The first question:
Osho,
How can we prepare ourselves for death?
Don’t accumulate anything whatever: power, money, prestige, virtue, knowledge, even the so-called spiritual experiences. Don’t accumulate. If you don’t accumulate you are ready to die any moment, because you have nothing to lose. The fear of death is not really fear of death; the fear of death comes out of the accumulations of life. Then you have too much to lose. You cling to it. That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit.
I don’t mean become a beggar, and I don’t mean renounce the world. I mean be in the world, but don’t be of the world. Don’t accumulate inside, be poor in spirit. Never possess anything – and then you are ready to die. Possessiveness is the problem, not life itself. The more you possess, the more you are afraid to lose. If you don’t possess anything, if your purity, if your spirit is uncontaminated by anything, if you are simply there alone, you can disappear any moment; whenever death knocks on the door it will find you ready. You are not losing anything. By going with death you are not a loser. You may be moving into a new experience.
And when I say don’t accumulate, I mean it as an absolute imperative. I’m not saying don’t accumulate things of this world and go on accumulating virtue, knowledge, and so-called spiritual experiences, visions – no. I am talking in absolute terms: don’t accumulate. There are people, particularly in the East, who teach renunciation. They say, “Don’t accumulate anything in this world because it will be taken away from you when death comes.” These people seem to be basically greedier than the ordinary, worldly people. Their logic is: don’t accumulate in this world because death will take it away, so accumulate something that death cannot take away from you – accumulate virtue, punya; accumulate character, morality, knowledge; accumulate experiences, spiritual experiences, experiences of kundalini, meditation, this and that; accumulate something that death cannot take away from you.
But if you accumulate, with that accumulation comes fear. Each accumulation brings fear in its own proportion; then you are afraid. Don’t accumulate and fear disappears. I don’t teach you renunciation in the old sense; my sannyas is an absolutely new concept. It teaches you to be in the world and yet to be not of it. Then you are always ready.

I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam. Once he was the Emperor of Bokhara, then he left everything and became a Sufi beggar. When he was staying with another Sufi mystic he was puzzled because every day the man was continuously complaining of his poverty.
Abraham Adam said to him, “The way you abuse it, it may be that you have bought your poverty cheaply.”
“How stupid you must be!” the man retorted, not knowing to whom he was talking, not knowing that Abraham was once the emperor. He said, “How stupid you must be to think that one buys poverty.”
Abraham replied, “In my case, I paid my kingdom for it. I would even give away a hundred worlds for a single moment of it, for every day its value becomes more and more to me. No wonder then that I give thanks for it while you lament it.”

The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word sufi comes from an Arabic word safa. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.
And what is purity? Don’t misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality. Don’t interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hanker to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness. There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into your consciousness. But if you want to possess, that possessiveness can enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If you don’t want to possess anything you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.
A man who is really spiritual has tremendous experiences, but he never accumulates them. Once they have happened he forgets about them. He never remembers, he never projects them into the future. He never says that they should be repeated or that they should happen again to him. He never prays for them. Once they have happened they have happened. Finished! He is finished with them and he moves away from them. He is always available for the new, he never carries the old.
And if you don’t carry the old you will find life absolutely new – incredibly, unbelievably new at each step. Life is new, only the mind is old; and if you look through the old mind life also looks like a repetition, a boring thing. If you don’t look through the mind… Mind means your past, mind means the accumulated experiences, knowledge and everything. Mind means that through which you have passed, but which you are still hanging onto. Mind is a hang-over, dust from the past covering your mirrorlike consciousness. Then when you look through it everything becomes distorted. Mind is the faculty of distortion. If you don’t look through the mind you will be ready for death. In fact not looking through the mind you will know that life is eternal. Only mind dies – without mind you are deathless. Without mind nothing has ever died; life goes on and on and on forever. It has no beginning and no end.
Accumulate – then you have a beginning, and then you will have an end.
This is the way, how to prepare yourself for death. When I say “how to prepare for death,” I don’t mean preparing for the death that will come in the end – that is very far away. If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future and again the mind will come in. No, when I say prepare for death, I don’t mean the death that will come finally; I mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation. Accept this death each moment and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.
Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown. With dying and being reborn each moment you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also.
And that’s what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death. If you live life and death totally, you transcend. In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the one. That one is really the truth. You can call it godliness, you can call it life, you can call it truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.

The second question:
Osho,
At times you seem to intend to confuse us about love and meditation. Sometimes you stress the ultimate futility of love; on other occasions you pronounce meditation as being useless. And sometimes you say both love and meditation are fundamental paths of enlightenment.
The questioner says, “At times you seem to intend to confuse us.” No, you have not listened to me well. I am always confusing, not only at times. Confusion is my method.
What I am trying to do by confusing you is to uproot you from your mind. I would not like you to have any roots in the mind in the name of love or in the name of meditation or in the name of God. Your mind is very cunning. It can thrive on anything; on meditation, on love, it can thrive. The moment I see that your mind is thriving on anything, I immediately have to uproot you from it. My whole effort is to create a no-mind state in you. I am not here to convince you about anything. I am not here to give you a dogma, a creed to live by. I am here to take all creeds away from you because only then will life happen to you. I am not giving you anything to live by, I am simply taking all props away from you, all crutches.
The mind is very clever. If you say, “Drop money,” the mind says, “Okay. Can I cling to meditation?” If you say to the mind, “Renounce the world,” the mind says, “Okay. Can I now possess spiritual experiences?” If you say, “Renounce the world,” the mind says, “I can renounce the world, but now I will cling to the idea of God.” And nothing is a greater barrier to godliness than the idea of God.
The word God has become a great barrier, the belief in God has become a great barrier. If you want to reach to godliness you will have to drop all ideas about God, all beliefs about God – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. You will have to be absolutely silent, unclinging, not-knowing. In that profound ignorance godliness reveals itself to you – only in that profound ignorance.
My effort is totally different from your effort. What you are doing here is diametrically opposite to what I am doing here. My effort is to create a profound ignorance in you, so I will have to confuse you. Whenever I see that some knowledge is being gathered, I immediately jump on it and destroy it. By and by you will learn – being close to me you are bound to learn – that it is futile to accumulate because this man will not leave you in peace. If you cling to something he is going to take it away, so what is the point? One day you will simply listen to me, not clinging, not making any belief out of it, not creating a philosophy, a theology out of it; simply listening as you listen to the birds, as you listen to the wind passing through the pines, as you listen to the river rushing toward the ocean, as you listen to the wild roar of the ocean waves. Then you don’t create a philosophy, you simply listen.
Let me be a wild ocean roaring in front of you, or a wind passing through the trees, or birds singing in the morning. I am not a philosopher, I am not imparting knowledge to you. I am trying to point to something which is beyond knowledge.
So the moment I see that you are nodding, the moment I see that you are saying, “Yes, this is true,” the moment I see that you are accumulating something, immediately I have to jump upon it and contradict it to confuse you. Confusion is my method; I am doing it all the time. I will not leave you to rest unless you drop that whole effort of philosophizing, unless you start listening to me without any mind – out of the sheer joy of it, as you listen to music. When you start listening to me in that way then you will never feel confused. You feel confused because first you cling to something, then in the next step I destroy it. You feel confused. You were making a house and again I come there and destroy it.
Your confusion is in fact created by yourself. Don’t create that house, then I cannot destroy it. If you create, I am going to destroy. If you stop creating houses – card-houses, they are – if you stop creating houses, if you say, “This man will come and destroy,” if you simply wait and listen and you don’t bother to make any house to live in, then I cannot confuse you. And the day I cannot confuse you will be a great day of rejoicing for you because that very moment you will be able to understand me, not by your intellect but by your being. It will be a communion, not a communication. It will be a transfer of energy, not of words. You will have entered into my house.
I will not allow you to create any house because that will be a barrier. Then you will start living in that house and I am trying to bring you into my house. Jesus says to his disciples, “In my God’s house there are many mansions.” I also say to you, “I am taking you on a journey to where a great palace is waiting for you.” But I see you making houses by the side of the road and I have to destroy them, otherwise your journey will be destroyed and you will never reach the goal. You start worshipping anything. You are in such a hurry, you are so impatient, that whatsoever I tell you, you simply grab it.
I am not going to allow it to happen. So, be alert. If you are alert there will be no need to confuse you. In fact, if you are alert, whatsoever I do I cannot confuse you. The day you can say, “Now, Osho, you cannot confuse me. Whatsoever you say I listen, I rejoice in it, but I don’t make any conceptualization” is the day I cannot confuse you. Until that moment I am going to confuse you again and again and again.

The third question:
Osho,
As sex is closely related to death, what is the meaning of spontaneous celibacy?
Sex is more closely related to birth than to death. Birth is out of sex; birth is a sexual phenomenon. Naturally, sex is also closely related to death – but as a by-product. Because birth is out of sex, death is also going to be out of sex. Hence the nonsensical idea arose in the East that if you remain celibate, if you remain a brahmachari, if you go beyond sex, you will never die – you will become an immortal. That is foolish, because death is not something that is going to happen in the future, it has already happened with birth. You cannot avoid it. You can indulge in sex or you can indulge in celibacy, it is going to make no difference.

Mulla Nasruddin had completed his hundredth year, and a few journalists came to interview him. He was the first citizen of his town who had become a centenarian. They asked how he had attained to such great age.
He said, “I never touched wine, I was never interested in women. That must be the reason for it.”
Immediately something in the next room fell very loudly and there was a racket. The journalists became very alert. They said, “What is going on?”
Mulla said, “It must be my dad. It seems he is again running after the maid, and he seems to be drunk.”
The old man must be one hundred and twenty-five. Mulla had said, “I have attained to this age because of celibacy and because I never touched any wine, I have remained away from women,” but here is his father still rushing, drunk, trying to catch hold of a woman.

Death has already happened the moment you became incarnated in the body. The moment you entered the womb, death has already happened. Your clock, the clock of your life, can run only so far – seventy years, eighty years – it depends on a thousand and one things. But your clock can only run so far. It makes no difference how you live your life, death is going to happen. Death cannot be avoided.
The questioner has asked: “As sex is closely related to death what is the meaning of spontaneous celibacy?”
The first thing is: birth and death are both related to sex, but just by becoming celibate you are not going to transcend death. Death has already happened in birth, there is no way to transcend it. It is going to happen because in fact it has already happened. It is only a question of time unfolding. You are rushing toward it each moment.
So don’t try to be celibate just to avoid death, because that too again is fear. The people who try to become celibate are afraid of death, and one who is afraid of death can never know what death is, can never know what deathlessness is. So don’t be afraid.
And celibacy can only be spontaneous. You ask: “What is the meaning of spontaneous celibacy?” Celibacy can only be spontaneous; there is no other type of celibacy. If it is not spontaneous, it is not celibacy. You can force it, you can control your sexuality, but that is not going to help. You will not be celibate, you will be only more and more sexual. Sex will spread all over your being. It will become part of your unconscious. It will move your dreams, it will become your motivation in dreams, it will become your fantasy. In fact, you will become more sexual than you were ever before. You will think more about it and you will have to repress it again and again. And whatsoever is repressed has to be repressed again because the victory is never complete.
There is no way to destroy sex by force, by violence. There is no way to control and discipline it. The people who have tried to control and discipline it have made the whole world very pornographic. Your so-called saints have a very pornographic mind. If a window can be created and a hole can be made in their heads, you will be able to see just sex, pornography. It is bound to be so. It is natural.
Never enforce any celibacy on yourself. Try to understand what sexuality is, go deep into it. It has a tremendous beauty of its own. It is one of the profoundest mysteries of life. Life comes out of it – it has to be a great mystery. Sex is not sin; repression is a sin. Sex is very natural, very spontaneous. You have not done anything to have it, it is inborn, it is part of your being. Don’t condemn it, don’t judge it, don’t fear it, don’t fight with it. Simply go into it more – more meditatively. Let it happen in such silence, in such deep acceptance, that you can know the very core of it. The moment you penetrate to the very core of sexual orgasm, by and by you will see sex is losing its appeal for you, your energy is moving in a higher plane, you are becoming more loving and less sexual. And this happens spontaneously.
I am not saying become more loving. I am saying that if you go deep into the mystery of sex, love arises out of it naturally. You become more loving and sexuality becomes less and less and less. And one day there is just a pure flame of love, all the smoke of sex has disappeared. The crude energy of sex has been transformed into a more subtle perfume – the perfume of love.
Then I will say go deep into love. If you go deep into love, again you will come to the very core of it. And in that moment prayerfulness will arise. That too happens spontaneously. In sex you are more concerned with the body; in love you are more concerned with the psyche; in prayerfulness you suddenly become concerned with the soul. These are the three possibilities hidden in the seed of sex. And when sex has disappeared into love and love has disappeared into prayerfulness, there is a spontaneous celibacy.
The Indian term for it is very beautiful. It is brahmacharya. The word literally means living like a god. Brahmacharya means living like a god. The whole energy is just prayerfulness, the whole energy is just a grace, a gratitude, a benediction. One becomes absolutely divine.
But I am not saying that sex is not divine; it is the seed. Love is the tree, prayer is the flowering. Prayer arises out of sex energy. You have to be grateful toward it, you have to respect it. Sex should be respected because everything is going to happen out of it. Life has happened out of it; death is going to happen out of it; love, prayer and godliness are going to happen out of it. Sex carries the whole blueprint of your destiny. To me, sex is not just sex, sex is all.
So if from the very beginning you take an “anti” attitude you will be missing the whole journey of life. And you will get involved in such a fight which leads nowhere, you will get involved in a fight in which your defeat is certain. You cannot defeat sexual energy because in sexual energy godliness is hidden, in sexual energy love and prayer are hidden. How can you defeat it? You are very tiny and sexual energy is very universal. This whole existence is full of sexual energy.
But the word sex has become so condemned. It has to be taken out of the mud. It has to be cleaned. A temple has to be made around it. And remember, celibacy can only be spontaneous, there is no other type of celibacy. It is not a control, it is not a discipline; it is a tremendous understanding of your own energies and their possibilities.

The fourth question:
Osho,
You said nobody should dictate what you should do with your life. How does that fit with being available and surrendering to you?
In the first place I am a nobody. Now listen to the question again. “You said nobody should dictate what you should do with your life.” And the second thing: don’t surrender to me because I dictate to you. But if you feel like surrendering, what can I do? If you feel like surrendering, it is your feeling. If I am dictating to you to surrender to me, don’t listen to me. But if your heart is dictating, then what are you going to do? If I tell you to be available to me, don’t listen at all. But if your own understanding says, “Be available to this man,” then be.
And here there is nobody. If you look deeply into me you will not find anybody there. The house is empty, the whole space is yours, just for the asking. I am just a space. The man you see here sitting in the chair died long before. There is no entity who can dictate anything to you.
Just last night one woman seeker was saying, “I would like to do what other sannyasins are doing, but I cannot surrender. I cannot lose my freedom. I have lived in many confinements from my very childhood, in many disciplines. Now I am afraid to get involved in another imprisonment.” I said, “Don’t be worried. I confer freedom upon you, an absolute freedom.”
Sannyas is freedom. If you understand rightly, it is absolute freedom. And the woman understood the point because I said, “Now you are afraid that you may get into another trap. But are you aware that your ego itself can become the trap, and the greatest of all?” You have lived within many other commitments and you found they all became imprisonments – but your own ego can become the imprisonment.
When you surrender to a nobody he cannot imprison you, and the very danger of your own ego becoming an imprisonment for you disappears. When you surrender to me you are not really surrendering to me, because I am not here. And I’m not enjoying your surrender at all – whether you surrender or not makes no difference to me. In fact, when you surrender to me, you surrender yourself. You don’t surrender to me, you simply surrender your ego. I am just a device, an excuse. It will be difficult for you to go and surrender to the river, or to the sky, or to the stars – it will be very difficult and you will look a little ridiculous. So I pretend to be here just to help you so that you don’t feel ridiculous. You can put your ego here. There is nobody to receive it and nobody to be happy about it, but it helps.
Buddha used to call such things devices – upaya. It is just an upaya, a device to help those who cannot put their egos down unless they find some feet. I make my feet available to you, but inside there is nobody.

The fifth question:
Osho,
Why do you give us these religious titles? They seem absurd. Outside the ashram Indians seldom call me swami with a straight face.
You must be hankering for it. I have not called you swami to be swami for others. The word swami means lord. Don’t hanker for others to call you lord. I have called you swami just to indicate your path – so that you become lord of yourself. It is not to make others slaves to you; it is just to make a master of you. The word swami is intended for self-mastery. So don’t feel frustrated if nobody calls you swami. In fact if somebody calls you swami be alert, because there is danger. You may start thinking that you are a swami, you may start thinking that you are some holy man or something. Don’t carry that type of nonsense. I am not here to make you holy or saintly or anything.
You ask why I give you these religious titles because they seem absurd. They are! Really my whole intention is to make you so ridiculous, so absurd, that others laugh at you and you can also laugh at yourself. That is the whole trick in it.
And also for another purpose I call you swami. I give you these religious titles because to me the profane and the sacred are not two separate things; the profane is the sacred, the ordinary is the extraordinary, and the natural is the super-natural.
God is not somewhere away from the world. God is in the world, immanent. That’s my whole approach: that everything is divine as it is. The old concept of a religious man is that he is anti-life. He condemns this life, this ordinary life – he calls it mundane, profane, illusion. He denounces it. I am so deeply in love with life that I cannot denounce it. I am here to enhance the feeling for it.
When I give you these religious titles I am not making you in any way superior to others. Don’t carry any idea of “holier than you,” don’t carry any idea of that sort. That is stupid.
I give you these orange clothes. These clothes have been used for centuries down through the ages for a specific purpose – to make a demarcation between the ordinary life and the religious life. I want to dissolve all those differences. Hence I give you these robes and I don’t take you away from life.
You will be sitting in ordinary life, working in ordinary life, walking in ordinary life. You will be in the marketplace, you will be in the shop or in the factory, you will be a laborer, a doctor, an engineer. I am not making you special in any way – because that very desire to become special is irreligious.
And I have given you these robes to destroy the whole concept completely. That’s why the traditional sannyasins are very much against me. I am destroying their whole superiority. Now sooner or later there will be no distinction. My swamis are growing so fast that the old traditional swamis will be simply lost in the jungle of my swamis. And people will not know who is who. That’s the purpose behind it. I want to make religious life ordinary life, because this is the only life there is. All else is just an ego trip. And this life is so beautiful, there is no need to create another life superior to it.
Go deeper into it, move deeper into it, and profounder depths will be revealed to you. This ordinary life is carrying tremendous possibilities. So I don’t want you to become religious in the sense that others are not religious. I want to drop all distinctions between the profane and the sacred, between the holy and the unholy. It is a great revolution. You may not even be aware of what is happening.
And if the traditionalists are against me, I can understand. I am destroying their whole “holier than you” attitude. That’s why I have chosen the orange particularly. That has been the traditional dress for sannyasins. But I have chosen only the dress; nothing else is there in you – nothing else of the traditional discipline. There is just awareness, a love for life, a respect for life, a reverence for life. I have given you the orange robe. The day I see that now the traditional distinction has been destroyed, I will free you from the orange robe. There is no need then. But it will take time because they have been creating the distinction for centuries.
You cannot conceive of what is happening. When an orange-robed sannyasin walks with his girlfriend on the street, you cannot conceive what is happening. It has never happened in India, not for ten thousand years. People cannot believe it – and you are expecting that they should call you swami? It is enough that they are not killing you! You are destroying their whole tradition. A sannyasin was one who would never look at a woman. Touching was out of the question – and holding the hand, impossible! That was enough to throw him into hell.
I have made you a totally new kind of sannyasin. It is a neo-sannyas. And behind whatsoever I am doing there is a method. You may be aware of it or not. I want to destroy the whole traditional attitude. Life should be religious and religion should not have any other life. The distinction between the marketplace and the monastery should not be there. The monastery should be in the marketplace; the divine dimension should become part of everyday life.

Somebody asked Bokoju, “What do you do? What is your religious discipline?”
He said, “I live an ordinary life. That is my discipline. When I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel sleepy I sleep.”
Yes, this is exactly how it should be.
The questioner was puzzled. He said, “But I don’t see anything special in it.”
Bokoju said, “That is the point. There is nothing special All hankering for the special is of the ego.”
The questioner was still puzzled. He said, “But this is what everybody else is doing – when hungry they eat, when feeling sleepy they sleep.”
Bokoju laughed. He said, “No, when you eat, you do a thousand and one things also. You think, you dream, you imagine, you remember. You are not there just eating. When I eat, I simply eat. Then there is only eating and nothing else. It is pure. When you sleep you do a thousand and one things – you dream, fight, have nightmares. When I sleep I simply sleep, there is nothing else. When sleep is there, there is only sleep. Not even Bokoju exists. When eating is there, there is only eating. Not even Bokoju exists. When there is walking, there is only walking – no Bokoju. There is walking, simply walking.”

This is what I would like you to become. Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring truth to your ordinary life, introduce godliness into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special. And then you will be special. A man who is ready to live an ordinary life is an extraordinary man. Because to be extraordinary, to desire to be extraordinary, is a very ordinary desire. To relax and to be ordinary is really extraordinary.

The sixth question:
Osho,
Why is this life, which has no end and no beginning, so mysterious? Please explain.
Now, not only do I give you absurd answers, you have started asking absurd questions. Why is this life so mysterious? How am I supposed to know? It is so! It is simply a fact. I am not talking about theories. I’m not saying that it is my theory that life is mysterious – then you could ask why. It is simply so. The trees are green. You ask why. The trees are green because they are green. There is no question of why.
If you can ask why and the question can be answered, then life will not be a mystery. If the why can be answered, then life cannot be a mystery. Life is a mystery because no why is relevant.
“Why is this life, which has no end and no beginning, so mysterious?”
Now you make me feel guilty, as if I am responsible for life having no beginning and no end. It should have. I agree perfectly with you, but what to do? It has no beginning and no end.
I have heard:

Mulla Nasruddin was saying to one of his disciples that life is like a woman. I was surprised, so I listened attentively to what he was saying.
He was saying, “The man who says he understands women is bragging. The man who thinks he understands them is gullible. The man who pretends to understand them is ambiguous. The man who wants to understand them is wistful. On the other hand, the man who does not say he understands them, does not think he understands them, does not pretend to understand them, does not even want to understand them – he understands them!”

And that’s how life is also. Life is a woman. Try to understand life and you will become a mess. Forget all about understanding. Just live it and you will understand it. The understanding is not going to be intellectual, theoretical; the understanding is going to be total. The understanding is not going to be verbal; it is going to be non-verbal. That is the meaning when we say life is a mystery. It can be lived but it cannot be solved.
You can know what it is, but you cannot say what it is. That is the meaning of mystery. When we say that life is a mystery, we are saying that life is not a problem. A problem can be solved. A mystery is that which cannot be solved; insolubility is inbuilt. And it is good that life cannot be solved, otherwise what would you do then? Just think of it. If life is not a mystery and somebody comes and explains it to you – then what will you do? There will be nothing left except to commit suicide. Even that will look meaningless.
Life is a mystery; the more you know it, the more beautiful it is. But the less you know – a moment comes when suddenly you start living it, you start flowing with it. An orgasmic relationship evolves between you and life, but you cannot figure out what it is. That’s the beauty of it, that’s its infinite depth.
And yes, there is no beginning and no end. How can there be any beginning to life and any end to life? Beginning will mean that something came out of nothing, and end will mean that something was there and went into nothing. That will be an even bigger mystery. When we say life has no beginning, we simply say it has always been there. How can there be a beginning? Can you mark a line and say that at this moment life started? – as Christian theologians used to say. Just four thousand years before Jesus Christ, they say, life started on a certain Monday. Of course, it must have been in the morning. But how can you call it Monday if there was no Sunday before it? And how can you call it morning if there was no night before it? Just think of it.
No, you cannot make a mark – that is foolish. It is not possible to mark a line because even to mark a line something is needed. Something is needed to precede it, otherwise demarcation is not possible. You can mark a line if there are two things, but if there is only one thing, how can you mark a line? The fence around your house is possible because there is a neighbor. If there is no neighbor, nothing beyond your fence, the fence cannot exist. Just think of it. If there is absolutely nothing beyond your fence, your fence will fall down into nothing. How can it exist? Something is needed beyond the fence to hold it.
If on a certain Monday life started, a Sunday is needed to precede it. Otherwise the Monday will fall, topple down and disappear. And in the same way there is no possibility of any end. Life is, life simply is. It has been, it will be. It is eternity.
And don’t start thinking about it. Otherwise you will be missing it, because all the time that you waste in thinking about it, is simply waste. Use that time, use that space, use that energy to live it.

The seventh question:
Osho,
Why do you prefer to call meditation the art of dying rather than calling it the art of growing?
Because I know your ego will like it very much if I called it the art of growing. The art of dying comes like a shock.
Let me tell you an anecdote:

One day Mulla Nasruddin saw a crowd gathered around a pond. A Muslim priest with a huge turban on his head had fallen into the water, and was calling for help. People were leaning over and saying, “Give me your hand, Reverend, give me your hand!” But the priest didn’t pay attention to their offer to rescue him. He kept wrestling with the water and shouting for help.
Finally Mulla Nasruddin stepped forward: “Let me handle this!” He stretched out his hand toward the priest and shouted at him, “Take my hand!” The priest grabbed Mulla’s hand and was hoisted out of the pond.
People were very surprised and asked Mulla for the secret of his strategy. “It is very simple,” he said. “I know this miser would not give anything to anyone, not even his hand. So instead of saying, ‘Give me your hand’ I said, ‘Take my hand, your Reverence.’ And sure enough, he took it.”

I know you would like it to be called the art of growing. Then your ego would feel perfectly good: “So it is a question of growth; so I am going to remain and grow.” That’s what the ego always wants.
I have knowingly called it the art of dying. Meditation is the art of dying. Then your ego will be shocked.
And it is also truer to call it the art of dying, because your ego is not going to grow, your ego is going to die in meditation. These are the only two possibilities: either your ego goes on growing more, it becomes stronger, or it disappears. If your ego goes on growing and becomes stronger and stronger, you are getting more and more into the mud. You are getting more and more into fetters, you are getting more and more into the imprisonment of it. You will be suffocated. Your whole life will become a hell.
The growth of the ego is a cancerous growth. It is like cancer, it kills you. Meditation is not growth of the ego, it is death of the ego.

The eighth question:
Osho,
The more you talk about death, the greater my desire for life. I have just realized that I have not really lived. While I can understand that life and death come together, there is a yearning inside me that cries out for life, love and passionate intensity. I have discovered I am anguished at the thought of surrendering my unfulfilled desires. Can one give up what one has never had? I feel I would only return to the body again. Illusion or not, to my great amazement I have to admit that I still desire, and I have never felt such hunger.
When I say “to die” I really mean to live intensely; I really mean to live passionately. How can you die unless you have lived totally? In total life there is death, and that death is beautiful. In a passionate, intense life, death comes spontaneously – as a silence, as a profound bliss. When I say “to die”, I am not saying anything against life; in fact, if you are afraid of death you will be afraid of life also. That’s what has happened to the questioner.
A man who is afraid of death will be afraid of life also, because life brings death. If you are afraid of the enemy and you close your door, the friend will also be prohibited. And you are so afraid of the enemy that you close the door; the enemy may enter so you close the door for the friend also. And you become so afraid that you cannot open for the friend, because who knows? The friend may turn out to be the enemy. Or, when the door is open, the enemy may enter.
People have become afraid of life because they are afraid of death. They don’t live because at the highest points, peaks, death always penetrates into life. Have you watched this happening? Almost the majority of women have lived a frigid life – they are afraid of orgasm, they are afraid of that wild explosion of energy. For centuries women have been frigid; they have not known what orgasm is.
And almost the majority of men suffer because of that fear too – ninety-five percent of men suffer from premature ejaculation. They are so afraid of orgasm, there is so much fear, that somehow they want to finish it, somehow they want to get out of it.
Again and again they go into lovemaking and there is fear. The woman remains frigid and the man becomes so afraid that he cannot stay in that state any longer. The very fear makes him ejaculate sooner than is natural, and the woman remains rigid, closed, holding herself. Now orgasm has disappeared from the world because of the fear. In the deepest orgasm, death penetrates; you feel as if you are dying. If a woman goes into orgasm she starts moaning, she starts crying, screaming. She may even start saying, “I am dying. Don’t kill me!” That actually happens. If a woman goes into orgasm she will start mumbling, she will start saying, “I am dying! Don’t kill me! Stop!” A moment comes in deep orgasm where ego cannot exist, death penetrates. But that is the beauty of orgasm.
People have become afraid of love because in love also, death penetrates. If two lovers are sitting side by side in deep love and intimacy, not even talking… Talking is an escape, an escape from love. When two lovers are talking that simply shows they are avoiding the intimacy. Words in-between give distance; with no words distance disappears, death appears. In silence there is death just lurking around – a beautiful phenomenon. But people are so afraid that they go on talking whether it is needed or not. They go on talking about anything, everything – but they cannot keep silent.
If two lovers sit silently, death suddenly surrounds them. And when two lovers are silent you will see a certain happiness and also a certain sadness – happiness because life is at its peak, and sadness because at its peak death also comes in. Whenever you are silent you will feel a sort of sadness. Even looking at a roseflower, if you are sitting silently and not saying anything about the roseflower, just looking at it, in that silence you will suddenly feel it is there – death. You will see the flower withering, within moments it will be gone, lost forever. Such a beauty, and so fragile! Such a beauty, and so vulnerable! Such a beauty, such a miracle and soon it will be lost forever and it will not return again. Suddenly you will become sad.
Whenever you meditate you will find death moving around. In love, in orgasm, in any aesthetic experience – in music, in song, in poetry, in dance – wherever you suddenly lose your ego, death is there.
So let me tell you one thing. You are afraid of life because you are afraid of death. And I would like to teach you how to die so that you lose all fear of death. The moment you lose the fear of death you become capable of living.
I am not talking against life. How can I talk against life? I am madly in love with life! I am so madly in love with life that because of it I have fallen in love with death also. It is part of life. When you love life totally how can you avoid death? You have to love death also. When you love a flower deeply, you love its withering away also. When you love a woman deeply, you love her getting old also, you one day love her death also. That is part, part of the woman. The old age has not happened from the outside, it has come from the inside. The beautiful face has become wrinkled now – you love those wrinkles also. They are part of your woman. You love a man and his hair has grown white – you love those hairs also. They have not happened from the outside; they are not accidents. Life is unfolding. Now the black hair has disappeared and the grey hair has come. You don’t reject them, you love them; they are a part. Then your man becomes old, becomes weak – you love that too. Then one day the man is gone – you love that too.
Love loves all. Love knows nothing else than love. Hence, I say, love death. If you can love death it will be very simple to love life. If you can love even death, there is no problem.
The problem arises because the questioner must have been repressing, must be afraid of life. And then repression can bring dangerous outcomes. If you go on repressing, repressing, one day you will lose all aesthetic sense. You lose all sense of beauty, sense of grace, sense of divinity. Then the very repression becomes such a feverish state that you can do anything which may be ugly.
Let me tell you a beautiful anecdote. Chinmaya has sent this. He sends beautiful jokes:

A marine is sent to a distant island outpost where there are no women, but there is a large monkey population. He is shocked to see that without exception his fellow marines all make love with the monkeys, and he swears to them that he will never get that horny. They tell him not to be closed-minded. But as the months passed by, the marine can hold out no longer. He grabs the first monkey he can and gets caught in the act by his buddies, who start laughing their heads off.
Surprised, he says to them, “What are you guys laughing at? You keep telling me to do it!”
They answer, “Yeah, but did you have to pick the ugliest one?”

If you repress, the possibility is that you may choose the ugliest life. If you go on repressing, then the very fever is so much that you are not in your consciousness. Then you are almost in neurosis. Before the repression becomes too much, relax, move into life. It is your life! Don’t feel guilty. It is your life to live and love and to know and be. And whatsoever instincts existence has given to you, they are just indications of where you have to move, where you have to seek, where you have to find your fulfillment.
I know that this life is not all – a greater life is hidden behind it. But it is hidden behind it. You cannot find that greater life against this life; you have to find that greater life only by indulging deeply in this life. There are waves on the oceans. The ocean is hidden just behind the waves. If, seeing the turmoil and the chaos and you escape from the waves, you will be escaping from the ocean and its depth also. Jump in; those waves are part of it. Dive deep and waves will disappear, and then there will be the depth, the absolute silence of the ocean.
So this is my suggestion for the questioner. You have waited long, now no more. Enough is enough.
Let me tell you an anecdote, an old Italian joke:

The Pope’s personal waiter was delivering His Holiness’ breakfast, when he slipped and threw the food all over the floor. “Godammit!” he screamed as he fell.
His Holiness came out of the door of his room and said, “No cursing in here, my son. Say instead, Ave Maria.”
The following morning as he attempted to deliver His Holiness’ breakfast, the waiter slipped again, throwing the food on the floor. “Godammit!” screamed the poor man.
“No, my son,” said the Pope. “Ave Maria.”
On the third day the waiter was trembling with fear, but this time he remembered. “Ave Maria!” he yelled out as soon as he started falling with the breakfast on the floor.
“No!” exclaimed the Pope. “Godammit! This is my third day of skipping breakfast! Enough is enough!”

It is your life. There is no need going on skipping breakfast every day. And twice Ave Maria is good, but when it comes finally, it is Godammit!

The last question:
Osho,
I am a piece of rock in the middle of the mountain. Even this I don't dare to realize. I dream instead. Osho, why did you tell me about rivers, the ocean and the sky? And how could you give me sannyas? I am a piece of rock in the middle of the mountain.
Everybody is a piece of rock. Unless you attain to your uttermost glory, you are bound to be a piece of rock. But nothing is wrong in being a piece of rock. Because the piece of rock is nothing but existence fast asleep, snoring. A piece of rock is godliness asleep. Nothing is wrong in the piece of rock, it has to be awakened. Hence, I have given you sannyas.
You say, “And how could you give me sannyas?”
Sannyas is nothing but an effort to wake you, an effort to shake you, an effort to shock you into awareness. Sannyas is nothing but an alarm.
“Even this I don’t dare to realize” – that I am a piece of rock in the middle of the mountain – “I dream instead.”
That’s how the rock avoids its own growth, the rock avoids its own future – by dreaming. Dreaming is the barrier. By dreaming we are avoiding the reality, by dreaming we avoid the real. It is our escape. You don’t have any other escape. This is the only escape route – dreaming.
When you are listening to me, you can dream also. Sitting here you can have a thousand and one thoughts roaming around in your mind. You can think of the future or of the past. You can be for and against what I am saying, you can argue, you can debate with me inside yourself, but then you are missing me. I am a fact here. You need not dream here, you can just be here with me. And tremendous will be the result of it.
But we go on dreaming. People are dreamers, and that is their way. When they are making love to a woman, then they are dreaming; when they are eating, they are dreaming. When they are walking on the road – they have gone for a walk in the morning, the sun is rising, the day is beautiful, the people are getting up, the life is coming back again – they are dreaming. They are not looking at anything. We go on dreaming. Dreaming functions as a blindfold, and we go on missing the reality.
“Osho, why did you tell me about rivers, the ocean and the sky?”
Because those are your possibilities. The rock can fly; the rock can grow wings. I myself was a rock once, then I started growing wings – so I know. I know your possibility, you may not know it. Hence I talk about the rivers, the ocean and the sky. The rock can become a flower, the rock can become a river, the rock can become the ocean, the rock can become the sky – infinite are your possibilities! Your possibilities are as many as the possibilities of existence. You are multi-dimensional.
That’s why I go on talking about the rivers and the ocean and the sky. Some day or other a great thirst will possess you, a new passion will arise for the impossible and you will be able to fly into the sky. It is yours, claim it! You only look like a rock. Rocks also only look like rocks. If they make a little effort, if they shake themselves a little, they will find wings are hidden there. They will find infinite possibilities opening, doors upon doors.
But dreaming functions as the barrier. Being a rock is not the problem: being too much in dreams is the problem. Start dropping dreams. They are futile, meaningless, a wastage and nothing more. But people go on dreaming, go on dreaming… By and by people start thinking that dreaming is their only life. Life is not a dream and dreaming is not life. Dreaming is avoiding life.
Let me tell you an anecdote:

On his seventy-fifth birthday, Turtletaub rushed into a physician’s office. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, “I have got a date tonight with a twenty-two-year-old girl. You gotta give me something to pep me up.”
The MD smiled sympathetically and supplied the old man with a prescription. Later that night, out of curiosity, the medical man phoned his elderly patient, “Did the medicine help?”
“It’s wonderful,” replied Turtletaub. “Seven times already.”
“That’s great,” agreed the doctor. “And what about the girl?”
“The girl?” said Turtletaub. “She didn’t get here yet!”

Don’t go on dreaming, otherwise you will miss the girl. You will miss life. Stop dreaming, look at that which is. And it is already in front of you. It is already around you, it is within and without. Godliness is the only presence if you are not dreaming. If you are dreaming, then your dreams occupy your inner space. They become the hindrances for godliness to enter into you. This dreaming we call maya. Maya means a magic show, a dream show. When you are not dreaming, when you are in a state of no-dream, the reality is revealed.
The reality is already there, you are not to achieve it. You have only to do one thing: you have to put aside your dreams. And you will no more be a rock, you can fly with me to the very end of the sky.
Receive my invitation, receive my challenge. That’s what sannyas is all about.
Enough for today.

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