ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS
Take It Easy Vol 1 14
Fourteenth Discourse from the series of 14 discourses - Take It Easy Vol 1 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
What is a mystic?
I don’t know, and nobody else knows, either. That’s why a mystic is called a mystic. There is something indefinable, something very elusive, something that cannot be grasped, that cannot be comprehended. Not that it is something special; it is very ordinary, and that deepens the mystery ten-thousandfold.
A mystic is in a natural state. He is the most ordinary man; he has renounced all extraordinary desires. All desires are basically to become extraordinary, to become somebody special. A mystic is one who is and who has no desire to become anybody else. A mystic is in a state of utter contentment, a state of no movement. He is not going anywhere; he has no goals, no motives. He simply is. He has stopped all desire to know; rather, he has started living.
There are people who go on searching for knowledge. They are anti-mystic; their whole effort is to demystify life. That’s what knowledge means. Knowledge means knowing each and everything so that life can be demystified, so that the wonder of life is killed and man can become the absolute boss, a manipulator who can control everything.
Knowledge is an effort to control, knowledge is power. All curiosity, all desire for knowledge, is desire for power. Science is non-mystic. A scientist is just the anti-pole, the other extreme, of the mystic. He is trying to poke his nose into reality, to find out its secrets. He is trying to undress reality. He is trying to see reality so that reality can be manipulated.
The mystic is one who has come to see that there is no way to know reality, because we are part of it, and how can the knower know itself? There is no possibility; it is an impossible search, it is doomed to fail.
A mystic is one who has become mature enough to be able to live without knowledge, to be able to live in ignorance, to be ready to truly live. He is not worried about knowing, he does not make it a condition that “First I have to know; then I will live. How can I live without knowing? If I am to love, first I have to know what love is, and only then I can love. If I am to enjoy, first I have to know what enjoyment is, otherwise how can I enjoy?”
The non-mystic makes questions out of simple phenomena, creates questions, and transforms everything into a problem. That is the state of the non-mystic. The mystic is one who has relaxed, who says, “There is no need to know what love is, you can still love, knowledge does not help in any way, on the contrary it hinders.”
If you know everything about love you will never be able to love. It is a blessing that you are not capable of knowing what love is. It is a blessing that existence has made it an utter mystery, otherwise nobody will ever love. Once you know, love will disappear, awe will disappear from life; your eyes will not know the quality of wondering. You will become smug, you will become satisfied with your knowledge; you will become dull. Knowledge makes people dull. The more knowledgeable a person is the duller and more insensitive he is.
The mystic has come to see the point that knowledge is not possible, that life, existence, godliness, or whatever you call it is basically not only unknown but unknowable. All effort to know is futile. Relax and live.
The mystic lives, the non-mystic thinks. The non-mystic thinks about how to live, how to love, how to be. The mystic simply is. He is so occupied with living that he has no energy for knowing. And the paradox is that because he does not bother about knowing, he comes to know in a deeper way. It is not knowledge, it is experience.
The man who tries to know, never comes to know. His very effort is egoistic. The seeker after knowledge is a rapist; he is violent, aggressive. The mystic loves life, and in that love mysteries are opened, veils upon veils are removed. But the mystery deepens; it is not finished. One door opens, and you see another door. That opens, and you see another door. Deeper and deeper you move, but there is no end to depth.
I was reading…
A Yugoslav peasant reading the newspapers came more and more often upon the word dialectics. He wanted to know what the word meant, but nobody could tell him…
Communists talk much about dialectics: dialectical materialism, dialectical evolution. Hegelians also talk about dialectics, the theory that life moves through thesis, antithesis, synthesis; that everything moves through struggle, conflict with the opposite. And each synthesis becomes a thesis again, and it goes on and on.
So this peasant went to the priest who said, “It is simple and I’ll explain it to you with a concrete example. Two men, one clean and one dirty, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“The dirty one,” said the peasant.
“No, why should he? He is already used to his dirt. It is the clean one who will want to remain clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men, one dirty, one clean, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“It is simple,” the peasant said. “The clean one, for he will want to continue in cleanliness.”
“No,” the priest said. “Why should he, since he is already clean? It is the dirty one who will want to become clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“Both,” the peasant said – confident he has finally caught up with dialectics.
“Neither,” the priest said. “Why should they? The clean one is already clean and the dirty is used to dirt.”
And so on and so on…
The man who is looking for knowledge moves this way, that way, this way, zigzagging. He argues for, and then he starts arguing against, then he starts arguing for because each for leads to against; and each against leads to for.
Atheists become theists, theists become atheists, Christians become Hindus, Hindus become Christians, and this goes on, this search for knowledge. The West comes to the East, the East goes to the West… See the absurdity of it. The Eastern seeker of knowledge goes to Western universities, to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Harvard, and the Western seeker of knowledge comes to the East, to the Himalayas.
What is this nonsense all about? Thesis becomes antithesis. Everyone changes and turns into one’s opposite sooner or later, because he gets tired of one position and then starts thinking of the opposite position. The opposite seems alluring, new, unfamiliar, an adventure; then tired of that, he starts moving again, by now having forgotten that he had been in the first position before. That’s how people go on moving.
It has been my observation that if you are a man in this life there is every possibility that you were a woman in your past life. If you are a woman, there is every possibility that you were a man in the past life. A man becomes tired of being a man and starts thinking that there must be some joy which is not available to him but which is available to women. A woman becomes tired of being a woman; people go on changing.
Now science is making change available even in one life. Sooner or later, by the end of this century, people won’t bother waiting for another life. Three years you have been a man, enough is enough. Now why not try being a woman? And it is chemically possible now, physiologically possible; you can be changed. Then you can try being a woman. Then within a few years you will be tired and you will start thinking again of being a man. That’s how things go.
People get tired of heterosexuality, they become homosexual. Homosexuals become tired of homosexuality, they become heterosexual. Thesis, antithesis, and there is also synthesis: bisexuals. In every possible way, man goes on moving from one extreme to another. Sometimes he gets tired of both; then he tries some synthesis.
A mystic is one who has dropped the whole search, the whole project. He does not look for any truth. He simply enjoys the simple things of life. Breakfast in the morning, a shower, a morning walk, a child giggling on the street, a dog barking, a crow crowing, he enjoys these small things. He is not concerned about the distant: his whole concern is immediate.
That is the whole approach of Zen. Understanding Zen, you will become a mystic. Then each moment is such joy, such glory, such splendor, each moment is so precious. Once the hankering for knowledge is dropped, everything takes on grandeur. Just a pebble on the beach is beautiful. “Look at the lilies of the field, how beautiful they are. Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not attired like one of these.”
Then this moment is all. A mystic is one who knows no time; time has disappeared from his mind, he lives in this moment and in eternity. He is not worried about birth, he is not worried about death; he is not worried about becoming. It is becoming that keeps you away from yourself, and he has dropped all ideas of becoming. He is not trying to become, he simply is, and when becoming disappears, being is revealed. That revelation of being is the state of being a mystic.
People are trying the impossible. Becoming is the most impossible thing. You are – how can you become? How can you become that which you are not? And what is the need to become that which you are? Just see the impossibility of it. You can’t become that which you are not; you need not become that which you are. A is A, and cannot become B. And, of course, A has no need to become A; it is already A. This simple understanding is mysticism.
I have heard…
There was once a man who owned a beautiful garden. One day he trapped a hummingbird which was eating his finest fruits. The bird promised him three wise teachings as the price of his release. The man agreed.
Safely out of reach, the bird said, “Do not regret the irrevocable. Do not believe the impossible. Do not seek the unattainable,” and burst into laughter. “If you had not let me go, you would have found inside of me a pearl the size of a lemon.”
Enraged, the man climbed up the tree after the bird. As he came closer, the bird flew higher. With the man in frenzied pursuit, the bird flew to the highest branch of all and walked to its very tip. The man came scrambling after; the branch snapped, the bird flew off, the man dropped to the ground with a thud.
Bruised, he picked himself up and gazed ruefully at his tormentor. “Wisdom is for the wise,” the bird admonished. “I told you not to regret the irrevocable, but no sooner did you let me go than you came after me again. I told you not to believe the impossible, yet you believed that a bird my size could contain a pearl the size of a lemon. And I told you not to seek the unattainable, yet you climbed a tree to catch a bird. You are a fool!”
The mystic is a wise man; he is wisdom incarnate. Not knowledge, remember, wisdom. Knowledge is a search after the impossible. Wisdom comes out of relaxing into your being. A mystic is a relaxed person, he is in a let-go, immense is his joy; inexpressible is his bliss.
Relax and see. Be and see.
The second question:
Osho,
Why do I allow women to hold power over me, to accept or reject me? This old rut makes me sick at heart. I want to get out.
Do you know that women love a deluded man? They are always searching for a deluded man, somebody who is mad and insane because the insane is very attractive: the mad, the deluded, has a certain magnetism. He is full of possibilities, dreams – and women love a dreamer.
And men? Men love a sane woman – otherwise, they will really go mad – to keep them back on the earth. The woman represents the earth. A man needs a woman because he has no roots in his own being. He needs a woman, the warm earth, the dark soil, where he can have his roots and remain rooted in the earth. He is afraid; he has wings but no roots. And he is afraid that if he is not holding to the earth he may be gone, he may disappear into the infinite sky and there may be no coming back. That fear keeps men running after women.
A woman has no wings, she has roots, great roots; a woman is pure earth. And she is afraid that if she remains alone she will never be able to fly into the unknown. A woman can’t be a dreamer like a man. It is not just accidental that women have not created great poetry or music. They don’t have wings; they are very earthly, very pragmatic, very real. And, of course, they are sane; they are so sane, that’s why they don’t write poetry. You have to have some insanity to write poetry; you have to have some delusions, megalomania.
A woman makes a laundry list, not a poem, a shopping list. Her concern is immediate. She talks about the neighbors; she is not worried about Vietnam or Israel. She simply laughs at men and wonders why they are so concerned, why they get into such excitement. If something is happening in Israel, it is happening in Israel. Why are you worried? And a woman in the neighborhood has run away with somebody else – that is the important thing; it is so immediate.
Women are not interested in gospels, they are interested in gossips. Both the words come from the same root: when it is about the faraway it is a gospel, when it is about the close by it is gossip. When it is immediate it is gossip, when it is ultimate it is a gospel.
Man cannot live without woman, because then he loses his roots. He simply becomes a vagabond; he belongs nowhere. Just see a man who has no woman: he has no home, he becomes like a piece of driftwood, waves taking him anywhere. Until he gets entangled with a woman somewhere; then the home arises.
Researchers say that the home is the creation of the woman. If man had lived alone, there would have been no home and no civilization either. He would have been a wanderer, a hunter; he would have gone from one corner of the world to the other corner. Look: man is trying to go to the other planets; now he has reached to the moon. And women simply laugh at the whole lunacy. Men must be lunatics, they are so interested in reaching the lunar, the moon. For what? You can’t go shopping there. There seems to be no point at all. And there are no people, no gossiping, nothing of the sort, just empty desert.
Man without woman is a wanderer, a vagabond; hence, sooner or later, he needs to get rooted. The woman becomes his earth. Unless a man finds something in him that can become his earth, unless the man finds his own inner woman, he will have to look for the outer woman.
Yes, there have been men who have lived without women, a Buddha or a Jesus. But they too have not really lived without a woman; they have found a deeper woman in their own being. Man is both man and woman, and woman is also both woman and man. It has to be so, because you come from two persons – your father and mother. Your father has contributed the man in you; your mother has contributed the woman in you. Each person is fifty percent man, fifty percent woman. Unless you turn inside yourself and find your woman or man there, you will have to look outside, the outside is a substitute.
You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” Because without them you will be insane. And the same is true about women – without men they will be too sane, and to be too sane is just a different kind of insanity. To be too sane becomes heavy; to be too sane, you cannot sing, you cannot dance.
A woman needs somebody who can dream for her, and a man needs somebody who can become a home for him. This is a must unless you have found your other polarity inside yourself. When a man has found the other polarity inside, he becomes a total orgasm. Then there is no need to look out. You can still go on loving women, but there will be no clinging; you will not become possessive or possessed. When you have found your unity inside, you will still be loving men but it will not be an obsession, it will be just a sharing. Then love is a joy; then love has a totally different quality.
Otherwise it will have something of fever in it. The fever has to be there, for a certain psychological reason. If you cannot be alone, naturally you feel powerless before the woman or before the man. If you cannot be alone, then your woman is your need, then you are dependent on her. And you are annoyed because your independence is lost. You are annoyed because she has so much power over you. You cannot forgive her. And the woman cannot forgive you either, because without you she is simply earth. The sky disappears, the stars disappear. Without you she is just earth, dark, waiting for somebody. Waiting for somebody to come and bloom into her being, waiting for somebody to release her fragrance.
Have you noticed a woman without love and then one in love? They smell different; they actually smell different; their fragrance is different. When a woman is alone she has sadness all around her: depressed, lonely, forlorn, in despair, just anxiety. The moment she falls in love she starts blooming, something immediately opens up; then she has beauty.
A woman not in love shrinks, closes up; she starts living in a shut-upness. She closes the doors and the windows. There is nobody to wait for, so why keep the windows open or the doors open? She starts living in a kind of grave; she is no longer alive. She starts dying, she becomes suicidal. Just mathematics, just arithmetic, just sanity is not enough; some poetry is needed to keep balance.
A man alone looks lost; he does not know who he is. Unless he sees himself in the eyes of a loving woman, he will never know who he is. He can go on doing the Enlightenment Intensive and go on asking “Who am I? Who am I?” And no answer will come unless he looks into the eyes of love. Only then will he be reflected, only then will he see who he is in the mirror.
The woman gives him form, substance; makes him aware who he is. By her love she creates the man. It is not only that you are created by your mother in her womb; you are created by each woman whenever you fall in love. Whenever you fall in love the woman gives you shape, color, polish; she makes you human. Otherwise, man will be very, very barbarous, violent, aggressive, uncaring, uncompassionate.
But the problem is that both depend on each other and both feel hurt because nobody wants to be dependent. And on whomsoever you depend, you will never be able to forgive him or her. You will take revenge; that’s why lovers go on fighting. The fight is nothing more than an attempt to show that “I am still independent” – just to feel that “I am still independent. If I want I can leave her.” And for the woman the fight is just to feel, “I am not so dependent on him. I can still bloom alone, I will still be happy without him.”
Hence they fight, just to test their independence. But within hours the fight is gone and they are hugging each other. Because the moment they start separating from each other, they start feeling suffocated, hungry, thirsty. They start losing whatsoever they had. The warmth is missed, the man starts feeling cold. And if there is nobody to hold the woman she starts feeling absolutely lonely.
If there is no love we are all alone. If love is not possible, then loneliness is the truth and has to be accepted. Only love gives you glimpses that loneliness is not ultimate.
You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” It is not a personal question, every man allows that power. And every man resists it. Every husband becomes a henpecked husband – and I say every! There is no other kind of husband. Whatsoever the pretensions, the only kind that really exists is the henpecked husband.
When the tree takes so much nourishment from the earth, it becomes dependent; it cannot remain independent, it is a simple phenomenon. And when the earth sees its own joy, its celebration, its potential, being expressed by the tree in the green foliage and the red flowers, and the branches raised high into the sky with wings that the earth always wanted, and now they are there, how can the earth remain independent?
Man and woman exist in a kind of interdependence. Independent, they are half-hungry, starved for the other. Interdependence is the truth, but then independence is lost. It is not an accident that all the monks of the world, down the ages, have been escaping from woman. The woman represents the world. They are really escaping from the feeling that they are dependent; they want to be independent.
This is a human phenomenon, not personal at all. The woman cannot feel happy without a man. Without a man she cannot flow in dreams. A deluded man is more attractive than an ordinary man. That’s why women fall in love with people who have great illusions about themselves. An ordinary man is one who has no illusions; no woman is attracted toward an ordinary man. A deluded man looks magical. He has magic, his eyes flare up with something unknown, and that is the desire of the woman. He has the sense of possibility, and that sense of possibility gives him the quality of magic.
In nature, watch: the bird with the best dance and the best song gets the best female. This is also the case with human beings. Have you observed how many good-looking women hang around musicians, singers and actors? Why? They sense something magical, something not of this earth, something of the beyond, and they immediately become attracted. This is a natural attraction; both fulfill each other. And this is going to remain.
You say: “I want to get out.” You will have to get in. You cannot get out so easily, everything has a price. Get in, as deeply as possible. Don’t be in such a hurry; if you get out, and you are not mature enough to get out, you will have to get in again. Go through the whole lot; go to the very end of it, see it through and through.
Meanwhile, go on meditating and watching the phenomenon. Don’t take it personally, it is not personal. If you take it personally, you will misunderstand the whole thing from the very beginning. It is something between man and woman, nothing between you and your woman. It is something between man-energy and woman-energy; it is something between masculine energy and feminine energy.
Just watch it as a detached observer. Don’t bring your small egos in it, they are irrelevant. They create a mess, they don’t help any understanding. Just see what is happening with your energies. And, slowly, slowly, that very meditation will help you to find the woman within you; she is there.
The day that happens and you start turning in then you can get out. Get into yourself to such a depth that you can find your inner woman and it is there. If you are a man, then your conscious is masculine, your unconscious is feminine. If you are a woman, then your conscious is feminine, your unconscious is masculine. Just dive deep into the unconscious.
That is what meditation is all about. Go on loving; go on experiencing the joys and the miseries that love brings, they are all needed to make you ripe and mature, and meanwhile go on meditating. Both these processes, love and meditation, if they continue simultaneously, will make you aware slowly, slowly that whatsoever you are finding outside can be found inside in a far better way.
Once that happens, when your unconscious and conscious meet, you become ardhanarishwar, man and woman together. Then there is a difference, a total difference; your quality is no longer the same. Then you can still love a woman, but it is no longer dependence. It is now a sharing. You can still love a man, but it is just pure joy, it is just overflowing energy. You have so much that you have to give it to somebody. But you can be alone too, and as happy as together.
When a man is capable of being alone and as happy as when he is with someone, then he will never be in the grip of anybody else. He will not feel that “Somebody holds power upon me.” Then he will not be fighting with his woman or man, because then there is no question of fight. Then two independent people are sharing out of independence, out of immense freedom.
But there is no necessity to share; it is for no other motive than because you are overflowing. Then you don’t feel hurt, you don’t feel that you have become a slave. Then you remain a master and she remains a master. Nobody possesses anybody, all possessiveness disappears.
Why does this possessiveness come in the mind again and again? Why are you so jealous and so possessive? The reason is that you are dependent, you are afraid. If your woman leaves you tomorrow, you are afraid you will lose your earth. And what are you going to do in the cold lonely nights? You cannot imagine yourself lonely, it is frightening; hence you are afraid.
If your woman is laughing with somebody else, talking to somebody else, you become suspicious. Or if your man has gone to the movies with some other woman, you boil, you become feverish. You are sitting on a volcano; you are ready to explode into ugliness. Why? Why so much possessiveness, jealousy? It is because of fear.
Who knows? He loves you, he can love another woman. He loves you as a woman, his love for women is still alive, and he can find another woman. Maybe the new woman is more attractive than the old because the unfamiliar is more attractive than the familiar. He has become completely aware of you. Now it is a kind of repetition, you know it. He still loves you, but it is a kind of repetition. It has lost that glamour, it has lost those beautiful beginning days; those honeymoon days are no longer there. Things have settled into a routine.
Now you are afraid that he may fall into somebody else’s love and may have again those honeymoon days, and you will be left alone. Fear arises; death arises in you. You have to stop it; you have to create a Wall of China around your man or around your woman. You have to not allow him or her to have any kind of relationship with anybody, any friendship with anybody, so that you can be certain that tomorrow also he will be available to you.
But the more possessive you become, the more the relationship becomes ugly, the more the relationship becomes repulsive. The more you become possessive, the more it becomes a boredom. And the man starts dreaming about other women, the woman starts thinking about other men. They are just physically together then, deep inside, they are no longer together.
And the more you see it happening, the more panicky you become and the more you possess. Possessiveness is the poison that kills all love. But that seems bound to happen, almost inevitable; in this state of dependence it is bound to happen.
You can only be non-possessive, non-jealous, when a different kind of love has arisen in you which is no longer dependent, which needs nobody, which simply goes on overflowing. If somebody partakes of it, good, you are grateful. If nobody partakes of it, very good, you are alone, absolutely happy.
The third question:
Osho,
Yesterday you commented on the creativity of Buddha's religion. Since coming to you, my urge to create has slowly dropped away, while I've become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Everything feels fine as it is, more than enough, and to add to it by making anything else whatever, seems like painting the river.
That is true. The creativity that you ordinarily know is not the creativity I am talking about. Ordinary creativity is nothing but an ego trip. You want to show to the world that you are somebody: you are a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a musician. You want to show to the world that you are somebody; your creativity is not really creative, it is just a prop to the ego.
When you come to me, that kind of creativity will start disappearing because in the first place it was not real creativity. All that creativity will simply disappear from your mind. But you will become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Just wait, and out of this aliveness, sensitivity, openness, another kind of creativity will take possession of you soon. You will be possessed by something from the beyond. It will not be your ego trip; you will be just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo. The music will flow through you; it will not be of you, it will only flow through you. You will be just a hollow bamboo, a flute. You have only to allow it.
I am preparing you for that. The openness, the aliveness, the sensitivity, is nothing but making your bamboo as hollow as possible, so when existence starts singing through you, you don’t hinder.
Existence is the only creator. The ordinary creativity comes from the ego: “I am the creator.” That’s why you see the ordinary poet and the painter so egoistic. It is difficult to find more egoistic people than the artists; they are very egoistic. Always fighting among themselves like dogs, criticizing each other and fighting and barking, and everybody pretending that he is the only authentic, original, creative person, and everybody else is just phony. Why does this happen to artists?
The reason is simple: the creativity is not yet from the beyond, it is not of the transcendent, it is very tiny. They are simply bragging about themselves. This happens here to many people every day. So many people come to me. They say, “We want to become therapists, we want to become healers, we want to become this and that.” They see that the therapists seem to be important people, healers are important people, they are doing something extraordinary; everybody who comes here sooner or later starts thinking that he has to become a therapist or a healer.
This is not creativity; this is just finding a way, a means, for the fulfillment of the ego. And if the ego is there, you cannot be a real therapist. Real therapists are rare. A real therapist is one who is ready to let existence work through him, and that is also the definition of a real healer. Therapy means healing. A healer is not a healer; a healer is just a passage for the healing forces of existence to flow through. He cannot claim anything.
So if you move toward healing with the idea that “I have to become a healer, so I will be somebody important, doing great miracles around,” you will never be a healer. How can you be a healer when the very condition of being a healer is dropping the ego.
It is very rare to find a healer, very rare to find a therapist. I am training my therapists, my healers, here. The whole training is that they should disappear. They should not be there, they should become absent. And through the absence of the ego, some presence, some unknown presence, starts working through you. That brings miracles to life. That is a real phenomenon, not a created, believed-in thing.
So when you come to me, whatsoever you have been doing, if it was not real, it will disappear. And it is good that it disappears. If it was real, then it will be enhanced immediately, and that too is good. But I am not here to support anything unreal.
This buddhafield is going to take everything away from you that is ego-centered, ego-oriented. Then, slowly, slowly, one day you will be surprised by the arrival of a new energy knocking on your door. The sun has risen, you are not to be found, the poetry arises and the painting happens. You cannot even sign it; you cannot say, “This is mine.” At the most, you can be grateful that “Existence has chosen me as a vehicle, as a medium.”
The fourth question:
Osho,
What is the difference between a contented pig, a discontented Socrates, and a natural man of Zen?
You will have to understand these five categories: First, the contented pig. This has nothing to do with pigs, remember; all these categories are of human beings. The contented pig is that man or woman who lives in an unconscious way; who simply vegetates, who has no awareness; hence, there is no discontent. Discontent presupposes a little awareness.
If you are unconscious and somebody is doing surgery on you, you will not feel any pain. How can you feel pain? To feel pain, consciousness is needed. That’s why in surgery we have to give anesthesia, so the man falls completely into a coma. Then you can operate, remove parts of the body without any pain. Otherwise, the pain is going to be unbearable.
A contented pig is that kind of man who lives in life absolutely like a robot, a zombie. He eats, walks, goes to work, comes home, makes love, reproduces children, and dies, never becoming aware of what really was happening. Just moves from one thing to another in a kind of daze.
The second is the discontented pig. He is still unconscious, ninety-nine percent unconscious, but one percent of consciousness is arising. The first ray of consciousness has penetrated; one is becoming aware of the pain and the anguish and the anxiety of life. People avoid the second state; they want to live in the first.
The first state is that of the materialist. Don’t think, don’t contemplate, don’t meditate upon anything. Don’t become conscious: consciousness is dangerous. Remain unconscious, and if sometimes in spite of you some consciousness happens – because life has so much pain that sometimes it can happen that just the pain can give you a little consciousness – then go and take drugs, tranquilize yourself. Or use alcohol, other intoxicants, dull yourself again, back into your anesthetic life, into your unconsciousness. Fall again into that anesthesia.
The discontented pig is one who is coming out of this anesthesia. Have you ever been in anesthesia? Slowly, slowly, when you start coming out of it, you start hearing a few noises around: the traffic noise, the doctors walking, the nurses talking. Slowly, slowly, you start feeling some pain in those parts of the body where the operation has been done. Slowly, slowly, you come back.
The discontented pig is one who is coming out of the anesthesia of life, who is becoming a man. It is painful, because to be a man is painful, to remain a pig is very painless. Millions have decided to remain pigs. When the discontent arises, you are becoming religious: the first approach toward godliness.
The third state is discontented Socrates. You are fully alert about the pain, and you are divided. You are two now: the pain is there and you are there. And life becomes almost unlivable; the pain of it is so much. Something has to be done, either you fall back and become again a pig, or you start moving and become a buddha.
The discontented Socrates is just the midpoint. Below, at the lowest, is the pig. Above, at the highest, is the buddha, the real, natural man of Zen. Discontented Socrates is just in the middle, in the middle of the bridge. And there is every possibility that you will fall back because the old is known, and the future is unknown. Who knows? If you go ahead, the pain may increase even more, who knows? You have never known that state ahead. But one thing you do know: at the back there was a moment when there was no pain. Why not fall back into it?
That’s where people start becoming interested in drugs. That is falling back, that is a regression. Man cannot be freed from alcohol and such intoxicants, unless man is on the way toward buddhahood. No government can prevent people from alcohol; they will find ways. Because life becomes so unbearable, one has to forget it. Either one has to become a buddha or one has to become a pig. One cannot remain in the middle; the middle is such a torture.
The fourth state is contented Socrates. You start moving ahead, you don’t go back. You move more and more into awareness, you move more and more into meditation. Your thinking is transformed into more of a kind of meditativeness. So the fourth stage is contented Socrates: consciousness and unconscious are being bridged.
And the fifth state is: no contentment, no discontentment; no pig, no Socrates. All is gone, all those dreams have disappeared. Neither conscious nor unconscious, but a new thing, transcendence, has arisen. This is buddhahood. This is what Zen people call the natural state of man. Purified of all junk, cleaned of all dust, purified of all poisons and the past and the memories, sanskars, conditionings, you have come home.
The pig is completely unconscious. The natural man of Zen is completely conscious. Between these two are those other three states. These five states have to be pondered over. Find out where you are, and start moving from there.
The goal is not far away. Sometimes it can be reached in a single step, in a single leap. All that is needed is courage. It is out of fear that people fall back into the old rut. If I can teach you courage, I have taught you all. If I can help you to be courageous, then I have made you religious. To me, courage is the most important religious quality, more important than truth, more important than honesty, more important than anything else. Without courage, nothing becomes possible, not truth or love or godliness.
The fifth question:
Osho,
When is mind against itself?
Always.
The last question:
Osho,
During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now – a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water. I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated – I can't quite make it.
It is the same with looking at a river or lake – the desire for union is there, but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.
Can this tell me anything about myself?
By the way, I'm a plumber.
Metaphors are metaphors, don’t take them literally. When I say: Melt, let your ice become water, and evaporate, let your water become vapor, I am talking in metaphors. All that I am saying to you is metaphorical, because that is the only way to say it. But don’t become too attached to metaphors, otherwise you will miss the point.
Water is beautiful, and a love for swimming is beautiful. But if you take the metaphor too seriously and you stretch it too far, you will create trouble for yourself. That’s what has happened to you; that’s what has happened to many people here. They listen to me, they jump upon one metaphor that appeals to them, they take hold of it, and they start thinking; that they have got something of the truth.
A metaphor has to be understood and dropped, and forgotten. A metaphor is dangerous. If you take it too seriously, you miss the point. A metaphor is only an indicator; it is a way of saying.
It is good if you understand what I mean by melting. You are not ice, certainly not. Had you been ice it would have been so easy; you would have melted in the Pune heat automatically. You are not ice, certainly not. Things are more difficult.
Metaphors are simple. They have to be simple, because they are meant to relate something which cannot be related in any other way. Melting has to be understood. By melting I mean become loving, because love melts. The warmth of love – not the Pune heat – the warmth of love melts you. What do I mean when I say, “Become water?” I mean become a flow, river-like, but not that you have to become a river. You have been a river somewhere millions of lives before. You have lost that, you have gone far away from it, and there is no need to go back to it.
You have evolved much; hence the desire remains there. When you go to the sea and you feel a great attraction toward the sea, a gravitation, almost a pull, do you know from where it comes? Millions of lives before, you have been in the sea, you have been a fish, life started there. And our bodies have not forgotten it; they never forget anything, their memory is absolute.
The body knows the thrill, the freedom, the flow of the ocean. So when you see ocean waves, you cannot resist. Something pulls you: “Come into the ocean.” It is your fish inside. Do you know that in the mother’s womb for nine months you swim in almost the same kind of water as in the sea, with the same chemicals, in the same proportion? Do you know inside your body, eighty percent is sea-water? If you don’t take any salt for a few days you will feel tired, because that sea-water is not getting as much salt as it needs, and the fish is feeling thirsty, tired, worried.
You are still eighty percent water, and the water is exactly of the same kind as sea-water. That’s why when it is full moon you feel great upsurges of energy in you. Exactly like the ocean, when it is full moon the ocean is affected. You are also eighty percent ocean. You are bound to be affected.
In your small ocean, in your tea-cup, storms arise. Many more people go mad on the full-moon night than on any other night. That is only one side of the story: many more people become enlightened, too, on the same night. Buddha became enlightened on a full-moon night. He was born on a full-moon night, he became enlightened on a full-moon night, he died on a full-moon night. He must have been a great fish.
So when you are attracted to the ocean it is because something is ingrained deep in your memories. That’s what happens when you go to a lake, or a river, a swimming pool, or even just under your shower, if you cannot go anywhere. The falling water on you stirs memories in the body. The body feels relaxed, happy; it feels nourished, rooted, centered.
But that is not what I mean. Enjoy all these things, these are beautiful things. I am not against them, I am all for them. My metaphor has another meaning. When I say “melt” I mean love. Create as much love-heat in you as possible. Only that can melt you. When I say “become water” I mean become a flow, don’t remain stagnant, move, and move like water.
Lao Tzu says: “The way of the Tao is a watercourse way.” It moves like water. What is the movement of water, or of a river? The movement has a few beautiful things about it. One, it always moves toward the depth, it always searches for the lowest ground. It is non-ambitious; it never hankers to be the first, it wants to be the last.
Remember, Jesus says: “Those who are the last here will be the first in the Kingdom of Heaven.” He is talking about the watercourse way of Tao, not mentioning it, but talking about it. Be the last, be non-ambitious. Ambition means to climb uphill. Water goes downhill, it searches for the lowest ground; it wants to be a nonentity. It does not want to declare itself unique, exceptional, extraordinary. It has no ego idea.
That is what I mean when I say become water: drop the ego, drop ambition. Don’t struggle for the top of the hill and don’t start moving upstream. Go with the stream, down the stream, seek and search the lowest, because only in the lowest will you find peace, tranquility and silence. Only in the lowest will you find the inner emptiness I have been talking about all these days. When you start striving to be somebody, you will not be empty. You will become full of bullshit, you will become garbage.
Go downward. Search the lowest depths and disappear there, that is the first thing. The second thing: the water is soft, feminine, non-aggressive; it never fights. It makes its way without fighting. It is from water that the Chinese and Japanese learned the secret art of judo or jujitsu, winning without fighting, conquering through surrendering – wei-wu-wei.
Learn this one thing from water: it comes across great stone walls, granite walls. It does not fight, it goes on flowing silently; if a stone is too big it finds another way, it bypasses it. But slowly, slowly the granite is dissolved into water, becomes sand. Ask the sands of the oceans from where they have come. They have come from the mountains. They will tell you a great secret: “Water wins finally. We were hard, and we thought that water cannot win. We were very, very settled; we could not believe that this poor water, so soft, unharming, unhurting, nonviolent could destroy us. But it destroyed us.”
That is the beauty of feminine energy. Don’t be like a rock. Be like water, soft, feminine. And victory is yours.
Remember Jesus again: Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek? Yes, they follow the watercourse way and they will reach the kingdom. It takes time, but they have patience. They have no idea of winning, that’s why they win. The people who want to win are defeated by their very idea, because they start struggling, and in struggling they dissipate their energy.
That’s what I mean when I say “become water” – melt, become water. And what do I mean when I say “evaporate”? That is the ultimate: learning how not to be, learning the art of absence. The vapor simply disappears, you cannot catch hold of it; you cannot even see it. You can see it only when it is turning into vapor and soon it is gone, soon it is invisible.
A buddha is seen only when he is in the body. Once the body is dropped, you will not be able to catch hold of him. He is simply gone, he has become part of the ultimate sky. That is the ultimate – to disappear. Buddha calls it anatta – no-self, shunyata – emptiness, nothingness, nirvana, cessation.
So when I use these metaphors, always remember they are metaphors, poetic ways of saying things which cannot be said in any other way.
You ask: “During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now, a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water.” Get attracted to water, feel affinity with water. Feeling affinity with any element of nature, water, fire, sky, earth, or air is immensely helpful. But that’s not what I meant.
“I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise.” You are a good man. That’s how one should think of paradise. Do you know about Jaina monks? They don’t take a shower, they don’t take a bath. Never go to a Jaina paradise, otherwise you will be in difficulty. There will be no showers. And plumbers, of course, will not be needed. They are so much against the body that even a simple joy like a shower seems to be too much of a luxury.
See the pathological mind, how it works. They are afraid that if they take a shower they will be enjoying the body, that joy will come, and gladness will spread all over the body. They are so against the body, how can they take a shower? They stink; they don’t brush their teeth because that is a kind of beautifying of the body. And for what? – for the idea that the body has to be dropped, and the sooner the better. The body has to be felt as horrible, so make it as horrible as possible. Make it horrible for yourself and for others too.
It used to happen in the past: Jaina monks and nuns would come to see me. Now they have become too afraid, they don’t come. And even if they want to come, their followers won’t allow them. They used to come; it was such a difficult thing to talk to them, because their breath smells so bad that one really feels that the body is horrible. Their bodies smell so bad.
What have people been doing on this earth? They have been negating life. My approach is that of affirmation. I am in love with life. It is fleeting, it is momentary, but who says that it is not momentary and it is not fleeting? Still you can love it even more so because it is fleeting. You can pour all your love. Tomorrow it may not be there. Go on loving, go on being as much in celebration as possible, in all the ways possible.
You say: “I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it.” That is taking the metaphor too far. It is good when swimming in a river to feel one with the river. Feel the river pass through you. But please don’t become water itself, otherwise how will you come back? And who is going to do the plumbing in the ashram? Please don’t do that; you have to come back too.
And that will not be a real thing, either. If somebody thinks he has become water, he has simply gone mad. If somebody thinks that he has become the tree, he has gone mad. It is the same as if somebody thinks he has become Napoleon and somebody has become Alexander the Great, it is the same. Now you are doing the same trick with water, but it is madness.
Enjoy the unity, the affinity, the synchronicity with water, the harmony. But there is no need to become water, there is no need.
“I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated.” Naturally. If you want to merge with it and then you have to get out of it, frustration comes. It is your idea of getting merged with the water that is creating the frustration. You have to get out of it just as you got into it. Enjoy being with it but don’t become obsessed, and then the frustration will disappear.
“I can’t quite make it.” There is no need. “It is the same with looking at a river or lake, the desire for union is there but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.” It is bound to be so. You are trying to live a metaphor. A metaphor has to be understood, not lived. Live life; understand metaphors.
The word God is not God. Don’t start living the word God – that’s what people are doing. The word love is not love – don’t start living the word love – that’s what people are doing. Love is just a symbol to indicate toward something which is far more complex, far simpler, far bigger and more infinite, than the word can contain. Only silence can contain it.
“Can this tell me anything about myself?” Certainly. It tells one thing: you take words too seriously. You don’t understand that which is hidden behind the words, you don’t understand that which is between two words in the intervals and the gaps. You jump upon the words and you try to carry them in your life. Your life will become false, phony, pseudo. Avoid it.
“By the way I am a plumber,” you say. By the way, I am also a plumber. I plumb into the depths of your being. And when somebody starts leaking, I have to fix them. And when somebody’s nuts and bolts become loose, I have to make them tight again. Or when somebody’s nuts and bolts are too tight I have to make them loose.
By the way, I am also a plumber.
Enough for today.
Osho,
What is a mystic?
I don’t know, and nobody else knows, either. That’s why a mystic is called a mystic. There is something indefinable, something very elusive, something that cannot be grasped, that cannot be comprehended. Not that it is something special; it is very ordinary, and that deepens the mystery ten-thousandfold.
A mystic is in a natural state. He is the most ordinary man; he has renounced all extraordinary desires. All desires are basically to become extraordinary, to become somebody special. A mystic is one who is and who has no desire to become anybody else. A mystic is in a state of utter contentment, a state of no movement. He is not going anywhere; he has no goals, no motives. He simply is. He has stopped all desire to know; rather, he has started living.
There are people who go on searching for knowledge. They are anti-mystic; their whole effort is to demystify life. That’s what knowledge means. Knowledge means knowing each and everything so that life can be demystified, so that the wonder of life is killed and man can become the absolute boss, a manipulator who can control everything.
Knowledge is an effort to control, knowledge is power. All curiosity, all desire for knowledge, is desire for power. Science is non-mystic. A scientist is just the anti-pole, the other extreme, of the mystic. He is trying to poke his nose into reality, to find out its secrets. He is trying to undress reality. He is trying to see reality so that reality can be manipulated.
The mystic is one who has come to see that there is no way to know reality, because we are part of it, and how can the knower know itself? There is no possibility; it is an impossible search, it is doomed to fail.
A mystic is one who has become mature enough to be able to live without knowledge, to be able to live in ignorance, to be ready to truly live. He is not worried about knowing, he does not make it a condition that “First I have to know; then I will live. How can I live without knowing? If I am to love, first I have to know what love is, and only then I can love. If I am to enjoy, first I have to know what enjoyment is, otherwise how can I enjoy?”
The non-mystic makes questions out of simple phenomena, creates questions, and transforms everything into a problem. That is the state of the non-mystic. The mystic is one who has relaxed, who says, “There is no need to know what love is, you can still love, knowledge does not help in any way, on the contrary it hinders.”
If you know everything about love you will never be able to love. It is a blessing that you are not capable of knowing what love is. It is a blessing that existence has made it an utter mystery, otherwise nobody will ever love. Once you know, love will disappear, awe will disappear from life; your eyes will not know the quality of wondering. You will become smug, you will become satisfied with your knowledge; you will become dull. Knowledge makes people dull. The more knowledgeable a person is the duller and more insensitive he is.
The mystic has come to see the point that knowledge is not possible, that life, existence, godliness, or whatever you call it is basically not only unknown but unknowable. All effort to know is futile. Relax and live.
The mystic lives, the non-mystic thinks. The non-mystic thinks about how to live, how to love, how to be. The mystic simply is. He is so occupied with living that he has no energy for knowing. And the paradox is that because he does not bother about knowing, he comes to know in a deeper way. It is not knowledge, it is experience.
The man who tries to know, never comes to know. His very effort is egoistic. The seeker after knowledge is a rapist; he is violent, aggressive. The mystic loves life, and in that love mysteries are opened, veils upon veils are removed. But the mystery deepens; it is not finished. One door opens, and you see another door. That opens, and you see another door. Deeper and deeper you move, but there is no end to depth.
I was reading…
A Yugoslav peasant reading the newspapers came more and more often upon the word dialectics. He wanted to know what the word meant, but nobody could tell him…
Communists talk much about dialectics: dialectical materialism, dialectical evolution. Hegelians also talk about dialectics, the theory that life moves through thesis, antithesis, synthesis; that everything moves through struggle, conflict with the opposite. And each synthesis becomes a thesis again, and it goes on and on.
So this peasant went to the priest who said, “It is simple and I’ll explain it to you with a concrete example. Two men, one clean and one dirty, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“The dirty one,” said the peasant.
“No, why should he? He is already used to his dirt. It is the clean one who will want to remain clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men, one dirty, one clean, are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“It is simple,” the peasant said. “The clean one, for he will want to continue in cleanliness.”
“No,” the priest said. “Why should he, since he is already clean? It is the dirty one who will want to become clean. Let us see it one more time. Two men are walking toward the river. Which one will take a bath?”
“Both,” the peasant said – confident he has finally caught up with dialectics.
“Neither,” the priest said. “Why should they? The clean one is already clean and the dirty is used to dirt.”
And so on and so on…
The man who is looking for knowledge moves this way, that way, this way, zigzagging. He argues for, and then he starts arguing against, then he starts arguing for because each for leads to against; and each against leads to for.
Atheists become theists, theists become atheists, Christians become Hindus, Hindus become Christians, and this goes on, this search for knowledge. The West comes to the East, the East goes to the West… See the absurdity of it. The Eastern seeker of knowledge goes to Western universities, to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Harvard, and the Western seeker of knowledge comes to the East, to the Himalayas.
What is this nonsense all about? Thesis becomes antithesis. Everyone changes and turns into one’s opposite sooner or later, because he gets tired of one position and then starts thinking of the opposite position. The opposite seems alluring, new, unfamiliar, an adventure; then tired of that, he starts moving again, by now having forgotten that he had been in the first position before. That’s how people go on moving.
It has been my observation that if you are a man in this life there is every possibility that you were a woman in your past life. If you are a woman, there is every possibility that you were a man in the past life. A man becomes tired of being a man and starts thinking that there must be some joy which is not available to him but which is available to women. A woman becomes tired of being a woman; people go on changing.
Now science is making change available even in one life. Sooner or later, by the end of this century, people won’t bother waiting for another life. Three years you have been a man, enough is enough. Now why not try being a woman? And it is chemically possible now, physiologically possible; you can be changed. Then you can try being a woman. Then within a few years you will be tired and you will start thinking again of being a man. That’s how things go.
People get tired of heterosexuality, they become homosexual. Homosexuals become tired of homosexuality, they become heterosexual. Thesis, antithesis, and there is also synthesis: bisexuals. In every possible way, man goes on moving from one extreme to another. Sometimes he gets tired of both; then he tries some synthesis.
A mystic is one who has dropped the whole search, the whole project. He does not look for any truth. He simply enjoys the simple things of life. Breakfast in the morning, a shower, a morning walk, a child giggling on the street, a dog barking, a crow crowing, he enjoys these small things. He is not concerned about the distant: his whole concern is immediate.
That is the whole approach of Zen. Understanding Zen, you will become a mystic. Then each moment is such joy, such glory, such splendor, each moment is so precious. Once the hankering for knowledge is dropped, everything takes on grandeur. Just a pebble on the beach is beautiful. “Look at the lilies of the field, how beautiful they are. Even Solomon, in all his glory, was not attired like one of these.”
Then this moment is all. A mystic is one who knows no time; time has disappeared from his mind, he lives in this moment and in eternity. He is not worried about birth, he is not worried about death; he is not worried about becoming. It is becoming that keeps you away from yourself, and he has dropped all ideas of becoming. He is not trying to become, he simply is, and when becoming disappears, being is revealed. That revelation of being is the state of being a mystic.
People are trying the impossible. Becoming is the most impossible thing. You are – how can you become? How can you become that which you are not? And what is the need to become that which you are? Just see the impossibility of it. You can’t become that which you are not; you need not become that which you are. A is A, and cannot become B. And, of course, A has no need to become A; it is already A. This simple understanding is mysticism.
I have heard…
There was once a man who owned a beautiful garden. One day he trapped a hummingbird which was eating his finest fruits. The bird promised him three wise teachings as the price of his release. The man agreed.
Safely out of reach, the bird said, “Do not regret the irrevocable. Do not believe the impossible. Do not seek the unattainable,” and burst into laughter. “If you had not let me go, you would have found inside of me a pearl the size of a lemon.”
Enraged, the man climbed up the tree after the bird. As he came closer, the bird flew higher. With the man in frenzied pursuit, the bird flew to the highest branch of all and walked to its very tip. The man came scrambling after; the branch snapped, the bird flew off, the man dropped to the ground with a thud.
Bruised, he picked himself up and gazed ruefully at his tormentor. “Wisdom is for the wise,” the bird admonished. “I told you not to regret the irrevocable, but no sooner did you let me go than you came after me again. I told you not to believe the impossible, yet you believed that a bird my size could contain a pearl the size of a lemon. And I told you not to seek the unattainable, yet you climbed a tree to catch a bird. You are a fool!”
The mystic is a wise man; he is wisdom incarnate. Not knowledge, remember, wisdom. Knowledge is a search after the impossible. Wisdom comes out of relaxing into your being. A mystic is a relaxed person, he is in a let-go, immense is his joy; inexpressible is his bliss.
Relax and see. Be and see.
The second question:
Osho,
Why do I allow women to hold power over me, to accept or reject me? This old rut makes me sick at heart. I want to get out.
Do you know that women love a deluded man? They are always searching for a deluded man, somebody who is mad and insane because the insane is very attractive: the mad, the deluded, has a certain magnetism. He is full of possibilities, dreams – and women love a dreamer.
And men? Men love a sane woman – otherwise, they will really go mad – to keep them back on the earth. The woman represents the earth. A man needs a woman because he has no roots in his own being. He needs a woman, the warm earth, the dark soil, where he can have his roots and remain rooted in the earth. He is afraid; he has wings but no roots. And he is afraid that if he is not holding to the earth he may be gone, he may disappear into the infinite sky and there may be no coming back. That fear keeps men running after women.
A woman has no wings, she has roots, great roots; a woman is pure earth. And she is afraid that if she remains alone she will never be able to fly into the unknown. A woman can’t be a dreamer like a man. It is not just accidental that women have not created great poetry or music. They don’t have wings; they are very earthly, very pragmatic, very real. And, of course, they are sane; they are so sane, that’s why they don’t write poetry. You have to have some insanity to write poetry; you have to have some delusions, megalomania.
A woman makes a laundry list, not a poem, a shopping list. Her concern is immediate. She talks about the neighbors; she is not worried about Vietnam or Israel. She simply laughs at men and wonders why they are so concerned, why they get into such excitement. If something is happening in Israel, it is happening in Israel. Why are you worried? And a woman in the neighborhood has run away with somebody else – that is the important thing; it is so immediate.
Women are not interested in gospels, they are interested in gossips. Both the words come from the same root: when it is about the faraway it is a gospel, when it is about the close by it is gossip. When it is immediate it is gossip, when it is ultimate it is a gospel.
Man cannot live without woman, because then he loses his roots. He simply becomes a vagabond; he belongs nowhere. Just see a man who has no woman: he has no home, he becomes like a piece of driftwood, waves taking him anywhere. Until he gets entangled with a woman somewhere; then the home arises.
Researchers say that the home is the creation of the woman. If man had lived alone, there would have been no home and no civilization either. He would have been a wanderer, a hunter; he would have gone from one corner of the world to the other corner. Look: man is trying to go to the other planets; now he has reached to the moon. And women simply laugh at the whole lunacy. Men must be lunatics, they are so interested in reaching the lunar, the moon. For what? You can’t go shopping there. There seems to be no point at all. And there are no people, no gossiping, nothing of the sort, just empty desert.
Man without woman is a wanderer, a vagabond; hence, sooner or later, he needs to get rooted. The woman becomes his earth. Unless a man finds something in him that can become his earth, unless the man finds his own inner woman, he will have to look for the outer woman.
Yes, there have been men who have lived without women, a Buddha or a Jesus. But they too have not really lived without a woman; they have found a deeper woman in their own being. Man is both man and woman, and woman is also both woman and man. It has to be so, because you come from two persons – your father and mother. Your father has contributed the man in you; your mother has contributed the woman in you. Each person is fifty percent man, fifty percent woman. Unless you turn inside yourself and find your woman or man there, you will have to look outside, the outside is a substitute.
You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” Because without them you will be insane. And the same is true about women – without men they will be too sane, and to be too sane is just a different kind of insanity. To be too sane becomes heavy; to be too sane, you cannot sing, you cannot dance.
A woman needs somebody who can dream for her, and a man needs somebody who can become a home for him. This is a must unless you have found your other polarity inside yourself. When a man has found the other polarity inside, he becomes a total orgasm. Then there is no need to look out. You can still go on loving women, but there will be no clinging; you will not become possessive or possessed. When you have found your unity inside, you will still be loving men but it will not be an obsession, it will be just a sharing. Then love is a joy; then love has a totally different quality.
Otherwise it will have something of fever in it. The fever has to be there, for a certain psychological reason. If you cannot be alone, naturally you feel powerless before the woman or before the man. If you cannot be alone, then your woman is your need, then you are dependent on her. And you are annoyed because your independence is lost. You are annoyed because she has so much power over you. You cannot forgive her. And the woman cannot forgive you either, because without you she is simply earth. The sky disappears, the stars disappear. Without you she is just earth, dark, waiting for somebody. Waiting for somebody to come and bloom into her being, waiting for somebody to release her fragrance.
Have you noticed a woman without love and then one in love? They smell different; they actually smell different; their fragrance is different. When a woman is alone she has sadness all around her: depressed, lonely, forlorn, in despair, just anxiety. The moment she falls in love she starts blooming, something immediately opens up; then she has beauty.
A woman not in love shrinks, closes up; she starts living in a shut-upness. She closes the doors and the windows. There is nobody to wait for, so why keep the windows open or the doors open? She starts living in a kind of grave; she is no longer alive. She starts dying, she becomes suicidal. Just mathematics, just arithmetic, just sanity is not enough; some poetry is needed to keep balance.
A man alone looks lost; he does not know who he is. Unless he sees himself in the eyes of a loving woman, he will never know who he is. He can go on doing the Enlightenment Intensive and go on asking “Who am I? Who am I?” And no answer will come unless he looks into the eyes of love. Only then will he be reflected, only then will he see who he is in the mirror.
The woman gives him form, substance; makes him aware who he is. By her love she creates the man. It is not only that you are created by your mother in her womb; you are created by each woman whenever you fall in love. Whenever you fall in love the woman gives you shape, color, polish; she makes you human. Otherwise, man will be very, very barbarous, violent, aggressive, uncaring, uncompassionate.
But the problem is that both depend on each other and both feel hurt because nobody wants to be dependent. And on whomsoever you depend, you will never be able to forgive him or her. You will take revenge; that’s why lovers go on fighting. The fight is nothing more than an attempt to show that “I am still independent” – just to feel that “I am still independent. If I want I can leave her.” And for the woman the fight is just to feel, “I am not so dependent on him. I can still bloom alone, I will still be happy without him.”
Hence they fight, just to test their independence. But within hours the fight is gone and they are hugging each other. Because the moment they start separating from each other, they start feeling suffocated, hungry, thirsty. They start losing whatsoever they had. The warmth is missed, the man starts feeling cold. And if there is nobody to hold the woman she starts feeling absolutely lonely.
If there is no love we are all alone. If love is not possible, then loneliness is the truth and has to be accepted. Only love gives you glimpses that loneliness is not ultimate.
You ask me: “Why do I allow women to hold power over me?” It is not a personal question, every man allows that power. And every man resists it. Every husband becomes a henpecked husband – and I say every! There is no other kind of husband. Whatsoever the pretensions, the only kind that really exists is the henpecked husband.
When the tree takes so much nourishment from the earth, it becomes dependent; it cannot remain independent, it is a simple phenomenon. And when the earth sees its own joy, its celebration, its potential, being expressed by the tree in the green foliage and the red flowers, and the branches raised high into the sky with wings that the earth always wanted, and now they are there, how can the earth remain independent?
Man and woman exist in a kind of interdependence. Independent, they are half-hungry, starved for the other. Interdependence is the truth, but then independence is lost. It is not an accident that all the monks of the world, down the ages, have been escaping from woman. The woman represents the world. They are really escaping from the feeling that they are dependent; they want to be independent.
This is a human phenomenon, not personal at all. The woman cannot feel happy without a man. Without a man she cannot flow in dreams. A deluded man is more attractive than an ordinary man. That’s why women fall in love with people who have great illusions about themselves. An ordinary man is one who has no illusions; no woman is attracted toward an ordinary man. A deluded man looks magical. He has magic, his eyes flare up with something unknown, and that is the desire of the woman. He has the sense of possibility, and that sense of possibility gives him the quality of magic.
In nature, watch: the bird with the best dance and the best song gets the best female. This is also the case with human beings. Have you observed how many good-looking women hang around musicians, singers and actors? Why? They sense something magical, something not of this earth, something of the beyond, and they immediately become attracted. This is a natural attraction; both fulfill each other. And this is going to remain.
You say: “I want to get out.” You will have to get in. You cannot get out so easily, everything has a price. Get in, as deeply as possible. Don’t be in such a hurry; if you get out, and you are not mature enough to get out, you will have to get in again. Go through the whole lot; go to the very end of it, see it through and through.
Meanwhile, go on meditating and watching the phenomenon. Don’t take it personally, it is not personal. If you take it personally, you will misunderstand the whole thing from the very beginning. It is something between man and woman, nothing between you and your woman. It is something between man-energy and woman-energy; it is something between masculine energy and feminine energy.
Just watch it as a detached observer. Don’t bring your small egos in it, they are irrelevant. They create a mess, they don’t help any understanding. Just see what is happening with your energies. And, slowly, slowly, that very meditation will help you to find the woman within you; she is there.
The day that happens and you start turning in then you can get out. Get into yourself to such a depth that you can find your inner woman and it is there. If you are a man, then your conscious is masculine, your unconscious is feminine. If you are a woman, then your conscious is feminine, your unconscious is masculine. Just dive deep into the unconscious.
That is what meditation is all about. Go on loving; go on experiencing the joys and the miseries that love brings, they are all needed to make you ripe and mature, and meanwhile go on meditating. Both these processes, love and meditation, if they continue simultaneously, will make you aware slowly, slowly that whatsoever you are finding outside can be found inside in a far better way.
Once that happens, when your unconscious and conscious meet, you become ardhanarishwar, man and woman together. Then there is a difference, a total difference; your quality is no longer the same. Then you can still love a woman, but it is no longer dependence. It is now a sharing. You can still love a man, but it is just pure joy, it is just overflowing energy. You have so much that you have to give it to somebody. But you can be alone too, and as happy as together.
When a man is capable of being alone and as happy as when he is with someone, then he will never be in the grip of anybody else. He will not feel that “Somebody holds power upon me.” Then he will not be fighting with his woman or man, because then there is no question of fight. Then two independent people are sharing out of independence, out of immense freedom.
But there is no necessity to share; it is for no other motive than because you are overflowing. Then you don’t feel hurt, you don’t feel that you have become a slave. Then you remain a master and she remains a master. Nobody possesses anybody, all possessiveness disappears.
Why does this possessiveness come in the mind again and again? Why are you so jealous and so possessive? The reason is that you are dependent, you are afraid. If your woman leaves you tomorrow, you are afraid you will lose your earth. And what are you going to do in the cold lonely nights? You cannot imagine yourself lonely, it is frightening; hence you are afraid.
If your woman is laughing with somebody else, talking to somebody else, you become suspicious. Or if your man has gone to the movies with some other woman, you boil, you become feverish. You are sitting on a volcano; you are ready to explode into ugliness. Why? Why so much possessiveness, jealousy? It is because of fear.
Who knows? He loves you, he can love another woman. He loves you as a woman, his love for women is still alive, and he can find another woman. Maybe the new woman is more attractive than the old because the unfamiliar is more attractive than the familiar. He has become completely aware of you. Now it is a kind of repetition, you know it. He still loves you, but it is a kind of repetition. It has lost that glamour, it has lost those beautiful beginning days; those honeymoon days are no longer there. Things have settled into a routine.
Now you are afraid that he may fall into somebody else’s love and may have again those honeymoon days, and you will be left alone. Fear arises; death arises in you. You have to stop it; you have to create a Wall of China around your man or around your woman. You have to not allow him or her to have any kind of relationship with anybody, any friendship with anybody, so that you can be certain that tomorrow also he will be available to you.
But the more possessive you become, the more the relationship becomes ugly, the more the relationship becomes repulsive. The more you become possessive, the more it becomes a boredom. And the man starts dreaming about other women, the woman starts thinking about other men. They are just physically together then, deep inside, they are no longer together.
And the more you see it happening, the more panicky you become and the more you possess. Possessiveness is the poison that kills all love. But that seems bound to happen, almost inevitable; in this state of dependence it is bound to happen.
You can only be non-possessive, non-jealous, when a different kind of love has arisen in you which is no longer dependent, which needs nobody, which simply goes on overflowing. If somebody partakes of it, good, you are grateful. If nobody partakes of it, very good, you are alone, absolutely happy.
The third question:
Osho,
Yesterday you commented on the creativity of Buddha's religion. Since coming to you, my urge to create has slowly dropped away, while I've become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Everything feels fine as it is, more than enough, and to add to it by making anything else whatever, seems like painting the river.
That is true. The creativity that you ordinarily know is not the creativity I am talking about. Ordinary creativity is nothing but an ego trip. You want to show to the world that you are somebody: you are a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a musician. You want to show to the world that you are somebody; your creativity is not really creative, it is just a prop to the ego.
When you come to me, that kind of creativity will start disappearing because in the first place it was not real creativity. All that creativity will simply disappear from your mind. But you will become more sensitive, more open, more alive. Just wait, and out of this aliveness, sensitivity, openness, another kind of creativity will take possession of you soon. You will be possessed by something from the beyond. It will not be your ego trip; you will be just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo. The music will flow through you; it will not be of you, it will only flow through you. You will be just a hollow bamboo, a flute. You have only to allow it.
I am preparing you for that. The openness, the aliveness, the sensitivity, is nothing but making your bamboo as hollow as possible, so when existence starts singing through you, you don’t hinder.
Existence is the only creator. The ordinary creativity comes from the ego: “I am the creator.” That’s why you see the ordinary poet and the painter so egoistic. It is difficult to find more egoistic people than the artists; they are very egoistic. Always fighting among themselves like dogs, criticizing each other and fighting and barking, and everybody pretending that he is the only authentic, original, creative person, and everybody else is just phony. Why does this happen to artists?
The reason is simple: the creativity is not yet from the beyond, it is not of the transcendent, it is very tiny. They are simply bragging about themselves. This happens here to many people every day. So many people come to me. They say, “We want to become therapists, we want to become healers, we want to become this and that.” They see that the therapists seem to be important people, healers are important people, they are doing something extraordinary; everybody who comes here sooner or later starts thinking that he has to become a therapist or a healer.
This is not creativity; this is just finding a way, a means, for the fulfillment of the ego. And if the ego is there, you cannot be a real therapist. Real therapists are rare. A real therapist is one who is ready to let existence work through him, and that is also the definition of a real healer. Therapy means healing. A healer is not a healer; a healer is just a passage for the healing forces of existence to flow through. He cannot claim anything.
So if you move toward healing with the idea that “I have to become a healer, so I will be somebody important, doing great miracles around,” you will never be a healer. How can you be a healer when the very condition of being a healer is dropping the ego.
It is very rare to find a healer, very rare to find a therapist. I am training my therapists, my healers, here. The whole training is that they should disappear. They should not be there, they should become absent. And through the absence of the ego, some presence, some unknown presence, starts working through you. That brings miracles to life. That is a real phenomenon, not a created, believed-in thing.
So when you come to me, whatsoever you have been doing, if it was not real, it will disappear. And it is good that it disappears. If it was real, then it will be enhanced immediately, and that too is good. But I am not here to support anything unreal.
This buddhafield is going to take everything away from you that is ego-centered, ego-oriented. Then, slowly, slowly, one day you will be surprised by the arrival of a new energy knocking on your door. The sun has risen, you are not to be found, the poetry arises and the painting happens. You cannot even sign it; you cannot say, “This is mine.” At the most, you can be grateful that “Existence has chosen me as a vehicle, as a medium.”
The fourth question:
Osho,
What is the difference between a contented pig, a discontented Socrates, and a natural man of Zen?
You will have to understand these five categories: First, the contented pig. This has nothing to do with pigs, remember; all these categories are of human beings. The contented pig is that man or woman who lives in an unconscious way; who simply vegetates, who has no awareness; hence, there is no discontent. Discontent presupposes a little awareness.
If you are unconscious and somebody is doing surgery on you, you will not feel any pain. How can you feel pain? To feel pain, consciousness is needed. That’s why in surgery we have to give anesthesia, so the man falls completely into a coma. Then you can operate, remove parts of the body without any pain. Otherwise, the pain is going to be unbearable.
A contented pig is that kind of man who lives in life absolutely like a robot, a zombie. He eats, walks, goes to work, comes home, makes love, reproduces children, and dies, never becoming aware of what really was happening. Just moves from one thing to another in a kind of daze.
The second is the discontented pig. He is still unconscious, ninety-nine percent unconscious, but one percent of consciousness is arising. The first ray of consciousness has penetrated; one is becoming aware of the pain and the anguish and the anxiety of life. People avoid the second state; they want to live in the first.
The first state is that of the materialist. Don’t think, don’t contemplate, don’t meditate upon anything. Don’t become conscious: consciousness is dangerous. Remain unconscious, and if sometimes in spite of you some consciousness happens – because life has so much pain that sometimes it can happen that just the pain can give you a little consciousness – then go and take drugs, tranquilize yourself. Or use alcohol, other intoxicants, dull yourself again, back into your anesthetic life, into your unconsciousness. Fall again into that anesthesia.
The discontented pig is one who is coming out of this anesthesia. Have you ever been in anesthesia? Slowly, slowly, when you start coming out of it, you start hearing a few noises around: the traffic noise, the doctors walking, the nurses talking. Slowly, slowly, you start feeling some pain in those parts of the body where the operation has been done. Slowly, slowly, you come back.
The discontented pig is one who is coming out of the anesthesia of life, who is becoming a man. It is painful, because to be a man is painful, to remain a pig is very painless. Millions have decided to remain pigs. When the discontent arises, you are becoming religious: the first approach toward godliness.
The third state is discontented Socrates. You are fully alert about the pain, and you are divided. You are two now: the pain is there and you are there. And life becomes almost unlivable; the pain of it is so much. Something has to be done, either you fall back and become again a pig, or you start moving and become a buddha.
The discontented Socrates is just the midpoint. Below, at the lowest, is the pig. Above, at the highest, is the buddha, the real, natural man of Zen. Discontented Socrates is just in the middle, in the middle of the bridge. And there is every possibility that you will fall back because the old is known, and the future is unknown. Who knows? If you go ahead, the pain may increase even more, who knows? You have never known that state ahead. But one thing you do know: at the back there was a moment when there was no pain. Why not fall back into it?
That’s where people start becoming interested in drugs. That is falling back, that is a regression. Man cannot be freed from alcohol and such intoxicants, unless man is on the way toward buddhahood. No government can prevent people from alcohol; they will find ways. Because life becomes so unbearable, one has to forget it. Either one has to become a buddha or one has to become a pig. One cannot remain in the middle; the middle is such a torture.
The fourth state is contented Socrates. You start moving ahead, you don’t go back. You move more and more into awareness, you move more and more into meditation. Your thinking is transformed into more of a kind of meditativeness. So the fourth stage is contented Socrates: consciousness and unconscious are being bridged.
And the fifth state is: no contentment, no discontentment; no pig, no Socrates. All is gone, all those dreams have disappeared. Neither conscious nor unconscious, but a new thing, transcendence, has arisen. This is buddhahood. This is what Zen people call the natural state of man. Purified of all junk, cleaned of all dust, purified of all poisons and the past and the memories, sanskars, conditionings, you have come home.
The pig is completely unconscious. The natural man of Zen is completely conscious. Between these two are those other three states. These five states have to be pondered over. Find out where you are, and start moving from there.
The goal is not far away. Sometimes it can be reached in a single step, in a single leap. All that is needed is courage. It is out of fear that people fall back into the old rut. If I can teach you courage, I have taught you all. If I can help you to be courageous, then I have made you religious. To me, courage is the most important religious quality, more important than truth, more important than honesty, more important than anything else. Without courage, nothing becomes possible, not truth or love or godliness.
The fifth question:
Osho,
When is mind against itself?
Always.
The last question:
Osho,
During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now – a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water. I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated – I can't quite make it.
It is the same with looking at a river or lake – the desire for union is there, but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.
Can this tell me anything about myself?
By the way, I'm a plumber.
Metaphors are metaphors, don’t take them literally. When I say: Melt, let your ice become water, and evaporate, let your water become vapor, I am talking in metaphors. All that I am saying to you is metaphorical, because that is the only way to say it. But don’t become too attached to metaphors, otherwise you will miss the point.
Water is beautiful, and a love for swimming is beautiful. But if you take the metaphor too seriously and you stretch it too far, you will create trouble for yourself. That’s what has happened to you; that’s what has happened to many people here. They listen to me, they jump upon one metaphor that appeals to them, they take hold of it, and they start thinking; that they have got something of the truth.
A metaphor has to be understood and dropped, and forgotten. A metaphor is dangerous. If you take it too seriously, you miss the point. A metaphor is only an indicator; it is a way of saying.
It is good if you understand what I mean by melting. You are not ice, certainly not. Had you been ice it would have been so easy; you would have melted in the Pune heat automatically. You are not ice, certainly not. Things are more difficult.
Metaphors are simple. They have to be simple, because they are meant to relate something which cannot be related in any other way. Melting has to be understood. By melting I mean become loving, because love melts. The warmth of love – not the Pune heat – the warmth of love melts you. What do I mean when I say, “Become water?” I mean become a flow, river-like, but not that you have to become a river. You have been a river somewhere millions of lives before. You have lost that, you have gone far away from it, and there is no need to go back to it.
You have evolved much; hence the desire remains there. When you go to the sea and you feel a great attraction toward the sea, a gravitation, almost a pull, do you know from where it comes? Millions of lives before, you have been in the sea, you have been a fish, life started there. And our bodies have not forgotten it; they never forget anything, their memory is absolute.
The body knows the thrill, the freedom, the flow of the ocean. So when you see ocean waves, you cannot resist. Something pulls you: “Come into the ocean.” It is your fish inside. Do you know that in the mother’s womb for nine months you swim in almost the same kind of water as in the sea, with the same chemicals, in the same proportion? Do you know inside your body, eighty percent is sea-water? If you don’t take any salt for a few days you will feel tired, because that sea-water is not getting as much salt as it needs, and the fish is feeling thirsty, tired, worried.
You are still eighty percent water, and the water is exactly of the same kind as sea-water. That’s why when it is full moon you feel great upsurges of energy in you. Exactly like the ocean, when it is full moon the ocean is affected. You are also eighty percent ocean. You are bound to be affected.
In your small ocean, in your tea-cup, storms arise. Many more people go mad on the full-moon night than on any other night. That is only one side of the story: many more people become enlightened, too, on the same night. Buddha became enlightened on a full-moon night. He was born on a full-moon night, he became enlightened on a full-moon night, he died on a full-moon night. He must have been a great fish.
So when you are attracted to the ocean it is because something is ingrained deep in your memories. That’s what happens when you go to a lake, or a river, a swimming pool, or even just under your shower, if you cannot go anywhere. The falling water on you stirs memories in the body. The body feels relaxed, happy; it feels nourished, rooted, centered.
But that is not what I mean. Enjoy all these things, these are beautiful things. I am not against them, I am all for them. My metaphor has another meaning. When I say “melt” I mean love. Create as much love-heat in you as possible. Only that can melt you. When I say “become water” I mean become a flow, don’t remain stagnant, move, and move like water.
Lao Tzu says: “The way of the Tao is a watercourse way.” It moves like water. What is the movement of water, or of a river? The movement has a few beautiful things about it. One, it always moves toward the depth, it always searches for the lowest ground. It is non-ambitious; it never hankers to be the first, it wants to be the last.
Remember, Jesus says: “Those who are the last here will be the first in the Kingdom of Heaven.” He is talking about the watercourse way of Tao, not mentioning it, but talking about it. Be the last, be non-ambitious. Ambition means to climb uphill. Water goes downhill, it searches for the lowest ground; it wants to be a nonentity. It does not want to declare itself unique, exceptional, extraordinary. It has no ego idea.
That is what I mean when I say become water: drop the ego, drop ambition. Don’t struggle for the top of the hill and don’t start moving upstream. Go with the stream, down the stream, seek and search the lowest, because only in the lowest will you find peace, tranquility and silence. Only in the lowest will you find the inner emptiness I have been talking about all these days. When you start striving to be somebody, you will not be empty. You will become full of bullshit, you will become garbage.
Go downward. Search the lowest depths and disappear there, that is the first thing. The second thing: the water is soft, feminine, non-aggressive; it never fights. It makes its way without fighting. It is from water that the Chinese and Japanese learned the secret art of judo or jujitsu, winning without fighting, conquering through surrendering – wei-wu-wei.
Learn this one thing from water: it comes across great stone walls, granite walls. It does not fight, it goes on flowing silently; if a stone is too big it finds another way, it bypasses it. But slowly, slowly the granite is dissolved into water, becomes sand. Ask the sands of the oceans from where they have come. They have come from the mountains. They will tell you a great secret: “Water wins finally. We were hard, and we thought that water cannot win. We were very, very settled; we could not believe that this poor water, so soft, unharming, unhurting, nonviolent could destroy us. But it destroyed us.”
That is the beauty of feminine energy. Don’t be like a rock. Be like water, soft, feminine. And victory is yours.
Remember Jesus again: Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek? Yes, they follow the watercourse way and they will reach the kingdom. It takes time, but they have patience. They have no idea of winning, that’s why they win. The people who want to win are defeated by their very idea, because they start struggling, and in struggling they dissipate their energy.
That’s what I mean when I say “become water” – melt, become water. And what do I mean when I say “evaporate”? That is the ultimate: learning how not to be, learning the art of absence. The vapor simply disappears, you cannot catch hold of it; you cannot even see it. You can see it only when it is turning into vapor and soon it is gone, soon it is invisible.
A buddha is seen only when he is in the body. Once the body is dropped, you will not be able to catch hold of him. He is simply gone, he has become part of the ultimate sky. That is the ultimate – to disappear. Buddha calls it anatta – no-self, shunyata – emptiness, nothingness, nirvana, cessation.
So when I use these metaphors, always remember they are metaphors, poetic ways of saying things which cannot be said in any other way.
You ask: “During your discourse yesterday, you spoke on how we can move from being like ice to becoming like water, then evaporating. Your words prompted a feeling I have been getting for a few months now, a feeling of great affinity for and attraction to water.” Get attracted to water, feel affinity with water. Feeling affinity with any element of nature, water, fire, sky, earth, or air is immensely helpful. But that’s not what I meant.
“I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise.” You are a good man. That’s how one should think of paradise. Do you know about Jaina monks? They don’t take a shower, they don’t take a bath. Never go to a Jaina paradise, otherwise you will be in difficulty. There will be no showers. And plumbers, of course, will not be needed. They are so much against the body that even a simple joy like a shower seems to be too much of a luxury.
See the pathological mind, how it works. They are afraid that if they take a shower they will be enjoying the body, that joy will come, and gladness will spread all over the body. They are so against the body, how can they take a shower? They stink; they don’t brush their teeth because that is a kind of beautifying of the body. And for what? – for the idea that the body has to be dropped, and the sooner the better. The body has to be felt as horrible, so make it as horrible as possible. Make it horrible for yourself and for others too.
It used to happen in the past: Jaina monks and nuns would come to see me. Now they have become too afraid, they don’t come. And even if they want to come, their followers won’t allow them. They used to come; it was such a difficult thing to talk to them, because their breath smells so bad that one really feels that the body is horrible. Their bodies smell so bad.
What have people been doing on this earth? They have been negating life. My approach is that of affirmation. I am in love with life. It is fleeting, it is momentary, but who says that it is not momentary and it is not fleeting? Still you can love it even more so because it is fleeting. You can pour all your love. Tomorrow it may not be there. Go on loving, go on being as much in celebration as possible, in all the ways possible.
You say: “I really love taking showers and to go for a swim is my idea of paradise. I want to become the water and merge with it.” That is taking the metaphor too far. It is good when swimming in a river to feel one with the river. Feel the river pass through you. But please don’t become water itself, otherwise how will you come back? And who is going to do the plumbing in the ashram? Please don’t do that; you have to come back too.
And that will not be a real thing, either. If somebody thinks he has become water, he has simply gone mad. If somebody thinks that he has become the tree, he has gone mad. It is the same as if somebody thinks he has become Napoleon and somebody has become Alexander the Great, it is the same. Now you are doing the same trick with water, but it is madness.
Enjoy the unity, the affinity, the synchronicity with water, the harmony. But there is no need to become water, there is no need.
“I want to become the water and merge with it. But I get out of the water feeling frustrated.” Naturally. If you want to merge with it and then you have to get out of it, frustration comes. It is your idea of getting merged with the water that is creating the frustration. You have to get out of it just as you got into it. Enjoy being with it but don’t become obsessed, and then the frustration will disappear.
“I can’t quite make it.” There is no need. “It is the same with looking at a river or lake, the desire for union is there but the realization seems both so close and yet so far away.” It is bound to be so. You are trying to live a metaphor. A metaphor has to be understood, not lived. Live life; understand metaphors.
The word God is not God. Don’t start living the word God – that’s what people are doing. The word love is not love – don’t start living the word love – that’s what people are doing. Love is just a symbol to indicate toward something which is far more complex, far simpler, far bigger and more infinite, than the word can contain. Only silence can contain it.
“Can this tell me anything about myself?” Certainly. It tells one thing: you take words too seriously. You don’t understand that which is hidden behind the words, you don’t understand that which is between two words in the intervals and the gaps. You jump upon the words and you try to carry them in your life. Your life will become false, phony, pseudo. Avoid it.
“By the way I am a plumber,” you say. By the way, I am also a plumber. I plumb into the depths of your being. And when somebody starts leaking, I have to fix them. And when somebody’s nuts and bolts become loose, I have to make them tight again. Or when somebody’s nuts and bolts are too tight I have to make them loose.
By the way, I am also a plumber.
Enough for today.