KABIR
The Guest 14
Fourteenth 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,
What is receptivity?
Receptivity is a state of no-mind. When you are utterly empty of all thought, when your consciousness has no content, when the mirror reflects nothing, that is receptivity. Receptivity is the door to the divine. Drop the mind and be. In the mind, you are miles away from being. The more you think, the less you are; the less you think, the more you are. And if you don’t think at all, those are the moments when being asserts itself in its totality.
Receptivity simply means dropping the garbage that you go on carrying in your head. And there is so much utterly useless garbage there. The mind means the past. Now the past is no longer of any use; it has happened, and it is never going to happen again because in reality nothing ever repeats. Even when you think, feel, that this is the same situation, it is never the same. Each morning is a new morning, and each morning the sun that you encounter is a new sun. I am not talking about the material sun, I am talking about the beauty, the benediction, the blessing that it brings every day – it is so utterly new.
If you keep on carrying pictures of the past you will not be able to see the new. Your eyes will be covered by your experiences, expectations; and those eyes will not be able to see what confronts you. That’s how you go on missing life: the past becomes a barrier, encloses you, traps you into something that is no longer. You become encapsulated in the dead. And as you become more experienced, more grown-up, the shell of dead experience becomes thicker and thicker around you. You become more and more closed. Slowly, slowly, all the windows, all the doors, are closed. You exist, but you exist alienated, you exist uprooted; you are not in communion with life. You are not in communion with the trees and the stars and the mountains. You can’t be in communion because a Great Wall of China, your past, surrounds you.
When I say become receptive, I mean become a child again. Remember Jesus, who keeps on saying to his disciples: “Unless you are like small children you will not be able to enter my Kingdom of God.” What he is saying is exactly the meaning of receptivity. The child is receptive because he knows nothing – not knowing anything, he is receptive. The old man is not receptive because he knows too much – knowing too much, he is closed. He has to be reborn, he has to die to the past and become a child again. Not in the body, of course: the consciousness should always be like a child. Not childish, remember, but like a child – grown-up, mature, but innocent.
And that’s how one learns the truth that is presented to you every moment of your life; learns to know the guest who comes and knocks on your door every moment, day in, day out, year in, year out. But you are so surrounded by your own inner talk, by your own inner procession of thoughts, that you don’t hear the knock.
Do you hear the distant call of the cuckoo? Do you hear the birds chirping? That is receptivity. It is an existential state of silence, utter silence; nothing moves, nothing stirs, and yet you are not asleep, and yet you are alert, and yet you are absolutely aware. Where silence and awareness meet, mingle, and become one, there is receptivity. Receptivity is the most important religious quality.
Become a child. Start functioning from a state of not-knowing, and then silence will come of its own accord, and great awareness. And then life is a benediction.
The second question:
Osho,
Why are you so much against philosophy?
Philosophy means mind, philosophy means thinking, philosophy means going away from yourself. Philosophy is the art of losing yourself in thoughts, becoming identified with dreams. Hence I am against philosophy because I am all for religion.
You cannot be philosophical if you want to be religious; it is not possible. Religion is existential, philosophy is intellectual. Philosophy is round and about, religion is direct. Philosophy is thinking about things you don’t know. Religion is a knowing, not thinking. Philosophy depends on doubt because the more you can doubt, the more you can think. Doubt is the mother of thinking.
Religion is trust because the more you trust, the less need there is to think. In trust, thinking commits suicide – trust kills thinking. And when there is no thinking, and trust pulsates in your being, trust permeates every pore of your being, overwhelms you – you know what is.
Philosophy tries to know, but never does. Religion never tries to know, but knows. Philosophy is an exercise in futility, of futility. Yes, it talks about great things – freedom, love, God, meditation – but it only talks about them. The philosopher never meditates. He talks about meditation, he spins and weaves theories, hypotheses, inferences about meditation, but he never tastes anything of meditation, never meditates.
Hegel and Kant, Plato and Aristotle – they are philosophers. Buddha and Kabir – they are not. But Heraclitus and Plotinus are also not philosophers, even though in the philosophy books they are called philosophers. They are not. To use the word philosopher for them is not right, unless you change the whole meaning of the word. Aristotle and Heraclitus cannot both be called philosophers in the same sense. If Aristotle is a philosopher, then Heraclitus is not; if Heraclitus is a philosopher, then Aristotle is not.
I use a totally different word, philosia, instead of philosophy. Philosophy means, literally, linguistically, “love of knowledge.” Philosia means love of seeing, not only love of knowledge. Knowledge is not enough for the real inquirer, he wants to see. He does not want to contemplate God, he wants to encounter God. He wants to hold God’s hand in his own, he wants to hug and kiss God. He is not satisfied with the concept of God. How can the concept be of any help?
When you are thirsty, you cannot be satisfied by the formula H2O. Howsoever right it is – right or wrong, that is not my concern, that is irrelevant – the formula H2O cannot quench your thirst. You would like water, and whether you know about H2O or not does not matter. For millions of years man has been drinking water without knowing anything about H2O, and it has been perfectly satisfying. Philosophy talks about water, religion drinks.
Talking about food is utterly stupid. You have to prepare it, you have to eat it, you have to chew it, you have to digest it. Unless food becomes blood and bones and marrow, just talking about it is not going to help. Hence I am against philosophy.
A woman went to the doctor for a physical examination before her fourth marriage. During the course of her examination the doctor was startled to discover that she was still a virgin.
He asked for an explanation, “How can this be? You are preparing for your fourth marriage and yet you are still a virgin?”
“My first husband,” she replied, “I married for love, but as we were leaving the church to go on our honeymoon, there was a tragic automobile accident and he was killed.”
“My second husband,” she continued, “I married for money. He was very old, and so nothing ever happened between us.”
“My third husband,” she said, “was a great philosopher, and all he could ever do was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it was going to be.”
Philosophy is pseudo-religion. Religion is true philosophy because religion leads you into the world of seeing, knowing, experiencing. In exactly that sense, Pythagoras coined the word philosophy. Sophy comes from sophia, meaning wisdom; philo means love: love for the ultimate wisdom – that was the meaning given by the man who coined the word philosophy. Pythagoras had traveled all over the world: he had been to India, he had conferred with the great mystics of the East, he had met seers, enlightened people; and it was he who coined the word.
The original meaning is beautiful, but it got lost. When the word fell into the hands of the Greeks it started to have a totally different meaning because the Greek mind is analytical, logical, rational. There are only two types of minds in the world: the Greek and the Hindu. The Greek mind is logical, the Hindu mind is illogical. The Greek mind is intellectual, the Hindu mind is intuitive. The Greek mind has given birth to philosophy and science, the Hindu mind has given birth to religion and poetry.
The Greek and the Hindu exist in each person because each person has two minds. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, one is Greek, the other is Hindu. The left side of your brain is Greek, the right side of your brain is Hindu. I am using the words Hindu and Greek metaphorically; don’t take it literally. Your left-side brain, which is joined with your right hand, calculates, thinks, analyzes. Your right-side brain, which is joined with your left hand, intuits, sings, loves.
The religious person goes through an inner conversion from the Greek to the Hindu. He moves from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Yoga and all other techniques of meditation are nothing but bridges to take you from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Once you have reached the right hemisphere, the world of poetry, the world of beauty, the world of love, opens its doors. Then God is. No proof is needed, one simply feels. It is a feeling. It is a feeling in the guts; for no other reason, one simply knows. Once you are centered in the right hemisphere of your brain you can use the left hemisphere as well, but now it will function as a servant. And the left hemisphere is a good servant but a bad master.
I am all for religion because, as I have seen, life is far, far, more than logic can comprehend. Life is so vast and your capacity to think is so tiny. Life can be envisaged only through love, not through logic.
You will have to melt into existence. You will have to dance with it, sing with it. Dancing with the trees in the wind, singing with the river in flood, being in communion with the clouds and the stars, you will know what God is – not by thinking about him.
The third question:
Osho,
I love you. In a magazine you said that you are not a person. What are you then?
This question is from Bindiya. She is a small girl, ten years old.
Bindiya, nobody is a person, although everybody believes that they are a person. Nobody can be a person because we are not separate. We are like waves in the ocean. No wave has a personality. Yes, it has a form, but it is not separate from the ocean. It is one with the ocean, you cannot separate it from the ocean. You cannot take the wave away from the ocean; it will disappear, it will not be a wave at all. It can only be a wave in the ocean, with the ocean. It is not separate, it is part of the dance of the ocean. It has no personality. Yes, it has a certain individuality because it is different from the other waves – it is unique – but it is not separate from existence. And it is not separate from the other waves either because they are all joined together in one ocean.
When I say I am not a person, I simply mean that I am not separate from existence. I am one with the trees and one with the rocks and one with the earth and one with the sky. I am a presence not a person, and so are you, and so is everybody else. To believe in the person is to believe in the ego. And I can understand from your question that this is how every child has been brought up, for centuries. Your question is relevant.
You say, “I love you. But if you are not a person, then how can I love you?” You have been told that you can only love people. The truth is just the opposite: you cannot love people. People can only fight, people can only be in conflict, because wherever there are two egos there is conflict, constant war; sometimes hot, sometimes cold, but war continues. Sometimes the warriors are tired so they maintain a certain peace, but whenever their energy comes back they start fighting again.
You can see it happening with all kinds of lovers – a continuous fight, a kind of intimate enmity, together and yet not together. Why is there this fighting? – because of the two egos. There are two people, and of course each person wants to dominate. The ego is a deep desire to dominate. The ego is a deep desire that says, “I am special, higher, bigger, greater than you.” And both are trying to dominate. Conflict is inevitable, necessary. Love cannot exist in such a state. Love exists between two presences, not between two people. Then there is no conflict; then there is great harmony, melody, music, rhythm. When there are no more egos and both feel at one with existence, they can be at one with each other. Love is possible only when you disappear. I have disappeared, and now my work here is to help you disappear too.
You ask me, “Then what are you?” I am not a person, I am a presence. I am a nobody. I am a kind of nothingness, emptiness. The host has disappeared, and the disappearance of the host has made the guest appear. I am not, godliness is. I cannot love you, but I am love. You can partake of me as much as you like, you can drink of me as much as you like. I cannot be in a love relationship with you because relationships only exist between egos.
But I can share. It will be a relating, not a relationship. It will not be static, it will be a flow. And it will have no motivation to it: I love you because I am love. There is no motivation, no desire to get anything back from you. It is enough that you accepted my love.
And I know this time… Two days ago, when Bindiya came to see me – she had come back after a long time away – I could see great love in her eyes. I had to call her close, I had to hold her face in my hands and pour my love into her eyes. She is a small sannyasin, but because she is small she is still capable of receiving. Because she is small, still uncontaminated, still unpolluted, still uncorrupted, something natural is still there.
And you are fortunate, Bindiya, that you have become a sannyasin so early – now nobody will be able to corrupt you. Now you will be able to protect yourself against this corrupt society, against all kinds of corruptions. The church corrupts, the state corrupts, the educational system corrupts. You have become a sannyasin at the right time. You will be able to see all the games that are being played around you. You will become more and more intelligent, more and more loving, and less and less a person.
Those who are really with me are on the way to disappearing, evaporating. Just as in the early morning sun the dewdrops start disappearing, that is the way for the disciple to disappear – when he is in a close love relationship with the master.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Why did Friedrich Nietzsche declare that God is dead?
He had to declare it because God was dead. The God that had been worshipped for thousands of years was dead. Not the real God, but the God that the human mind had created – the God that was in the temples and the mosques and the churches and the synagogues, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Vedas. Man had outgrown those concepts.
Nietzsche simply declared a fact. Of course, he was as shocked by it as everybody else. He himself was not ready to accept it. In fact, for his whole life he struggled to accept it. He tried to convince himself that God was really dead by argument, but it was difficult for the poor man. It would have been difficult for anybody. And he was a man of steel; he was no ordinary man, he was a really strong man, but still it was too much. He suffered tremendously because he was the first to declare it, and to be a pioneer is always dangerous. He had a nervous breakdown and the last part of his life was spent in a state of madness. He risked much for his declaration.
In his great book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, comes a parable…
“God is dead” is now almost a cliché. But when Nietzsche first used that phrase it was like an earthquake, a thunderbolt from the skies – it shattered man’s illusions. But remember, it is only half of his message, the other half has almost been forgotten. He declared “God is dead” because he wanted to declare the coming of a new man. He called the new man the “overman” or “superman.” He said that if God continues to live in the old way, man cannot assert himself in total freedom. Man cannot grow, man cannot mature; he will always remain dependent on a father figure. This is the first half of the message: God as the great father is dead. The other half is: now be on your own, stand on your own; now become mature. Enough of this dependence, enough of this stupid praying, enough of these rituals. Stop these games.
Man has been playing many, many, games in the name of God. And priests have been exploiting man in the name of God. Nietzsche put an end to all that; the world has never been the same again. Although Nietzsche suffered much for his declaration, he served humanity in a tremendous way. He heralded a new age.
The old God being dead is a very basic requirement for the new God to appear; a new vision of God more in harmony with modern, contemporary consciousness. The God of the Old Testament was perfectly right for the people who invented him, perfectly right for the people Moses was talking to; he used a language they understood. Now thousands of years have passed. God needs new clothes, but man goes on and on putting old, rotten clothes on him. God is not dead. God cannot be dead. But the old concept is dead.
Zarathustra is entrusted by Nietzsche with the task of conveying the news of God’s death to the world. He starts out on his journey and meets an old hermit, a saint. The saint tells Zarathustra that he loves God, but not man because man is imperfect. Zarathustra replies that he loves man. Then he asks the saint what he is doing in the forest.
The saint replies, “I make songs and sing them. And when I make songs I laugh, cry, and hum. Thus I praise God.”
The two separate, laughing like young boys. But when Zarathustra is alone again he wonders to himself, “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of it, that God is dead!”
The old saint says that he loves God, not man because man is imperfect. But Zarathustra says that he loves man, and that God is dead: this is going to be the new religion.
But it has not yet become a reality, even though a hundred years have passed since Nietzsche’s declaration, and it has spread all over the world like wildfire. The destructive part has happened, but not yet the creative part: Nietzsche’s declaration of the superman.
Man has to be loved because it is only through the nourishment of love that man can grow. Man has to know that he is alone, and he has to know that he is dependent on his own resources, not on some heavenly father. Once man takes responsibility, total responsibility, onto his own shoulders, a great revolution is bound to happen because man has an infinite potential for growth. But, by remaining dependent on some God, he has become completely oblivious to his potential, to his future, to his growth.
It is good that God has been discarded. Now you have to take your life in your own hands. You have to declare your freedom because God is dead, because there is nobody higher than you. And the beauty of it is, if you become responsible, responsible for yourself, if you declare your freedom, life will take a new plunge into the depths of the unknown. If you accept that now you have to seek and search your way, now you have to grope for it on your own, life will again become an adventure. Life will again be an ecstatic discovery of new facts, new truths, of new territories, of new peaks of joy. And it is only by becoming an adventurer that you will come upon the new face of God – which will be far truer than the old because it will be far more mature than the old.
Nietzsche remained in difficulty. On the one hand he continued fighting with the old God, and on the other hand, in moments when he was not so strong, he became scared.
Zarathustra says:
Away!
He himself fled
My last, only companion,
My great enemy,
My unknown,
My hangman-god!
No! Do come back
With all thy tortures!
To the last of all that are lonely
Oh, come back!
All my tear-streams run
Their course to thee;
And my heart’s final flame –
Flares up for thee!
Oh, come back,
My unknown god! My pain!
My last – happiness!
These words look almost insane: “My unknown god! My pain! My last happiness! Ah, come back!”
Nietzsche remained divided, split, schizophrenic. One part of him was still afraid – maybe he was wrong, maybe God was still alive. Who could know? How could he be certain about such a profound matter? And he was the first to say it, so naturally he was scared. He wanted to get rid of the enemy. He called God “the enemy,” the enemy of man, because God, man’s so-called God, had been like a rock on man’s chest.
I am not talking about the God of Buddha and Mahavira and Zarathustra and Jesus and Moses, no. I am talking about the God of the common masses, of the mob. Nietzsche also is talking about the mob. The God of the crowds is an ugly concept: it says much about man’s weaknesses, but nothing about the truth of existence. When you pray on your knees you simply show your weakness, not that you know what prayer is. When you go to the temple, you go to demand something, to beg for something. You simply show your beggarliness, it has nothing to do with God. Very few people have known the truth of God.
If Nietzsche had met Buddha, Buddha would have agreed with him perfectly, and yet disagreed. He would have said, “You are right: God is dead, the God of the crowds. But there is another vision, the vision of the enlightened ones; their God is not a person, their God is life in its essence. How can life be dead? The trees are still green, the birds are still singing, the sun is still there, the night still becomes poetry, love still happens. How can God be dead?”
God as existence can never be dead. But God as a concept has to die many times. Each time man grows, the old concept has to be dropped. And the old has been dropped. But the problem with the contemporary mind is that although the old has been dropped, man has not yet become rooted in his own being. Only half of Nietzsche’s declaration has been fulfilled; the other half is missing. Hence, there is great meaninglessness all over the world. Everybody is feeling a kind of dullness, sadness, frustration. Everybody is living nothing but a kind of long, drawn-out, misery, anxiety, anguish. Life has become synonymous with a kind of agony. All that you can do is to use pain killers, tranquilizers; somehow pull yourself together until death comes and you can rest forever.
Sigmund Freud said that man can never be happy. At the most we can reduce his unhappiness a little bit. At the most we can make him normally unhappy. That is the goal of psychoanalysis: to make people normally unhappy, to help them not to become abnormally unhappy. What kind of goal is this? But this is what has happened, and Freud was simply stating a fact. He had looked at modern man, looked into the unconscious of modern man. He was the one who looked the deepest into the conscious and the unconscious mind. How could he lie? He had to say the truth. He came to understand that, when God dies, it is impossible for happiness to happen if man has not yet searched for another vision, for another goal, for another star – so that the journey can start again, the journey of meaning and significance. Hence, without God, how can man ever be happy? – at the most, man can be normally unhappy.
Freud’s conclusion is part of Nietzsche’s declaration. My work here consists of doing the other half, hence I don’t talk much about God. Even if atheists come and want to become sannyasins, I accept them with an open heart; even if they are a little suspicious of why I am accepting them. They say, “We are atheists. We don’t believe in God. Are you still ready to accept us as sannyasins? Can we still meditate?”
And I say to them, you are the people who can meditate. People who believe in the old God cannot meditate, they depend too much on God, they are never grown-up people. Meditation needs a certain growth. You can meditate – God is not needed. God is not a prerequisite for meditation, but when you meditate, slowly, slowly, you become aware of God. God is the ultimate revelation, not the prerequisite. God is not a condition of becoming a sannyasin. God is the ultimate realization of sannyas.
And you will not then be angry with Nietzsche, remember, because you will know that what he was saying is also true – he was talking about the concept of God. Moses’s concept of God is certainly dead. When Moses died, his concept of God died. In fact, it lived too long; for three thousand years continuously it prevailed. That simply shows the stupidity of humanity – otherwise the moment an enlightened person leaves the world, his concept of God will also disappear. But if we could learn something from the enlightened person, we could go ahead, further ahead. We could stand on the shoulders of the enlightened person and be able to look further ahead than him. We could create better visions of God, beautiful visions of God. We would come closer and closer to the truth.
And remember, one can only come closer and closer to the truth. The moment you come absolutely to the truth, you disappear. Then only truth is. Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” I say: I am dead and God is alive, very alive. That’s what happens if you go on meditating: one day you suddenly find that you are not, only God is.
The fifth question:
Osho,
How can I get back the will to live?
Wolfgang, you are suffering from the ancient German disease, “the will to live,” “the will to power,” will and will and will. You have fallen into the wrong company here. Either escape or we are going to de-Germanize you because here the message is surrender, not will.
Listening to me, you must have been misunderstanding me. I am not teaching you the will to live. The will to live is already there, otherwise how would you be living? You are alive. That’s enough proof that the will to live is there. If the will to live leaves you, you will not breathe even a single breath more. Who will breathe? For what? If the will to live leaves, your breath will leave you immediately. You are still breathing; the will to live is there. The will to live is not something that has to be learned, it is inborn.
What has to be learned is the will to surrender. That is not inborn, that has to be learned. The will to live is a natural phenomenon, instinctive. The will to die is not instinctive; one has to learn it with great effort. It needs tremendous courage to learn it, even to think of it. Sannyas is the will to die – so that God can live, so that you disappear, so that you are no longer a hindrance, so that you are no longer a rock in his way. But you must be misunderstanding me. I am saying one thing, you are hearing another. The German screen must be misinterpreting.
A fat man was sitting on his front steps, drinking a can of beer, when a busybody spinster from down the street began to berate him for his appearance.
“What a disgusting sight,” she said. “If that belly was on a woman, I’d swear she was pregnant.”
To which the man simply smiled and replied, “Madam, it was and she is.”
It is always possible to understand things in your own way. Words are very flexible. Words don’t have any fixed meaning; they cannot have. The meaning is always provided by you. When I say something, the moment it reaches you it changes its color. You immediately dye it your own color.
But one thing I must make you aware of, is that if you want to learn the will to live, you are in the wrong place. Here, I am teaching you how to die – although one who is ready to die attains to eternal life, but that is another matter. That is something which happens as a consequence and cannot be used as a motive. You are in the wrong place.
The bank robbers arrived just before closing time, and promptly ordered the few remaining depositors, tellers, clerks and guards to disrobe and lie face down behind the counter. One nervous blonde pulled off her clothes and lay down on the floor, facing upward.
“Turn over, Mabel,” whispered the girl lying beside her. “This is a stick up, not an office party.”
You have to beware of where you are. You are not listening to Friedrich Nietzsche, “the will to power.” And you are not listening to Adolf Hitler either. You are in a totally different dimension.
I teach you how to die because that is the only way that you can attain eternal life. When the seed dies in the soil, the sprout arrives. And when the drop disappears in the ocean, it becomes the ocean. I teach you crucifixion because resurrection follows; it inevitably follows. I cannot promise you anything because if you crucify yourself with the motive that you will be resurrected, then it will not happen.
You have to be unmotivated in the world of religion. You have to move for the sheer joy of it and for nothing else. You have to not be result oriented, and that is the most difficult thing for the modern mind to do, to not be result oriented. Whatsoever we do, we always do it to get something else. Everything is a means and has to be used to some end. And what I am teaching here is the end itself; it is not a means to anything else. Each moment is an end unto itself. Enjoy it, die into it, disappear into it, and then something miraculous happens: great eternal life descends into you. You will be surprised because that was not your motivation.
I don’t talk about what is going to happen because that can create disturbance in your mind; you can become too interested in it. I only talk about what you have to do, I leave the outcome to the future. It will happen, I know it is bound to happen. I don’t tell the seeds, “Die so that you can become trees,” because if the seeds are too interested in becoming trees they will not be able to die at all. If the dewdrop is too interested in becoming the ocean, it will become very hesitant, afraid to risk dropping into the ocean: “Who knows?” I persuade the dewdrop to disappear, that disappearance is a benediction.
Disappear, drop yourself into the ocean, because dropping, and dying into the ocean, is the greatest orgasmic joy in itself. And if I can persuade the dewdrop to do this, it is going to become the ocean. That will be a surprise, a gift from the unknown.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I have been asking this question of myself in myriad ways for several weeks now; watching it change and shrink as witnessing brings insights, yet leaves the essence untouched.
I left last year, overflowing with the experience of your compassion, love, and understanding, and with a deep sense of love and personal connection to you. Your books and tapes spoke your parting words, “Hurry back,” to me, and my focus on returning never wavered, only deepened, leaving all else pointless.
Now I am here, and I feel lost and disoriented and alien. Where I used to pulsate with you in the magic of your discourse, I now listen to you with dry eyes. They are quite wet as I write this.
Where is the love and connection I felt for you as my master, such an incredible being, that so penetrated me and my life for the last year and a half? What is happening?
Sharda, it is natural, it is expected. The last time you were here, you were here without any expectations. You were simply here, with no motivation. You enjoyed being in my presence. You were open, available, because you were functioning from a state of not-knowing.
Now, coming back, it is not the same thing. I am the same, the whole situation is the same, but you are not the same: now you are functioning out of a state of knowing. You are now expecting things which you were not expecting the first time.
This happens to almost everybody. The first time you come you are very innocent. My love simply reaches you, there is no barrier. My compassion overwhelms you. You cannot believe it, it is unbelievable, it is too much. Then you go back with all those memories rambling through your mind. Now those memories start becoming desires. Now those memories say to you, “Go back. Much more is going to happen. If the first time it happened so deeply, this time it will happen even more deeply. The first time you were just an amateur, now you are an adept. So much more is going to happen.” For all the months that you have been away, you have been dreaming, desiring, fantasizing. Now you are here with all these fantasies, desires, expectations – and your eyes are dry, and nothing is happening.
You have to drop your expectations. You have to become innocent again. You have to start functioning from not-knowing again, otherwise you will be unnecessarily creating a hell for yourself. And it will be an absolutely private hell because others, just sitting by your side, are in heaven.
But don’t be worried, this is absolutely normal and natural. This happens to everybody, once at least. If you are intelligent it happens only once. If you are not intelligent it happens many times; each time you leave and come back, you do the same foolish thing.
I cannot fulfill your expectations, I cannot fulfill your fantasies, I cannot fulfill your desires. I can fulfill you, but not your mind. You have brought a big mind with you. It will be difficult, hard to drop it, but there is no other way. You will have to drop it, and the sooner you drop it the better.
Sharda is a very intellectual woman, very clever, calculating, logical, rational. She functions as a money therapist in the West. She helps people to get more money, to earn more, to create money, to attract money toward themselves. So you can understand that she has a certain type of very, very, intellectual mind. She is not intuitive. It was a miracle that the first time she was here she fell in love. Money therapists are not expected to fall in love. I was surprised also. Now the money therapist is back again, and with ideas about how to have more – more of those experiences that happened the last time; how to attract those same spaces again.
That is creating trouble for you. You have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and paradise is lost. Please vomit it – just throw it out of your system. When you are here, be just like an innocent child, and not just with me – it is very easy to be innocent with me; you have to be innocent with the commune too. Put aside your knowledge, put aside all your expertise about money.
The commune also functions through money – there is no other way, it has to function – but it moves in a very illogical way. That too creates problems for Sharda. With her expert eye, she cannot believe how things are happening; they can be done better, they can be done more methodologically. But with me, everything always remains in chaos. I love it. I never allow anything to settle because once things settle people start dying, people start becoming zombies – so nothing is ever settled. I go on separating couples, I go on changing their rooms, their jobs – using every possible way to unsettle them.
I never allow you a single moment of respite, rest, so you can never say “Now I have arrived.” The moment you say “I have arrived” something will be created for you so that you have to gather up your luggage and move.
Sharda’s mind is bound to be in great difficulty; I can understand. I don’t know anything about money, although money comes. I am not a money therapist, but whenever money is needed, money comes; somebody simply comes with the money. And this has been so my whole life. I don’t have a single rupee – you can see, I don’t even have pockets. I have lived for many, many years without money. And I have not lived like a beggar, that is not my way. I live like an emperor, and without money. What Buddha could never manage to do, I am managing. He was an emperor; at that time he could not manage to live with the freedom of a beggar. To live with the freedom of a beggar he had to leave his kingdom. Then he was free, but he had to live like a beggar, begging.
I am living in absolute freedom and yet I am not living like a beggar. I don’t go outside my room, but things happen. I cannot tell you the secret; in fact there isn’t one. I don’t know myself how it happens. But once you disappear, God takes over. Then it is his responsibility and his worry. I never worry about anything, and I don’t think of anything as my responsibility. If this commune grows, good; if it disappears, very good. It doesn’t matter either way.
But I can understand Sharda’s mind; she must be in difficulty. With good wishes, good intentions, she wants to help the commune; but then there is a conflict because the approach of this commune is not scientific toward anything. It is a totally different approach – paradoxical, illogical, intuitive.
I am trying to get this whole commune to function through the right hemisphere of the brain. And you are entrapped in the left hemisphere; that is creating all the trouble. Now you have come for a year – but that too is calculation. I wanted you to come forever, I wanted you to simply burn all your bridges, but your money-therapist mind would like to manage both worlds. Who knows? You would like to keep your home so that if you don’t like it here you can always go back there. You are moving in a rational way.
I wanted you to come back forever. Then there would be a good chance of you shifting from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Because every risk throws you toward the intuitive, toward the supralogical; every risk is helpful in transforming your being. But you have managed the risk, you have come for a year – that is a compromise. A year is a long time, so you feel contented that you are coming for at least one year. But one year is one year; it will be gone soon. And you know you have a home and you can always go back there. You have not yet got into my boat; you are still keeping your boat separate. There is nothing wrong in keeping it separate, but be conscious, be alert that you are doing it, that you are only half-heartedly with me.
And you are no longer young. What is left for you there in the West? Even the young people here don’t want to go back. For them the West has everything; what is there in the East? They are young, and the West can supply everything they would like to enjoy. But you have enjoyed your life, you have seen everything there; America is finished for you.
Take another look, a very dispassionate look, at your mind, and you will see what I am saying. You are still being calculating with me and a distance remains. You have to be absolutely noncalculating. You have to be like Mukta.
She comes from a very rich family. She is Greek, basically logical, but the day I told her, “Finish things there and come,” she said, “Okay.” And she finished everything and has never looked back. Even when her father was dying, and he was asking again and again for her to come, to see him at least, she was not willing to go – I had to push her. I simply had to order her to go, she was not willing to. She had completely forgotten that other world, as if it had never existed. That is the way to be with me, that is the way to become part of my heart, that is the way to melt into me. And with no expectation. She has not asked for a single experience, she has not asked for a single thing in all the years she has been here, and she has given everything to the commune.
Only such surrender, such trust, such unmotivated love, can bring the transformation that you long for. Your longing is right, but you will have to change your mind. Your mind is wrong, it is expert in things which are hindrances here.
The last question:
Osho,
I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me, but still, somewhere inside me, doubt lingers. What should I do to get rid of this doubt?
In the first place, why should you ask that she be faithful to you? It is from there that the doubt arises. The very desire that your wife should be faithful to you is the beginning of doubt. Why? Who are you that she should be faithful to you? She should be faithful to herself, you should be faithful to yourself.
That’s what love is. If you love the woman, you would like her to be faithful to herself because you would like her to be authentic. You would like her to be an individual in her own right. Why should you demand that she should be faithful to you? Who are you? – just a stranger. You need not be faithful to her, you have to be faithful to yourself.
This is my basic approach, it has to be understood well. Down the ages it has been said: be faithful to your husband, be faithful to your wife, be faithful to this and that. Nobody has told you: be faithful just to yourself. And that’s exactly what my message is: be faithful to yourself. Then doubt disappears.
Doubt is not good, it is a by-product of the desire that she should be faithful to you, the wrong desire. And how can you expect anybody to be faithful to you? In that very expectation, you are asking something so unnatural that doubt will arise. Who knows, she may come across a beautiful man, far more beautiful than you are. And you know there are far more beautiful men; fear, doubt, are bound to be there. Who knows, she may be getting fed up with you! In fact, there is every possibility that you are fed up with yourself. You know how ugly you are, how ugly your habits are – and she must have come to know that by now.
In the beginning things are different. When you meet a woman on the beach, just for a few hours things are different. The full moon creates great illusions, and the ocean, and the vibrant air, and the silence, and the night – and the unknown territory, the woman. She is unknown to you; you are unknown to her. You and she would both like to explore each other’s geographies; you are tremendously interested, so is she. But when you have traveled over the same geography so many times, the same contours… You know you are fed up with your wife, so deep down the doubt arises that she may be fed up with you.
Don’t ask for faithfulness, ask for freedom. Give freedom, so that you can have freedom. And if out of freedom you go on loving each other, it is beautiful. Out of freedom everything has beauty. But out of a certain duty, even if she remains faithful to you, it has no value. If she comes across a beautiful man on the road and a longing arises in her heart to know this man, to be with this man, she knows it is not right so she represses it. Then she has already gone away, she is no longer with you. You may be holding her hand in yours, but she is no longer with you. Her whole being has gone in that moment. She may not ever do anything, but you cannot control her fantasies, you cannot control her imagination. In her fantasies, in her imagination, in her dreams, she may be making love to other people. Who makes love to one’s own husband in a dream? Have you ever heard of such a foolish woman or foolish man? Have you ever made love to your own wife in a dream? One always makes love to other people’s wives. In dreams you are free and private: the magistrate is not there, the policeman is not there, the wife is not there, nobody is there. You are free again. You can fulfill the formalities just on the surface.
Doubt arises because you have the wrong expectations in the first place. I cannot help you to drop the doubt unless you drop the desire that your wife should be faithful to you. Drop that, and then how can doubt arise? If you can create doubt, then it would be a miracle.
We never go to the very root of a problem, we only go on changing the symptoms. My help is available to you only to go to the deep root of the problem, to the very foundation of it. Change it there!
And you say, “I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me.” How can you be so sure? You are just trying to convince yourself by using these words, “I am sure” – just using great words to hide something. You are not sure. See the cunningness of the mind. You are not sure, hence you are using the word sure: “I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me.” Just faithfulness won’t do? Utterly faithful? Is there some doubt? Why utterly faithful?
A circle is simply a circle. You cannot say that it is a complete circle, utterly circular. If it is a circle it is a circle. You cannot call it a perfect circle because if it is not perfect then it is not a circle, it must be something else. Watch, meditate on these words.
“But still,” you say, “I doubt. Somewhere doubt lingers.” You doubt your wife? Are you certain about your faithfulness toward her? Maybe that’s why the doubt arises. You may be fooling around, if not actually, then in your imagination. And then, naturally, the inference is there that your wife may be fooling around, if not actually, at least in her imagination. And the male ego is such that it cannot allow the wife to fool around, even in her imagination.
The story is told…
Mulla Nasruddin got married and spent a pleasant honeymoon with his bride. But one day he came to the office with a rather glum expression on his face. When a fellow clerk asked him what was bothering him he said, “Gee, I made a dumb mistake this morning. Getting out of bed, like an absent-minded jackass, I laid a ten rupee note down on the table.”
The other man consoled him. The wife won’t think anything of it, he assured him.
“That doesn’t bother me,” Mulla Nasruddin answered. “But she gave me three rupees change.”
Your own mind may be creating the doubt. When a beautiful woman passes by, does something happen to you or not? Only in two cases does nothing happen: either you are dead or you are enlightened – which both mean the same thing. Otherwise something is bound to happen. And then the suspicion comes that the same must be happening to your woman because she is as unenlightened as you are, and as alive as you are.
Maybe the doubt is there because you are not loving her as much as she would like. That happens to couples – how can you go on being at the same peak of love as you were in the beginning, at the honeymoon peak? One has to come down. Sooner or later one has to come down from the hills to ordinary, mundane life. Sooner or later one has to forget all the poetry, fantasies, romance. And then fear arises: maybe I am not loving her as much as I should, I am not taking as much care of her as I should? Maybe this will be an opportunity for her to move on to somebody else?
Look into yourself…
A husband comes home and finds his wife in bed with a man. He is furious and makes to leave at once.
The wife pleads, “Give me a moment to explain. This man came to my door an hour ago and asked for something to eat, so I gave him a sandwich. I noticed that his shoes were worn out. So I looked in your closet, found a pair that you haven’t worn for five years, and gave them to him to put on.
“Then I saw that his jacket was very torn, so I went back to your closet and found a jacket that you haven’t worn for eight years. When he took his old jacket off to put yours on, I saw that his shirt was falling to pieces, so I opened your bureau drawer and gave him a shirt that you haven’t worn for the past twelve years.
“Then as he was going out of the door he turned back and asked, ‘Is there anything else round here that your husband doesn’t use?’”
Your wife is not the question, the question is your own mind. Just look deep down – have you been with her? For how long have you not been with her? I don’t mean physically, I mean spiritually. Just remember: for how long have you not seen her face? For how long have you not looked into her eyes? Figure it out, and you will be surprised that for years you have taken her for granted – and that may be the cause of your doubt. Remember, problems are always part of the mind; go deep into them.
In the first place, don’t ask that she should be faithful to you; that is violent. Nobody has the right to ask anybody to be faithful toward them. Help her to be faithful toward herself.
And secondly, look inside your own being. Are you still in love with her? If you are, then doubt is not possible. The doubt is simply a reflection that your love has disappeared. Life has become a drag; you have started taking her for granted. Love is no longer there. Now it is only a hangover, hence the doubt. Bring the love back, bring the poetry back, bring the romance back. And those who are intelligent can bring it back every day. Every morning they can look at their wife, their husband, with fresh eyes.
Go on dying to past experiences, so that you can remain available to the present, fresh, young, utterly intelligent. And then life has a totally different flavor. Then these stupid things don’t arise in the mind at all.
Enough for today.
Osho,
What is receptivity?
Receptivity is a state of no-mind. When you are utterly empty of all thought, when your consciousness has no content, when the mirror reflects nothing, that is receptivity. Receptivity is the door to the divine. Drop the mind and be. In the mind, you are miles away from being. The more you think, the less you are; the less you think, the more you are. And if you don’t think at all, those are the moments when being asserts itself in its totality.
Receptivity simply means dropping the garbage that you go on carrying in your head. And there is so much utterly useless garbage there. The mind means the past. Now the past is no longer of any use; it has happened, and it is never going to happen again because in reality nothing ever repeats. Even when you think, feel, that this is the same situation, it is never the same. Each morning is a new morning, and each morning the sun that you encounter is a new sun. I am not talking about the material sun, I am talking about the beauty, the benediction, the blessing that it brings every day – it is so utterly new.
If you keep on carrying pictures of the past you will not be able to see the new. Your eyes will be covered by your experiences, expectations; and those eyes will not be able to see what confronts you. That’s how you go on missing life: the past becomes a barrier, encloses you, traps you into something that is no longer. You become encapsulated in the dead. And as you become more experienced, more grown-up, the shell of dead experience becomes thicker and thicker around you. You become more and more closed. Slowly, slowly, all the windows, all the doors, are closed. You exist, but you exist alienated, you exist uprooted; you are not in communion with life. You are not in communion with the trees and the stars and the mountains. You can’t be in communion because a Great Wall of China, your past, surrounds you.
When I say become receptive, I mean become a child again. Remember Jesus, who keeps on saying to his disciples: “Unless you are like small children you will not be able to enter my Kingdom of God.” What he is saying is exactly the meaning of receptivity. The child is receptive because he knows nothing – not knowing anything, he is receptive. The old man is not receptive because he knows too much – knowing too much, he is closed. He has to be reborn, he has to die to the past and become a child again. Not in the body, of course: the consciousness should always be like a child. Not childish, remember, but like a child – grown-up, mature, but innocent.
And that’s how one learns the truth that is presented to you every moment of your life; learns to know the guest who comes and knocks on your door every moment, day in, day out, year in, year out. But you are so surrounded by your own inner talk, by your own inner procession of thoughts, that you don’t hear the knock.
Do you hear the distant call of the cuckoo? Do you hear the birds chirping? That is receptivity. It is an existential state of silence, utter silence; nothing moves, nothing stirs, and yet you are not asleep, and yet you are alert, and yet you are absolutely aware. Where silence and awareness meet, mingle, and become one, there is receptivity. Receptivity is the most important religious quality.
Become a child. Start functioning from a state of not-knowing, and then silence will come of its own accord, and great awareness. And then life is a benediction.
The second question:
Osho,
Why are you so much against philosophy?
Philosophy means mind, philosophy means thinking, philosophy means going away from yourself. Philosophy is the art of losing yourself in thoughts, becoming identified with dreams. Hence I am against philosophy because I am all for religion.
You cannot be philosophical if you want to be religious; it is not possible. Religion is existential, philosophy is intellectual. Philosophy is round and about, religion is direct. Philosophy is thinking about things you don’t know. Religion is a knowing, not thinking. Philosophy depends on doubt because the more you can doubt, the more you can think. Doubt is the mother of thinking.
Religion is trust because the more you trust, the less need there is to think. In trust, thinking commits suicide – trust kills thinking. And when there is no thinking, and trust pulsates in your being, trust permeates every pore of your being, overwhelms you – you know what is.
Philosophy tries to know, but never does. Religion never tries to know, but knows. Philosophy is an exercise in futility, of futility. Yes, it talks about great things – freedom, love, God, meditation – but it only talks about them. The philosopher never meditates. He talks about meditation, he spins and weaves theories, hypotheses, inferences about meditation, but he never tastes anything of meditation, never meditates.
Hegel and Kant, Plato and Aristotle – they are philosophers. Buddha and Kabir – they are not. But Heraclitus and Plotinus are also not philosophers, even though in the philosophy books they are called philosophers. They are not. To use the word philosopher for them is not right, unless you change the whole meaning of the word. Aristotle and Heraclitus cannot both be called philosophers in the same sense. If Aristotle is a philosopher, then Heraclitus is not; if Heraclitus is a philosopher, then Aristotle is not.
I use a totally different word, philosia, instead of philosophy. Philosophy means, literally, linguistically, “love of knowledge.” Philosia means love of seeing, not only love of knowledge. Knowledge is not enough for the real inquirer, he wants to see. He does not want to contemplate God, he wants to encounter God. He wants to hold God’s hand in his own, he wants to hug and kiss God. He is not satisfied with the concept of God. How can the concept be of any help?
When you are thirsty, you cannot be satisfied by the formula H2O. Howsoever right it is – right or wrong, that is not my concern, that is irrelevant – the formula H2O cannot quench your thirst. You would like water, and whether you know about H2O or not does not matter. For millions of years man has been drinking water without knowing anything about H2O, and it has been perfectly satisfying. Philosophy talks about water, religion drinks.
Talking about food is utterly stupid. You have to prepare it, you have to eat it, you have to chew it, you have to digest it. Unless food becomes blood and bones and marrow, just talking about it is not going to help. Hence I am against philosophy.
A woman went to the doctor for a physical examination before her fourth marriage. During the course of her examination the doctor was startled to discover that she was still a virgin.
He asked for an explanation, “How can this be? You are preparing for your fourth marriage and yet you are still a virgin?”
“My first husband,” she replied, “I married for love, but as we were leaving the church to go on our honeymoon, there was a tragic automobile accident and he was killed.”
“My second husband,” she continued, “I married for money. He was very old, and so nothing ever happened between us.”
“My third husband,” she said, “was a great philosopher, and all he could ever do was sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it was going to be.”
Philosophy is pseudo-religion. Religion is true philosophy because religion leads you into the world of seeing, knowing, experiencing. In exactly that sense, Pythagoras coined the word philosophy. Sophy comes from sophia, meaning wisdom; philo means love: love for the ultimate wisdom – that was the meaning given by the man who coined the word philosophy. Pythagoras had traveled all over the world: he had been to India, he had conferred with the great mystics of the East, he had met seers, enlightened people; and it was he who coined the word.
The original meaning is beautiful, but it got lost. When the word fell into the hands of the Greeks it started to have a totally different meaning because the Greek mind is analytical, logical, rational. There are only two types of minds in the world: the Greek and the Hindu. The Greek mind is logical, the Hindu mind is illogical. The Greek mind is intellectual, the Hindu mind is intuitive. The Greek mind has given birth to philosophy and science, the Hindu mind has given birth to religion and poetry.
The Greek and the Hindu exist in each person because each person has two minds. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, one is Greek, the other is Hindu. The left side of your brain is Greek, the right side of your brain is Hindu. I am using the words Hindu and Greek metaphorically; don’t take it literally. Your left-side brain, which is joined with your right hand, calculates, thinks, analyzes. Your right-side brain, which is joined with your left hand, intuits, sings, loves.
The religious person goes through an inner conversion from the Greek to the Hindu. He moves from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Yoga and all other techniques of meditation are nothing but bridges to take you from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Once you have reached the right hemisphere, the world of poetry, the world of beauty, the world of love, opens its doors. Then God is. No proof is needed, one simply feels. It is a feeling. It is a feeling in the guts; for no other reason, one simply knows. Once you are centered in the right hemisphere of your brain you can use the left hemisphere as well, but now it will function as a servant. And the left hemisphere is a good servant but a bad master.
I am all for religion because, as I have seen, life is far, far, more than logic can comprehend. Life is so vast and your capacity to think is so tiny. Life can be envisaged only through love, not through logic.
You will have to melt into existence. You will have to dance with it, sing with it. Dancing with the trees in the wind, singing with the river in flood, being in communion with the clouds and the stars, you will know what God is – not by thinking about him.
The third question:
Osho,
I love you. In a magazine you said that you are not a person. What are you then?
This question is from Bindiya. She is a small girl, ten years old.
Bindiya, nobody is a person, although everybody believes that they are a person. Nobody can be a person because we are not separate. We are like waves in the ocean. No wave has a personality. Yes, it has a form, but it is not separate from the ocean. It is one with the ocean, you cannot separate it from the ocean. You cannot take the wave away from the ocean; it will disappear, it will not be a wave at all. It can only be a wave in the ocean, with the ocean. It is not separate, it is part of the dance of the ocean. It has no personality. Yes, it has a certain individuality because it is different from the other waves – it is unique – but it is not separate from existence. And it is not separate from the other waves either because they are all joined together in one ocean.
When I say I am not a person, I simply mean that I am not separate from existence. I am one with the trees and one with the rocks and one with the earth and one with the sky. I am a presence not a person, and so are you, and so is everybody else. To believe in the person is to believe in the ego. And I can understand from your question that this is how every child has been brought up, for centuries. Your question is relevant.
You say, “I love you. But if you are not a person, then how can I love you?” You have been told that you can only love people. The truth is just the opposite: you cannot love people. People can only fight, people can only be in conflict, because wherever there are two egos there is conflict, constant war; sometimes hot, sometimes cold, but war continues. Sometimes the warriors are tired so they maintain a certain peace, but whenever their energy comes back they start fighting again.
You can see it happening with all kinds of lovers – a continuous fight, a kind of intimate enmity, together and yet not together. Why is there this fighting? – because of the two egos. There are two people, and of course each person wants to dominate. The ego is a deep desire to dominate. The ego is a deep desire that says, “I am special, higher, bigger, greater than you.” And both are trying to dominate. Conflict is inevitable, necessary. Love cannot exist in such a state. Love exists between two presences, not between two people. Then there is no conflict; then there is great harmony, melody, music, rhythm. When there are no more egos and both feel at one with existence, they can be at one with each other. Love is possible only when you disappear. I have disappeared, and now my work here is to help you disappear too.
You ask me, “Then what are you?” I am not a person, I am a presence. I am a nobody. I am a kind of nothingness, emptiness. The host has disappeared, and the disappearance of the host has made the guest appear. I am not, godliness is. I cannot love you, but I am love. You can partake of me as much as you like, you can drink of me as much as you like. I cannot be in a love relationship with you because relationships only exist between egos.
But I can share. It will be a relating, not a relationship. It will not be static, it will be a flow. And it will have no motivation to it: I love you because I am love. There is no motivation, no desire to get anything back from you. It is enough that you accepted my love.
And I know this time… Two days ago, when Bindiya came to see me – she had come back after a long time away – I could see great love in her eyes. I had to call her close, I had to hold her face in my hands and pour my love into her eyes. She is a small sannyasin, but because she is small she is still capable of receiving. Because she is small, still uncontaminated, still unpolluted, still uncorrupted, something natural is still there.
And you are fortunate, Bindiya, that you have become a sannyasin so early – now nobody will be able to corrupt you. Now you will be able to protect yourself against this corrupt society, against all kinds of corruptions. The church corrupts, the state corrupts, the educational system corrupts. You have become a sannyasin at the right time. You will be able to see all the games that are being played around you. You will become more and more intelligent, more and more loving, and less and less a person.
Those who are really with me are on the way to disappearing, evaporating. Just as in the early morning sun the dewdrops start disappearing, that is the way for the disciple to disappear – when he is in a close love relationship with the master.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Why did Friedrich Nietzsche declare that God is dead?
He had to declare it because God was dead. The God that had been worshipped for thousands of years was dead. Not the real God, but the God that the human mind had created – the God that was in the temples and the mosques and the churches and the synagogues, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Vedas. Man had outgrown those concepts.
Nietzsche simply declared a fact. Of course, he was as shocked by it as everybody else. He himself was not ready to accept it. In fact, for his whole life he struggled to accept it. He tried to convince himself that God was really dead by argument, but it was difficult for the poor man. It would have been difficult for anybody. And he was a man of steel; he was no ordinary man, he was a really strong man, but still it was too much. He suffered tremendously because he was the first to declare it, and to be a pioneer is always dangerous. He had a nervous breakdown and the last part of his life was spent in a state of madness. He risked much for his declaration.
In his great book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, comes a parable…
“God is dead” is now almost a cliché. But when Nietzsche first used that phrase it was like an earthquake, a thunderbolt from the skies – it shattered man’s illusions. But remember, it is only half of his message, the other half has almost been forgotten. He declared “God is dead” because he wanted to declare the coming of a new man. He called the new man the “overman” or “superman.” He said that if God continues to live in the old way, man cannot assert himself in total freedom. Man cannot grow, man cannot mature; he will always remain dependent on a father figure. This is the first half of the message: God as the great father is dead. The other half is: now be on your own, stand on your own; now become mature. Enough of this dependence, enough of this stupid praying, enough of these rituals. Stop these games.
Man has been playing many, many, games in the name of God. And priests have been exploiting man in the name of God. Nietzsche put an end to all that; the world has never been the same again. Although Nietzsche suffered much for his declaration, he served humanity in a tremendous way. He heralded a new age.
The old God being dead is a very basic requirement for the new God to appear; a new vision of God more in harmony with modern, contemporary consciousness. The God of the Old Testament was perfectly right for the people who invented him, perfectly right for the people Moses was talking to; he used a language they understood. Now thousands of years have passed. God needs new clothes, but man goes on and on putting old, rotten clothes on him. God is not dead. God cannot be dead. But the old concept is dead.
Zarathustra is entrusted by Nietzsche with the task of conveying the news of God’s death to the world. He starts out on his journey and meets an old hermit, a saint. The saint tells Zarathustra that he loves God, but not man because man is imperfect. Zarathustra replies that he loves man. Then he asks the saint what he is doing in the forest.
The saint replies, “I make songs and sing them. And when I make songs I laugh, cry, and hum. Thus I praise God.”
The two separate, laughing like young boys. But when Zarathustra is alone again he wonders to himself, “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of it, that God is dead!”
The old saint says that he loves God, not man because man is imperfect. But Zarathustra says that he loves man, and that God is dead: this is going to be the new religion.
But it has not yet become a reality, even though a hundred years have passed since Nietzsche’s declaration, and it has spread all over the world like wildfire. The destructive part has happened, but not yet the creative part: Nietzsche’s declaration of the superman.
Man has to be loved because it is only through the nourishment of love that man can grow. Man has to know that he is alone, and he has to know that he is dependent on his own resources, not on some heavenly father. Once man takes responsibility, total responsibility, onto his own shoulders, a great revolution is bound to happen because man has an infinite potential for growth. But, by remaining dependent on some God, he has become completely oblivious to his potential, to his future, to his growth.
It is good that God has been discarded. Now you have to take your life in your own hands. You have to declare your freedom because God is dead, because there is nobody higher than you. And the beauty of it is, if you become responsible, responsible for yourself, if you declare your freedom, life will take a new plunge into the depths of the unknown. If you accept that now you have to seek and search your way, now you have to grope for it on your own, life will again become an adventure. Life will again be an ecstatic discovery of new facts, new truths, of new territories, of new peaks of joy. And it is only by becoming an adventurer that you will come upon the new face of God – which will be far truer than the old because it will be far more mature than the old.
Nietzsche remained in difficulty. On the one hand he continued fighting with the old God, and on the other hand, in moments when he was not so strong, he became scared.
Zarathustra says:
Away!
He himself fled
My last, only companion,
My great enemy,
My unknown,
My hangman-god!
No! Do come back
With all thy tortures!
To the last of all that are lonely
Oh, come back!
All my tear-streams run
Their course to thee;
And my heart’s final flame –
Flares up for thee!
Oh, come back,
My unknown god! My pain!
My last – happiness!
These words look almost insane: “My unknown god! My pain! My last happiness! Ah, come back!”
Nietzsche remained divided, split, schizophrenic. One part of him was still afraid – maybe he was wrong, maybe God was still alive. Who could know? How could he be certain about such a profound matter? And he was the first to say it, so naturally he was scared. He wanted to get rid of the enemy. He called God “the enemy,” the enemy of man, because God, man’s so-called God, had been like a rock on man’s chest.
I am not talking about the God of Buddha and Mahavira and Zarathustra and Jesus and Moses, no. I am talking about the God of the common masses, of the mob. Nietzsche also is talking about the mob. The God of the crowds is an ugly concept: it says much about man’s weaknesses, but nothing about the truth of existence. When you pray on your knees you simply show your weakness, not that you know what prayer is. When you go to the temple, you go to demand something, to beg for something. You simply show your beggarliness, it has nothing to do with God. Very few people have known the truth of God.
If Nietzsche had met Buddha, Buddha would have agreed with him perfectly, and yet disagreed. He would have said, “You are right: God is dead, the God of the crowds. But there is another vision, the vision of the enlightened ones; their God is not a person, their God is life in its essence. How can life be dead? The trees are still green, the birds are still singing, the sun is still there, the night still becomes poetry, love still happens. How can God be dead?”
God as existence can never be dead. But God as a concept has to die many times. Each time man grows, the old concept has to be dropped. And the old has been dropped. But the problem with the contemporary mind is that although the old has been dropped, man has not yet become rooted in his own being. Only half of Nietzsche’s declaration has been fulfilled; the other half is missing. Hence, there is great meaninglessness all over the world. Everybody is feeling a kind of dullness, sadness, frustration. Everybody is living nothing but a kind of long, drawn-out, misery, anxiety, anguish. Life has become synonymous with a kind of agony. All that you can do is to use pain killers, tranquilizers; somehow pull yourself together until death comes and you can rest forever.
Sigmund Freud said that man can never be happy. At the most we can reduce his unhappiness a little bit. At the most we can make him normally unhappy. That is the goal of psychoanalysis: to make people normally unhappy, to help them not to become abnormally unhappy. What kind of goal is this? But this is what has happened, and Freud was simply stating a fact. He had looked at modern man, looked into the unconscious of modern man. He was the one who looked the deepest into the conscious and the unconscious mind. How could he lie? He had to say the truth. He came to understand that, when God dies, it is impossible for happiness to happen if man has not yet searched for another vision, for another goal, for another star – so that the journey can start again, the journey of meaning and significance. Hence, without God, how can man ever be happy? – at the most, man can be normally unhappy.
Freud’s conclusion is part of Nietzsche’s declaration. My work here consists of doing the other half, hence I don’t talk much about God. Even if atheists come and want to become sannyasins, I accept them with an open heart; even if they are a little suspicious of why I am accepting them. They say, “We are atheists. We don’t believe in God. Are you still ready to accept us as sannyasins? Can we still meditate?”
And I say to them, you are the people who can meditate. People who believe in the old God cannot meditate, they depend too much on God, they are never grown-up people. Meditation needs a certain growth. You can meditate – God is not needed. God is not a prerequisite for meditation, but when you meditate, slowly, slowly, you become aware of God. God is the ultimate revelation, not the prerequisite. God is not a condition of becoming a sannyasin. God is the ultimate realization of sannyas.
And you will not then be angry with Nietzsche, remember, because you will know that what he was saying is also true – he was talking about the concept of God. Moses’s concept of God is certainly dead. When Moses died, his concept of God died. In fact, it lived too long; for three thousand years continuously it prevailed. That simply shows the stupidity of humanity – otherwise the moment an enlightened person leaves the world, his concept of God will also disappear. But if we could learn something from the enlightened person, we could go ahead, further ahead. We could stand on the shoulders of the enlightened person and be able to look further ahead than him. We could create better visions of God, beautiful visions of God. We would come closer and closer to the truth.
And remember, one can only come closer and closer to the truth. The moment you come absolutely to the truth, you disappear. Then only truth is. Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” I say: I am dead and God is alive, very alive. That’s what happens if you go on meditating: one day you suddenly find that you are not, only God is.
The fifth question:
Osho,
How can I get back the will to live?
Wolfgang, you are suffering from the ancient German disease, “the will to live,” “the will to power,” will and will and will. You have fallen into the wrong company here. Either escape or we are going to de-Germanize you because here the message is surrender, not will.
Listening to me, you must have been misunderstanding me. I am not teaching you the will to live. The will to live is already there, otherwise how would you be living? You are alive. That’s enough proof that the will to live is there. If the will to live leaves you, you will not breathe even a single breath more. Who will breathe? For what? If the will to live leaves, your breath will leave you immediately. You are still breathing; the will to live is there. The will to live is not something that has to be learned, it is inborn.
What has to be learned is the will to surrender. That is not inborn, that has to be learned. The will to live is a natural phenomenon, instinctive. The will to die is not instinctive; one has to learn it with great effort. It needs tremendous courage to learn it, even to think of it. Sannyas is the will to die – so that God can live, so that you disappear, so that you are no longer a hindrance, so that you are no longer a rock in his way. But you must be misunderstanding me. I am saying one thing, you are hearing another. The German screen must be misinterpreting.
A fat man was sitting on his front steps, drinking a can of beer, when a busybody spinster from down the street began to berate him for his appearance.
“What a disgusting sight,” she said. “If that belly was on a woman, I’d swear she was pregnant.”
To which the man simply smiled and replied, “Madam, it was and she is.”
It is always possible to understand things in your own way. Words are very flexible. Words don’t have any fixed meaning; they cannot have. The meaning is always provided by you. When I say something, the moment it reaches you it changes its color. You immediately dye it your own color.
But one thing I must make you aware of, is that if you want to learn the will to live, you are in the wrong place. Here, I am teaching you how to die – although one who is ready to die attains to eternal life, but that is another matter. That is something which happens as a consequence and cannot be used as a motive. You are in the wrong place.
The bank robbers arrived just before closing time, and promptly ordered the few remaining depositors, tellers, clerks and guards to disrobe and lie face down behind the counter. One nervous blonde pulled off her clothes and lay down on the floor, facing upward.
“Turn over, Mabel,” whispered the girl lying beside her. “This is a stick up, not an office party.”
You have to beware of where you are. You are not listening to Friedrich Nietzsche, “the will to power.” And you are not listening to Adolf Hitler either. You are in a totally different dimension.
I teach you how to die because that is the only way that you can attain eternal life. When the seed dies in the soil, the sprout arrives. And when the drop disappears in the ocean, it becomes the ocean. I teach you crucifixion because resurrection follows; it inevitably follows. I cannot promise you anything because if you crucify yourself with the motive that you will be resurrected, then it will not happen.
You have to be unmotivated in the world of religion. You have to move for the sheer joy of it and for nothing else. You have to not be result oriented, and that is the most difficult thing for the modern mind to do, to not be result oriented. Whatsoever we do, we always do it to get something else. Everything is a means and has to be used to some end. And what I am teaching here is the end itself; it is not a means to anything else. Each moment is an end unto itself. Enjoy it, die into it, disappear into it, and then something miraculous happens: great eternal life descends into you. You will be surprised because that was not your motivation.
I don’t talk about what is going to happen because that can create disturbance in your mind; you can become too interested in it. I only talk about what you have to do, I leave the outcome to the future. It will happen, I know it is bound to happen. I don’t tell the seeds, “Die so that you can become trees,” because if the seeds are too interested in becoming trees they will not be able to die at all. If the dewdrop is too interested in becoming the ocean, it will become very hesitant, afraid to risk dropping into the ocean: “Who knows?” I persuade the dewdrop to disappear, that disappearance is a benediction.
Disappear, drop yourself into the ocean, because dropping, and dying into the ocean, is the greatest orgasmic joy in itself. And if I can persuade the dewdrop to do this, it is going to become the ocean. That will be a surprise, a gift from the unknown.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I have been asking this question of myself in myriad ways for several weeks now; watching it change and shrink as witnessing brings insights, yet leaves the essence untouched.
I left last year, overflowing with the experience of your compassion, love, and understanding, and with a deep sense of love and personal connection to you. Your books and tapes spoke your parting words, “Hurry back,” to me, and my focus on returning never wavered, only deepened, leaving all else pointless.
Now I am here, and I feel lost and disoriented and alien. Where I used to pulsate with you in the magic of your discourse, I now listen to you with dry eyes. They are quite wet as I write this.
Where is the love and connection I felt for you as my master, such an incredible being, that so penetrated me and my life for the last year and a half? What is happening?
Sharda, it is natural, it is expected. The last time you were here, you were here without any expectations. You were simply here, with no motivation. You enjoyed being in my presence. You were open, available, because you were functioning from a state of not-knowing.
Now, coming back, it is not the same thing. I am the same, the whole situation is the same, but you are not the same: now you are functioning out of a state of knowing. You are now expecting things which you were not expecting the first time.
This happens to almost everybody. The first time you come you are very innocent. My love simply reaches you, there is no barrier. My compassion overwhelms you. You cannot believe it, it is unbelievable, it is too much. Then you go back with all those memories rambling through your mind. Now those memories start becoming desires. Now those memories say to you, “Go back. Much more is going to happen. If the first time it happened so deeply, this time it will happen even more deeply. The first time you were just an amateur, now you are an adept. So much more is going to happen.” For all the months that you have been away, you have been dreaming, desiring, fantasizing. Now you are here with all these fantasies, desires, expectations – and your eyes are dry, and nothing is happening.
You have to drop your expectations. You have to become innocent again. You have to start functioning from not-knowing again, otherwise you will be unnecessarily creating a hell for yourself. And it will be an absolutely private hell because others, just sitting by your side, are in heaven.
But don’t be worried, this is absolutely normal and natural. This happens to everybody, once at least. If you are intelligent it happens only once. If you are not intelligent it happens many times; each time you leave and come back, you do the same foolish thing.
I cannot fulfill your expectations, I cannot fulfill your fantasies, I cannot fulfill your desires. I can fulfill you, but not your mind. You have brought a big mind with you. It will be difficult, hard to drop it, but there is no other way. You will have to drop it, and the sooner you drop it the better.
Sharda is a very intellectual woman, very clever, calculating, logical, rational. She functions as a money therapist in the West. She helps people to get more money, to earn more, to create money, to attract money toward themselves. So you can understand that she has a certain type of very, very, intellectual mind. She is not intuitive. It was a miracle that the first time she was here she fell in love. Money therapists are not expected to fall in love. I was surprised also. Now the money therapist is back again, and with ideas about how to have more – more of those experiences that happened the last time; how to attract those same spaces again.
That is creating trouble for you. You have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and paradise is lost. Please vomit it – just throw it out of your system. When you are here, be just like an innocent child, and not just with me – it is very easy to be innocent with me; you have to be innocent with the commune too. Put aside your knowledge, put aside all your expertise about money.
The commune also functions through money – there is no other way, it has to function – but it moves in a very illogical way. That too creates problems for Sharda. With her expert eye, she cannot believe how things are happening; they can be done better, they can be done more methodologically. But with me, everything always remains in chaos. I love it. I never allow anything to settle because once things settle people start dying, people start becoming zombies – so nothing is ever settled. I go on separating couples, I go on changing their rooms, their jobs – using every possible way to unsettle them.
I never allow you a single moment of respite, rest, so you can never say “Now I have arrived.” The moment you say “I have arrived” something will be created for you so that you have to gather up your luggage and move.
Sharda’s mind is bound to be in great difficulty; I can understand. I don’t know anything about money, although money comes. I am not a money therapist, but whenever money is needed, money comes; somebody simply comes with the money. And this has been so my whole life. I don’t have a single rupee – you can see, I don’t even have pockets. I have lived for many, many years without money. And I have not lived like a beggar, that is not my way. I live like an emperor, and without money. What Buddha could never manage to do, I am managing. He was an emperor; at that time he could not manage to live with the freedom of a beggar. To live with the freedom of a beggar he had to leave his kingdom. Then he was free, but he had to live like a beggar, begging.
I am living in absolute freedom and yet I am not living like a beggar. I don’t go outside my room, but things happen. I cannot tell you the secret; in fact there isn’t one. I don’t know myself how it happens. But once you disappear, God takes over. Then it is his responsibility and his worry. I never worry about anything, and I don’t think of anything as my responsibility. If this commune grows, good; if it disappears, very good. It doesn’t matter either way.
But I can understand Sharda’s mind; she must be in difficulty. With good wishes, good intentions, she wants to help the commune; but then there is a conflict because the approach of this commune is not scientific toward anything. It is a totally different approach – paradoxical, illogical, intuitive.
I am trying to get this whole commune to function through the right hemisphere of the brain. And you are entrapped in the left hemisphere; that is creating all the trouble. Now you have come for a year – but that too is calculation. I wanted you to come forever, I wanted you to simply burn all your bridges, but your money-therapist mind would like to manage both worlds. Who knows? You would like to keep your home so that if you don’t like it here you can always go back there. You are moving in a rational way.
I wanted you to come back forever. Then there would be a good chance of you shifting from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Because every risk throws you toward the intuitive, toward the supralogical; every risk is helpful in transforming your being. But you have managed the risk, you have come for a year – that is a compromise. A year is a long time, so you feel contented that you are coming for at least one year. But one year is one year; it will be gone soon. And you know you have a home and you can always go back there. You have not yet got into my boat; you are still keeping your boat separate. There is nothing wrong in keeping it separate, but be conscious, be alert that you are doing it, that you are only half-heartedly with me.
And you are no longer young. What is left for you there in the West? Even the young people here don’t want to go back. For them the West has everything; what is there in the East? They are young, and the West can supply everything they would like to enjoy. But you have enjoyed your life, you have seen everything there; America is finished for you.
Take another look, a very dispassionate look, at your mind, and you will see what I am saying. You are still being calculating with me and a distance remains. You have to be absolutely noncalculating. You have to be like Mukta.
She comes from a very rich family. She is Greek, basically logical, but the day I told her, “Finish things there and come,” she said, “Okay.” And she finished everything and has never looked back. Even when her father was dying, and he was asking again and again for her to come, to see him at least, she was not willing to go – I had to push her. I simply had to order her to go, she was not willing to. She had completely forgotten that other world, as if it had never existed. That is the way to be with me, that is the way to become part of my heart, that is the way to melt into me. And with no expectation. She has not asked for a single experience, she has not asked for a single thing in all the years she has been here, and she has given everything to the commune.
Only such surrender, such trust, such unmotivated love, can bring the transformation that you long for. Your longing is right, but you will have to change your mind. Your mind is wrong, it is expert in things which are hindrances here.
The last question:
Osho,
I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me, but still, somewhere inside me, doubt lingers. What should I do to get rid of this doubt?
In the first place, why should you ask that she be faithful to you? It is from there that the doubt arises. The very desire that your wife should be faithful to you is the beginning of doubt. Why? Who are you that she should be faithful to you? She should be faithful to herself, you should be faithful to yourself.
That’s what love is. If you love the woman, you would like her to be faithful to herself because you would like her to be authentic. You would like her to be an individual in her own right. Why should you demand that she should be faithful to you? Who are you? – just a stranger. You need not be faithful to her, you have to be faithful to yourself.
This is my basic approach, it has to be understood well. Down the ages it has been said: be faithful to your husband, be faithful to your wife, be faithful to this and that. Nobody has told you: be faithful just to yourself. And that’s exactly what my message is: be faithful to yourself. Then doubt disappears.
Doubt is not good, it is a by-product of the desire that she should be faithful to you, the wrong desire. And how can you expect anybody to be faithful to you? In that very expectation, you are asking something so unnatural that doubt will arise. Who knows, she may come across a beautiful man, far more beautiful than you are. And you know there are far more beautiful men; fear, doubt, are bound to be there. Who knows, she may be getting fed up with you! In fact, there is every possibility that you are fed up with yourself. You know how ugly you are, how ugly your habits are – and she must have come to know that by now.
In the beginning things are different. When you meet a woman on the beach, just for a few hours things are different. The full moon creates great illusions, and the ocean, and the vibrant air, and the silence, and the night – and the unknown territory, the woman. She is unknown to you; you are unknown to her. You and she would both like to explore each other’s geographies; you are tremendously interested, so is she. But when you have traveled over the same geography so many times, the same contours… You know you are fed up with your wife, so deep down the doubt arises that she may be fed up with you.
Don’t ask for faithfulness, ask for freedom. Give freedom, so that you can have freedom. And if out of freedom you go on loving each other, it is beautiful. Out of freedom everything has beauty. But out of a certain duty, even if she remains faithful to you, it has no value. If she comes across a beautiful man on the road and a longing arises in her heart to know this man, to be with this man, she knows it is not right so she represses it. Then she has already gone away, she is no longer with you. You may be holding her hand in yours, but she is no longer with you. Her whole being has gone in that moment. She may not ever do anything, but you cannot control her fantasies, you cannot control her imagination. In her fantasies, in her imagination, in her dreams, she may be making love to other people. Who makes love to one’s own husband in a dream? Have you ever heard of such a foolish woman or foolish man? Have you ever made love to your own wife in a dream? One always makes love to other people’s wives. In dreams you are free and private: the magistrate is not there, the policeman is not there, the wife is not there, nobody is there. You are free again. You can fulfill the formalities just on the surface.
Doubt arises because you have the wrong expectations in the first place. I cannot help you to drop the doubt unless you drop the desire that your wife should be faithful to you. Drop that, and then how can doubt arise? If you can create doubt, then it would be a miracle.
We never go to the very root of a problem, we only go on changing the symptoms. My help is available to you only to go to the deep root of the problem, to the very foundation of it. Change it there!
And you say, “I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me.” How can you be so sure? You are just trying to convince yourself by using these words, “I am sure” – just using great words to hide something. You are not sure. See the cunningness of the mind. You are not sure, hence you are using the word sure: “I know for sure that my wife is utterly faithful to me.” Just faithfulness won’t do? Utterly faithful? Is there some doubt? Why utterly faithful?
A circle is simply a circle. You cannot say that it is a complete circle, utterly circular. If it is a circle it is a circle. You cannot call it a perfect circle because if it is not perfect then it is not a circle, it must be something else. Watch, meditate on these words.
“But still,” you say, “I doubt. Somewhere doubt lingers.” You doubt your wife? Are you certain about your faithfulness toward her? Maybe that’s why the doubt arises. You may be fooling around, if not actually, then in your imagination. And then, naturally, the inference is there that your wife may be fooling around, if not actually, at least in her imagination. And the male ego is such that it cannot allow the wife to fool around, even in her imagination.
The story is told…
Mulla Nasruddin got married and spent a pleasant honeymoon with his bride. But one day he came to the office with a rather glum expression on his face. When a fellow clerk asked him what was bothering him he said, “Gee, I made a dumb mistake this morning. Getting out of bed, like an absent-minded jackass, I laid a ten rupee note down on the table.”
The other man consoled him. The wife won’t think anything of it, he assured him.
“That doesn’t bother me,” Mulla Nasruddin answered. “But she gave me three rupees change.”
Your own mind may be creating the doubt. When a beautiful woman passes by, does something happen to you or not? Only in two cases does nothing happen: either you are dead or you are enlightened – which both mean the same thing. Otherwise something is bound to happen. And then the suspicion comes that the same must be happening to your woman because she is as unenlightened as you are, and as alive as you are.
Maybe the doubt is there because you are not loving her as much as she would like. That happens to couples – how can you go on being at the same peak of love as you were in the beginning, at the honeymoon peak? One has to come down. Sooner or later one has to come down from the hills to ordinary, mundane life. Sooner or later one has to forget all the poetry, fantasies, romance. And then fear arises: maybe I am not loving her as much as I should, I am not taking as much care of her as I should? Maybe this will be an opportunity for her to move on to somebody else?
Look into yourself…
A husband comes home and finds his wife in bed with a man. He is furious and makes to leave at once.
The wife pleads, “Give me a moment to explain. This man came to my door an hour ago and asked for something to eat, so I gave him a sandwich. I noticed that his shoes were worn out. So I looked in your closet, found a pair that you haven’t worn for five years, and gave them to him to put on.
“Then I saw that his jacket was very torn, so I went back to your closet and found a jacket that you haven’t worn for eight years. When he took his old jacket off to put yours on, I saw that his shirt was falling to pieces, so I opened your bureau drawer and gave him a shirt that you haven’t worn for the past twelve years.
“Then as he was going out of the door he turned back and asked, ‘Is there anything else round here that your husband doesn’t use?’”
Your wife is not the question, the question is your own mind. Just look deep down – have you been with her? For how long have you not been with her? I don’t mean physically, I mean spiritually. Just remember: for how long have you not seen her face? For how long have you not looked into her eyes? Figure it out, and you will be surprised that for years you have taken her for granted – and that may be the cause of your doubt. Remember, problems are always part of the mind; go deep into them.
In the first place, don’t ask that she should be faithful to you; that is violent. Nobody has the right to ask anybody to be faithful toward them. Help her to be faithful toward herself.
And secondly, look inside your own being. Are you still in love with her? If you are, then doubt is not possible. The doubt is simply a reflection that your love has disappeared. Life has become a drag; you have started taking her for granted. Love is no longer there. Now it is only a hangover, hence the doubt. Bring the love back, bring the poetry back, bring the romance back. And those who are intelligent can bring it back every day. Every morning they can look at their wife, their husband, with fresh eyes.
Go on dying to past experiences, so that you can remain available to the present, fresh, young, utterly intelligent. And then life has a totally different flavor. Then these stupid things don’t arise in the mind at all.
Enough for today.