13^th of April is the birthday of Samuel Barclay Beckett. He was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known work is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Company, Worstward Ho these are also some of his works.

Samuel Beckett was also depicted on an Irish commemorative coin celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Osho has mentioned Beckett’s most popular play waiting for Godot several times in his discourses. Osho says a rationalist will be more like Samuel Beckett — absurd. Samuel Beckett’s plays go on, move in absurdity, because the whole of life is absurd. There is no possibility of any coherence, meaning. All is mad. So somebody asks you about A and you talk about B; that too is okay because there is no way to know what is okay. There is no way to judge what is what. It is a chaos.

[The new sannyasin asks if it was necessary for him to go through sex… I want to go but I haven’t anybody to go with. I want to know if you feel it is really necessary.]

It is very necessary because if you don’t go through it, something will always remain hanging around you. It is better to be finished with it. One has to go beyond it; it is something to be passed beyond. There is no need to make your abode there; it is just a bridge. But if you don’t go through it — and there are other ways; you can go via a boat, you can swim; there are a thousand and one ways to avoid the bridge — then continuously in your mind something will go on thinking about the bridge. Who knows? Perhaps the bridge was beautiful. Many never go beyond that bridge, and you will always be aware that many are not only passing on the bridge — they have made their houses there on the bridge and they live there. It is simply human to be curious about what is happening there. Why are so many people interested? Not so many people are interested in God.

If people have to choose between sex and God they will choose sex. They have already chosen it. There are not so many people who are meditative, so there must be something. The curiosity will continue. Just to avoid that curiosity, I say it is a must. Go through it so you are finished with it. Only experience liberates. When you pass through a thing and you know what it is you are finished with it. So I say go through it but never remain in it. You understand me? There are many people who say it is not only a must, it is what the whole life is all about. And there are people who say it is not only to be avoided, it is to be completely and absolutely avoided; you should not even think about it. Both are wrong because those who think that sex is all and there is nothing more than it, are missing much. And those that say that sex has to be absolutely avoided become depressive, ill, morbid.

I would like you to become a very very healthy person; so healthy that there is no hangover from the past of any desire seeking to be, haunting you, to be fulfilled. Ghosts are very very dangerous, and whatsoever arises in your mind and you don’t fulfill, becomes a ghost.

Then it haunts you. If you enter into monks’ heads, they think continuously of sex. They go on repeating Ave Maria, but that doesn’t make much sense. Deep down sex continues. In fact they go on repeating mantras, chanting, just to avoid that constant current of sex. They become more and more afraid to move in life, because wherever they go there is provocation — and it becomes more provocative to them. If you live an ordinary life, a woman is just a woman. If you are a monk, a woman is something tremendously powerful. Ordinarily people don’t know what power a woman has; only monks know.

It is just as if you have not eaten food for many days and you have been starved. Then you know what food is. You think only about food. Nothing else comes into your fantasy, your dreams, your imagination; only food floats all around. You imagine the flavour and the aroma and everything hints to you of food, whatsoever you see. Even if a camel passes, you think about food; it has nothing to do with a camel. An elephant passes and you will think about food. You will become food-obsessed — but it is natural because you have been starved.

So never starve. Understand. There are ways to go beyond, and it is better to learn everything that life makes available. Sex is one of the most secret forces of life. We come through sex, we are made of sex. Each cell of the body is a sex cell. The whole of life has a great collaboration with sexual energy. Life exists through sex, in sex. Of course life is bigger than sex but it is rooted in it, just as a lotus flower is rooted in mud. It comes out of the mud, but it is not mud. It is absolutely different from mud.

How can you say that the lotus is mud? Just by looking at it you will see that the lotus is something of the other world. It is not earthly at all — but it comes out of mud.

Life arises out of sex, but it should not be confined to sex. It should flower and become a lotus. But the lotus cannot avoid the mud. It remains rooted in the mud. It goes on being nourished by the mud; so mud is not an enemy. Sex is not an enemy. Be friendly. And meditate. Remain available and don’t close your doors. Somebody will come and knock. Don’t be shy — open the door. If you feel attracted towards somebody, don’t remain closed. Take the initiative. Initiative is one of the most important values in life. People who cannot take initiative miss many things in life; they always go on missing. Whenever the moment arises, they cannot take the initiative; they wait.

Have you read Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’? Read it. People go on waiting for Godot. They don’t take any initiative. They don’t do anything. They simply wait… inert. They don’t even know what they are waiting for, because unless you create it, it is hot going to happen. So wait not for Godot. Do something so it happens! Otherwise there are millions of people who don’t know exactly what they are waiting for. That is the meaning of Godot. Somebody asked Samuel Beckett, ‘What do you mean by Godot?’ He said, ‘If I had known I would have said so. I don’t know myself.’ ‘Waiting for Godot’… it simply gives an idea of God. Mm? Just the sound. But God has to be created, otherwise He becomes a Godot. If you don’t create your God you will not find Him.

Now this looks paradoxical when I say create your God and only then you find Him. Don’t wait for Him. Create your love — only then will you find; don’t wait for it. People who are creative find millions of ways of love, prayer, gratitude.

Experience is always around you, always ready to sprout flowers, but you have to be creative, receptive, open — and remember initiative. Otherwise the world will pass you by. If you remain closed, hiding yourself somewhere and just waiting for Godot, nobody will come because they are also shy. Somebody has to break the ice. So meditate, do a few groups and remain available. And there is nothing wrong in chasing. One has to find a lover, and when it is time it is good to chase. Otherwise people start chasing in old age and then it is foolish. Right now when you are ready to chase, don’t waste time!

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.

Darshan Diary:

Beloved of My Heart

Chapter title: Don’t be Limited by Religion
Chapter #10
12 May 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on eminent poets and writers like Byron, Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Ghalib, Heinrich Heine, John Ruskin, Kahlil Gibran, Kalidas, Keats, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Milton, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Rumi, Rudyard Kipling, Shakespeare, Shelley, William Blake, Wordsworth and many more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses: