
New bottles for the old wine
Beloved Osho,
You are famous for your contradictions. But it seems that one of the most powerful confirmations that you are who you are – for the world in general and posterity – is that, in all those millions and millions of words, spoken spontaneously over several decades, you really never ever contradicted yourself at all.
That’s true!
I have never contradicted myself. I cannot do it. In the first place I don’t remember anything that I have said before – how to contradict it?
Secondly, it is not my thinking, it is my experience. Contradictions happen in thinking, but not in experience. I have said things which may appear to people contradictory, but they are really evolutionary. My experience I have expressed in different ways; that may create the idea that I am contradictory. I was expressing it in different ways so if you have missed one way, perhaps the other way you may get it.
I have tried to describe it from all aspects possible, just to help people, because sometimes it happens that one aspect does not reach you but the other aspect is more in tune with you. I have used all possible, multi-dimensional expressions, but there is no way for me to contradict. It is my experience. I am not taking about others’ experience. Even if I am talking about others, it is always according to my experience. They may agree with it, they may not agree with it – but I cannot go against my experience.
During the years, talking to you, I have been sharpening my arrows, my words, so that they can penetrate directly to your heart. But contradiction is not there at all. And you are right: the day all of my words will be understood, there will be found an undercurrent running through all of them and joining them. They are like flowers of a garland – a thin thread, invisible, is running through all the flowers – and that is my consistency, that is my experience.
It is true, I don’t think anybody else has spoken so much. Much of it is lost because it was not recorded; almost half of it is lost, but whatever remains is still more than anyone else has ever tried to convey.
The reason is simple: I enjoy it, I love it. When I see a word settling in your heart, my joy knows no bounds. When I see a glimpse in your eyes that you have caught the meaning, I am immensely happy.
And I had to speak so much because nobody before me has addressed the whole world. They were addressing small fragments of humanity. Jesus remained confined to Judea, Buddha remained confined to Bihar, Socrates remained confined to Athens. Fortunately they don’t let me remain in one place, so I have to be all over the world. And I have to speak again and again through different angles about the same experience, because in that also my life has been unique: people have been coming to me and leaving me – new people coming, old people going. It has been beautiful. It has not been like a dead pond where the water only evaporates, and soon there is left nothing but muddy mess.
It is almost as if I have been speaking by the side of a river, which is running so fast that each time I look at it there are new faces to whom I have to speak again. In thirty years so many people have changed. It was not true about Socrates or Buddha or Lao Tzu, they worked with a group their whole life. I have been working with so many new people, and I have always to find out a new mode, a new phase, new expressions, new bottles for the old wine… but the wine is old, and it is the same wine that I have been offering to all.
Osho, Beyond Psychology, Ch 30, Q 2