ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS
The First Principle 10
Tenth Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - The First Principle by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
There are moments when I feel no hope, without feeling desperate, when there is recognition that the “I” has fought enough and cannot help anymore. Yet, under these momentary covers lingers the one and only longing: to become my real nature, to experience truth and to live it in the world. My mind pleases itself to call this longing an authentic, genuine thirst. However, the suspicion is there that it is just a way to hide my plain greed.
Yes Gunakar, it is a way to hide the greed. And not only that, it is a way to avoid the real. It is not a thirst for the real, it is a way to escape from the real. All greed, all desire, is an escape from the real. The desire is for that which is not. That which is, is already there; you need not be greedy about it, you need not desire it. Whether you desire or not does not make any difference. It is there. By desiring you will miss because you will create a cloud around yourself.
This is how the mind goes on playing games. It can play the game in the name of reality too, in the name of God, in the name of enlightenment, nirvana.
One thing has to be remembered always, that you are not to become real, you are real. That which you are is the reality. Gunakar has said, only one longing lingers: “…to become my real nature…” But then who are you? You are your real nature. What else can you be? How else can you be? There is no way to go away from your reality. There is no way to go against it. There is no way to be anything other than it.
But you can forget about it. You can start looking in some other direction. All that is possible is to be forgetful. You cannot lose contact with reality, you can only forget it. You can start looking in some other direction. You can put it at the back. You can avoid your eyes. You can pretend that you are not the real.
The first thing: you are the real. Whatever you are is your reality. It has not to be attained, it is already there. It has happened. Nirvana is not somewhere in the future. Either it is now or never. To seek it is to miss it. If you want to find it, don’t seek it. Just be herenow. And when I say just be herenow, don’t make a desire out of it. Don’t start asking how to be here and now. Don’t start planning, “I have to work hard to be here and now.” You have moved away, that “how” takes you away.
You are your real nature. This is the great declaration of Zen. Other religions say you have to find God. Zen says you are. Other religions say long is the journey. Zen says there is no question of any journey whatever. You are already there. Maybe fast asleep, snoring, but you are there. The goal is where you are. You are the goal, you are the target.
You want “…to experience truth and to live it in the world.” That’s what you are already doing. Drinking tea you are living the truth. Talking to a friend you are living the truth. Going for a morning walk you are living the truth. Even being angry you are living the truth. How can it be otherwise?
The ordinary is the extraordinary, and the trivial is the profound. Samsara is nirvana. It is just a question of remembering.
“…to become my real nature, to experience truth and to live it in the world.” That’s what you are doing. Just the mind goes on playing a game. The mind says things can be better. The mind says life can be improved upon. The mind says there must be something more, you must be missing something, seek, search, do something. This is greed, and the greed is so subtle that it can hide in millions of ways. It can even start trying not to be greedy. Now, listening to me, your mind will say, “Right. Now I am not to be greedy at all because it is greed that is destroying my life. So I have to get rid of greed.” Again the greed has come from the back door.
“It was deep in the woods back yonder,” began old Herman, the guide. “I was plodding along minding my own business when suddenly a huge bear sneaked up behind me. He pinned my arms to my sides and started to squeeze the breath out of me. My gun fell out of my hands. First thing you know, the bear had stooped down, picked up the gun, and was pressing it against my back.”
“What did you do?” gasped the tenderfoot.
Old Herman sighed. “What could I do? I married his daughter.”
But the bear or the daughter, it makes no difference. It is the same.
Just be aware of the ways of greed. Don’t try to get rid of it. Don’t try to do anything. Just be aware of how greed takes a thousand and one forms. Watch it. There is no hurry.
And you are not losing anything. You are living the truth, you cannot lose. In the very nature of things, we are all winners. Here nobody can be a loser. Existence has managed the world in such a way. That’s why the mystics say this is the most perfect world. Existence has managed it in such a way that everybody is a winner, nobody is a loser. Everybody is a victor, nobody is ever defeated. Even in your defeat there is victory, and even when you think you are lost, you are not lost. It is all a dream. The day you become awake you will find you have never been outside your home, you have always been there.
The only thing is to become more and more alert. Just watch. You see greed arising in one way, watch it. Don’t try to stop it, otherwise it will arise in another way. It may choose just the opposite so it can deceive you. Don’t do anything to it, otherwise it will find another way. No need to fight with it. Just watch it, let it be there. Watch it. See it naked, through and through.
Awareness functions like an X ray. It sees things through and through, and in that very seeing there is freedom. If you have seen greed totally, in that very seeing greed disappears. Not that you make it disappear. It disappears. In that vision it is not found. In that light, that darkness is no longer there. Suddenly you are free of greed.
And when you are free of greed, you know you have never left the home, you have always been there. You have never left God. Adam has never been expelled from the Garden of Eden. He still lives there, he just dreams that he has been expelled. This is the Zen interpretation of the biblical story.
I must have given you a thousand interpretations about the story. The story is so beautiful. Zen says Adam is still living in the Garden of Eden. The snake has not tricked him into sin. The snake has only tricked him into a dream. And God has not expelled him. How can God expel you? And to where can he expel you? It is all his garden. Where will you be? Wherever you will be, it will be his garden, so to where can he expel you? And how can God expel? Expelling Adam, God will be expelling himself, a part of himself. He will fall into parts. No, it is not possible.
Then what has happened? Adam has fallen asleep. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam has fallen asleep and is dreaming that God is very angry. It is his dream. It is his idea. It is his guilt. It is his mind, “I have broken the rule,” “I had promised and I have broken my promise.” Now he is trembling and feeling guilty, and in the sleep, the guilt is creating a dream that God is very angry. He is projecting his guilt on God. His guilt is becoming God’s anger, in his mind. Naturally God must be very angry and he is expelling him, and he has expelled him. The gates are closed and Adam is thrown into the world.
But it is just a dream. The moment Adam becomes awake he will laugh. He will have an uproarious laugh. He will roll down on the ground. His belly will start bursting with the laughter because he will see the whole absurdity of it. He had never been out.
Have you not dreamed dreams like this? In a dream you are being killed, and in that moment when you are being murdered, can you doubt it? It is so real. You shriek, you scream, and because of the shriek and the scream you become alert, you become aware. The dream is broken. Even after the dream your heart is beating louder, your breath is not in rhythm, your hands are shaking. You know now it was a dream, a nightmare, you are sitting in your bed and there is nobody, just your poor wife sleeping by your side, no murderer. The doors are closed, everything is silent, there has been nobody in the room, nobody was murdering you, but still you are trembling. The fear has been so deeply there, the idea of murder has penetrated so deeply in you, that even when you are awake, a little smoke of it continues to be there. But now you know you have never been out of the room, and nobody is trying to murder you; there is nobody.
This is what I say to you. You are still in the Garden of Eden. God has not expelled you. You have fallen asleep.
And the work of the master is to bring you back. Back, not from anywhere, but only from sleep. Back to awareness.
The second question:
Osho,
Why do you talk only to your disciples? Why not to the masses?
There is a beautiful Zen saying. Let that be the answer.
“I sing my songs to him who understands them. I drink my wine with the friend who knows me well.”
The third question:
Osho,
It all sounds so great, as perfect as can be articulated. But what the hell do you do in the meantime?
You have missed. You have not understood what has been said to you. You have not heard. Again the greed has become a barrier. Listening to me, you are listening through the greed.
When you listen to me, if I am talking about enlightenment and the joy of it, you become greedy. You start thinking, “When am I going to become enlightened?” So you say it is great. “It all sounds great, as perfect as can be articulated.” Now, this greed creates a problem. You make whatever I am saying a goal. Of course, the goal is far away. There is a distance between you and the goal, and the distance has to be traveled, so the second question arises. “…what the hell do you do in the meantime?”
But there is no meantime. I am not talking about the goal, I am talking about the way. And I am not saying anything about the future or afterlife. I am saying something about this moment, this very moment. This is it! You think in terms of tomorrow. I am talking about today.
Jesus says to his disciples, “Look in the field. Look at the beautiful lilies. They don’t think of the morrow, they toil not, they labor not. Look at these beautiful flowers. They are just herenow. Even Solomon attired in all his costly clothes was not so beautiful. Look at these lilies in the field.”
I am talking about this moment. What do you mean by “meantime”? There is no meantime. This is it! These birds, this cuckoo, these trees, you and me. This moment. This is the moment of nirvana.
But you start thinking in terms of desire. You say, “It sounds great…” In fact, a thing that could have released your celebration becomes a desire, and through desire you start feeling sad because the goal is far away.
The cuckoo is singing right now. And the trees have flowered right now. It is all beautiful this moment. It will never be more beautiful. It has never been less beautiful. Each moment is perfect. But you start thinking about tomorrow. Then the whole glory is there, somewhere away from you, and here you are a miserable creature, crying and weeping for the goal.
You create the meantime. I am not talking about the meantime. I am not talking about time at all, so what to say about meantime? I am talking about the eternal moment, about eternity. You bring time in. The mind always brings time in. Time is a mind faculty.
The mind cannot be herenow. The mind says, “Right. Hoard this. Whatever Osho is saying, hoard it. Someday we are going to practice it, and one day we are going to attain this buddhahood. It sounds great.” Then the misery, then the sadness… Then you will remain miserable your whole life. This buddhahood will never happen, because you missed it in the first place.
You have become so miserable that you cannot trust me that the celebration is possible right now. You say, “First one has to prepare. First one has to become this and that. First one has to meditate. First one has to become a great saint. First one has to become virtuous.” This is something which from the very childhood has been deeply conditioned on your mind.
The parents, the teachers, the schools, the universities, the priest, the politicians, they all have been teaching you, “Get ready. Get ready. Something is going to happen.” And then you go on getting ready, and one day you simply die, just getting ready. It never happens. When you were a child they were saying, “Wait, grow up, first be educated. Go to the university, come back home.” Thrilled, you go to the university and you suffer all sorts of tortures there, in the hope that it is not going to last forever, in the hope that now you are getting ready. You don’t know what for, what you are getting ready for.
To listen to this cuckoo singing? To watch a bird on the wing? To see a full moon in the night? To hold a friend’s hand? To love? For what? Because all this is available right now.
You go to the university, you go through a thousand and one imprisonments, and by the time you come back home you are destroyed. It is very rare; very fortunate people come back from the university without being destroyed by the education system.
Then they come home. Then the father says, “Now find a job, and get ready. Get married, and get ready. Then everything is going to be beautiful.” And you read the novels and you go to the movie and you see the film, and once the marriage happens, the story says, “Ever afterward they lived in happiness.” Have you ever seen anybody living after marriage, and happy? But these stories circulate, they condition the mind: get ready.
So one day you find a job. Another humiliation. One day you get married. Another distraction from the moment. And so on, so forth. Then you go on missing. It is not happening, so somebody says, “How can you have it unless you have a child?” Right. So get ready, have a child. And so on, so forth.
Finally you recognize the fact that the whole life has been a wastage.
I am not saying don’t go to the university, and I am not saying don’t get married, I am not saying don’t get a job. Please, don’t misunderstand me. What I am saying is: don’t get ready for happiness, it is already here. Go to the university. Enjoy. Have a job, but enjoy it. It is not going to lead to happiness. Each moment is an end unto itself, it is not to be converted into a means toward something else. Love, and enjoy love. Don’t think that you will be happy when you are married. Get married, and be happy. Don’t think that when you have a child, and you become a mother or a father, then you will be happy. Have you not seen your mother and your father? So what are you hoping for? Don’t wait and don’t go on postponing.
The greatest calamity that has happened to humanity is postponement – always postponing. There are people who are always looking at the timetable and thinking about where to go on the holidays, what trains to catch and what planes to go by, this place or that, to the Himalayas or to the Alps, to Kashmir or to Switzerland. And they are always preparing and preparing, and they never go. What will you say about these people? You will think they are mad. They have all the guidebooks and all the maps of the world and all the literature that government information services go on publishing. They have a whole library, and they go on looking into it and they go on preparing, but they always prepare and they never go. What will you think about them? Will you not call them neurotic?
This is what the situation is with everybody. You always talk about God, you always talk about moksha, nirvana, heaven, paradise, you always talk about it, but it is always tomorrow. So you have to prepare. “Meantime” you prepare.
I am saying there is no meantime. God is available right now, just for the asking.
Start enjoying. Don’t ask how to dance. Start dancing. Can’t you move your body? It may not be very graceful. So who bothers? It may not be a trained, disciplined thing. So who bothers? Start dancing. Don’t go on consulting manuals about love. Start loving. Don’t go on and on in the mind. Start moving into existence, be existential. That is the message of Zen.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Are you really crazy?
How can I be crazy? I have no mind out of which to go.
The fifth question:
Osho,
As sin can be defined as “missing the mark,” could one define Zen as “hitting the mark”?
No. Sin means missing the mark. Zen means there is no mark to miss. There is nothing, no target. There is no destiny. It is all beautiful purposelessness. It is all beautiful meaninglessness. It is a song. It has no meaning. It has a rhythm, but no meaning. It has tremendous beauty in it, but no logic. And it is not a syllogism, there is no conclusion. It is an unconcluded existence, and it remains always unconcluded.
We are always in the middle. There has been no source, and there is no goal.
Osho,
There are moments when I feel no hope, without feeling desperate, when there is recognition that the “I” has fought enough and cannot help anymore. Yet, under these momentary covers lingers the one and only longing: to become my real nature, to experience truth and to live it in the world. My mind pleases itself to call this longing an authentic, genuine thirst. However, the suspicion is there that it is just a way to hide my plain greed.
Yes Gunakar, it is a way to hide the greed. And not only that, it is a way to avoid the real. It is not a thirst for the real, it is a way to escape from the real. All greed, all desire, is an escape from the real. The desire is for that which is not. That which is, is already there; you need not be greedy about it, you need not desire it. Whether you desire or not does not make any difference. It is there. By desiring you will miss because you will create a cloud around yourself.
This is how the mind goes on playing games. It can play the game in the name of reality too, in the name of God, in the name of enlightenment, nirvana.
One thing has to be remembered always, that you are not to become real, you are real. That which you are is the reality. Gunakar has said, only one longing lingers: “…to become my real nature…” But then who are you? You are your real nature. What else can you be? How else can you be? There is no way to go away from your reality. There is no way to go against it. There is no way to be anything other than it.
But you can forget about it. You can start looking in some other direction. All that is possible is to be forgetful. You cannot lose contact with reality, you can only forget it. You can start looking in some other direction. You can put it at the back. You can avoid your eyes. You can pretend that you are not the real.
The first thing: you are the real. Whatever you are is your reality. It has not to be attained, it is already there. It has happened. Nirvana is not somewhere in the future. Either it is now or never. To seek it is to miss it. If you want to find it, don’t seek it. Just be herenow. And when I say just be herenow, don’t make a desire out of it. Don’t start asking how to be here and now. Don’t start planning, “I have to work hard to be here and now.” You have moved away, that “how” takes you away.
You are your real nature. This is the great declaration of Zen. Other religions say you have to find God. Zen says you are. Other religions say long is the journey. Zen says there is no question of any journey whatever. You are already there. Maybe fast asleep, snoring, but you are there. The goal is where you are. You are the goal, you are the target.
You want “…to experience truth and to live it in the world.” That’s what you are already doing. Drinking tea you are living the truth. Talking to a friend you are living the truth. Going for a morning walk you are living the truth. Even being angry you are living the truth. How can it be otherwise?
The ordinary is the extraordinary, and the trivial is the profound. Samsara is nirvana. It is just a question of remembering.
“…to become my real nature, to experience truth and to live it in the world.” That’s what you are doing. Just the mind goes on playing a game. The mind says things can be better. The mind says life can be improved upon. The mind says there must be something more, you must be missing something, seek, search, do something. This is greed, and the greed is so subtle that it can hide in millions of ways. It can even start trying not to be greedy. Now, listening to me, your mind will say, “Right. Now I am not to be greedy at all because it is greed that is destroying my life. So I have to get rid of greed.” Again the greed has come from the back door.
“It was deep in the woods back yonder,” began old Herman, the guide. “I was plodding along minding my own business when suddenly a huge bear sneaked up behind me. He pinned my arms to my sides and started to squeeze the breath out of me. My gun fell out of my hands. First thing you know, the bear had stooped down, picked up the gun, and was pressing it against my back.”
“What did you do?” gasped the tenderfoot.
Old Herman sighed. “What could I do? I married his daughter.”
But the bear or the daughter, it makes no difference. It is the same.
Just be aware of the ways of greed. Don’t try to get rid of it. Don’t try to do anything. Just be aware of how greed takes a thousand and one forms. Watch it. There is no hurry.
And you are not losing anything. You are living the truth, you cannot lose. In the very nature of things, we are all winners. Here nobody can be a loser. Existence has managed the world in such a way. That’s why the mystics say this is the most perfect world. Existence has managed it in such a way that everybody is a winner, nobody is a loser. Everybody is a victor, nobody is ever defeated. Even in your defeat there is victory, and even when you think you are lost, you are not lost. It is all a dream. The day you become awake you will find you have never been outside your home, you have always been there.
The only thing is to become more and more alert. Just watch. You see greed arising in one way, watch it. Don’t try to stop it, otherwise it will arise in another way. It may choose just the opposite so it can deceive you. Don’t do anything to it, otherwise it will find another way. No need to fight with it. Just watch it, let it be there. Watch it. See it naked, through and through.
Awareness functions like an X ray. It sees things through and through, and in that very seeing there is freedom. If you have seen greed totally, in that very seeing greed disappears. Not that you make it disappear. It disappears. In that vision it is not found. In that light, that darkness is no longer there. Suddenly you are free of greed.
And when you are free of greed, you know you have never left the home, you have always been there. You have never left God. Adam has never been expelled from the Garden of Eden. He still lives there, he just dreams that he has been expelled. This is the Zen interpretation of the biblical story.
I must have given you a thousand interpretations about the story. The story is so beautiful. Zen says Adam is still living in the Garden of Eden. The snake has not tricked him into sin. The snake has only tricked him into a dream. And God has not expelled him. How can God expel you? And to where can he expel you? It is all his garden. Where will you be? Wherever you will be, it will be his garden, so to where can he expel you? And how can God expel? Expelling Adam, God will be expelling himself, a part of himself. He will fall into parts. No, it is not possible.
Then what has happened? Adam has fallen asleep. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam has fallen asleep and is dreaming that God is very angry. It is his dream. It is his idea. It is his guilt. It is his mind, “I have broken the rule,” “I had promised and I have broken my promise.” Now he is trembling and feeling guilty, and in the sleep, the guilt is creating a dream that God is very angry. He is projecting his guilt on God. His guilt is becoming God’s anger, in his mind. Naturally God must be very angry and he is expelling him, and he has expelled him. The gates are closed and Adam is thrown into the world.
But it is just a dream. The moment Adam becomes awake he will laugh. He will have an uproarious laugh. He will roll down on the ground. His belly will start bursting with the laughter because he will see the whole absurdity of it. He had never been out.
Have you not dreamed dreams like this? In a dream you are being killed, and in that moment when you are being murdered, can you doubt it? It is so real. You shriek, you scream, and because of the shriek and the scream you become alert, you become aware. The dream is broken. Even after the dream your heart is beating louder, your breath is not in rhythm, your hands are shaking. You know now it was a dream, a nightmare, you are sitting in your bed and there is nobody, just your poor wife sleeping by your side, no murderer. The doors are closed, everything is silent, there has been nobody in the room, nobody was murdering you, but still you are trembling. The fear has been so deeply there, the idea of murder has penetrated so deeply in you, that even when you are awake, a little smoke of it continues to be there. But now you know you have never been out of the room, and nobody is trying to murder you; there is nobody.
This is what I say to you. You are still in the Garden of Eden. God has not expelled you. You have fallen asleep.
And the work of the master is to bring you back. Back, not from anywhere, but only from sleep. Back to awareness.
The second question:
Osho,
Why do you talk only to your disciples? Why not to the masses?
There is a beautiful Zen saying. Let that be the answer.
“I sing my songs to him who understands them. I drink my wine with the friend who knows me well.”
The third question:
Osho,
It all sounds so great, as perfect as can be articulated. But what the hell do you do in the meantime?
You have missed. You have not understood what has been said to you. You have not heard. Again the greed has become a barrier. Listening to me, you are listening through the greed.
When you listen to me, if I am talking about enlightenment and the joy of it, you become greedy. You start thinking, “When am I going to become enlightened?” So you say it is great. “It all sounds great, as perfect as can be articulated.” Now, this greed creates a problem. You make whatever I am saying a goal. Of course, the goal is far away. There is a distance between you and the goal, and the distance has to be traveled, so the second question arises. “…what the hell do you do in the meantime?”
But there is no meantime. I am not talking about the goal, I am talking about the way. And I am not saying anything about the future or afterlife. I am saying something about this moment, this very moment. This is it! You think in terms of tomorrow. I am talking about today.
Jesus says to his disciples, “Look in the field. Look at the beautiful lilies. They don’t think of the morrow, they toil not, they labor not. Look at these beautiful flowers. They are just herenow. Even Solomon attired in all his costly clothes was not so beautiful. Look at these lilies in the field.”
I am talking about this moment. What do you mean by “meantime”? There is no meantime. This is it! These birds, this cuckoo, these trees, you and me. This moment. This is the moment of nirvana.
But you start thinking in terms of desire. You say, “It sounds great…” In fact, a thing that could have released your celebration becomes a desire, and through desire you start feeling sad because the goal is far away.
The cuckoo is singing right now. And the trees have flowered right now. It is all beautiful this moment. It will never be more beautiful. It has never been less beautiful. Each moment is perfect. But you start thinking about tomorrow. Then the whole glory is there, somewhere away from you, and here you are a miserable creature, crying and weeping for the goal.
You create the meantime. I am not talking about the meantime. I am not talking about time at all, so what to say about meantime? I am talking about the eternal moment, about eternity. You bring time in. The mind always brings time in. Time is a mind faculty.
The mind cannot be herenow. The mind says, “Right. Hoard this. Whatever Osho is saying, hoard it. Someday we are going to practice it, and one day we are going to attain this buddhahood. It sounds great.” Then the misery, then the sadness… Then you will remain miserable your whole life. This buddhahood will never happen, because you missed it in the first place.
You have become so miserable that you cannot trust me that the celebration is possible right now. You say, “First one has to prepare. First one has to become this and that. First one has to meditate. First one has to become a great saint. First one has to become virtuous.” This is something which from the very childhood has been deeply conditioned on your mind.
The parents, the teachers, the schools, the universities, the priest, the politicians, they all have been teaching you, “Get ready. Get ready. Something is going to happen.” And then you go on getting ready, and one day you simply die, just getting ready. It never happens. When you were a child they were saying, “Wait, grow up, first be educated. Go to the university, come back home.” Thrilled, you go to the university and you suffer all sorts of tortures there, in the hope that it is not going to last forever, in the hope that now you are getting ready. You don’t know what for, what you are getting ready for.
To listen to this cuckoo singing? To watch a bird on the wing? To see a full moon in the night? To hold a friend’s hand? To love? For what? Because all this is available right now.
You go to the university, you go through a thousand and one imprisonments, and by the time you come back home you are destroyed. It is very rare; very fortunate people come back from the university without being destroyed by the education system.
Then they come home. Then the father says, “Now find a job, and get ready. Get married, and get ready. Then everything is going to be beautiful.” And you read the novels and you go to the movie and you see the film, and once the marriage happens, the story says, “Ever afterward they lived in happiness.” Have you ever seen anybody living after marriage, and happy? But these stories circulate, they condition the mind: get ready.
So one day you find a job. Another humiliation. One day you get married. Another distraction from the moment. And so on, so forth. Then you go on missing. It is not happening, so somebody says, “How can you have it unless you have a child?” Right. So get ready, have a child. And so on, so forth.
Finally you recognize the fact that the whole life has been a wastage.
I am not saying don’t go to the university, and I am not saying don’t get married, I am not saying don’t get a job. Please, don’t misunderstand me. What I am saying is: don’t get ready for happiness, it is already here. Go to the university. Enjoy. Have a job, but enjoy it. It is not going to lead to happiness. Each moment is an end unto itself, it is not to be converted into a means toward something else. Love, and enjoy love. Don’t think that you will be happy when you are married. Get married, and be happy. Don’t think that when you have a child, and you become a mother or a father, then you will be happy. Have you not seen your mother and your father? So what are you hoping for? Don’t wait and don’t go on postponing.
The greatest calamity that has happened to humanity is postponement – always postponing. There are people who are always looking at the timetable and thinking about where to go on the holidays, what trains to catch and what planes to go by, this place or that, to the Himalayas or to the Alps, to Kashmir or to Switzerland. And they are always preparing and preparing, and they never go. What will you say about these people? You will think they are mad. They have all the guidebooks and all the maps of the world and all the literature that government information services go on publishing. They have a whole library, and they go on looking into it and they go on preparing, but they always prepare and they never go. What will you think about them? Will you not call them neurotic?
This is what the situation is with everybody. You always talk about God, you always talk about moksha, nirvana, heaven, paradise, you always talk about it, but it is always tomorrow. So you have to prepare. “Meantime” you prepare.
I am saying there is no meantime. God is available right now, just for the asking.
Start enjoying. Don’t ask how to dance. Start dancing. Can’t you move your body? It may not be very graceful. So who bothers? It may not be a trained, disciplined thing. So who bothers? Start dancing. Don’t go on consulting manuals about love. Start loving. Don’t go on and on in the mind. Start moving into existence, be existential. That is the message of Zen.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Are you really crazy?
How can I be crazy? I have no mind out of which to go.
The fifth question:
Osho,
As sin can be defined as “missing the mark,” could one define Zen as “hitting the mark”?
No. Sin means missing the mark. Zen means there is no mark to miss. There is nothing, no target. There is no destiny. It is all beautiful purposelessness. It is all beautiful meaninglessness. It is a song. It has no meaning. It has a rhythm, but no meaning. It has tremendous beauty in it, but no logic. And it is not a syllogism, there is no conclusion. It is an unconcluded existence, and it remains always unconcluded.
We are always in the middle. There has been no source, and there is no goal.