like light. Keep the window open. That’s all you need to do: just keep the window open. So when the light arises and the clouds are gone and the sun is high, the rays can enter in you.
About meditation you can only do negative things. Keep the door open, keep your eyes open, keep yourself alert and it comes. It will certainly come. It will immediately start flowing in you. It is a benediction. You cannot pull it, you cannot manipulate it. A manipulated meditation will not be of any value. That’s what people are doing: someone is doing TM, someone is doing something else – trying to manipulate.
Here, when you are doing the Dynamic, the Kundalini or the Nadabrahma Meditations – they are not really meditations, you are just getting in tune. It is like Indian classical musicians playing. If you have seen them… For half an hour, or sometimes even longer, they simply go on tuning their instruments. They will move the knobs, they will tighten or loosen the strings. The drummer will go on checking his drum – whether it is perfect enough. For half an hour they go on doing this. This is not music, this is just a preparation. Kundalini is not really a meditation, it is just a preparation. You prepare your instrument. When it is ready, you stand in silence – meditation begins. You are utterly there. You have woken yourself up by jumping, by dancing, by breathing, by shouting – these are all devices to make you a little more alert than you ordinarily are. Once you are alert, then the waiting.
Waiting is meditation – waiting with full awareness.
And then it comes, it descends on you, it surrounds you, it plays around you, it dances around you, it cleanses you, it purifies you – it transforms you.
The ninth question:
Osho,
Why do you sometimes use big and difficult words?
I don’t know very much English. I somehow go on expressing myself. I am not at home with English. The problem is: first, I am not at home with any language at all – the basic problem – because what I want to say is beyond language. The English language is unacquainted with me, so I have to create my own English. I know the English language through books, so sometimes big words may filter in because I don’t know the smaller words for them. Otherwise, I would have used the smaller ones because smaller words are more expressive. The bigger the word, the less expressive; the bigger the word, the more scholastic.
Listen to this anecdote:
An African diplomat, paying his first visit to England, was met at the airport by the usual gaggle of media men.
“Did you have a good flight, Sir?” asked one reporter.
“Wowie, ssssh! Yes, yes, very comfortable, thank you,” replied the African.
“And how long will you be here?” asked another.
“Wowie, ssssh! About three weeks.”
“And will you be going straight to see the Prime Minister today?”
“Wowie, ssssh! Yes, I am going as soon as I have answered your questions.”
“How did you learn such a distinctive style of speaking?” asked another journalist, intrigued by the strange noises which preceded each of the African’s replies.
“Wowie, ssssh! The English on the Radio service of the BBC.”
Enough for today.
Osho,
Is God overhead in the sky, in heaven?
God is everywhere; God is everywhere-ness. God is not a person and you cannot locate him. He is the totality of all beings, of all things. Down the ages, man has looked for God in the sky overhead. The reason for this is not that God is overhead, but rather that to search for God, we have to go above our heads. We have to transcend ourselves, we have to look upward. Not that God is there, God is everywhere – below you, beside you, behind you, in front of you.
We look up because we are low. We are living in a dark valley and we look up. This is a kind of inner search. Just as the tree grows upward, man grows upward. Man is a kind of tree. But always remember, when the tree grows upward, its roots meanwhile are growing downward. If the tree only grows upward it will fall, it will not be able to remain rooted in the soil. The bigger the tree, the deeper, the lower, it has to go. The roots grow into the soil and the branches grow into the sky; there is a great balance. It is almost in proportion: the bigger tree will have bigger roots and the proportion of the two is almost the same. There is a balance.
If a tree only grows downward, it will be meaningless; if a tree only grows upward, it will not be able to exist. That’s what has happened to humanity. A few people live only downward – in sexuality, in food, in the body – in the lower centers. They go on spreading their roots. Their life becomes meaningless because meaning arises only when you start rising upward.
The higher you go, the more meaning, the more significance there is because there is more light. Clouds become available to you and the sun and the moon and the stars; life starts taking the shape of poetry. Life starts becoming a song. You can sway and dance in the sky; you can whisper with the stars; you can love the wind and the rain; you can have a dialogue with the sun – with the source of life and light. Roots remain dismal, sad, dark, lost in the soil. If a tree has only roots and no branches, no foliage, no leaves, no flowers, no fruits, how can it be meaningful? It cannot have fulfillment. Fulfillment comes only from fruition, flowering.
If a tree simply grows upward and forgets to grow its roots, it will fall down; it cannot grow very far. It will be at the most, seasonal. Flowers will come and within a few weeks they will be gone. It will be very tentative. There cannot be any eternal significance in it. It will be seasonal. To be really in existence and in God, one needs this proportion. I bring this proportion to you. That’s why I am not against the body because the body is your soil. I am not against sexuality because that is where your roots have to grow and become strong. It is there that your roots have to get nourishment, the waters of life. But to stop there is to commit suicide.
Take the nourishment from the soil, take the vitality from the body, from sexuality and use it for higher purposes, for higher rhythms, for higher harmony. Then bloom. Bloom in meditation, in love, in ecstasy. Let there be a great rejoicing and a dance. Only then are you a total man. A total man is a balanced man; he is not an extremist. So to look for God upward does not mean that God is overhead, it simply means that if we grow upward we will have a closer contact with God. Not that God is upward, God is downward too. But unless you are fulfilled, you will not have a closer contact with God. In your fulfillment is the experience of God.
Don’t seek God. Seek fulfillment and you will find God. If you seek God and forget fulfillment, you will not find God. God does not come as an accident, God comes as an inner growth. It is something that happens in your innermost core. But in the old days, this metaphor of looking overhead, praying to the sky became very rigid. People took it literally. They started thinking God is overhead. That is a natural fallacy. But times have changed; man has come of age. Man is more alert, man is no longer childish. Humanity has come a long way since the Vedas and the Talmud; humanity has passed through many stages. It is no longer needed to take God and the metaphors associated with him literally. Take them metaphorically. They are metaphors.
If you ask me, “Where is God – overhead?” I would like to tell you that the metaphor has become a little bit rotten. It has been used too much, misused – the associations have gone wrong. They have to be dropped. Instead of saying that God is overhead, it would be better to say that God is alongside. Let God become your “alongsided-ness.” Rather than thinking of God as a father figure, think of him as a beloved, as a friend and you will find the approach easier, you will find yourself more open.
Yes, one day it was so – to call God “the father” was to bring him very close. When Jesus called him abba he was speaking the language of his day. The father was immensely respected, the father was very deeply rooted in the child, in the psyche of the child. To call God “father” was valuable; it had much meaning. Now things have changed, utterly changed. Father is not a respectable word anymore. It smells of authority, authoritarianism. It smells of institutionalism. It smells of a power structure. The moment you say, “God is the father,” you fall apart rather than being joined by it. Father is no longer a hyphen between you and God. The word has fallen because the institution of fatherhood has deteriorated. You will have to find new words and new metaphors – a new language to relate. Let God be your beloved, let God be your friend.
If you are a woman, think of God as your lover. If you are a man, think of God as your beloved. This has also to be understood. There have been religions – for example, the Sufis – who call God “the Beloved.” But that is man-oriented. What is a Sufi woman going to call God? If God is taken to be a woman, what is a Sufi woman going to call her? It will be difficult. In the East the bhaktas have called God “the Lover.” But if the man has to call God “the Lover,” it becomes difficult; it does not sound right. Something seems to be missing.
There is no need for God to be a man or a woman. If you are a man, God is a woman; if you are a woman, God is a man. There is no need to have a fixed idea of God. Let the idea of God arise within your soul – whatsoever your need, let God be that. So I don’t say who God is – he or she, it depends on you. If you are a he, he is a she; if you are a she, she is a he. Let God become meaningful to you – personally meaningful, intimate – so that you can hug him, so that you can embrace him, so you can have a love affair with him. Without the love affair, you will never find him. So don’t say that God is overhead, it is no longer relevant. God is to be understood more as “alongsided-ness.”
Martin Buber calls the relationship between man and God an I-Thou relationship. It seems a little stiff. It is stuffy and churchy: I-Thou. Thou is no longer used in ordinary conversation. You don’t call your woman “thou,” you don’t call your lover “thou.” It is out of use. His understanding is right – man and God’s relationship is an I-Thou relationship; that’s how prayer arises.
But I would like to say to you, that let it be an I-You relationship rather than an I-Thou one. Let God come close. “Thou” keeps him far away. It is too respectful and respect is always less than love. When love is possible, forget about respect. When love is not possible, it is the second best. Let it be an I-You relationship, only then is a dialogue possible. Man and God can move hand in hand. Remember, words become useless after a certain time. They do not only become useless but sometimes dangerous, harmful. The same words which used to have much meaning become meaningless. The same words which were very significant become out-of-date after a time; they lose meaning. Words are also born and they die. The word, the metaphor: “God the Father” has died. “God the Beloved” can still ring bells in your heart.
Victor Hugo has said, “All the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The time has come for God to become your beloved, your lover. We have tried all other relationships with God. There have been religions which have called him “Mother”; there have been religions which have called him “Father”; there have been religions which have thought of God as their child. But man now knows that there is only one relationship that goes to the very core; all other relationships are secondary.
A child is born to you because you loved a woman or a man. The relationship of the mother or the father with the child is a secondary relationship. Somebody becomes your father because he loved a woman and somebody becomes your mother because she loved a man. All relationships revolve around the single relationship of love.
Love is the shrine, the innermost shrine of the whole temple of relationship.
Man has tried all other relationships. They did well for a time, but now only one relationship can be of any help. All other relationships look a little faint and dull. As man grows in understanding, in maturity, many things will happen that will go on changing his own world vision. For example, after Freud, it is very difficult to call God “the Mother,” because ninety-nine percent of mental problems exist because of the mother. Now, Freud has to be reckoned with, he has to be included. You cannot neglect him; he has happened.
Before Freud, “mother” was an absolutely pure concept. Nobody had ever thought that the world was neurotic because of the mother; nobody had ever gone into it. It was taken for granted that the relationship of the mother and the child was the most divine, spiritual relationship. “There is nothing like it. It is the purest love.” That was the thinking before Freud. After Freud, things became totally different. You cannot go on neglecting Freud because his work contains some truth; it is not just fiction. Man’s problems – almost ninety-nine percent – exist because of the mother. Now the mother has become the source of all neurosis, schizophrenia, psychosis, madness, suicide, murder. How can you call God “Mother” anymore? It will be difficult.
After Marx, Engels and others, “father” is no longer a natural relationship; it is institutional. The concept of “father” has come because of private property. It is economical, it has nothing to do with love. Once the economic structure of society changes, once there is no longer private property in the world, the father is going to disappear. You will be surprised to know that uncle is an older word than father. Uncle existed first, then father. And sooner or later uncle will exist again and father will disappear.
People will live in communes. The child will never know who his father is, but he will know that all the people who are of his father’s age are uncles. Haven’t you noticed? The relationship with an uncle is always lovely. It is never so lovely with the father. With the uncle, the child has a friendship. It is always beautiful. It is very difficult to find a bad relationship between the child and the uncle; it is always a happy relationship. What is the problem? In the relationship with the father, there is possessiveness and with the uncle, there is no possessiveness. The uncle cares, just like the father, but without possessing. He is not authoritative, friendship is possible. If the word father disappears, God will be called uncle for the first time. Nobody as yet has called him uncle, but things change.
To me, father is institutional because in nature he doesn’t exist. Mother exists, mother is more natural. So religions who call God “Mother,” are more natural religions. But that too is not possible because of Freud. Freud has looked deep into the mother and has found that all those fictions of the “spiritual relationship” and “pure love” etcetera are all nonsense. “Mother” has to be transformed and changed, otherwise the world will remain neurotic forever.
The mother goes on doing whatsoever she feels is right, but the question is: “Is what she feels to be right, right?” The mother cares about the child, but is the care unconditional, really unconditional, or are there hidden conditions in it? The mother brings up the child and sacrifices much for him, but that sacrifice takes its revenge on the child. It goes on taking revenge on him. The mother starts proving herself to be a kind of martyr – she has sacrificed for you, now you sacrifice for her. That demand is constantly there – deliberately made or not, but it is always there. “I have sacrificed my life for you.” Consciously, unconsciously, that is always the message. “I have destroyed my life, I have sacrificed my life for you – now what about you? I am getting old, now you sacrifice your life for me!”
And she really has done a lot, so the child feels guilty. Every child feels guilty. When a man falls in love with a woman he feels guilty. He feels he is doing something against his mother because he is moving toward another woman, he is betraying her. Mothers are never happy with the wives of their sons – never! There is a competition, conflict, continuous conflict – those other women have taken away their sons. If a son wants to live his life he has to go away, otherwise his mother will suffocate him. He feels grateful but that gratefulness does not mean that he has to remain hanging around her apron strings for his whole life. He has to go.
Every mother makes her child feel guilty. These things have to be transformed. God cannot be called “Mother”; God cannot be called “Father.” The father has always been the disciplinarian. It was perfectly okay for Moses to call God “Father” because the whole concept was legal. God was the super-disciplinarian. He was disciplining everybody – punishing those who were wrong, rewarding those who were following him. It was a kind of court. It was a continuous judgment. You cannot love your judge. You are afraid of the judge and you are always trembling before your judge.
It is not just accidental that this century has declared, “God is dead.” God as the judge is dead, certainly dead. I agree with it. God as the Father is dead. God as the authority is dead. Now God can be revived only as love – not the love of the mother toward the child, or the father toward the child, or the love of the child toward the mother or the father. There is only one natural love and that is between a couple. It is the only love that descends – one never knows from where. It is the only one that arises spontaneously.
Your love for your mother is not spontaneous, it is a conditional love. If you had been taken away the day you were born, and brought up by another woman who told you that she was your mother, you would have loved her. If you had met your real mother one day, after twenty years, you would not have recognized her at all. It’s a conditioning. It arises because you live in close contact with your mother, it is a kind of imprinting, continuous imprinting. She gives you milk, she gives you warmth, she gives you care. When you are ill, she serves you… She does so many things for you. She surrounds you from everywhere. Love arises, but this love is a liking rather than love; it has no madness in it. It is a liking. So is the case with the father. He protects you, he finances you – he sends you to school, to college and to university – he prepares you for your life. You feel obliged to him. You have a respect for him.
The only spontaneous love is between a man and a woman. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you come across a woman and something clicks. You come across a man and your heart starts beating in the same rhythm. You are possessed by something called love. It is very mysterious. There is no reason for it – the woman has never done anything for you, the man has never done anything for you. There is no past between you and there is no future. You don’t know this woman – what she will do to you in the future. You don’t know this man – how he will prove himself to you in the future. There is no past – you have met for the first time and there is no guarantee for the future.
Yet, the thing is so tremendous that you forget the past, you forget the future and you start moving in the present. This moment is so valuable in itself that for no other reason you are ready to sacrifice all and everything for it. It is foolish, it is mad – that’s why down the ages the so-called wise people have called love, mad. It is mad because it has no reason in it. But that is the beauty of it, that is the depth of it. It comes from somewhere beyond reason, beyond the mind. It has the same quality as God. That’s why Jesus says, “Love is God.” Now love is going to be the metaphor for the future. Let God be your boy-friend or your girl-friend. It will depend on you who he is, not on him. God has no fixed entity, he becomes what you need him to be. He is liquid.
The day for that idea has come. When the day for an idea comes, nothing is more powerful than that. And vice versa it is also true. When the day of an idea has gone, nothing is more impotent than that. God as Father is impotent, God as Mother is impotent. Those ideas will linger because a few people live in the past. You can’t help it. A few people always live backward; they only look in the rear-view mirror, they never look ahead. A few people have fixed minds about the past. They are so very afraid of the new that they don’t look ahead, they look backward.
All people are not contemporaries. For anybody who lived two thousand years ago, Jesus’ idea: “God is Father” would have been appealing. Anybody who lived beyond two thousand years ago, some other idea would have been appealing. But those who are contemporaries and those who are ahead of their time, for them a new metaphor is needed: the metaphor of love.
God as overhead is out-of-date.
A customs officer at Heathrow opened up the suitcase belonging to an attractive Frenchwoman and found six pairs of saucy panties. “What are these for?” he demanded.
“I tell you,” she replied. “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.”
“What about Saturday?” he asked.
“Saturday – oh, la, la.”
He chalked her case and off she went. Next in line was a stout, motherly party from Yorkshire. One of the party had twelve pairs of red flannel drawers in her case.
“What’s all this, Ma?” he asked.
She answered, “January, February, March, April…”
There are people who are not contemporaries. But remember to be a contemporary because life belongs to those who are contemporaries. The past is no more – don’t cling to it.
The second question:
Osho,
Have I come here to enjoy myself or get enlightened? Does one need to suffer to become enlightened? I seem to fluctuate between the two. I'm very confused.
It is very simple. There is no need to be confused about it. If you are searching for enlightenment here, you will never find it. If you search for enjoyment here, you will find enjoyment and enlightenment comes in its wake. Enlightenment happens only to a person who lives in immense enjoyment of life. Only he is worthy of it because enlightenment is a greater joy – the greatest, the highest. You have to train for it. You have to train for it by being happy, joyous, by being in tune with life, by being a celebrator.
Forget about enlightenment. You need not worry about it. It is useless to think about it. Just enjoy yourself. Get lost in enjoyment. It is the easiest and shortest way to lose your ego. Once the ego is lost and you are really enjoying life, you are delighted with it. A great gratitude arises of its own accord. Suddenly you start feeling that you are grateful to God; whosoever God may be, whatsoever it means – that doesn’t matter anymore. Your life is such a joy, how can you feel ungrateful? Your life is such a joy that it is not possible to complain.
The complaining mind is the root cause of the atheist’s mind. When you complain, when everything is wrong, you cannot believe in God. Even if you try to believe, that belief will just be pseudo. It won’t have any depth in you, it will be superficial. It maybe out of fear or it maybe just out of conditioning, but there is no reality in it for you.
When you are joyous, when you are enjoying your life – the ordinary life, because there is no other life, only this life; when you start enjoying it – your food, your sleep, your bath, your walk early in the morning, the song, the birds, the trees, the people; when you start enjoying all this, gratefulness arises. You start feeling very calm and quiet. You start feeling a kind of contentment descending on you, slowly, slowly. The contentment becomes part of your being. You become suffused with it, immersed in it. Every cell of your body starts falling into a harmony. In that harmony you will have the first glimpses of enlightenment, not otherwise.
So if you ask me, I will say: “Forget about enlightenment, otherwise the idea of enlightenment will make you more miserable.” You are already miserable. Everything is wrong, nothing is ever right. You are suffering. Now, you bring another misery – enlightenment; this is very difficult. The misery of not having enough money is not very big. Make a little effort and you can have it, if not legally then illegally – but you can have it and there are ways. You are not famous and you are suffering; you can become notorious – that too is a kind of fame. If people don’t know you as a mahatma, they can know you as a devil, but you can make yourself known.
There is not much difference between the mahatma and a devil and there is not much difference between the saint and the sinner. Both are after fame; the basic urge is the same. The saint is one who has made it legally. The sinner is one who could not make it legally – was not so clever, was not so intelligent – and had to find some illegal ways, some criminal ways. But the reason is the same. These things are easily possible, so there will not be much suffering. Now, enlightenment… You cannot make it legally, you cannot make it illegally; you cannot make it. You as you cannot make it because you are the problem. So there is no illegal way to enlightenment; there is not even a legal way to enlightenment. In fact, those who know say there is no path to it. It is a pathless path. There is no gate; it is a gateless gate. There is no method to it. When all methods disappear, it happens.
So once a person becomes interested in enlightenment, he will be getting into eternal trouble. Now, whatsoever he does is going to fail – whatsoever. His failure is predetermined, it is built-in. In the very effort is the failure. So you do this and you do that, and you go on failing. The more you fail, the more desperate, the more anguish you will feel and the more hopeless you will become.
You will feel more and more lost – more lost than ever before and you will feel that this idea of enlightenment has been a curse. It has taken your ordinary life from you. It won’t allow you any other life, it takes possession of you totally, utterly. The old life has gone and the new one hasn’t happened. You start hanging in limbo. You are neither here nor there; you become a question mark. Your whole life becomes split. So remember, never become desirous of enlightenment; it will give you a great hell.
This is my basic approach: that you should learn how to enjoy life. Enjoy it more and more, and as deeply as possible. Go into it. Small moments can be transformed into eternities of joy. Small things can become celebrations – very small things. Just an unknown flower – and if you sit by the side of it and you look at it and you are open to it, it will give you great ecstasy. You will start swaying and dancing, you will feel drunk. Any small thing is full of godliness. This ordinary reality is not just ordinary, it is carrying the extraordinary, the superb, the supreme-most.
So love this life and don’t think of enlightenment. It always brings misery because it brings conflict. Let it come through this – you love a woman, you love a man… Let God come through that love, let God center you when you are in a state of orgasm. Eat, enjoy food and let God come to you as a taste. Listen to music, get lost in it and let God come to you as sound, as harmony. Let God descend on you slowly, slowly, without any hankering to grasp him, without any effort to possess him in your hands.
Just open yourself as much as possible – to the trees, to the birds, to the rains, to the sun, to the sands. Open yourself wherever you are, absorb and gratitude will arise and that gratitude will become your prayer. You will not know toward whom this gratitude is arising. When you don’t know toward whom this gratitude is arising, it is toward God. When you know that it is toward God, you don’t know anything. Is it the Christian God, the Hindu God, or the Mohammedan God? All these are not God. God is basically hidden. Nobody knows his name.
The Jews were right never to spell his name. The name of Yahweh was not allowed to be pronounced: “How can we pronounce his name? We don’t know his name.” His whereabouts are unknown. Nobody has ever seen him. Whosoever has seen him, has gone into him and disappeared forever; nobody has come back. Nobody knows where he is, who he is. But still, when life is flowing, when life has a flow to it and a dance to it, one feels gratitude. Gratitude comes first and God comes second, not otherwise.
People are trying to put God first. First they create God and that is their created God, man-made, home-made, manufactured. They bow down to their own manufactured statues. This is utterly stupid – a man bowing down to a statue he has made himself, or has purchased from the market. God is not for sale anywhere. Nobody has seen his face and nobody can make his statue. Nobody knows where he is: overhead, behind, in front, right, left – nobody knows. But gratitude arises… Just as fragrance arises out of a flower and disperses, not knowing where, unaddressed; in the same way, gratitude arises unaddressed. It is prayer, real prayer and you start feeling God in your heart. Because of this gratitude and because of this prayerfulness and thankfulness, enlightenment is not far away. First, become joyous. Jesus goes on saying it, but nobody listens. He says again and again: “Rejoice! Rejoice! I say again rejoice!”
You have asked: “Have I come here to enjoy myself or get enlightened?” You have come here to get enlightened, as far as you are concerned. As far as I am concerned, you have come here to enjoy yourself. Through enjoyment comes enlightenment and through enlightenment comes just suffering. They are all ego trips. You have found beautiful names, that’s all, but they are all ego trips. Now, you want to become enlightened. Why? What for? Where did you get this idea of enlightenment? Now, you will be searching and this will create so much suffering for you. What to do? Stand on your head to become enlightened? Fast, to become enlightened? Go to the mountains and live in a cave? Become a masochist – torture yourself? Practice a thousand and one things – which will be of the mind and will not lead you beyond the mind?
Just go and look at the people. The East has been on this trip for a very long time. The West is new and unaware of the pitfalls. The East has been in it far too long. Just go and watch Eastern seekers going after enlightenment and you will find all kinds of pathologies. Someone has been fasting for months. His body has become just bones, with sunken eyes and all his energy gone. Torturing himself in the hope that this is the way – as if God were a sadist, and would like you to torture yourself. “The more you torture yourself the more valuable you will become.” This is something that has gone deep into the psychology of man.
The child learns this from his parents. Whenever the child is happy, the parents are not happy. Whenever the parents are happy, the child is not happy. The child learns one basic fundamental of life: “Parents can only be happy when I am not happy.” For example, the child is ready to go out. It is raining and the rains are calling him. It is so beautiful outside… And the sound of the rain… And it is so cool. He wants to go out and stand in the rain. But his mother is not prepared to let him to go, the father is not prepared to let him to go. They shout at him. He remains in the house. He looks out of the window with greedy eyes. It looks so beautiful out there and the trees look so happy and the trees are so moved by the rains.
He would like to go out into this world and he would like to stand like a tree, but he is not allowed to. The parents are happy if he doesn’t go, if he suffers. If he does go out, the parents suffer. When he comes back, he has been a nuisance, he will be punished. The parents will be angry for many days. Now, one thing the child goes on learning every day: “Whatsoever I feel as joyous is wrong and whatsoever I feel as painful, boring, is right.”
He is so full of energy that he wants to play with the dog outside, or he wants to go and run around the house – but the parents say, “Do your homework.” Now, he doesn’t like homework. He hates it. But the parents are only happy when he is in some kind of sad situation. So he has learned one thing: “God is father.” So the logic reaches easily to the conclusion that if you are enjoying food, God will be very angry with you, he will throw you into hell – God the father. If you are fasting and suffering, God will be very happy and he will send you to heaven.
If you love a woman and you’re feeling immensely happy, guilt arises. God must be watching. God seems to be continuously watching! That’s what people have been told, that he is a kind of Peeping Tom – whatsoever you are doing, wherever you are, he is watching. Just think of him – he must get tired of all this nonsense. Watching and watching and watching… He must have gone mad by now. Millions and millions of people have been doing things… How many things are people doing? And he is watching! He has nothing else to do, he is just a “watcher.”
You have been taught that he is watching you everywhere. Wherever you go he is there, following you – those two eyes, or, if you are a Hindu, three eyes, watching you. And continuous fear… You are happy and he is watching. You will suffer for it. Haven’t you noticed that whenever you are happy, you feel a certain kind of guilt arising in you? Every day someone or other comes to me and says, “Osho I am feeling very happy. But guilt arises in me – why?” It arises because of a wrong association. You have been taught a wrong philosophy of life. You have not been taught the grammar of joy, you have been taught the grammar of suffering. So you ask: “Does one need to suffer to become enlightened? I fluctuate between the two. I’m very confused.”
Naturally, you will be confused. You will have to drop one, otherwise you will continuously fluctuate. There is no enlightenment without enjoyment. Let this become your rule, the golden rule: God comes through joy; God comes only when you are happy, immensely happy; God flows only toward those hearts which are glad; God comes only to those who are dancing; God comes to you only when he hears your laughter, not your prayer but your laughter. Let your laughter be your only prayer. Let your joy be your only offering. Love life. Love small things. Don’t miss a single moment. Go on becoming more and more joyful and you will find God is coming to you more and more.
Hindus are right when they say that God is anand, bliss. It is true, it is his ultimate definition. So he can be attained only through bliss, not through suffering. The suffering will help your ego to become stronger, and the stronger the ego, the farther away you are from God. Only when you melt in happiness, you become liquid in happiness, you start flowing in happiness, you are no longer frozen… And when you are not frozen, where can you flow? There is only God all around you. Once you melt, you flow into him, when you flow, he flows into you. It is reciprocal.
God comes to you only in that proportion in which you go into him. A man who is trying to achieve God, enlightenment, nirvana, becomes more and more egoistic, becomes more and more self-centered. His whole effort is how to attain and possess God. But how can you possess God? You can only be possessed by him, you cannot possess him. He is not smaller than you, he is bigger. How can the river possess the ocean? The river can only disappear into the ocean. The ocean will possess the river and that is the only way for the river to possess the ocean. The man who is seeking enlightenment is trying to do the impossible. It is not possible in the very nature of things.
Here, being close to me, learn one thing, that is joy. Rejoice! Forget all about enlightenment, otherwise it will create a continuous suffering and anxiety in you. Naturally, enlightenment happens only in the future, so the future comes in. You start planning for it and you go on missing the present. Live the moment as if it is all and enlightenment will find you. You need not find it.
The third question:
Osho,
You said that love is more important than the person. Well, what about you? I love you!
If you think of me as a person, you have not seen me yet, you are missing. I am not a person. You can love me; I am love. There is nobody here. Or, only nobody is here. Look on me as love, not as a person. If you look at me as a person, you will become attached and attachment brings misery. If you look at me as love, you cannot be attached and if you look at me as love you can dissolve with me. You cannot dissolve with a person. You can only dissolve with an energy, not with a person. People collide, that is the misery of all the lovers in the world. People collide, because people are two egos. When two egos come close, sooner or later, the clash, the conflict comes because each of them wants to possess the other and the other doesn’t like it.
Nobody wants to be possessed. So the natural calamity of love arises because you have not understood love as energy. Don’t think of me as a person, otherwise you will start possessing me and there will be inner conflict. Think of me as love, as energy, as space: you can dissolve in me and you can allow me to dissolve in you. There will be no clash. That is the real relationship between a disciple and a master – a non-clashing relationship. There is no conflict, there is only harmony, attunement. They move on the same wave length. I am not a person. If you really love me, you will also become a non-person. And when you have also become a non-person there will be a meeting, not before it.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Did Jesus father any children?
I don’t think so because he would not go into that tedium. But there is a man… Just the other day I was reading about him, he lives in Srinagar, Kashmir and his name is Sahib Zadda Basarat Salim. He claims that he is the direct descendant of Jesus Christ. He has in his possession even today, a complete genealogical table which traces his direct ancestry from Jesus Christ. People go for nonessential things. Now this genealogy must be fictitious. It is true that Jesus lived in Kashmir for many years, but there is not any possibility of him fathering children because once a master starts creating disciples, they are his children. Giving birth to children will simply be a conflict. It will create problems, it will not help anybody.
The master is no longer interested in his physical persistence through children, his whole interest has moved to a higher plane. Now he would like to persist as a spiritual force through his disciples. They are his children, they are his real children – spiritual children. And when you can have spiritual children, who bothers having physical children? The disciple is the real child. Only the disciple can take the message of the master to the future. So I don’t think that Jesus fathered any children. My feeling is that the Bible is correct because it stops at Jesus, the son of Mariam. It starts from the very beginning: fourteen generations – it gives the chart and it stops at Jesus. It seems to be perfectly as it should be.
With Jesus, things have come to a climax. In Jesus, the revolution has happened; the body has disappeared into the soul. Now Jesus no longer functions like a body. To have children means that he still functions like a body. He functions as a spiritual force, as a spiritual magnetism. He functions as a soul, not as a body. The body is there but it is just the abode. The identity is no longer there and he does not think of himself as the body.
So, don’t get involved in such unnecessary things. They are unnecessary, they don’t lead you to any understanding.
The fifth question:
Osho,
Why does the Bible talk about man's state with metaphors such as: lameness, deafness, blindness, drunkenness, sleep and death?
You ask why? Just observe yourself and you will find all these things. Lameness… A man is lame if he has not yet reached God. What use are your legs if they have not led you to God? What use are they? – you are lame. A man is deaf if he has not yet heard the song, the music of God. It is all around and you have not heard it yet? Jesus had to say again and again, “If you have ears, listen! If you have eyes, see!” Whom is he talking to? To you! Don’t think that he is visiting some institution where only blind people live, or only deaf people live. He is talking to people just like you who have eyes and ears, but who have not seen the real and who have not heard the real. Who go on seeing dreams and who go on hearing whatsoever they want to hear, not that which is. Man is deaf, man is blind.
What have you seen? You have not seen the real, you have not seen the miraculous, the mysterious. The irony is that the mysterious surrounds you from everywhere – day in, day out, year in, year out. You live in the mysterious like a fish lives in the ocean and the fish has not seen the ocean yet!
Kabir says: “I wonder and I laugh why the fish is thirsty living in the ocean.”
There is an old Hindu parable that a fish became philosophic and started inquiring, “Where is the ocean?” And she swam in the ocean all the time. She went from one place to another in search of enlightenment. She wanted to know where the ocean was – because she had heard that we are born in the ocean and we disappear into the ocean and that the ocean is our source and our goal; that the ocean is God. So she started searching for the ocean and she asked many people and they said, “We have heard about it, but we also don’t know.” They were all living in the ocean, those philosophers, those professors – they were all fish. How do you know the ocean if you have never been out if it? To know, a little distance is needed.
Sometimes a fish comes to know, when she is thrown out of the ocean. When somebody catches her in a net and takes her onto the hot sands, then she knows what the ocean is. That is possible for a fish, but what about man? Man cannot be taken out of God. There is no place which is outside of God. We are born in him, we breathe in him. We breathe him, we eat him, we love him, we are loved by him; we fight with him, we quarrel with him; we are young in him and we become old in him. One day we die in him, as one day we were born in him. You must be blind because you don’t see him and you go on asking, “Where is God?”
You have asked: “Why does the Bible talk about man’s state with metaphors, such as: lameness, deafness, blindness, drunkenness, sleep and death?” This life is not life. It cannot be called life yet because joy hasn’t happened. What kind of life is this? – maybe just a preparation, a rehearsal for the real life. The real has not happened because it does not show in the glow of your being. That splendor is not there, present within you; that aura does not surround you. Yes, you go on dragging yourself, hoping that some day life will happen, but it has not happened yet. So Jesus is right, the Bible is right – you are dead, you are asleep.
Jesus goes on saying again and again, “Awake! Be wakeful because one never knows when the Beloved will come. Don’t fall asleep. He may come and you may be asleep.” But there is no need for you to fall asleep – people are asleep. Only with conscious meditation, only with awareness, living moment to moment with absolute alertness, does one come out of sleep.
You are drunk – drunk with money, drunk with the ego, drunk with power and prestige. There are a thousand kinds of alcoholic beverages available: money is alcohol, power is alcohol, politics is alcohol. Beware of these things. People are so clever that they can turn anything into alcohol. Work becomes alcohol. There are workaholics, who cannot remain without work. They have to do something. They feel good when they are involved in doing something. When they have a little gap and they don’t know what to do, they start going crazy. They have to do. They read the same newspaper that they have already read. They rush to the TV or the radio and listen to the same news that they have listened to before. Or they may go to see the same movie again. Or they start talking about the things that they have talked about a thousand and one times; nobody listens and they know it. They are bored, others are bored – but what to do? Workaholics…
A great organization is needed, greater than Alcoholics Anonymous: “Workaholics Anonymous.” Politicians will come, scientists will come, artists will come, millionaires will come – all kinds of people will come. Anything that possesses you so much that you cannot be without it is alcohol.
The mind is very cunning. Your mantra may become your alcohol, your TM may become your alcohol. Every morning you have to do your mantra for twenty minutes, you have to repeat it in a stupid way, “Ram, Ram, Ram.” If you repeat it, you don’t get anything; if you don’t repeat it, you feel lost. If you repeat it you know nothing is happening, but if you don’t repeat it you feel you are missing something. A great urge arises to repeat the mantra – the same kind of urge that a smoker experiences.
He knows that by smoking cigarettes he doesn’t get anything – there is no need to say that he doesn’t get anything. If he does get something, it is bad – maybe tuberculosis, asthma. He could get great things like that, otherwise he doesn’t get anything. He knows it also. But the problem is that if he doesn’t smoke, he starts feeling a great urge. That urge becomes more and more powerful; it possesses him. He has to smoke. He knows it isn’t good, he has decided not to smoke, he has taken a vow, but it doesn’t help. He has to go and smoke, otherwise he feels very nervous, tense. Smoking helps him. Just an old habit… Habits are very relaxing. You feel comfortable, cozy in them. Your mantra can become your alcohol. Beware. One has to be very conscious, otherwise anything can become your alcohol. And man is drunk.
Man is ordinarily like a person living in a trance induced by post-hypnotic suggestions. Jesus says that there is only one cure: metanoia – turning backward, turning into yourself, turning your consciousness toward your inner being. Unless you start looking into your being and become very alert… And you can. You know there are moments when you are more alert and there are moments when you are less alert. There is the key.
Why are you more alert in a certain moment? A beautiful woman passes by and you become more alert. What has happened? You really wanted to see her, you didn’t want to miss the opportunity – that’s why you became more alert. If you look at a tree in the same way… An opportunity may be missed – you may never come across this rosebush again. Who knows? The rosebush may not be there tomorrow, you may not be there tomorrow. Who knows? This may be your last meeting – the first and the last. Have a look, a total look at the rose and you will be alert. A bird is singing. This may be the last time. You may never listen to the song of a bird again, you may be lying down in your grave tomorrow. It is not worth missing. It is so precious. How can you not be alert? Be alert. A friend has come to your home. Be alert.
Each moment has to be taken as if it were the last. There is every possibility that this may be the last moment. So use it totally. Squeeze the juice out of it, totally. In that very totality, you will be alert and the drunkenness will be gone. This is what Jesus calls metanoia.
A drunk staggered up to a policeman, and said, “Officer, Officer, where am I?”
“You are in front of the Osho Ashram,” said the policeman. “It is Koregaon Park.”
“Never mind the details,” said the drunk. “What town am I in?”
A drunk is a drunk. He is not interested in details. He is not even aware what town he is in. Are you aware of where you are? Are you aware of what planet you are on? Are you aware of the life you have, which is slipping through your hands without being used at all? Are you aware of the opportunity? Are you aware of who you are? So if Jesus says that you are drunk, he is perfectly right. Don’t feel offended.
A fire engine, with its siren screaming, tore up St. Martin’s Lane toward New Oxford Street. At the same moment, a drunk staggered out of the Salisbury and immediately set off in hot pursuit. He was soon outdistanced and collapsed, panting on the pavement. As the fire engine receded into the distance, he shook his fist at it and shouted, “All right then! Keep your rotten old ice-cream!”
What are you running after? Please, first take a look, then start running. Your desire is not enough proof that things exist to satisfy your desires. They may not exist and your whole life will prove a futile effort, in vain. That’s how it proves to millions of people. Rarely does a man come to his fulfillment. You can also be that rare man. You can be a Jesus or a buddha, but that is possible only if you drop your drunkenness.
During the match, the batsman heard a cry from the crowd, “Smith! Smith! Your house is on fire!”
He dropped his bat and ran off the field, through the crowd and into the road. Breathlessly he pounded along and then stopped. “Why am I running?” he said. “My name is not Smith.”
Have a look again at who you are and why you are running. Is your house really on fire? Where are you going so fast? And people are going very fast. If they don’t reach their destination, they think they have not been fast enough. So they develop, invent faster ways, without knowing exactly where it is they want to reach to. Man uses more and more power to reach without knowing where he is going, without knowing where he really wants to reach.
Three drunks rushed onto the platform at Cannon Street Station just as the last train to Greenwich was pulling out. With great difficulty and with a lot pushing and shoving, two of them managed to get a door open and tumble in before the train picked up speed and disappeared. The man who was left behind collapsed on the platform and roared with laughter.
“Your friends just managed to catch the train, sir,” said a porter who was watching.
“Yes, they did,” said the drunk, still laughing. “And the funny thing is they came to see me off!”
And you ask why the Bible calls you drunk and asleep? You are, that’s why.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I have a question to the lecture on November 2nd. What did Jesus write in the sand?
In one of the ancient monastery papers, the following footnote is recorded just opposite the passage where Jesus said: “Let he among you who is without sin throw the first stone.” His mother, Mary, was also there in the crowd and he was afraid that she, being the Virgin, may throw the first stone. He actually saw the thought cross his mother’s mind. So he was writing again and again on the sand: “I really wish you wouldn’t do that, Mother!”
The seventh question:
Osho,
How do you always manage to find the appropriate jokes for your talks?
It is just the other way round.
Little Tom and his dad went to the circus. After the show, on the way home the father said to little Tom, “Wasn’t that clever to time the horses so finely with the music?”
“Yes indeed,” answered little Tom, yet not totally convinced.
Suddenly a few steps further, little Tom stops and facing his father, said in a confident voice, “What about timing the music with the horses?”
It can be the other way around, too. It seems natural for you, as it looked to the father, “Wasn’t that clever to time the horses so finely with the music?” But to little Tom, the horses were more important than the musicians. Little children live in a different world, their perspective is different. He was not totally convinced of it. He said, “What about timing the music with the horses?” Rather than the horses being timed with the music, it can be otherwise.
I love jokes. When I find a joke, I try to find a question for it. When I love a joke, sooner or later somebody or other is going to ask the question to which the joke is going to fit.
The eighth question:
Osho,
What is meditation?
Now this is strange. It reminds me of a story…
A cricket fan took his girlfriend out on a date – it was a full-moon night and the beach was silent. They were sitting on the beach and it was beautiful. They were holding hands and hugging each other. The cricket fan continued to talk about cricket for three hours. Suddenly he became aware that he must be boring the girl. Three hours is too long! So he said, “Sorry, forgive me. I have been talking for three hours about my hobby. I am a fan, I am mad about cricket. I must have bored you utterly?”
The girl said, “Not at all, not at all. But do tell me, what is cricket?”
Now you ask, “What is meditation?” And my whole life I have been talking about meditation. But still, I understand why the question has arisen. You listen, but you don’t get it. You understand intellectually what meditation is, but still it remains elusive. You cannot catch hold of it. And you cannot catch hold of it! It is not that something is wrong with you. Meditation cannot be caught hold of. You have to allow it to happen so that it can catch hold of you!
Meditation is not something that you have to do; meditation is something for which you have to wait. It is something that comes and comes on its own. It is like a breeze. It is not that you can pull in, manage and order. You cannot order anything that is valuable. Ordered things are ordered things. You cannot order God. So, meditation, satori, samadhi, enlightenment, nirvana and God cannot be ordered. The very idea is silly. You cannot order. You can receive. Certainly you can receive. You can invite, you can wait patiently. So whenever you are feeling happy, whenever you are feeling joyous, whenever you are feeling harmonious, in tune, just sit silently. Wait for it. Just wait for it. Nothing else is needed to be done.
Meditation is not an action. Just wait. Relax and wait. Lie down, sit or stand – as you feel good – and wait for it. Wait, alert and soon you will hear the whisperings, the silent steps of something which is coming closer to you. Soon you will see something entering into your heart, into your being. You cannot see it, but it is there. You can feel it. It is like a fragrance that fills your nostrils. It is like light. Keep the window open. That’s all you need to do: just keep the window open. So when the light arises and the clouds are gone and the sun is high, the rays can enter in you.
About meditation you can only do negative things. Keep the door open, keep your eyes open, keep yourself alert and it comes. It will certainly come. It will immediately start flowing in you. It is a benediction. You cannot pull it, you cannot manipulate it. A manipulated meditation will not be of any value. That’s what people are doing: someone is doing TM, someone is doing something else – trying to manipulate.
Here, when you are doing the Dynamic, the Kundalini or the Nadabrahma Meditations – they are not really meditations, you are just getting in tune. It is like Indian classical musicians playing. If you have seen them… For half an hour, or sometimes even longer, they simply go on tuning their instruments. They will move the knobs, they will tighten or loosen the strings. The drummer will go on checking his drum – whether it is perfect enough. For half an hour they go on doing this. This is not music, this is just a preparation. Kundalini is not really a meditation, it is just a preparation. You prepare your instrument. When it is ready, you stand in silence – meditation begins. You are utterly there. You have woken yourself up by jumping, by dancing, by breathing, by shouting – these are all devices to make you a little more alert than you ordinarily are. Once you are alert, then the waiting.
Waiting is meditation – waiting with full awareness.
And then it comes, it descends on you, it surrounds you, it plays around you, it dances around you, it cleanses you, it purifies you – it transforms you.
The ninth question:
Osho,
Why do you sometimes use big and difficult words?
I don’t know very much English. I somehow go on expressing myself. I am not at home with English. The problem is: first, I am not at home with any language at all – the basic problem – because what I want to say is beyond language. The English language is unacquainted with me, so I have to create my own English. I know the English language through books, so sometimes big words may filter in because I don’t know the smaller words for them. Otherwise, I would have used the smaller ones because smaller words are more expressive. The bigger the word, the less expressive; the bigger the word, the more scholastic.
Listen to this anecdote:
An African diplomat, paying his first visit to England, was met at the airport by the usual gaggle of media men.
“Did you have a good flight, Sir?” asked one reporter.
“Wowie, ssssh! Yes, yes, very comfortable, thank you,” replied the African.
“And how long will you be here?” asked another.
“Wowie, ssssh! About three weeks.”
“And will you be going straight to see the Prime Minister today?”
“Wowie, ssssh! Yes, I am going as soon as I have answered your questions.”
“How did you learn such a distinctive style of speaking?” asked another journalist, intrigued by the strange noises which preceded each of the African’s replies.
“Wowie, ssssh! The English on the Radio service of the BBC.”
Enough for today.