Osho,
Is it enough to go to your discourses without understanding the words? My Japanese girlfriend does not speak any English but enjoyed your lectures very much.
She wrote to me that she will not learn English because it is too dangerous for her to understand what you say. Can the non-verbal communication between master and disciple really be the ultimate, or should I develop all the abilities that existence gave me and learn English?
Anand Alok, the real communion between the master and the disciple is certainly not through words. On the contrary, words are hindrances. Your Japanese girlfriend is absolutely right. If she can enjoy just being in my presence, there is no need to learn the language.
She is also right that it is dangerous to understand me through words – dangerous for two reasons. The more basic reason is that she will start connecting with me through the mind, and that is no connection. That is just a false and pseudo supplement, substitute for the authentic connection that is heart to heart. And secondly, it is true that what I am saying is dangerous, because it may disturb her conditionings, it may disturb her prejudices, it may disturb her completely. But tell her to remember that a heart-to-heart communion is far more dangerous than any communion between minds, because your mind can have safety measures, defenses.
The heart is open; there are no safety measures, no defenses. Your mind may interpret me according to your prejudices – then it need not be disturbed – but your heart will simply take me in without any interpretation on its own part. She has chosen the more dangerous path, but the more sincere, more authentic and the most shortcut.
So don’t disturb her and force her to learn the language. Language has to be forgotten. You have to forget, you have to unlearn all that you know. In the space of unlearning your innocence starts growing. I speak just to help you to understand my silent gaps. But what I am really doing is in the silences – not through the words, but between the words. Words are just toys that I am giving to your mind to play with. Silence is really the sword that penetrates directly into your heart; it brings transformation.
Mind is very reluctant to change, very stubborn in changing. It has so much investment in its past that it is almost blind to the future possibilities. The heart has no past, it has only the present and an opening into the future. It longs for the unknown, for the mysterious. It is not satisfied with the mundane, it is not satisfied with money or power, or prestige. Its longing is for something beyond the ordinary, beyond ambitions, because only beyond ambitions is the land of the lotus paradise.
Your Japanese girlfriend has a deeper understanding than you have. In fact, it is a strange coincidence that you are Chinese.
The whole philosophy of meditation first reached China from India, but China already had its own ideas. Confucius was a very mundane philosopher, and he was the dominant figure in China, the most respected person – because he was the most moralistic, puritan. He created all kinds of disciplines for the development of the personality. And meditation is a demolishing of the personality.
There was a great clash between meditation and Confucian philosophy, which was predominant in China. It was a long struggle. There was a small stream of Tao – Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu – but it was a very small stream. It had no national impact because the people who were impressed by Confucius remained in their heads, and Tao was the philosophy of the heart.
So when Buddhist monks reached China from India, there was immediately a deep communion between them and the small Taoist stream. Just looking into each other’s eyes they understood, language was not a barrier.
But with Confucius there was a continuous argument for centuries. And it is a strange fact that Confucius has won, finally, because the communism that now prevails over China is an extension of Confucius. Mao is a Confucian, and they have destroyed all the Taoist monasteries; their scriptures; they have forced the Taoist meditators to go to the fields and work there.
China has gone against Lao Tzu, who was its greatest son. It has gone with Confucius, who is just as ordinary as Manu in India – just a social thinker, creating ways for having a better culture, better civilization, without thinking at all about consciousness. The West has many philosophers of the same quality.
Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are rare flowers, exotic…but they were the people who understood Bodhidharma without a single word being said to them. They were the people who simply accepted Gautam Buddha and his immense contribution of meditation. But China has slipped out of the Taoist world of non-verbal, non-linguistic silence.
But in Japan things were different. When the philosophy of meditation reached Japan, it already had a religion, Shinto – very primitive, without any great philosophy or any great arguments. People were only formally related to it; their hearts were not dancing with it. It was out of date, there was a vacuum. They needed something to fill the vacuum, and then came the philosophy of meditation. And by now it was even richer than it was when it had reached China, because Gautam Buddha’s approach to life was tremendously enhanced and enriched by the Taoist approach.
They melted into each other, they made each other brighter, lovelier, deeper, higher. In fact it was a miracle. Meditation has never reached to such heights as when Gautam Buddha and Lao Tzu’s philosophies met in an eternal communion.
What reached Japan was Gautam Buddha and Lao Tzu both together. China had made Gautam Buddha’s approach more refined, had given it new dimensions, made it more pure. Japan was fortunate that it was in a state of vacuum. It simply absorbed this new philosophy without any resistance. Hence dhyan, or meditation, came to the highest flowering in Japan.
The flowering of Zen has left even the original master, Gautam Buddha, far behind. It has also left Lao Tzu far behind. It went on improving because there was no resistance, no argument against it, nobody to fight with it. Everybody was immediately in an agreeable receptivity. Zen became such a flowering that nothing like it has happened anywhere in the world.
Anand Alok you have been with me for many years, but your foundation is Confucian. And on top of it, you are interested in communism too. Both these together are preventing you from growing. Springs come and go but your meditation has not reached to the peak, although you love me, and slowly, slowly you have started loving meditation too. But you have barriers within you: Confucius and Karl Marx and Mao Zedong. And these are big boulders, preventing the whole passage, not allowing your consciousness to reach to its ultimate heights.
Your girlfriend is in a far more blessed state – please don’t disturb her. Let her enjoy a silent communion. It is the ultimate as far as communion is concerned.
She is fortunate that she does not understand the English language; hence her mind cannot interfere. She can understand, but not what I am saying. She can feel me, but not the meaning of my words. I am to her just a presence which makes her silent, which helps her to be more conscious, and she is absolutely right not to learn the language, because she is growing. Why bother about what I am saying? If you can understand me, what I am, there is no point in understanding what I am saying.
If you can also forget Confucius and Karl Marx and Mao Zedong-Tung, it will be a great step toward Gautam Buddha, toward Lao Tzu, toward me – and in the final analysis, toward yourself.

“You must help me, doctor,” said Hymie to his psychiatrist. “I can’t remember anything for more than a few minutes. It is driving me crazy.”
The psychiatrist asked gently, “How long have you had the problem?”
Hymie paused, then said thoughtfully, “What problem?”

Mind is nothing but memory, and memory is not understanding. This has to become as clear as possible to you. Memory is a totally separate mechanism; even a very stupid person can have a very good memory. Intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. More often, the intelligent people don’t have good memories. Their whole energy is involved in intelligence. The mechanism of memory does not get enough nourishment. But a person who has no intelligence, all his energies go into his memory systems, and there have been such strange cases of memory, almost unbelievable, but the people were simply idiots.
It happened in the time of the emperor Akbar, in India, and it happened again in the times of a British governor-general, Curzon. The Curzon case is very famous, and perhaps there has never been such a complicated examination of a villager’s memory, who had no intelligence. And Curzon is close to us, and every detail has been written about it.
He heard that in Rajasthan there was a villager whose memory was phenomenal, almost inconceivable. Curzon became so intrigued that finally he invited the villager to his court. The villager only understood his local language, Rajasthani; it is a dialect of Hindi. He had no other education, he had no knowledge of any other language, and Curzon, with his political cunningness, made such an arrangement that it was almost certain that the man would fail.
The arrangement was this: He called the man into his court, where he had to encounter thirty people, and these thirty people all spoke different languages. Each person – this was the process, the procedure – each person was going to say one sentence in his language.
The man will go to the first person and he will say the first word of a sentence, and then there will be a big gong struck just to get the mind of the villager disturbed. Then he will move to the second person, who will say the first word of his sentence. In this way he will go on moving – one round. On the second round, the first person will give the second word of his sentence. And each time a word is given a very loud gong is struck.
And he went on and on; he had almost to take twelve rounds and then he was asked to repeat each sentence. He knew none of the languages, and the way the sentences were given to him was a very strange and cunning device: One word each time, then twenty-nine words of other languages; then he will get the second word of the first language. Again twenty-nine words of other languages, then he will get the third word. The man, to the amazement of all, repeated all thirty sentences with absolute accuracy, without knowing the meaning.
Curzon himself has written in his autobiography, “I saw it with my own eyes, I had made this whole arrangement, still, sometimes I start suspecting whether it really happened. Is it possible to have such a memory? And the man was just a village idiot.”
The whole village thought that he was good for nothing, he could never do anything intelligently. But his memory was perhaps the most evolved computer that nature has ever produced in anybody’s mind. And you will find hundreds of the same kind of stories about great intelligent people whose memory is either almost negligible or nil.
The first man who found the law of averages was a great mathematician, Diodorus. He had gone for a picnic with his wife and his half dozen children. The wife said, “Take care of the children,” because they were crossing a small mountain stream and the current was very strong. The wife said, “Hold each child and take him to the other side.”
He said, “Don’t be worried.” Instead of doing the simple thing, the great mathematician did his mathematics. He measured every child, his height, and in the sand of the bank of that stream, he calculated their average height. Then he went and in a few places measured the depth of the stream; he again calculated the average depth of the stream. The average height of the children was greater than the average depth, so he said, “There is no problem.”
The wife was suspicious – as every wife is always suspicious – about the intelligence of her husband. She said, “I don’t believe in your mathematics and all this nonsense. I am interested in the life of my children.”
He said, “Don’t be worried, my calculations are absolutely right.” He went ahead, and the wife shouted because two children started going down. She was holding them somehow, and the current was strong. But you will not believe it, Diodorus said, “What is happening? There must be some mistake in my calculation. So you wait, hold the children, I am going to the bank to see my calculations in the sand.”
She said, “Drop all that nonsense – these children will be gone! You can do your calculations later on.” Because she was screaming, he had to take the children to the other side. Leaving them on the other side, he came back to look at the calculation. Still he could not see a simple fact, that average is the most fictitious thing.
Some child was taller, some child was very small; the stream somewhere was very deep and somewhere it was very shallow – and you bring out the average. There is nobody who is average. But he was so much involved in his mathematics that even his common sense was missing. This has been the story of many great thinkers, philosophers, scientists. Their intelligence was great, they have contributed great ideas to the world, but their memory system and their common sense were very small.
Anand Alok has the mind of an intellectual. He wants to understand every word, analyze it, argue for and against, and come to a conclusion. But this is not the way of the meditator.
Anand Alok, your girlfriend is perfectly right, don’t disturb her. If she is enjoying my presence, my silence, and just the sound of my words, not the meaning, and if she is feeling a certain growth of consciousness in her, then everything is going as it should be. No interference is needed. On the contrary, you should start forgetting and unlearning Confucius, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong-Tung, who are all intellectuals. None of them is a meditator.

Osho,
For twelve years, as a sannyasin, I have repeatedly risked living above the income I could make, and so far have not only survived, but at times been immeasurably blessed. But since my re-entry into Chinese society and becoming forty-eight years old, I've become more sensible and worry about health insurance and creating a financial base for myself.
What does it mean for a sannyasin to live in society without falling into the mental traps of stability, and missing the growth in trust, possible in a state of insecurity?
Anand Alok, the first thing to be understood by a sannyasin is that life is insecurity. There is no insurance against death. And the more you make life safer and secure, the more it becomes dry and a desert.
Insecurity means you have to remain awake, alert to all the dangers. And life is always passing on a razor’s edge. The idea of being secure and safe is very dangerous, because then you don’t need to be alert and conscious. In fact, to avoid alertness and consciousness you want security and safety.
Live moment to moment with all the insecurity there is. The trees are living, the birds are living, the animals are living; they don’t know anything about insurance, they don’t know anything about safety. They are not concerned – that’s why every morning they can sing.
You cannot sing every morning. Perhaps you have never sung in any morning. Your nights will be filled with nightmares of insecurity, unsafety, dangers lurking all around. In the morning you wake up, not joyously; you wake up to again face the insecurities of the day – the problems, the anxieties.
But listen to the birds. And I don’t think they have lost anything. Just see the deer and their beauty and their agility, see the trees – who can be cut down any moment. But they are not concerned with that, their concern is the moment, not the next moment; this moment is all joy, all peace. Everything is green and everything is juicy.
I can understand that you have grown in age. And as one grows in age…in other words, he is saying that death is coming closer. But there is no way to prevent it. And if you cannot prevent death – and nobody has ever been able to prevent death – then it is better not to be bothered by it. What has to happen will happen, but why destroy your present moment for something which has not happened yet? Let it first happen, then you can worry about it. First let death happen, then in your grave you have eternity to worry about security, safety – you will not have anything else.
For twenty-four hours a day you can toss and turn in your grave, it is absolutely private and secure – you cannot even get out of it. Nobody can get into it. Only the people who are in graves are absolutely safe; nothing can happen to them.
The more alive you are, the more you will love insecurity, and your insecurity will make your intelligence sharper, your alertness keener, your consciousness a continuous growth.
Have you not watched that great scientists never come from rich people’s families? Neither do great poets or great mystics. The rich families have not contributed much to the development of consciousness or human growth. What is the reason? Because a boy who is born with a golden spoon in his mouth need not be bothered about security and safety, everything is secure and safe. Naturally, it dulls his mind. He has no challenge, he is surrounded continuously with servants, with facilities, with luxuries. He has no time even to think of consciousness, alertness, meditation.

I have heard…In front of a hotel in California a Rolls Royce limousine stopped, and the woman sitting inside told the guard, “Ask for four bearers to come, my child has to be carried to the room.”
The guard could not believe it, but he felt great pity for the poor child – perhaps he cannot walk. But he was looking perfectly healthy. Too fat certainly, but something must be wrong; otherwise, this was the first time that somebody had to be carried, and he was not more than ten years old. So four bearers were called. They carried the boy, and they were also puzzled. They asked the boy, “Can’t you walk? Is there some difficulty?”
He said, “There is no difficulty, there is no question, I can walk. But I need not – I can afford to be carried. Only poor people walk. When I can afford to be carried to my room, why should I behave like a poor man?”
They told the mother, “This is not good.” She said, “It is not your business to be worried. Each time the boy has to go anywhere, carry him to the car. When he comes back, carry him to the room. He is my boy, my only boy, and I have to give him all the luxury, all the comfort possible. And don’t be worried, we can afford it; whatever your charges are, they will be paid.”

Now, can this boy ever think of becoming meditative, conscious, alert? Can even the idea of searching for truth arise in him? No, he will remain just a vegetable.
You have seen, just a few years ago there were hippies all around the world. They were all below the age of thirty. And a strange phenomenon was happening, nobody has been observing it…after thirty, where do those hippies disappear? After thirty they start becoming worried about safety and security. Half the life is gone, they enjoyed it to the fullest, but now old age will come and death will come. They forget all about the philosophy of the hippies – they suddenly become square!
And I have information from my friends that those hippies who were not taking a bath, who were not shaving, who were not brushing their teeth, are now behaving perfectly normally – taking a bath, shaving their beard, brushing their teeth. They are working, and working efficiently, in offices, in factories, but they all have disappeared.
As one becomes older the shadow of the death starts falling on you; that’s what is creating the fear. But as far as a sannyasin is concerned, there is no death.
If you are feeling afraid of death and the dangers ahead, that only means you are not going deeper into your meditation, that meditation has been to you just a fashion. Now it is time, that you should sincerely and authentically enter into meditation, because that is the only space which can free you from all fears of death, old age, sickness.
It makes you aware that you are not the body and you are not the mind, and you are not only this life, you are eternal life. Death has happened many times and you are still alive, and death will happen many times and you will be still alive.
Meditation’s ultimate conclusion is, live the moment to its totality, intensively, joyously, because there is nothing to be feared – because even death is a fiction. There is no need for any security, for any safety. Live moment to moment, trusting the whole existence as the birds are trusting it, as the trees are trusting it. Don’t separate yourself from existence, become part of it and existence will take care of you. It is already taking care of you.

A traveling salesman, completing a trip earlier than anticipated, sent his wife a telegram: “Returning home Friday.”
Arriving home, he found his wife in bed with another man. Being a person of nonviolence, he complained to his father-in-law, who said, “I’m sure there must be an explanation.”
The next day the father-in-law was all smiles. “There was an explanation: she did not get your telegram.”

These are the ways of the mind: If you look deeply, mind is simply stupid – every mind. And the mind goes on creating all kinds of worries, concerns. My message to you is that you are not the mind. You don’t need any explanation, you need an experience, and that experience is missing; hence the problem has arisen.

An airplane passenger being served drinks by the stewardess exclaimed, “Hey, here is something new – an ice cube with a hole in it!”
“What is new about that?” answered the man sitting alongside him, “I married one.”

Don’t take much notice of what mind says and thinks, laugh at it.

The pope was making water in the men’s room when he noticed that somebody had written on the wall, “My mother made me a homosexual.”
So he took out a pencil and wrote underneath it, “If I buy her the material, will she make me one too?”

Avoid your mind games. Get beyond the mind, where only silence prevails…no insecurity, no question of safety. In that silence everything is secure. You are part of this existence.
Your worry is something like a leaf on a tree being worried about security. The tree is taking all the care, providing all the juice to the leaf, bringing water against gravitation – high up, perhaps a hundred feet or two hundred feet – but the leaf is not worried. The leaf is unaware that she is only a part of a vast tree.
You are part of a vast existence. Don’t think of yourself as separate and immediately all your problems disappear. In other words, your ego is the only problem.
“I am” – that is the only problem.
“I am not, the existence is,” is the only solution.

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