KABIR
The Guest 05
Fifth Discourse from the series of 15 discourses - The Guest by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
You, the fountain of love, our source is in thee.
Loving thy will our spirit is free.
This beautiful day that all of us see.
The hope of the world is love.
Love is not only the hope of the world, but the only hope. Up to now man has lived an absolutely loveless life. All the societies and the cultures and the religions that have existed on earth have talked about love, but have lived a very loveless existence. There has been much talk about love in the past, but the structure that societies have created is basically against love. Society is geared for war, and a society that is geared for war can only talk about love, not live it.
We have now come to the peak of this ugly, stupid structure of hatred. We have come to the point where man has to either change totally or die. The new man can only be born by having a new heart, a new soul – and the flavor of that soul will be love, and the poetry of that heart will be love. A society that lives without love is competitive, ambitious; obsessed with money, power, prestige. A society that lives without love lives through beliefs. Beliefs divide people, and all divisions breed war. A society that lives without love lives a very lustless existence because without love there is no splendor in life, no significance. Without love no song arises in the heart of man.
We have come to the point – or are coming to it, approaching it every day – that by the end of this century man will have to choose either total destruction or revolution. Not a political or social revolution, but a revolution of the heart. The turning point is coming closer every day; you must be prepared for it.
Sannyas has to become the herald for a new world, the first ray of the dawn. Man is reaching toward total war; all the preparations are there to commit global suicide. This is what your history has brought you to. All the Alexanders and all the Napoleons and all the Stalins and all the Hitlers and all the Maos have been working for centuries and centuries. Now their dream is going to be fulfilled: we can destroy this whole earth within seconds. Destruction has reached its peak; unless creativity also reaches its peak man cannot be saved.
And to me, love is nothing but the birth of creativity in you. By love I mean an overflowing heart. Love to me is not only a relationship; the relationship that we call love is a faraway, distant echo of the real thing.
The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love, but one is love. Whenever I talk about love, remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, a relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is – and you don’t know. Love is basically a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.
And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling, but by rising, soaring upward, higher than yourself. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A Buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.
Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, “Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you.” Love is like breathing; when it happens you simply are love. It does not matter who comes close to you, a sinner or a saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, rejoices. Love is unconditional giving – but only those who have are capable of giving.
One of the most mysterious things about man is that he goes on giving things which he doesn’t have. You go on giving love and you don’t have it in the first place, and you go on asking for love from others who also don’t have it – beggars begging from beggars.
Love first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. It is the quality of being alone, happily alone, joyously alone. It is the quality of being a no-mind, of being silent. Contentless consciousness is the space, the context, in which love arises in you.
And so much love arises in you it is unbearable. The pleasure is so unbearable that it almost becomes pain. It is heavy like clouds full of rain; they have to shower, they have to rain, they have to unburden themselves. When love arises in the silent heart, it has to be shared, it has to be given; you are helpless.
And the person you give your love to is not obliged to you in any way. In fact, you are obliged to them because they help to unburden you, they share something that was too much for you. And the economics of love are: the more you give, the more you have because in your silent being you are joined with the oceanic, the divine source of all. And you can go on sharing; more and more goes on flowing through you, welling up.
Yes, you are right, love is the only hope of the world. And we are coming close to the turning point: either total war or total love. This is a question of either–or, there is no third alternative. There is nothing like a compromise possible now, you cannot be in the middle. Man has to choose. It is a question of life and death: war is death, love is life.
By creating you here, by creating sannyasins here, I am creating a new kind of space. This is the beginning of a totally new man. Hence the old traditions will be unable to understand what is happening here; the experiment is so new they don’t have any criterion. Yes, in the past, once in a while, men like Buddha, Kabir, Krishna, Christ, Zarathustra, have happened, but they are only individuals. Now, only individuals won’t do; only a buddha here and there won’t be of much help. The world has gone too far into hate. The world is so full of hate that it is almost like an ocean of hatred, and a buddha will be just a spoonful of sugar – it won’t change the taste of the ocean. We need thousands of buddhas.
Hence I am not interested in Christians, I am interested only in Christs. I am not interested in Jainas, I am interested only in Mahaviras. I am not interested in Buddhists, I am interested only in Buddhas. My effort here is not to create a following, not to create believers, but to create individuals, lovers, meditators who can stand on their own; and each one can become a light. The night is going to become darker and darker every day and we will need millions of lights around the world, millions of people who are capable of love – unconditionally, without asking for anything in return – and who are so silent and so blissful that wherever they are they will be able to dissipate darkness.
Yes, love is the hope of the world, the only hope.
The second question:
Osho,
When dreaming, something is constantly telling me that I have to die. I remember no other dreams. What is happening?
Meditate first over this small anecdote…
The young man had been keeping company with a girl for over two years, but still had given no indication of serious intentions.
“I had a strange dream last night,” he remarked one day. “I dreamed I proposed to you. What that is a sign of, I wonder?”
“It’s a sign you’ve got more sense asleep than awake.”
And that’s exactly my answer to you: you have got more sense asleep than awake. In fact, the whole of psychoanalysis is based on the understanding that people are more intelligent while dreaming than while they are awake.
Why has this strange thing happened? People should be more intelligent when they are awake than when they are dreaming. There is a reason: society can make an impression on your waking mind; it has not yet been able to make an impression on your dreaming mind. Society has destroyed your waking mind, distorted it, polluted it, disfigured it; it is almost unrecognizable now from what it could have been naturally. So much has been pruned, cut, so much has been repressed, so much has been imposed from the outside, that you don’t know what you would have been if society had not interfered.
But your unconscious, your dreaming mind, is still out of range of being grabbed by society. But it will not be for long, there are people who are working to grab your unconscious mind too, remember. In Soviet Russia particularly, they have been experimenting for at least twenty years on how to influence your dreaming, sleeping mind – and they have succeeded. They have succeeded enough for you to need to be alert, to beware.
In Russia now, they have found that a person can be taught even while he is asleep and dreaming. Earphones are put on the person and messages are given, in a very, very, silent way, in a subliminal way, so that his sleep is not disturbed. He continues to sleep yet his mind goes on receiving messages. You can teach new languages, mathematics, history, philosophy, anything, and he will remember in the morning. In fact, it seems to work far better than ordinary schooling because in ordinary schooling you have to go on repeating the same thing again and again; when it is repeated often, only then does it go a little deeper. But when you are asleep your deep mind is available.
It is okay to teach mathematics and science and history – but politicians cannot stop there. They will teach communism, fascism – it is bound to happen. They will teach Gandhism, they will teach Christianity, Hinduism, Islam – it is bound to happen. Once the politicians have got the means to influence your sleeping mind they will not leave you alone.
At least right now you are free to dream; soon the danger is that you will not be. The government will go on influencing your dreams; it will allow you to dream only certain dreams, it will create dreams in you. In a communist country you will not be able to dream a capitalist dream; even in a dream you will not have a car of your own, it won’t be allowed.
And if your unconscious becomes available to the politicians, man is utterly destroyed. It should not be allowed. This is far more dangerous than atomic bombs because the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb can only destroy your body, but these new techniques of behaviorist psychology can destroy your psychology. Right now at least you have some privacy, but politicians are not willing to give you even that much; they want to interfere, they want to poke into your dreams. Up to now it has not happened much; they have succeeded with experimentation, but it has not yet been used on a wide scale.
You say, “When dreaming, something is constantly telling me that I have to die.” That is the voice of your inner being. It has nothing to do with your physical death, it has something to do with your psychological death. It has something to do with the death of the ego.
It happens to every meditator: the more you meditate, the more your inner voice says, “Let the ego die.” The more you meditate, the more you become aware that a certain death is going to happen. And you only know one kind of death, so naturally you misinterpret: you think, “I am going to die.” You are not going to die. Only the “I,” the ego, the personality, is going to die, is going to disappear. Your dream is giving you a very significant message.
And you say, “I remember no other dreams. What is happening?” This dream is not an ordinary dream, it is something extraordinary. It is not just the rubbish of the mind.
Ninety-nine percent of your dreams consist of rubbish, rubbish that you gather in the day, rubbish that you carry on chewing over in the night. They are a reflection of your day, they have nothing special in them. That’s why psychoanalysis takes so many years – to find a gem in the rubbish takes time. There is so much rubbish that it takes two, three years for the psychoanalyst to find something significant, sort it out, figure out where you are, what you are.
But in meditation it can happen very quickly because in meditation you go directly. You don’t search in the rubbish, you simply dive deep into your being to where the diamond is, where the lotus paradise is.
You are hearing something of your inner voice. It is not really a dream, it is far truer than any truth you have yet known. It is the voice of your soul, it is existence speaking to you. Listen, follow – help the ego to die. Become absolutely nonexistent as far as the ego is concerned.
And in the death of the ego love is born, godliness is born, light is born. In the death of the ego you are transformed; all misery disappears as if it had never existed. Your life right now is a nightmare. When the ego dies, nightmares disappear and a great sweetness and a subtle joy arise in your being, for no reason at all. You cannot explain it to anybody, you cannot explain it to yourself either. It is unexplainable, mysterious. But who cares for the explanation? When you are bathed, when you are rejoicing, when your being is in a dance, who cares?
Only when you are suffering do you ask, “Why?” You ask when you are ill, you never ask when you are healthy. You never ask your physician, “Why am I healthy?” When you are ill, you certainly ask “Why am I ill? Why this headache, why this stomachache?” But when you are perfectly healthy you don’t go to the physician to ask, “Why am I healthy?” Health is natural, so is bliss; misery is unnatural. Misery is pathology, illness, disease.
Let the ego die. The time has come, and your inner voice is saying, “Don’t cling to it. Let go.”
The third question:
Osho,
If I should meet Osho walking down the road, should I kill him?
Certainly. That’s why I never walk down the road, you know.
But you don’t understand; you have asked the question, but you don’t understand the meaning of it at all. This is a message only for disciples, and you are not yet a disciple, you are not yet a sannyasin.
This is a Zen way of saying something of immense value. It is a Zen saying: If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him. But Buddha is dead, and has been dead for twenty-five centuries. Where can you meet him, on what way? And how can you kill someone who has been dead for twenty-five centuries?
It has a totally different meaning: it is a message to the disciple who loves Buddha, who loves him so much that there is a possibility that Buddha may become his last barrier – because of his love, because he is a disciple, because he is a sannyasin; because he meditates, goes deeper and deeper into his being and feels more and more grateful toward Buddha.
At the last moment even the master has to be left behind – at the last moment. This is something inner, remember; it has nothing to do with the outer – this is something inner. All your thoughts disappear, then only one thought remains – the thought of your master. At the very last you have to say good-bye to the master too.
And it is very difficult to say good-bye. You owe so much to the master: he has been your source, your transformation, he has been your nourishment, your life, he has brought you along the long way. And now to say good-bye to the person who has been your guide, your friend? Now to say good-bye to him who has been a constant companion in the dark night of the soul; to say good-bye to him when the dawn is coming? It seems impossible. And the disciple, at the last moment, starts clinging to the idea of the master.
But that becomes a barrier. The master himself will give you a push, and if you don’t feel the push then he will give you a kick in the pants – because you have to go, you have to go into the unknown.
The master says to you, I say to you, “If you meet me on the way, kill me.” But what way is implied? You will not meet me on MG Road. What way? If you go inward, on the inner way, on the inward journey, at the last checkpoint I am waiting for you.
And it will be difficult to say good-bye, it has always been difficult to say good-bye. Hence the statement is to just kill the master, so there is no need to even say good-bye; kill the master so there is no need to look back; kill the master so you can now be left totally alone, with not even the shadow of the master with you. And this is done in great gratefulness, in great gratitude.
But this is not for you. First become a sannyasin, a disciple; start moving inward – only then can you meet me. You have not yet met me, even outwardly, how can you meet me inwardly? You have not yet come closer to me, how can you be in a state of clinging to me? You are far away, you are distant, you are avoiding. You have not even said good morning, so what is the point of saying good-bye? First become a disciple. Move on the inward way, let me help you to the ultimate point, and then certainly, if you meet me on the inner way, kill me.
But it happens that people only understand according to their own ideas. You have not understood this Zen koan. And it is not, remember again, it is not, that the disciple kills the master in anger: he kills him in gratitude. In fact, he kills him because the master orders him to kill him; he simply follows the commandment – crying, weeping, with tears in his eyes. And even when he has killed, the gratitude remains.
Do you know this story?…
The famous Zen master, Ikkyu, was staying in a temple on a very cold night. There were many wooden Buddhas in the temple, so he brought two, three Buddhas over and made a good fire, and enjoyed.
In the middle of the night, what with the fire and the smoke and the crackling of the wood, the priest awoke: “What is happening? What is going on?” He saw this monk – who was a stranger, who had asked for, and been given, shelter – and what had he done? Three Buddhas gone. Naturally, the priest was in a rage. He said, “Are you mad or something? You have burnt three Buddhas.”
Ikkyu took his staff and started searching for something in the ashes. There was nothing left now, just ashes, but he was searching. The priest asked, “What are you searching for?”
“Buddha’s bones,” Ikkyu said. “I am searching for the flowers, for the bones of Buddha.”
In India, in the East, the bones are called flowers – symbolically. Now the priest laughed. He said, “You are really mad. How can you find flowers, bones, from the wooden Buddhas?”
Ikkyu said, “So you are not as stupid as you look. Bring a few more Buddhas because the night is long and it is cold. If you know that these are only wooden Buddhas, then what is there to fear? We can enjoy. My buddha inside is feeling cold. And what do you think – should I care more about the living buddha or the wooden Buddha?”
It was too dangerous to keep this man inside the temple, and the priest had to go to sleep, so he said, “Please get out, otherwise you might burn more Buddhas. Simply get out. I don’t want anything to do with this nonsense.”
The priest threw Ikkyu out into the cold night. While he was being thrown out Ikkyu said, “What are you doing? On such a cold night, are you throwing out a buddha, a living buddha, to protect the wooden Buddhas?”
But the priest wouldn’t listen, he closed the door in Ikkyu’s face.
In the morning when the priest went out of the temple he found another miracle happening. Just by the side of the road there was a milestone. Ikkyu had gathered some flowers from the roadside and was offering them to the milestone. He was bowing down and saying, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami, sangham sharanam gachchhami, dhammam sharanam gachchhami – I take shelter at the feet of the Buddha, I take shelter in your commune, my lord, I take shelter in the dhamma, the law that you have taught us.”
The priest said, “What are you doing? During the night you burnt three Buddhas, and now you are worshipping the milestone as a Buddha!”
And Ikkyu said, “If you have gratitude you can show it anywhere. If you don’t have it, even thousands of wooden Buddhas cannot create it.”
“If you have gratitude you can show it anywhere.” Now this is a man of Zen. If you understand Ikkyu, then you will understand this statement: on the one hand he burned, on the other hand he worshipped.
The masters who used to tell their disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him,” were worshipping the Buddha every day – morning, afternoon, evening. They were prostrating themselves before the Buddha. And many times the disciples asked, “Sir, you say, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him.’ Then why do you worship him?”
And the master would say, “Because he is the only master in the world, Buddha is the only master in the world who helps you to get rid of him. Hence the gratitude.”
You have not understood the statement. These statements have a very different meaning than is apparent. To understand these statements you will have to become a little grown-up. As far as these statements are concerned, you are like children…
A teacher first explained to her class that the four basic elements of successful fiction were religion, royalty, sex and mystery. Then she asked them to write their first novel. After about five minutes little Peter walked up to the teacher’s desk and said, “Teacher, I’ve finished.”
“In five minutes?” said the teacher. “Are you sure you have included all the four basic elements: religion, royalty, sex and mystery?”
“Yes, I have,” said the boy. “I’ll read it to you:
‘Holy Moses!’ said the princess. ‘Pregnant again? I wonder who done it this time?’”
The novel was finished, and the four basic elements were all there: ‘“Holy Moses!” said the princess. ‘Pregnant again? I wonder who done it this time?’” To understand these great statements you will need a more grown-up mind.
Yes certainly, if you meet me on the way, kill me. But first, please, be on the way – where I am waiting for you, to be killed by you.
And you don’t know another thing which is not really ever said. This statement is only the half of it; the other half, the first half, is missing. Before you can ever kill me, I will kill you. That’s how you will enter the way.
The fourth question:
Osho,
My wise Shiatsu teacher at home told us, “You cannot fight against the Devil, you can only play with him.” I feel that this could help me but I do not understand it completely. Would you speak about it?
It is a beautiful statement and of great significance. You cannot fight against the Devil because if you fight with the Devil you take him very seriously, and to take the Devil very seriously is to believe in him.
The Devil is created by your seriousness about him, your seriousness is his nourishment. It is by being serious about the Devil that you pay him respect, that you feed him. And the more serious you are about him, the more frightened you are; the more frightened you are the more he will scare you. The Devil must not to be taken seriously at all, but if you fight you cannot avoid taking him seriously.
How are you going to fight with the Devil? Where will you find him? – you will find him within yourself, you will condemn some part of your being as the Devil and you will fight with it. And that is like your right hand fighting with your left hand, condemning; condemning the left as the Devil. And that’s how people think: right is right and left is wrong.
The left hand is as much you as your right hand. You will divide yourself: your head will start fighting with your heart, your mind will start fighting with your body. You will become fragmentary, you will become divided, there will be a great civil war within you. You will condemn sex, you will condemn anger, greed, you will condemn a thousand and one things – but they are part of you. The more you condemn them, the more power you give to them because whenever you condemn something you become focused on it – and to be attentive to something is to give power to it. Whenever you become too attentive toward something you become hypnotized by it.
The person who is against sex becomes obsessed with it. He continuously thinks about it because he has to be alert, on guard; otherwise the enemy will defeat him. And for twenty-four hours you are on guard against whom? – against your own energy. So you are split; and to be split is to be in misery, and to be split is to be poor because the energy dissipates. To be in inner conflict is to be in anguish, agony. Bliss means being integrated.
Where is the Devil? – it is some condemned part of you. And you cannot cut it out because it is so deeply a part of you that there is no possibility of separating it from your self. So you can go on fighting, but you will never win.
The statement is beautiful: “You cannot fight against the Devil, you can only play with him.” And that’s what I am teaching you here: be playful, nonserious. Yes, even with sex, anger, greed, everything that has been condemned down the ages, be playful with it. And then the miracle happens: if you are playful, the Devil starts evaporating because it is seriousness that gives him shape and form and solidity. When you become playful about him – when you are not on guard, when you are not fighting – he is being starved; when you are playful you take the very earth from underneath his feet.
Try being playful with anything and you will see the miracle happening. Be playful with sex and soon you will be beyond sex. That’s the whole secret of Tantra: just be playful about it, don’t take it so seriously, it is nothing to be worried about. It is not a problem to be solved, it is your energy to be understood – and not only understood but reabsorbed.
If you can absorb your own sexual energy you will be far richer than you are, far stronger than you are. If you can absorb your anger into yourself, your greed into yourself, you will no longer be a schizophrenic; your whole pathology will disappear. You will be whole and healthy, and you will have a totally different feeling of well-being. You will be surrounded by sunlight. You will be sunlit. And wherever you go you will carry peace around with you – very tangible, very substantial – because there will be no conflict in you.
Being playful is one of the great secrets of inner transformation. Learn to be playful. If all seriousness disappears from your life, you are religious.
But this is not what is ordinarily understood by a religious person. A religious person becomes very, very serious. He looks at you as if you are a sinner condemned to go to hell, doomed. He walks erect, with great pride. You can see in his eyes that he knows that he is “holier than thou,” higher than thou, that he is saved and you are condemned. So of course he becomes very serious; his going to the church, to the temple, his prayer, his ritual, are all very serious affairs. He does not take it nonseriously, playfully.
But you cannot know what prayer is if you don’t know what playfulness is. Real religion teaches you playfulness – sincerity of course, but seriousness no; authenticity of course, but seriousness no.
You have come to the right place, that’s what we are doing here. This whole space that is being created here is one of playfulness. People are working, but the work has no seriousness about it, no tension about it. They are enjoying it; that is prayer, that is worship. They are continuously working; nowhere else can you find so much work going on, and with such nonseriousness, with such playfulness.
Just a few days ago I told you that there are three hundred people working here. I was wrong –I am not very reliable with information, even about my own ashram. I never go out because I am afraid somebody may kill me, fools are everywhere. It is perfectly okay with Buddha if you kill him because he is already dead.
Laxmi told me that there are not three hundred, but seven hundred people working; and a hundred waiting because there is no space for them. How can there be enough space in such a small – six-acre – piece of land? Seven hundred people working – more than a hundred per acre. But you don’t feel crowded because there are no serious people around. Otherwise, one serious person is enough to make the place seem crowded. A hundred playful persons don’t make a crowd; they remain individuals, they don’t create a crowd. You can see the joy and the celebratory mood.
This I call true religion – playfulness, lovingness, cheerfulness.
The fifth question:
Osho,
How long does this stupid sex continue to haunt one? I am almost sixty and it is still there.
Sex has nothing to do with age, you can be six hundred and it will still be there. It has something to do with awareness, not with age. Remember, just by growing old you don’t grow up. You may be sixty physiologically, but you may just be nearabout twelve, thirteen, or at the most fourteen psychologically, hence this hang-up. A person who is psychologically fourteen is bound to be haunted by sex, and people are stuck at somewhere near thirteen, fourteen.
The average mental age of humanity is twelve. It is unbelievable that people get stuck so early. What happens? And why at just nearabout twelve, thirteen, fourteen? – because that is the time when sex ripens in you, and no society wants you to go beyond that point. Every society wants you to remain sexually starved because a sexually starved person is very useful to society – to this ill society. A sexually starved person can be channeled in any direction very easily because he is boiling within. You can make him go after money: then money will be his sex, then his whole starved sexual energy will move toward money. Then money will be his beloved, his God, and for his whole life he will run after money. And naturally, sex will haunt him because money cannot satisfy it. You can gather as much money as you want, but how can it satisfy your basic urge? Society has diverted your urge, has given you a diversion; it has given you a toy.
And that’s how we start from the very beginning: the child is crying, he wants milk, and he is given a pacifier. And the poor child starts sucking the pacifier and thinks that it is the mother’s breast. How mean can we be? That is sheer meanness. We are being very political with the poor child, diplomatic, cunning. The poor child has no understanding yet to make a distinction between the pacifier and the breast; he is being deceived. It will be no wonder if later on that child disrespects his mother, one day hates his mother.
You can go to any psychoanalyst and ask him, “What is the fundamental problem with every person?” and you will be surprised to know that he will not give you some name: neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, hysteria, etcetera, etcetera. If you ask him, “What is the fundamental problem with every psychologically disturbed person?” he will say, “the mother.” But why the mother? – because she was the first one to start deceiving the child; she was the child’s first acquaintance with the world. Because a child needs warmth as much as milk; it is a very deep physiological need of the child. And when the child was crying and wanting to be hugged… And now he cannot trust anybody. If he cannot trust even his own mother, how can he trust anybody else?
It is a proven scientific fact now, that if a child is given nourishment but no bodily warmth, he will shrink and die. Or if he survives he will remain retarded, unhealthy for his whole life; something will be missing in him. He not only needs the mother’s milk, he needs the warmth of the mother’s bosom, the warmth of the mother’s body. That warmth is now understood to be absolutely fundamental, absolutely necessary.
But when the child is crying he cannot say, “Mum, I want to be hugged,” because he has no language yet. By crying he is saying, “Hug me, kiss me, caress me, let me come close to you.” And he is being given a teddy bear, or some toy to engage with. He is being deceived from the very beginning: he wants something, he gets something else. That’s how we go on distorting him.
When a child is coming to sexual maturity we start giving him ambitions. We start telling him, “Come first at university, come first at school – come first. Wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing, you have to be first.” We implant a great desire into his mind to be first anywhere he is; this gives a new direction to his sexual energy.
Society is trying to divert his natural energies. We start telling him, “Unless you have a big car, a big house, lots of money in the bank, you are a failure.” He begins running after big things. He may not need a big house. In fact his needs are not such that he needs a big house with many, many rooms; a smaller house may be far more beautiful because it can be kept cleaner. But the idea that has been implanted in his mind is: “Unless you have a very imposing big house you are a failure.” Now the big house, the money in the bank, become his symbols of fulfillment – but they are only symbols, empty. Deep down he is still hankering, deep down he is unfulfilled. His deep consciousness is continuously telling him, “Be natural, let your energies flow in a natural, spontaneous way.”
You ask me, “How long does this stupid sex continue to haunt one?” Why do you call it stupid? – you are angry at it. Sex is not stupid. You may be stupid; sex is simply sex. You can be stupid with it, you can be intelligent with it; that is something to do with you, not sex. And if you call it names, if you condemn, it will persist. You will be sixty, you will be seventy, you will be eighty – it won’t make any difference. In fact, the weaker your body becomes, the more the repressed sex will explode in your consciousness.
A big burly rapist broke into a Texas homestead. All the men were out on a cattle drive, and he raped all ten women living there – all except the eighty-five-year-old great grandma.
The victims lay around groaning in a state of confusion. The rapist lay in the corner, naked and exhausted.
Old Granny took her spectacles off her nose, put them on the nose of the rapist and cried, “Look around, big fella, see if you missed anybody!”
Sex will persist. Don’t call it stupid; you are being stupid with it. Accept it. It is a natural desire, a natural energy, the very fountain-source of all life. Yes, there are things beyond it, beautiful spaces beyond it. Sex brings joy, and sex brings misery too. They are both mixed with sex because sex is a mixture of the sky and the earth, the body and the soul. Hence it brings both: one moment it gives you wings, another moment it cuts them. One moment is a great ecstasy, another moment you have fallen into deep agony. One moment you are on a peak, a sunlit peak, another moment you are groaning in a dark valley. One has to learn about the valleys and the peaks; sex is both.
And one has to learn by one’s own experience, not by what others say, not by what I say. Your own experience of sex will make you free of it. And I am not saying simply be free of it; don’t try to be free of it, otherwise you never will be. What I am saying is: freedom from sex is a consequence, a by-product. You cannot achieve it directly, it comes indirectly. If you live sex with deep playfulness, meditativeness, as a gift of existence, seeing the peaks and the valleys again and again, slowly, slowly, a third point will arise in your being: the witness who witnesses the peak, who witnesses the valley – and neither peaks are important, nor valleys are important. Slowly, slowly, your consciousness has gone through a revolution; you have become more centered in the witnessing soul. That witnessing is brahmacharya, that witnessing brings real celibacy. It is not against sex, it is beyond sex.
Otherwise, sex will go on haunting you to your very last moment. You will be dying and you will not be thinking of God, you will be thinking of sex. That’s why the moment you die, you are immediately reborn – not a minute is lost because you die with the idea of sex in your head. You leave this body and because sex can only be fulfilled through the body, immediately the desire to enter another body arises.
Down in sunny Mexico there lived an old aunt with four very pretty nieces. One day Pancho Villa and his gang of revolutionary bandits broke into the house. Accosting the women on the patio the brigand said, “This place is in our possession and you are in our power.”
“We are helpless!” one of the girls exclaimed, “and we must submit, but please spare our poor old aunt.”
“Shut up!” snapped the aunt, “War is war!”
Freedom from sex has nothing to do with age, it has something to do with gaining a higher awareness, a deeper awareness. Become a witness, and don’t call sex stupid. Become intelligent, see, watch, observe. Whatsoever is given to you must have a reason, a rhyme in it; whatsoever you have got must have something of the beyond in it. You are only able to see the lower part of the ladder because your eyes are not open and your being is not conscious; hence you see only sex, the lower part of the ladder. The higher part of the ladder is samadhi. If you can see the whole ladder, all the rungs of it, you will be surprised – sex is the door to samadhi.
The very idea of samadhi was born because of those few rare people who were able to attain to total orgasmic joy through sex. They became aware that there is something in sex which is not sexual at all. In a deep orgasmic state time disappears, mind disappears, ego disappears. Now these three things have nothing to do with sex. And because they disappear, great joy arises. That arising of joy has nothing directly to do with sex either – it arose because sex helped, became a context for the disappearance of the ego, mind and time.
The first experimenters – it must have been thousands of years ago, their names are lost – the first tantrikas, the first people who attained to samadhi through sex, watched, meditated, and saw one thing – sex is only a physiological triggering of a certain process which can also be triggered without sex, which can be triggered just by meditation. There is no need to go into sex. Once they knew that the process could be triggered by other means – by Yoga methods, by Tao methods, by Tantra methods, by Sufi methods – once they knew that the same state of no ego, no mind, no time, could be attained without going into sex, they had found the key. But the key was found only through searching in sex.
Sex has been the very source of religion, and the sexual experience was the first experience of samadhi. Don’t call it stupid, please. Go into it lovingly, playfully, meditatively. Try to understand because liberation comes through understanding and in no other way.
The sixth question:
Osho,
Should one listen to and follow the wise advice of parents, teachers and well-wishers?
Listen, but don’t follow. Listen well, but follow your own insight. Don’t follow others’ advice. Listen, certainly, very meditatively, try to understand what they want to convey to you. They may really wish you well, but if you start blindly following you will never attain to your own intelligence. You will remain dependent, on crutches, you will always be looking up to others to tell you what to do, what not to do. You will always be needing leaders – and to need leaders is a very unhealthy state.
Listen, because people have great experience, and if they are sharing, willing to share, it would be foolish on your part not to listen. Sharing in their experience may give you great insight; help you become more aware – but don’t follow.
People follow literally and then they just become blind. When others are giving you all that you need, what is the need to have your own eyes? When others are chewing for you, what is the need to chew for yourself? Slowly, slowly, you become more and more weakened, more and more impoverished, more and more starved.
A man who had recently opened a shop had a large notice overhead which read: Fresh Fish Sold Here.
A friend came along and said, “Why have you got Here on the board?” So the shopkeeper took off the word Here.
Then another friend came along and said, “Sold? Of course it is sold. You are not giving it away, are you?” So off came the word Sold.
A third friend came along and said, “Fresh fish? It has to be fresh. Who would buy stale fish from you? Cut out the word Fresh.”
The shopkeeper obliged. Now only the word Fish remained on the board. A fourth man arrived and said, Fish? Fancy having that up. You can smell it a mile away.” The shopkeeper erased this last word from the board.
A fifth man arrived and said, “What’s the idea of hanging a blank board over the shop?” The shopkeeper removed the board.
Finally a sixth man came along and said, “You have opened such a big shop here. Why don’t you put a board up saying: Fresh Fish Sold Here?”
Now if you go on listening to people you will become more and more confused. Your confusion is that you have been listening to many kinds of people and they are all giving different advice; that’s how you have become confused. And I am not saying they are not wishing you well; they are well-wishers, but not very conscious well-wishers, otherwise they would not give you advice. They would give you insights, not advice. They would not tell you what to do and what not to do. They would help you to become more aware, so that you can see for yourself what has to be done and what has not to be done.
The real friend is one who does not advise you, but helps you to become more alert, more aware, more conscious of life – its problems, its challenges, its mysteries; helps you to go on your own voyage, gives you the courage to experiment, gives you the courage to seek and search, gives you the courage to commit many mistakes – because one who is not ready to commit mistakes will never learn anything at all.
Commit as many mistakes as you can, but don’t commit the same mistake twice because that makes you stupid. Commit new mistakes, invent new mistakes, and you will be learning all the time and your intelligence will be growing all the time. Your intelligence needs sharpening.
Real friends help you sharpen your intelligence. They don’t give you fixed advice because fixed advice is of no use. What is true today may not be true tomorrow, and what is right in one situation may be wrong in another. Situations are changing all the time, so what you need is not a fixed pattern of living, but a way of seeing, so wherever you are, in whatsoever situation you find yourself, you know how to behave spontaneously, how to depend on your own being.
The seventh question:
Osho,
I simply can't believe in God. What should I do?
Krishna Kant, I have not been telling you to believe in God. Why should you be worried about it? If you can’t believe, you can’t believe – forget all about it. Now it is God’s problem that Krishna Kant does not believe in him; if he is anxious, worried, he will take care of it. But why are you worried? Deep down somewhere you must want to believe, otherwise why the question at all? I am not telling you to believe in God; there is no need.
Buddha attained to the ultimate without believing in God, why can’t you? Mahavira attained to truth, to enlightenment, without believing in any God, why can’t you?
In that sense, the Eastern religions are far richer than the Western religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the three religions that were born outside of India, are a little poor, unsophisticated, crude in that way. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, the three religions that were born in India, have a tremendous sophistication about them; they don’t make such unnecessary demands on you.
Buddhism is the ultimate in sophistication. Buddha says there is no need to believe in God, there is no need to even believe in the soul; there is no need to believe at all. Belief is not a necessity for being religious. Then what is necessary? – meditation is necessary, not belief. And one can meditate without belief because meditation is a scientific method.
It has happened many times that an atheist has come to me and asked, “Can I meditate?” The idea has become prevalent that you cannot meditate unless you believe in God. Now that is a very foolish notion, meditation has nothing to do with God. In fact the truth is, if you believe in God it will be difficult to meditate; your very belief will become a disturbance.
The person who does not believe in anything can simply move beyond thinking; the person who believes clings to thinking because his belief is a thought. Belief is part of the mind. If you believe too much in God you cannot leave the mind because leaving the mind will obviously mean leaving your belief. The man who cannot believe is in a better situation.
You should be happy that you cannot believe in God. So far, so good. Now meditate.
And remember, the English word meditate gives the wrong connotation. In English there is really no word which can translate the word dhyana. From dhyana the word ch’an arose in China, and then ch’an moved to Japan and became zen, but the root is dhyana.
When we use the word meditation it gives a feeling that you are meditating upon something – on what? To meditate means you have to have some object, and that is the problem. Dhyana simply means that it is not a question of focusing, concentrating on something; rather, it is dropping all the content of the mind and just being. Meditation in the sense of dhyana needs no object; it is an objectless, contentless state of consciousness. You go on dropping, neti neti – neither this nor that, you go on rejecting all thoughts, good and bad. When all thoughts are eliminated what is left? – you, and that is God.
But what you call it does not matter. You can call it God if the word appeals to you; if it doesn’t appeal to you, you can call it nirvana, you can call it Tao, or whatever. But don’t be worried that you can’t believe in God; that is good – this is my approach. If somebody says “I believe in God,” I say “That is good. Now let us start from there, that will do.” If somebody says “I don’t believe in God,” I say “That is good. Now let us start from there.”
You have to start from the point where you are. And all points are good because all points are on the circumference and from every point on the circumference the center is available. So move toward the center, don’t be worried about where you are.
One afternoon Mulla Nasruddin was getting a haircut in a barber’s shop. He noticed a pricelist on the wall of the shop and on the list was, “Singe – five rupees.” He asked the barber why it cost so much.
“Every hair on your head,” said the barber, “is a little hollow tube, open at the ends, so the body’s energy sort of bleeds out of it. After you have had a haircut it is a good idea to get a singe because it closes up the hole at the end of each hair and seals in the energy. Otherwise your hair, and your whole body, just keeps getting weaker and weaker every time you have it cut.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said the Mulla, “what about the hair on my chin? I shave it every day, and cut off the ends, and it just keeps getting thicker and stronger. How do you explain that?
“Easy!” said the barber. “You just ain’t the kind of a fella this story was made up for!”
These are all just stories. If it appeals, good; if it doesn’t appeal, very good.
Forget about God. There is no need to believe; you do not need to do anything about it. Don’t waste your time on God. Just because of this word so many people are wasting their time. Somebody is trying to prove, somebody is trying to disprove, great treatises are being written – more books are written about God than anything else, millions of books, the libraries are full. Don’t waste your time. If you can’t believe, then that story is not for you. But we have other stories, so why be worried? For Godless people too there is a way.
My way is for all. Whosoever comes is accepted. The Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Jaina, the Sikh, the Buddhist, the Parsi – whosoever comes is accepted. I love all kinds of stories.
Any kind of beginning is good, but begin. Don’t remain stuck where you are, move toward the center. Meditate, and that will bring you home. And then you can call it whatsoever you like; it is none of my business what you call it. You can give it any name you fancy.
The last question:
Osho,
Should children be told all the facts of life, irrespective of their age?
What to tell children, and what not to tell them, has always been a problem down the ages; parents have been very concerned. In the past, the strategy was not to tell them the facts of life, to avoid the subject as far as possible because people were very afraid of the facts of life.
The very phrase “facts of life” is a euphemism; it hides a simple thing. To avoid saying anything about sex, to not even use the word sex, they have made this metaphor, “facts of life.” What facts of life? – it is just to not say anything about sex.
The whole past of humanity has lived with this deception, but the children discover it sooner or later. In fact they discover it sooner rather than later, and they discover it in a very wrong way. Because the right person is not ready to tell them, they have to work it out on their own. They collect, they become peeping toms – and you are responsible for reducing them to peeping toms. They collect from all the wrong sources, from ugly people. They will carry those wrong notions with them their whole lives, and you are the cause of it. Their whole sex life may be affected by the wrong information they have gathered.
Now there is as much wrong information prevalent in the world about sex as is possible. Even in the twentieth century people are living with immense ignorance about sex; even people who you think should know better. Even your doctor does not really know what sex is, does not know its complexity. He should know, but even doctors live very superstitiously; they too learn things from the marketplace. In no medical college is sex taught as a separate subject – such an immense, powerful subject and yet nothing is taught about it. Yes, the physiology of sex is known by the physician, but the physiology is not all; there are deeper layers: there is psychology, there is spirituality. There is a psychology to sex and there is a spirituality to sex; the physiology is only the surface. Much research has been done, and in this century we know more than ever before, but the knowledge is not widespread.
People are afraid because their parents were afraid, and that fear has become infectious. You are afraid of sex and you don’t want to tell your children about it. But you have to tell your children about it, you owe it to them. You have to be truthful. Don’t shirk from the truth and don’t lie – in the long run, truth always pays.
“Mom, do we get our food from God?”
“Yes, we do, Barbara.”
“And at Christmas time does Santa bring all our presents?”
“That’s right.”
“And on my birthday the good fairy brings presents?”
“Hmm, yes.”
“And did the stork bring little brother?”
“True.”
“Then what the heck does Pop hang around here for?”
It is better to be truthful. But I am not saying to jump on your children and start being truthful whether they want it or not. Now that – the other extreme – is happening particularly in the West because the psychologists are saying that the truth has to be told. People go on telling the truth whether the children are inquiring about it or not. That too is wrong. Wait! If the child inquires, be truthful; if he does not inquire then there is no need, he is not interested yet.
At the dinner table the father almost choked when his little eight-year-old boy asked, “Daddy, where do I come from?”
Reddening, he said, “Well, I guess the time has come for you and me to have a man-to-man talk. After dinner I will tell you about the birds and the bees.”
The kid said, “What birds and bees? Little Frankie down the block told me he came from Chicago. All I want to know is where I come from!”
So wait a little. They will ask themselves, don’t be in such a hurry. And remember, whatsoever is the case, be truthful, however hard it seems. It will be hard because you were not told the truth by your parents. For centuries the truth has not been told; nobody ever tells it to their children, everybody gathers it from rumors. People feel embarrassed, afraid that the children may discover the truth. Drop all those fears, and don’t try to deceive the children in any way – it can be dangerous.
Six-year-old Luigino comes home from school where he has learned three new words, without knowing their meaning, so he asks his mother, “Mom, what do prick, pussy and balls mean?”
The mother, extremely embarrassed, answers, “Well, dear, prick means cheese, pussy means chair, and balls mean boots.”
After a few days the grandmother, a pious, prudish, country lady, visits her daughter and grandson She rings the bell and Luigino opens the door. The old woman hugs the child and Luigino, proud of his new vocabulary, says, “Granny, you must be tired. Sit down on this pussy.”
The woman almost faints, but Luigino goes on without hesitating. “And if you are hungry eat this piece of prick.”
Shocked and horrified the grandmother finally asks, “Luigino, where is your mum?”
“Ah, she is in the next room polishing Daddy’s balls!”
Enough for today.
Osho,
You, the fountain of love, our source is in thee.
Loving thy will our spirit is free.
This beautiful day that all of us see.
The hope of the world is love.
Love is not only the hope of the world, but the only hope. Up to now man has lived an absolutely loveless life. All the societies and the cultures and the religions that have existed on earth have talked about love, but have lived a very loveless existence. There has been much talk about love in the past, but the structure that societies have created is basically against love. Society is geared for war, and a society that is geared for war can only talk about love, not live it.
We have now come to the peak of this ugly, stupid structure of hatred. We have come to the point where man has to either change totally or die. The new man can only be born by having a new heart, a new soul – and the flavor of that soul will be love, and the poetry of that heart will be love. A society that lives without love is competitive, ambitious; obsessed with money, power, prestige. A society that lives without love lives through beliefs. Beliefs divide people, and all divisions breed war. A society that lives without love lives a very lustless existence because without love there is no splendor in life, no significance. Without love no song arises in the heart of man.
We have come to the point – or are coming to it, approaching it every day – that by the end of this century man will have to choose either total destruction or revolution. Not a political or social revolution, but a revolution of the heart. The turning point is coming closer every day; you must be prepared for it.
Sannyas has to become the herald for a new world, the first ray of the dawn. Man is reaching toward total war; all the preparations are there to commit global suicide. This is what your history has brought you to. All the Alexanders and all the Napoleons and all the Stalins and all the Hitlers and all the Maos have been working for centuries and centuries. Now their dream is going to be fulfilled: we can destroy this whole earth within seconds. Destruction has reached its peak; unless creativity also reaches its peak man cannot be saved.
And to me, love is nothing but the birth of creativity in you. By love I mean an overflowing heart. Love to me is not only a relationship; the relationship that we call love is a faraway, distant echo of the real thing.
The real thing is not a relationship but a state; one is not in love, but one is love. Whenever I talk about love, remember this: I am talking about the state of love. Yes, a relationship is perfectly good, but the relationship is going to be false if you have not attained the state of love. Then the relationship is not only a pretension, it is a dangerous pretension because it can go on befooling you; it can go on giving you the sense that you know what love is – and you don’t know. Love is basically a state of being; one is not in love, one is love.
And that love arises not by falling in love with somebody. That love arises by going in – not by falling, but by rising, soaring upward, higher than yourself. It is a kind of surpassing. A man is love when his being is silent; it is the song of silence. A Buddha is love, a Jesus is love – not in love with a particular person, but simply love. Their very climate is love. It is not addressed to anybody in particular, it is spreading in all directions. Whosoever comes close to a buddha will feel it, will be showered by it, will be bathed in it. And it is unconditionally so.
Love makes no conditions, no ifs, no buts. Love never says, “Fulfill these requirements, then I will love you.” Love is like breathing; when it happens you simply are love. It does not matter who comes close to you, a sinner or a saint. Whosoever comes close to you starts feeling the vibe of love, rejoices. Love is unconditional giving – but only those who have are capable of giving.
One of the most mysterious things about man is that he goes on giving things which he doesn’t have. You go on giving love and you don’t have it in the first place, and you go on asking for love from others who also don’t have it – beggars begging from beggars.
Love first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. It is the quality of being alone, happily alone, joyously alone. It is the quality of being a no-mind, of being silent. Contentless consciousness is the space, the context, in which love arises in you.
And so much love arises in you it is unbearable. The pleasure is so unbearable that it almost becomes pain. It is heavy like clouds full of rain; they have to shower, they have to rain, they have to unburden themselves. When love arises in the silent heart, it has to be shared, it has to be given; you are helpless.
And the person you give your love to is not obliged to you in any way. In fact, you are obliged to them because they help to unburden you, they share something that was too much for you. And the economics of love are: the more you give, the more you have because in your silent being you are joined with the oceanic, the divine source of all. And you can go on sharing; more and more goes on flowing through you, welling up.
Yes, you are right, love is the only hope of the world. And we are coming close to the turning point: either total war or total love. This is a question of either–or, there is no third alternative. There is nothing like a compromise possible now, you cannot be in the middle. Man has to choose. It is a question of life and death: war is death, love is life.
By creating you here, by creating sannyasins here, I am creating a new kind of space. This is the beginning of a totally new man. Hence the old traditions will be unable to understand what is happening here; the experiment is so new they don’t have any criterion. Yes, in the past, once in a while, men like Buddha, Kabir, Krishna, Christ, Zarathustra, have happened, but they are only individuals. Now, only individuals won’t do; only a buddha here and there won’t be of much help. The world has gone too far into hate. The world is so full of hate that it is almost like an ocean of hatred, and a buddha will be just a spoonful of sugar – it won’t change the taste of the ocean. We need thousands of buddhas.
Hence I am not interested in Christians, I am interested only in Christs. I am not interested in Jainas, I am interested only in Mahaviras. I am not interested in Buddhists, I am interested only in Buddhas. My effort here is not to create a following, not to create believers, but to create individuals, lovers, meditators who can stand on their own; and each one can become a light. The night is going to become darker and darker every day and we will need millions of lights around the world, millions of people who are capable of love – unconditionally, without asking for anything in return – and who are so silent and so blissful that wherever they are they will be able to dissipate darkness.
Yes, love is the hope of the world, the only hope.
The second question:
Osho,
When dreaming, something is constantly telling me that I have to die. I remember no other dreams. What is happening?
Meditate first over this small anecdote…
The young man had been keeping company with a girl for over two years, but still had given no indication of serious intentions.
“I had a strange dream last night,” he remarked one day. “I dreamed I proposed to you. What that is a sign of, I wonder?”
“It’s a sign you’ve got more sense asleep than awake.”
And that’s exactly my answer to you: you have got more sense asleep than awake. In fact, the whole of psychoanalysis is based on the understanding that people are more intelligent while dreaming than while they are awake.
Why has this strange thing happened? People should be more intelligent when they are awake than when they are dreaming. There is a reason: society can make an impression on your waking mind; it has not yet been able to make an impression on your dreaming mind. Society has destroyed your waking mind, distorted it, polluted it, disfigured it; it is almost unrecognizable now from what it could have been naturally. So much has been pruned, cut, so much has been repressed, so much has been imposed from the outside, that you don’t know what you would have been if society had not interfered.
But your unconscious, your dreaming mind, is still out of range of being grabbed by society. But it will not be for long, there are people who are working to grab your unconscious mind too, remember. In Soviet Russia particularly, they have been experimenting for at least twenty years on how to influence your dreaming, sleeping mind – and they have succeeded. They have succeeded enough for you to need to be alert, to beware.
In Russia now, they have found that a person can be taught even while he is asleep and dreaming. Earphones are put on the person and messages are given, in a very, very, silent way, in a subliminal way, so that his sleep is not disturbed. He continues to sleep yet his mind goes on receiving messages. You can teach new languages, mathematics, history, philosophy, anything, and he will remember in the morning. In fact, it seems to work far better than ordinary schooling because in ordinary schooling you have to go on repeating the same thing again and again; when it is repeated often, only then does it go a little deeper. But when you are asleep your deep mind is available.
It is okay to teach mathematics and science and history – but politicians cannot stop there. They will teach communism, fascism – it is bound to happen. They will teach Gandhism, they will teach Christianity, Hinduism, Islam – it is bound to happen. Once the politicians have got the means to influence your sleeping mind they will not leave you alone.
At least right now you are free to dream; soon the danger is that you will not be. The government will go on influencing your dreams; it will allow you to dream only certain dreams, it will create dreams in you. In a communist country you will not be able to dream a capitalist dream; even in a dream you will not have a car of your own, it won’t be allowed.
And if your unconscious becomes available to the politicians, man is utterly destroyed. It should not be allowed. This is far more dangerous than atomic bombs because the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb can only destroy your body, but these new techniques of behaviorist psychology can destroy your psychology. Right now at least you have some privacy, but politicians are not willing to give you even that much; they want to interfere, they want to poke into your dreams. Up to now it has not happened much; they have succeeded with experimentation, but it has not yet been used on a wide scale.
You say, “When dreaming, something is constantly telling me that I have to die.” That is the voice of your inner being. It has nothing to do with your physical death, it has something to do with your psychological death. It has something to do with the death of the ego.
It happens to every meditator: the more you meditate, the more your inner voice says, “Let the ego die.” The more you meditate, the more you become aware that a certain death is going to happen. And you only know one kind of death, so naturally you misinterpret: you think, “I am going to die.” You are not going to die. Only the “I,” the ego, the personality, is going to die, is going to disappear. Your dream is giving you a very significant message.
And you say, “I remember no other dreams. What is happening?” This dream is not an ordinary dream, it is something extraordinary. It is not just the rubbish of the mind.
Ninety-nine percent of your dreams consist of rubbish, rubbish that you gather in the day, rubbish that you carry on chewing over in the night. They are a reflection of your day, they have nothing special in them. That’s why psychoanalysis takes so many years – to find a gem in the rubbish takes time. There is so much rubbish that it takes two, three years for the psychoanalyst to find something significant, sort it out, figure out where you are, what you are.
But in meditation it can happen very quickly because in meditation you go directly. You don’t search in the rubbish, you simply dive deep into your being to where the diamond is, where the lotus paradise is.
You are hearing something of your inner voice. It is not really a dream, it is far truer than any truth you have yet known. It is the voice of your soul, it is existence speaking to you. Listen, follow – help the ego to die. Become absolutely nonexistent as far as the ego is concerned.
And in the death of the ego love is born, godliness is born, light is born. In the death of the ego you are transformed; all misery disappears as if it had never existed. Your life right now is a nightmare. When the ego dies, nightmares disappear and a great sweetness and a subtle joy arise in your being, for no reason at all. You cannot explain it to anybody, you cannot explain it to yourself either. It is unexplainable, mysterious. But who cares for the explanation? When you are bathed, when you are rejoicing, when your being is in a dance, who cares?
Only when you are suffering do you ask, “Why?” You ask when you are ill, you never ask when you are healthy. You never ask your physician, “Why am I healthy?” When you are ill, you certainly ask “Why am I ill? Why this headache, why this stomachache?” But when you are perfectly healthy you don’t go to the physician to ask, “Why am I healthy?” Health is natural, so is bliss; misery is unnatural. Misery is pathology, illness, disease.
Let the ego die. The time has come, and your inner voice is saying, “Don’t cling to it. Let go.”
The third question:
Osho,
If I should meet Osho walking down the road, should I kill him?
Certainly. That’s why I never walk down the road, you know.
But you don’t understand; you have asked the question, but you don’t understand the meaning of it at all. This is a message only for disciples, and you are not yet a disciple, you are not yet a sannyasin.
This is a Zen way of saying something of immense value. It is a Zen saying: If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him. But Buddha is dead, and has been dead for twenty-five centuries. Where can you meet him, on what way? And how can you kill someone who has been dead for twenty-five centuries?
It has a totally different meaning: it is a message to the disciple who loves Buddha, who loves him so much that there is a possibility that Buddha may become his last barrier – because of his love, because he is a disciple, because he is a sannyasin; because he meditates, goes deeper and deeper into his being and feels more and more grateful toward Buddha.
At the last moment even the master has to be left behind – at the last moment. This is something inner, remember; it has nothing to do with the outer – this is something inner. All your thoughts disappear, then only one thought remains – the thought of your master. At the very last you have to say good-bye to the master too.
And it is very difficult to say good-bye. You owe so much to the master: he has been your source, your transformation, he has been your nourishment, your life, he has brought you along the long way. And now to say good-bye to the person who has been your guide, your friend? Now to say good-bye to him who has been a constant companion in the dark night of the soul; to say good-bye to him when the dawn is coming? It seems impossible. And the disciple, at the last moment, starts clinging to the idea of the master.
But that becomes a barrier. The master himself will give you a push, and if you don’t feel the push then he will give you a kick in the pants – because you have to go, you have to go into the unknown.
The master says to you, I say to you, “If you meet me on the way, kill me.” But what way is implied? You will not meet me on MG Road. What way? If you go inward, on the inner way, on the inward journey, at the last checkpoint I am waiting for you.
And it will be difficult to say good-bye, it has always been difficult to say good-bye. Hence the statement is to just kill the master, so there is no need to even say good-bye; kill the master so there is no need to look back; kill the master so you can now be left totally alone, with not even the shadow of the master with you. And this is done in great gratefulness, in great gratitude.
But this is not for you. First become a sannyasin, a disciple; start moving inward – only then can you meet me. You have not yet met me, even outwardly, how can you meet me inwardly? You have not yet come closer to me, how can you be in a state of clinging to me? You are far away, you are distant, you are avoiding. You have not even said good morning, so what is the point of saying good-bye? First become a disciple. Move on the inward way, let me help you to the ultimate point, and then certainly, if you meet me on the inner way, kill me.
But it happens that people only understand according to their own ideas. You have not understood this Zen koan. And it is not, remember again, it is not, that the disciple kills the master in anger: he kills him in gratitude. In fact, he kills him because the master orders him to kill him; he simply follows the commandment – crying, weeping, with tears in his eyes. And even when he has killed, the gratitude remains.
Do you know this story?…
The famous Zen master, Ikkyu, was staying in a temple on a very cold night. There were many wooden Buddhas in the temple, so he brought two, three Buddhas over and made a good fire, and enjoyed.
In the middle of the night, what with the fire and the smoke and the crackling of the wood, the priest awoke: “What is happening? What is going on?” He saw this monk – who was a stranger, who had asked for, and been given, shelter – and what had he done? Three Buddhas gone. Naturally, the priest was in a rage. He said, “Are you mad or something? You have burnt three Buddhas.”
Ikkyu took his staff and started searching for something in the ashes. There was nothing left now, just ashes, but he was searching. The priest asked, “What are you searching for?”
“Buddha’s bones,” Ikkyu said. “I am searching for the flowers, for the bones of Buddha.”
In India, in the East, the bones are called flowers – symbolically. Now the priest laughed. He said, “You are really mad. How can you find flowers, bones, from the wooden Buddhas?”
Ikkyu said, “So you are not as stupid as you look. Bring a few more Buddhas because the night is long and it is cold. If you know that these are only wooden Buddhas, then what is there to fear? We can enjoy. My buddha inside is feeling cold. And what do you think – should I care more about the living buddha or the wooden Buddha?”
It was too dangerous to keep this man inside the temple, and the priest had to go to sleep, so he said, “Please get out, otherwise you might burn more Buddhas. Simply get out. I don’t want anything to do with this nonsense.”
The priest threw Ikkyu out into the cold night. While he was being thrown out Ikkyu said, “What are you doing? On such a cold night, are you throwing out a buddha, a living buddha, to protect the wooden Buddhas?”
But the priest wouldn’t listen, he closed the door in Ikkyu’s face.
In the morning when the priest went out of the temple he found another miracle happening. Just by the side of the road there was a milestone. Ikkyu had gathered some flowers from the roadside and was offering them to the milestone. He was bowing down and saying, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami, sangham sharanam gachchhami, dhammam sharanam gachchhami – I take shelter at the feet of the Buddha, I take shelter in your commune, my lord, I take shelter in the dhamma, the law that you have taught us.”
The priest said, “What are you doing? During the night you burnt three Buddhas, and now you are worshipping the milestone as a Buddha!”
And Ikkyu said, “If you have gratitude you can show it anywhere. If you don’t have it, even thousands of wooden Buddhas cannot create it.”
“If you have gratitude you can show it anywhere.” Now this is a man of Zen. If you understand Ikkyu, then you will understand this statement: on the one hand he burned, on the other hand he worshipped.
The masters who used to tell their disciples, “If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him,” were worshipping the Buddha every day – morning, afternoon, evening. They were prostrating themselves before the Buddha. And many times the disciples asked, “Sir, you say, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him.’ Then why do you worship him?”
And the master would say, “Because he is the only master in the world, Buddha is the only master in the world who helps you to get rid of him. Hence the gratitude.”
You have not understood the statement. These statements have a very different meaning than is apparent. To understand these statements you will have to become a little grown-up. As far as these statements are concerned, you are like children…
A teacher first explained to her class that the four basic elements of successful fiction were religion, royalty, sex and mystery. Then she asked them to write their first novel. After about five minutes little Peter walked up to the teacher’s desk and said, “Teacher, I’ve finished.”
“In five minutes?” said the teacher. “Are you sure you have included all the four basic elements: religion, royalty, sex and mystery?”
“Yes, I have,” said the boy. “I’ll read it to you:
‘Holy Moses!’ said the princess. ‘Pregnant again? I wonder who done it this time?’”
The novel was finished, and the four basic elements were all there: ‘“Holy Moses!” said the princess. ‘Pregnant again? I wonder who done it this time?’” To understand these great statements you will need a more grown-up mind.
Yes certainly, if you meet me on the way, kill me. But first, please, be on the way – where I am waiting for you, to be killed by you.
And you don’t know another thing which is not really ever said. This statement is only the half of it; the other half, the first half, is missing. Before you can ever kill me, I will kill you. That’s how you will enter the way.
The fourth question:
Osho,
My wise Shiatsu teacher at home told us, “You cannot fight against the Devil, you can only play with him.” I feel that this could help me but I do not understand it completely. Would you speak about it?
It is a beautiful statement and of great significance. You cannot fight against the Devil because if you fight with the Devil you take him very seriously, and to take the Devil very seriously is to believe in him.
The Devil is created by your seriousness about him, your seriousness is his nourishment. It is by being serious about the Devil that you pay him respect, that you feed him. And the more serious you are about him, the more frightened you are; the more frightened you are the more he will scare you. The Devil must not to be taken seriously at all, but if you fight you cannot avoid taking him seriously.
How are you going to fight with the Devil? Where will you find him? – you will find him within yourself, you will condemn some part of your being as the Devil and you will fight with it. And that is like your right hand fighting with your left hand, condemning; condemning the left as the Devil. And that’s how people think: right is right and left is wrong.
The left hand is as much you as your right hand. You will divide yourself: your head will start fighting with your heart, your mind will start fighting with your body. You will become fragmentary, you will become divided, there will be a great civil war within you. You will condemn sex, you will condemn anger, greed, you will condemn a thousand and one things – but they are part of you. The more you condemn them, the more power you give to them because whenever you condemn something you become focused on it – and to be attentive to something is to give power to it. Whenever you become too attentive toward something you become hypnotized by it.
The person who is against sex becomes obsessed with it. He continuously thinks about it because he has to be alert, on guard; otherwise the enemy will defeat him. And for twenty-four hours you are on guard against whom? – against your own energy. So you are split; and to be split is to be in misery, and to be split is to be poor because the energy dissipates. To be in inner conflict is to be in anguish, agony. Bliss means being integrated.
Where is the Devil? – it is some condemned part of you. And you cannot cut it out because it is so deeply a part of you that there is no possibility of separating it from your self. So you can go on fighting, but you will never win.
The statement is beautiful: “You cannot fight against the Devil, you can only play with him.” And that’s what I am teaching you here: be playful, nonserious. Yes, even with sex, anger, greed, everything that has been condemned down the ages, be playful with it. And then the miracle happens: if you are playful, the Devil starts evaporating because it is seriousness that gives him shape and form and solidity. When you become playful about him – when you are not on guard, when you are not fighting – he is being starved; when you are playful you take the very earth from underneath his feet.
Try being playful with anything and you will see the miracle happening. Be playful with sex and soon you will be beyond sex. That’s the whole secret of Tantra: just be playful about it, don’t take it so seriously, it is nothing to be worried about. It is not a problem to be solved, it is your energy to be understood – and not only understood but reabsorbed.
If you can absorb your own sexual energy you will be far richer than you are, far stronger than you are. If you can absorb your anger into yourself, your greed into yourself, you will no longer be a schizophrenic; your whole pathology will disappear. You will be whole and healthy, and you will have a totally different feeling of well-being. You will be surrounded by sunlight. You will be sunlit. And wherever you go you will carry peace around with you – very tangible, very substantial – because there will be no conflict in you.
Being playful is one of the great secrets of inner transformation. Learn to be playful. If all seriousness disappears from your life, you are religious.
But this is not what is ordinarily understood by a religious person. A religious person becomes very, very serious. He looks at you as if you are a sinner condemned to go to hell, doomed. He walks erect, with great pride. You can see in his eyes that he knows that he is “holier than thou,” higher than thou, that he is saved and you are condemned. So of course he becomes very serious; his going to the church, to the temple, his prayer, his ritual, are all very serious affairs. He does not take it nonseriously, playfully.
But you cannot know what prayer is if you don’t know what playfulness is. Real religion teaches you playfulness – sincerity of course, but seriousness no; authenticity of course, but seriousness no.
You have come to the right place, that’s what we are doing here. This whole space that is being created here is one of playfulness. People are working, but the work has no seriousness about it, no tension about it. They are enjoying it; that is prayer, that is worship. They are continuously working; nowhere else can you find so much work going on, and with such nonseriousness, with such playfulness.
Just a few days ago I told you that there are three hundred people working here. I was wrong –I am not very reliable with information, even about my own ashram. I never go out because I am afraid somebody may kill me, fools are everywhere. It is perfectly okay with Buddha if you kill him because he is already dead.
Laxmi told me that there are not three hundred, but seven hundred people working; and a hundred waiting because there is no space for them. How can there be enough space in such a small – six-acre – piece of land? Seven hundred people working – more than a hundred per acre. But you don’t feel crowded because there are no serious people around. Otherwise, one serious person is enough to make the place seem crowded. A hundred playful persons don’t make a crowd; they remain individuals, they don’t create a crowd. You can see the joy and the celebratory mood.
This I call true religion – playfulness, lovingness, cheerfulness.
The fifth question:
Osho,
How long does this stupid sex continue to haunt one? I am almost sixty and it is still there.
Sex has nothing to do with age, you can be six hundred and it will still be there. It has something to do with awareness, not with age. Remember, just by growing old you don’t grow up. You may be sixty physiologically, but you may just be nearabout twelve, thirteen, or at the most fourteen psychologically, hence this hang-up. A person who is psychologically fourteen is bound to be haunted by sex, and people are stuck at somewhere near thirteen, fourteen.
The average mental age of humanity is twelve. It is unbelievable that people get stuck so early. What happens? And why at just nearabout twelve, thirteen, fourteen? – because that is the time when sex ripens in you, and no society wants you to go beyond that point. Every society wants you to remain sexually starved because a sexually starved person is very useful to society – to this ill society. A sexually starved person can be channeled in any direction very easily because he is boiling within. You can make him go after money: then money will be his sex, then his whole starved sexual energy will move toward money. Then money will be his beloved, his God, and for his whole life he will run after money. And naturally, sex will haunt him because money cannot satisfy it. You can gather as much money as you want, but how can it satisfy your basic urge? Society has diverted your urge, has given you a diversion; it has given you a toy.
And that’s how we start from the very beginning: the child is crying, he wants milk, and he is given a pacifier. And the poor child starts sucking the pacifier and thinks that it is the mother’s breast. How mean can we be? That is sheer meanness. We are being very political with the poor child, diplomatic, cunning. The poor child has no understanding yet to make a distinction between the pacifier and the breast; he is being deceived. It will be no wonder if later on that child disrespects his mother, one day hates his mother.
You can go to any psychoanalyst and ask him, “What is the fundamental problem with every person?” and you will be surprised to know that he will not give you some name: neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, hysteria, etcetera, etcetera. If you ask him, “What is the fundamental problem with every psychologically disturbed person?” he will say, “the mother.” But why the mother? – because she was the first one to start deceiving the child; she was the child’s first acquaintance with the world. Because a child needs warmth as much as milk; it is a very deep physiological need of the child. And when the child was crying and wanting to be hugged… And now he cannot trust anybody. If he cannot trust even his own mother, how can he trust anybody else?
It is a proven scientific fact now, that if a child is given nourishment but no bodily warmth, he will shrink and die. Or if he survives he will remain retarded, unhealthy for his whole life; something will be missing in him. He not only needs the mother’s milk, he needs the warmth of the mother’s bosom, the warmth of the mother’s body. That warmth is now understood to be absolutely fundamental, absolutely necessary.
But when the child is crying he cannot say, “Mum, I want to be hugged,” because he has no language yet. By crying he is saying, “Hug me, kiss me, caress me, let me come close to you.” And he is being given a teddy bear, or some toy to engage with. He is being deceived from the very beginning: he wants something, he gets something else. That’s how we go on distorting him.
When a child is coming to sexual maturity we start giving him ambitions. We start telling him, “Come first at university, come first at school – come first. Wherever you are, whatsoever you are doing, you have to be first.” We implant a great desire into his mind to be first anywhere he is; this gives a new direction to his sexual energy.
Society is trying to divert his natural energies. We start telling him, “Unless you have a big car, a big house, lots of money in the bank, you are a failure.” He begins running after big things. He may not need a big house. In fact his needs are not such that he needs a big house with many, many rooms; a smaller house may be far more beautiful because it can be kept cleaner. But the idea that has been implanted in his mind is: “Unless you have a very imposing big house you are a failure.” Now the big house, the money in the bank, become his symbols of fulfillment – but they are only symbols, empty. Deep down he is still hankering, deep down he is unfulfilled. His deep consciousness is continuously telling him, “Be natural, let your energies flow in a natural, spontaneous way.”
You ask me, “How long does this stupid sex continue to haunt one?” Why do you call it stupid? – you are angry at it. Sex is not stupid. You may be stupid; sex is simply sex. You can be stupid with it, you can be intelligent with it; that is something to do with you, not sex. And if you call it names, if you condemn, it will persist. You will be sixty, you will be seventy, you will be eighty – it won’t make any difference. In fact, the weaker your body becomes, the more the repressed sex will explode in your consciousness.
A big burly rapist broke into a Texas homestead. All the men were out on a cattle drive, and he raped all ten women living there – all except the eighty-five-year-old great grandma.
The victims lay around groaning in a state of confusion. The rapist lay in the corner, naked and exhausted.
Old Granny took her spectacles off her nose, put them on the nose of the rapist and cried, “Look around, big fella, see if you missed anybody!”
Sex will persist. Don’t call it stupid; you are being stupid with it. Accept it. It is a natural desire, a natural energy, the very fountain-source of all life. Yes, there are things beyond it, beautiful spaces beyond it. Sex brings joy, and sex brings misery too. They are both mixed with sex because sex is a mixture of the sky and the earth, the body and the soul. Hence it brings both: one moment it gives you wings, another moment it cuts them. One moment is a great ecstasy, another moment you have fallen into deep agony. One moment you are on a peak, a sunlit peak, another moment you are groaning in a dark valley. One has to learn about the valleys and the peaks; sex is both.
And one has to learn by one’s own experience, not by what others say, not by what I say. Your own experience of sex will make you free of it. And I am not saying simply be free of it; don’t try to be free of it, otherwise you never will be. What I am saying is: freedom from sex is a consequence, a by-product. You cannot achieve it directly, it comes indirectly. If you live sex with deep playfulness, meditativeness, as a gift of existence, seeing the peaks and the valleys again and again, slowly, slowly, a third point will arise in your being: the witness who witnesses the peak, who witnesses the valley – and neither peaks are important, nor valleys are important. Slowly, slowly, your consciousness has gone through a revolution; you have become more centered in the witnessing soul. That witnessing is brahmacharya, that witnessing brings real celibacy. It is not against sex, it is beyond sex.
Otherwise, sex will go on haunting you to your very last moment. You will be dying and you will not be thinking of God, you will be thinking of sex. That’s why the moment you die, you are immediately reborn – not a minute is lost because you die with the idea of sex in your head. You leave this body and because sex can only be fulfilled through the body, immediately the desire to enter another body arises.
Down in sunny Mexico there lived an old aunt with four very pretty nieces. One day Pancho Villa and his gang of revolutionary bandits broke into the house. Accosting the women on the patio the brigand said, “This place is in our possession and you are in our power.”
“We are helpless!” one of the girls exclaimed, “and we must submit, but please spare our poor old aunt.”
“Shut up!” snapped the aunt, “War is war!”
Freedom from sex has nothing to do with age, it has something to do with gaining a higher awareness, a deeper awareness. Become a witness, and don’t call sex stupid. Become intelligent, see, watch, observe. Whatsoever is given to you must have a reason, a rhyme in it; whatsoever you have got must have something of the beyond in it. You are only able to see the lower part of the ladder because your eyes are not open and your being is not conscious; hence you see only sex, the lower part of the ladder. The higher part of the ladder is samadhi. If you can see the whole ladder, all the rungs of it, you will be surprised – sex is the door to samadhi.
The very idea of samadhi was born because of those few rare people who were able to attain to total orgasmic joy through sex. They became aware that there is something in sex which is not sexual at all. In a deep orgasmic state time disappears, mind disappears, ego disappears. Now these three things have nothing to do with sex. And because they disappear, great joy arises. That arising of joy has nothing directly to do with sex either – it arose because sex helped, became a context for the disappearance of the ego, mind and time.
The first experimenters – it must have been thousands of years ago, their names are lost – the first tantrikas, the first people who attained to samadhi through sex, watched, meditated, and saw one thing – sex is only a physiological triggering of a certain process which can also be triggered without sex, which can be triggered just by meditation. There is no need to go into sex. Once they knew that the process could be triggered by other means – by Yoga methods, by Tao methods, by Tantra methods, by Sufi methods – once they knew that the same state of no ego, no mind, no time, could be attained without going into sex, they had found the key. But the key was found only through searching in sex.
Sex has been the very source of religion, and the sexual experience was the first experience of samadhi. Don’t call it stupid, please. Go into it lovingly, playfully, meditatively. Try to understand because liberation comes through understanding and in no other way.
The sixth question:
Osho,
Should one listen to and follow the wise advice of parents, teachers and well-wishers?
Listen, but don’t follow. Listen well, but follow your own insight. Don’t follow others’ advice. Listen, certainly, very meditatively, try to understand what they want to convey to you. They may really wish you well, but if you start blindly following you will never attain to your own intelligence. You will remain dependent, on crutches, you will always be looking up to others to tell you what to do, what not to do. You will always be needing leaders – and to need leaders is a very unhealthy state.
Listen, because people have great experience, and if they are sharing, willing to share, it would be foolish on your part not to listen. Sharing in their experience may give you great insight; help you become more aware – but don’t follow.
People follow literally and then they just become blind. When others are giving you all that you need, what is the need to have your own eyes? When others are chewing for you, what is the need to chew for yourself? Slowly, slowly, you become more and more weakened, more and more impoverished, more and more starved.
A man who had recently opened a shop had a large notice overhead which read: Fresh Fish Sold Here.
A friend came along and said, “Why have you got Here on the board?” So the shopkeeper took off the word Here.
Then another friend came along and said, “Sold? Of course it is sold. You are not giving it away, are you?” So off came the word Sold.
A third friend came along and said, “Fresh fish? It has to be fresh. Who would buy stale fish from you? Cut out the word Fresh.”
The shopkeeper obliged. Now only the word Fish remained on the board. A fourth man arrived and said, Fish? Fancy having that up. You can smell it a mile away.” The shopkeeper erased this last word from the board.
A fifth man arrived and said, “What’s the idea of hanging a blank board over the shop?” The shopkeeper removed the board.
Finally a sixth man came along and said, “You have opened such a big shop here. Why don’t you put a board up saying: Fresh Fish Sold Here?”
Now if you go on listening to people you will become more and more confused. Your confusion is that you have been listening to many kinds of people and they are all giving different advice; that’s how you have become confused. And I am not saying they are not wishing you well; they are well-wishers, but not very conscious well-wishers, otherwise they would not give you advice. They would give you insights, not advice. They would not tell you what to do and what not to do. They would help you to become more aware, so that you can see for yourself what has to be done and what has not to be done.
The real friend is one who does not advise you, but helps you to become more alert, more aware, more conscious of life – its problems, its challenges, its mysteries; helps you to go on your own voyage, gives you the courage to experiment, gives you the courage to seek and search, gives you the courage to commit many mistakes – because one who is not ready to commit mistakes will never learn anything at all.
Commit as many mistakes as you can, but don’t commit the same mistake twice because that makes you stupid. Commit new mistakes, invent new mistakes, and you will be learning all the time and your intelligence will be growing all the time. Your intelligence needs sharpening.
Real friends help you sharpen your intelligence. They don’t give you fixed advice because fixed advice is of no use. What is true today may not be true tomorrow, and what is right in one situation may be wrong in another. Situations are changing all the time, so what you need is not a fixed pattern of living, but a way of seeing, so wherever you are, in whatsoever situation you find yourself, you know how to behave spontaneously, how to depend on your own being.
The seventh question:
Osho,
I simply can't believe in God. What should I do?
Krishna Kant, I have not been telling you to believe in God. Why should you be worried about it? If you can’t believe, you can’t believe – forget all about it. Now it is God’s problem that Krishna Kant does not believe in him; if he is anxious, worried, he will take care of it. But why are you worried? Deep down somewhere you must want to believe, otherwise why the question at all? I am not telling you to believe in God; there is no need.
Buddha attained to the ultimate without believing in God, why can’t you? Mahavira attained to truth, to enlightenment, without believing in any God, why can’t you?
In that sense, the Eastern religions are far richer than the Western religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the three religions that were born outside of India, are a little poor, unsophisticated, crude in that way. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, the three religions that were born in India, have a tremendous sophistication about them; they don’t make such unnecessary demands on you.
Buddhism is the ultimate in sophistication. Buddha says there is no need to believe in God, there is no need to even believe in the soul; there is no need to believe at all. Belief is not a necessity for being religious. Then what is necessary? – meditation is necessary, not belief. And one can meditate without belief because meditation is a scientific method.
It has happened many times that an atheist has come to me and asked, “Can I meditate?” The idea has become prevalent that you cannot meditate unless you believe in God. Now that is a very foolish notion, meditation has nothing to do with God. In fact the truth is, if you believe in God it will be difficult to meditate; your very belief will become a disturbance.
The person who does not believe in anything can simply move beyond thinking; the person who believes clings to thinking because his belief is a thought. Belief is part of the mind. If you believe too much in God you cannot leave the mind because leaving the mind will obviously mean leaving your belief. The man who cannot believe is in a better situation.
You should be happy that you cannot believe in God. So far, so good. Now meditate.
And remember, the English word meditate gives the wrong connotation. In English there is really no word which can translate the word dhyana. From dhyana the word ch’an arose in China, and then ch’an moved to Japan and became zen, but the root is dhyana.
When we use the word meditation it gives a feeling that you are meditating upon something – on what? To meditate means you have to have some object, and that is the problem. Dhyana simply means that it is not a question of focusing, concentrating on something; rather, it is dropping all the content of the mind and just being. Meditation in the sense of dhyana needs no object; it is an objectless, contentless state of consciousness. You go on dropping, neti neti – neither this nor that, you go on rejecting all thoughts, good and bad. When all thoughts are eliminated what is left? – you, and that is God.
But what you call it does not matter. You can call it God if the word appeals to you; if it doesn’t appeal to you, you can call it nirvana, you can call it Tao, or whatever. But don’t be worried that you can’t believe in God; that is good – this is my approach. If somebody says “I believe in God,” I say “That is good. Now let us start from there, that will do.” If somebody says “I don’t believe in God,” I say “That is good. Now let us start from there.”
You have to start from the point where you are. And all points are good because all points are on the circumference and from every point on the circumference the center is available. So move toward the center, don’t be worried about where you are.
One afternoon Mulla Nasruddin was getting a haircut in a barber’s shop. He noticed a pricelist on the wall of the shop and on the list was, “Singe – five rupees.” He asked the barber why it cost so much.
“Every hair on your head,” said the barber, “is a little hollow tube, open at the ends, so the body’s energy sort of bleeds out of it. After you have had a haircut it is a good idea to get a singe because it closes up the hole at the end of each hair and seals in the energy. Otherwise your hair, and your whole body, just keeps getting weaker and weaker every time you have it cut.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said the Mulla, “what about the hair on my chin? I shave it every day, and cut off the ends, and it just keeps getting thicker and stronger. How do you explain that?
“Easy!” said the barber. “You just ain’t the kind of a fella this story was made up for!”
These are all just stories. If it appeals, good; if it doesn’t appeal, very good.
Forget about God. There is no need to believe; you do not need to do anything about it. Don’t waste your time on God. Just because of this word so many people are wasting their time. Somebody is trying to prove, somebody is trying to disprove, great treatises are being written – more books are written about God than anything else, millions of books, the libraries are full. Don’t waste your time. If you can’t believe, then that story is not for you. But we have other stories, so why be worried? For Godless people too there is a way.
My way is for all. Whosoever comes is accepted. The Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian, the Jaina, the Sikh, the Buddhist, the Parsi – whosoever comes is accepted. I love all kinds of stories.
Any kind of beginning is good, but begin. Don’t remain stuck where you are, move toward the center. Meditate, and that will bring you home. And then you can call it whatsoever you like; it is none of my business what you call it. You can give it any name you fancy.
The last question:
Osho,
Should children be told all the facts of life, irrespective of their age?
What to tell children, and what not to tell them, has always been a problem down the ages; parents have been very concerned. In the past, the strategy was not to tell them the facts of life, to avoid the subject as far as possible because people were very afraid of the facts of life.
The very phrase “facts of life” is a euphemism; it hides a simple thing. To avoid saying anything about sex, to not even use the word sex, they have made this metaphor, “facts of life.” What facts of life? – it is just to not say anything about sex.
The whole past of humanity has lived with this deception, but the children discover it sooner or later. In fact they discover it sooner rather than later, and they discover it in a very wrong way. Because the right person is not ready to tell them, they have to work it out on their own. They collect, they become peeping toms – and you are responsible for reducing them to peeping toms. They collect from all the wrong sources, from ugly people. They will carry those wrong notions with them their whole lives, and you are the cause of it. Their whole sex life may be affected by the wrong information they have gathered.
Now there is as much wrong information prevalent in the world about sex as is possible. Even in the twentieth century people are living with immense ignorance about sex; even people who you think should know better. Even your doctor does not really know what sex is, does not know its complexity. He should know, but even doctors live very superstitiously; they too learn things from the marketplace. In no medical college is sex taught as a separate subject – such an immense, powerful subject and yet nothing is taught about it. Yes, the physiology of sex is known by the physician, but the physiology is not all; there are deeper layers: there is psychology, there is spirituality. There is a psychology to sex and there is a spirituality to sex; the physiology is only the surface. Much research has been done, and in this century we know more than ever before, but the knowledge is not widespread.
People are afraid because their parents were afraid, and that fear has become infectious. You are afraid of sex and you don’t want to tell your children about it. But you have to tell your children about it, you owe it to them. You have to be truthful. Don’t shirk from the truth and don’t lie – in the long run, truth always pays.
“Mom, do we get our food from God?”
“Yes, we do, Barbara.”
“And at Christmas time does Santa bring all our presents?”
“That’s right.”
“And on my birthday the good fairy brings presents?”
“Hmm, yes.”
“And did the stork bring little brother?”
“True.”
“Then what the heck does Pop hang around here for?”
It is better to be truthful. But I am not saying to jump on your children and start being truthful whether they want it or not. Now that – the other extreme – is happening particularly in the West because the psychologists are saying that the truth has to be told. People go on telling the truth whether the children are inquiring about it or not. That too is wrong. Wait! If the child inquires, be truthful; if he does not inquire then there is no need, he is not interested yet.
At the dinner table the father almost choked when his little eight-year-old boy asked, “Daddy, where do I come from?”
Reddening, he said, “Well, I guess the time has come for you and me to have a man-to-man talk. After dinner I will tell you about the birds and the bees.”
The kid said, “What birds and bees? Little Frankie down the block told me he came from Chicago. All I want to know is where I come from!”
So wait a little. They will ask themselves, don’t be in such a hurry. And remember, whatsoever is the case, be truthful, however hard it seems. It will be hard because you were not told the truth by your parents. For centuries the truth has not been told; nobody ever tells it to their children, everybody gathers it from rumors. People feel embarrassed, afraid that the children may discover the truth. Drop all those fears, and don’t try to deceive the children in any way – it can be dangerous.
Six-year-old Luigino comes home from school where he has learned three new words, without knowing their meaning, so he asks his mother, “Mom, what do prick, pussy and balls mean?”
The mother, extremely embarrassed, answers, “Well, dear, prick means cheese, pussy means chair, and balls mean boots.”
After a few days the grandmother, a pious, prudish, country lady, visits her daughter and grandson She rings the bell and Luigino opens the door. The old woman hugs the child and Luigino, proud of his new vocabulary, says, “Granny, you must be tired. Sit down on this pussy.”
The woman almost faints, but Luigino goes on without hesitating. “And if you are hungry eat this piece of prick.”
Shocked and horrified the grandmother finally asks, “Luigino, where is your mum?”
“Ah, she is in the next room polishing Daddy’s balls!”
Enough for today.