Osho,
The more years I am with you, the less I know who I am. Am I missing you?
This is the way of getting me, and this is the way of getting yourself too. You are not missing anything, but the mind will again and again raise the question, because mind needs information – more information means you are getting it, you are becoming more knowledgeable. Here, we are not concerned with information at all.
My work is transformation. The less information you have the better, because the more innocent you are. The moment you can say, “I know nothing” you have come very close. Remember, I am saying you have come very close; you have not got it yet – because to say “I know nothing” means at least you know this much, that you know nothing; there is still some information.
Let me tell you one beautiful story. I have loved many stories, but this is something that beats them all.

One of the greatest mystics India has produced was Bodhidharma. He was born fourteen hundred years ago. He went to China for a strange reason. When asked why he was going to China, he said, “Because people know too much in India, and I need people who are innocent.”
In China, he worked for twenty years. Now he was very old, nearabout ninety years. And he said, “It is time for me to go back to the Himalayas, because there is no other place in the whole world which is better as far as death is concerned – so silent, so eternally silent that you can receive death lovingly, meditatively, consciously. But before I go, I would like to give the mystery school that I have created in these twenty years to one of my disciples. So those who feel that they are capable of running my school should stand up.”
He had hundreds of disciples. Only five persons stood up. He laughed. He said, “You are the ones who have missed me, so just get out of the school and get lost.”
Then he went through the crowd of disciples, looking into each disciple’s eyes, and he found four persons. He brought them out and he said, “I am going to ask a single question. The answer is going to decide who will be my representative when I am gone. What is the essence of my whole mystic approach? Just use the minimum of words.”
The first man said, “It is meditation.”
Bodhidharma said, “You have my skin. You have penetrated me only skin deep. Just get back to your seat.”
And he asked the second man, “What is your answer?”
The second man said, “Enlightenment.”
Bodhidharma said, “You have my bones; just get back to your place.”
The third person said, “Master, I do not know.”
Bodhidharma said, “You have my very marrow. It is good, but not good enough; you still know something. Just go and sit down.”
He looked at the fourth man. The man just had tears in his eyes, no words. He fell at the feet of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma said, “You have been chosen, you will represent me. You have my being. You have got it – what they cannot say with words, you have said by your silence. What they cannot say… Although one of them came very close when he said, ‘I do not know,’ deep inside himself he was full of the pride of not knowing, he was full of knowing that ‘I don’t know.’ What he could not say, you managed to say loudly with your tears.”
This man became the second patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Bodhidharma, before leaving, advised him, “Take care. I have created so many enemies who would like to kill you. Those five who were the most knowledgeable scholars will take revenge. These three that have been rejected will turn sour against you. Protect – because I’m giving you my very heart.”

The more you come close to me the less you will know. One day you will come closest, when you feel “I do not know.” But even to be closest is as far away as the farthest star, because closeness – even the closest point – is a distant phenomenon.
The day you have become one, only then… But then there are no words left. Just gratitude, tears, a song, a dance – things which are thought crazy in the world of the intellect, but which are the only possible ways to express the inexpressible.

Osho,
When I come to your darshan, I feel a fear, as if of death. But with your presence, fear disappears and I feel life. Osho, what is happening?
The ancient seers have a very strange statement. I have asked shankaracharyas – because they are technically the representatives of those ancient seers – but none of them has been able to explain even a simple statement. The statement is, “The master is nothing but death.” But it is only a half statement; the remaining half is that the master is a resurrection too.
Coming to me, you feel the fear of death. That is absolutely as it should be. I am going to be a death to you. My whole function is to kill you, because whatever you are is not your reality. It has to be destroyed, dismantled, burned. So just like a phoenix bird – out of the fire which is burning your old personality – a new being is born.
Hence, the master is also life. That’s why when you are here you feel life. And naturally confusion arises: you were afraid of death, and here you feel more alive than anywhere else. Your life comes to its fullest expression; all the dust that you have gathered is gone, your mirror is absolutely clean.
The master is also the beginning of a new life – the end of an old, rotten personality and the beginning of a new, eternal individuality. That is the mystery of the master, his contradiction – that he kills you to save you, that there is no other way.
In the mystery school of al-Hillaj Mansoor, on the gate it was written: Unless you are ready to leave yourself outside where you leave your shoes, don’t come in. You are welcome, but leave your rotten self, your mind – which is nothing but rubbish – with your shoes. And you will be fortunate if somebody steals your shoes and your personality too.
Another master, the master of al-Hillaj Mansoor himself, Junnaid, had written a notice in front of the doors of his school: Unless you are willing to be killed, just turn back from the door; don’t dare to come in.
And these people were saying something absolutely right. They were making it clear, so that you could not say later on, “You deceived us.”
But those who entered their mystery schools came out with a new life, with an authentic life, with a joy that knows no ending, with a love that is eternal, with eyes which can only be called divine. And only then could they realize that what they had received is too much, and what they had lost was nothing but sickness, insanity, misery, death itself.
Both your experiences are correct. Now it is up to you to choose. If you want life, abundant life, then be ready to die. Dying each moment so that each moment you are reborn is the whole secret of all religion.

Osho,
The more I am with you, the less I can say I know you. It strikes me that in being with you there is no relationship – just an experience which happens afresh each time I sit at your feet. Osho, can you speak of this mystery?
There is no mystery at all. It is simply a reality.
Every kind of relationship is, in some way or other, a subtle bondage of expectations, demands, which are followed by complaints, frustrations. Each relationship ends in such bitterness that one cannot believe that this is the same relationship that had begun in such a sweet way. It is a fragrance in the beginning, and slowly, slowly it becomes disgusting. And the reason is not that somebody is responsible for it; the very nature of relationship turns every sweet experience into a bitter experience.
I have heard…

A great surgeon – one of the most famous of his country – was retiring at the age of seventy-five. People retired at the age of sixty, but the surgeon was so valuable, and even at the age of seventy-five his expertise was so accurate. He had never failed in any operation. He was a brain surgeon. An exception was made, and he was allowed to work for as long as he wanted. At seventy-five, he himself said, “It is now enough.”
All his students – and there were hundreds of students who had learned surgery from him – and all his colleagues gathered and they were celebrating the evening to say good-bye to him. They were dancing and drinking and singing, and suddenly somebody became aware that the surgeon was not there. This was strange. Somebody went out to look for him. The surgeon was sitting in the garden, under a tree, in darkness. They were old friends. He asked, “What is the matter with you? We have all gathered to celebrate and you have left us, you are sitting here in darkness.” He was one of the best attorneys in the country, and was also the attorney for the surgeon.
The surgeon said, “It is because of you that I am sitting here. You may have perhaps forgotten that fifty years ago, when I was only twenty-five and I had married just two years before… It was a love marriage, but within two years the love turned into hate. You were my attorney. I had come to you to ask, ‘If I kill my wife what will be the consequence?’ And you said, ‘Don’t do such a thing. You will spend at least fifty years in jail.’
“And I am sitting here thinking that if I had not listened to your advice, you idiot, today I would have been free. Just because of fifty years in jail, I thought it was better to somehow carry on as everybody else is doing – perhaps out of the same fear. The woman is doing it out of the same fear, the man is doing it out of the same fear. And I am feeling so angry with you that it feels like I should shoot you! You are responsible for spoiling my whole life, and you think you are a great law expert – all bullshit!”

Why does love turn into hate? Why does friendship turn into enmity? What goes wrong? It has nothing to do with individuals; it has something to do with the very fabric of relationship. Relationship depends on expectations. And man is not capable, he is helpless; neither is any woman capable of fulfilling anybody else’s expectations. And when those expectations are not fulfilled, frustration sets in; things start going wrong.
It is just because of the poverty of language that we have to use the word relationship for the strange experience that transpires between master and disciple. But it is not a relationship, not the relationship that you know; it is a category in itself. And you have understood it perfectly well – it is a moment-to-moment experience, with no demands, no expectations.
The master is available, the disciple is receptive, and between this availability and this receptivity some miracle transpires; something happens for which no word exists. And because it is not a relationship it never grows old – it is always fresh, it is always young. Each time you come to the master the experience is not a repetition.
It is not the same in your other relationships. But if you have learned the art in the presence of the master this can become your lifestyle: it can happen between you and your wife, between you and your child, between you and your husband, between you and your father, between you and your mother, between you and your friend. It is only a question of knowing that such a thing is possible, humanly possible. And if it is possible between the master and the disciple, why is it not possible between two lovers? – that each time they meet it is not a repetition, it is not a memory. It is not something that they have known before; it is utterly fresh, absolutely young, just born.
And if it can spread into all your relationships, you have brought magic to your life. That is my hope and dream: that my sannyasins will be able to bring this magic to their lives, that their whole world of relationships will go through a total change.
Ordinarily if you ask a husband to be truly honest about how long it has been since he has seen his wife’s face, perhaps he will say years have passed. Although they live in the same house, they fight in the same house, they produce children in the same house, they do all kinds of things in the same house – he has not looked at the face of his wife for years. So much dust of memories has gathered that even if he wants to see, he cannot see her face – so many faces, so many masks. Neither can the wife say…
When two persons fall in love – when it is not yet a relationship but only a dream, a beautiful hope – they look at each other, they touch each other’s hands, they feel the warmth, they see into each other’s eyes. They have thousands of ways to relate, and there is no relationship. There is something poetic; life has not yet become prose. But let them get married, and marriage has a certain chemistry of its own: poetry becomes prose, everything becomes flat.
At the most, something of those beautiful days when they were not married hovers over them till the end of the honeymoon – if you are fortunate. But very few people are so fortunate; otherwise the people who go for a honeymoon with suitcases labeled “Just Married” come back home as if they are coming from Hiroshima, Nagasaki. A disaster has happened.

A newly married couple in a beautiful holiday resort, a full-moon night – and the woman is lying on the bed waiting for the husband, and the husband is sitting at the window. She asks him again and again, “It is midnight. Are you coming to bed or not?”
He said, “Shut up and go to sleep. My mother has said to me, ‘Don’t miss a single moment.’ It is a honeymoon night, and I am not going to sleep. There is the whole life to sleep – you can go ahead.”
This idiot is still listening to his mother’s advice – “Don’t miss a single moment” – so he is looking at the moon. Naturally, “honeymoon” is concerned with the moon, not with the wife.
Now, their boat has already crashed on the rocks.

It is not just an absurd story. It has a whole psychology behind it, because every man is looking for his mother, and he never finds his mother in the wife. It is very frustrating. Every woman is looking for her father, and she never finds her father in the husband. It is a disaster. They have married each other for some unconscious reasons which they are not aware of. Each man has been jealous of his father from his very childhood. He wanted to possess the mother, and the father was the enemy. And each girl has been jealous of the mother: she wanted to possess the father but the mother was always coming in between. All those memories have gone deep into the unconscious mind.
That’s why when you fall in love with a woman or a man, you cannot say why, why this woman particularly, because you are not aware. Your love cannot be a conscious decision; it is an unconscious phenomenon. You are just a puppet in the hands of the unconscious. And before the marriage, when you are meeting each other, you are bringing your best mask, the most beautiful personality – not only the best tie and coat but your best personality – and the woman is doing the same. There are four persons meeting; on Chowpatty Beach, wherever you find two persons meeting, remember there are four persons: the real two persons are hidden behind; the unreal two persons are repeating dialogues from the films. Even the dialogues are not their own.
But once you are married, you cannot carry this burden. This is a very burdensome affair. You can manage it for one hour on Chowpatty, but not for your whole life. You will have to put away the coat, the tie. You will have to be your real self.

One man got married. Before going to sleep, his wife was going to the bathroom. She said, “Turn the light off.”
The man said, “But first come out of the bathroom, then turn the light off. Turning the light off now, you may fall in the darkness. It is a new place, a new hotel, and you don’t know where the furniture is.”
The woman said, “Are you going to listen to me or not?”
The man said, “I am not worried at all about turning the light off – in fact I want to turn it off myself, but I am just being concerned for you.”
The woman jumped immediately, “Why do you want to turn the light off?”
He said, “The reality is that my left leg is false. It is not real, it is wooden – but I can manage it in the darkness, there is no problem. And sooner or later you are going to know it, so it is better that you know it from the very beginning.”
The woman said, “That is very good; that’s why I was insisting that you turn the light off – because both my breasts are false, just flat ground.”
He said, “My God. Now I understand why you have a locket made of gold that looks like an airplane – so it is the airport! But if anything else is wrong, just tell me. It is better to be clear from the very beginning rather than to discover something every day and get shocks again and again.”
She said, “Yes, my left eye is phony.”
The man said, “Now I have to tell you the truth also: that all my teeth are false.”
The woman said, “You think in this way you are going to shock me? I don’t have a single hair. This is a wig.”
They are both just… Now in reality, what is left?
So they said, “It is good, now we should go to sleep. Now, even to think of anything else just looks out of place – lovemaking, etcetera, that is not for us. We are finished the first day; before it began it has ended.”

But whether it ends the first day or the second or the third, it does not matter. Every relationship is going to be shattered, because you are always posing your personality, and sooner or later you will have to bring your individuality in. And that will be the point where… You may live together, but you are divorced.
The presence of the master has to be a living experience each moment. Neither does the master ask you anything, neither does he impose anything, nor does he expect anything. He is happy and grateful that you have been trusting enough to be open and receptive to him. The disciple has to learn this: not to expect anything, not to demand anything, but just to wait and let things happen on their own accord.
Sometimes great statements can be dangerous. For example, Jesus says, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” I cannot say that.
I will say: Wait, watch. The moment your waiting and your watching is complete, the doors open of their own accord. Knocking is aggressive, violent.
Jesus says, “Ask and it shall be given to you.”
I say to you: Ask and you will be a beggar – and it is never given to the beggars. Do not ask. Just wait like an emperor, so centered in yourself, so full of trust in existence that there is no need to ask, existence is going to shower it on you.
Jesus says, “Seek and ye shall find it.”
And I say to you: Seek, and you shall never find it. Where are you going to seek? It is in the seeker. So wherever you go, you will be going on the wrong path. Just sit silently; withdraw all seeking, all desiring. Become a pool of energy, unmoving, unwavering – and you have found it. It is in the very center of the seeker.

Osho,
During the discourses I feel more intimacy than ever, and it feels like you are talking now to the individuals who are there in that moment with you. I never had this feeling so strongly in Pune or on the ranch. Is this part of the mystery school, or am I just more open to you?
First, I have been talking on different levels at different times; it was an absolute necessity. At first I had to talk indirectly because you might get scared. You have to be persuaded to die and to be reborn, but the new life is unknown to you, the old life is the only life you know of. So at first I was speaking very indirectly.
For example I was speaking on Kabir, on Meera, on Thomas, on Heraclitus, on Pythagoras – and inbetween, whenever I found a chance to hit you I would do it. But basically I would keep you engaged with Pythagoras, Heraclitus. I have been digging up graves and bringing dead people to life and keeping you engaged. So while you are engaged in listening about Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Shankara, just once in a while I will hit you to see whether you escape or you remain. Otherwise, what to do? I have nothing to do with Heraclitus; neither had he anything to do with me. He never spoke a single word about me, and I wasted years! But that was a device, needed. Then I dropped that device because I found that there are people who are ready to be talked to directly.
For three and half years I remained silent because I was not interested in those people who were only intellectually interested in me; I wanted them to drop out. In those three and half years they disappeared. Then only the people were left who were not concerned with Heraclitus or Pythagoras or Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Krishna – even if they all go to hell they don’t care, nobody bothers about them. Now I can talk to you directly, and you are not intellectually oriented.
Those silent years disconnected me with the intellectually oriented people, because silence can keep people around me only if their heart is beating in the same rhythm as my heart. Hence the new phase. Now it is a mystery school. And I can talk without any reservations, without bothering whether you will be hurt, wounded, brainwashed. Now you are my people, and you have opened toward me without holding anything back.
So you are right, it is a mystery school. To find it, I had to work for twenty-five years to find out the authentic, the real, the genuine ones.
And it is also true that you are more open. That’s why you feel there is a deeper, more individual contact – as if I am talking to each individual directly, not to a crowd. There is no crowd here.
You have to be reminded that, if your minds are chattering, there is a crowd; and if you are all silent then there is only one mind, one peace – because there cannot be one hundred silences in this room. There can be one hundred insane minds, but there cannot be one hundred sane beings. Sanity joins you with the others; insanity keeps you away from others. So now I am not talking to a crowd, I am talking to each individual absolutely directly. But it all depends on your openness.
So both your feelings are right; your opening and the mystery school are simply two sides of the same coin.

Osho,
In the beginning, I thought you knew each of us personally, even though we had never met, and I realized that I believed it because I very much wanted to. Later, I thought I found out that it wasn't true, but I somehow accepted this too. Now I don't know. And also, is it a necessity in the master-disciple relationship that the master knows the disciple personally?
The master’s function is to destroy your personality. He knows you as an individual, but he does not know you as a person. Personality is something created, invented. Individuality is something born.
The master is deeply concerned with your individuality, just the way you were born, your self-nature, uncontaminated, unpolluted. But he is not interested in whether you are a doctor, an engineer, a plumber, a president; whether you are successful in life or a failure, whether you are Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian, whether you have black skin or white skin. All these nonessentials make your personality. Only your consciousness makes your individuality. And as far as individuality is concerned, it is the same – it is universal.
This is the greatest mystery of life – that the most individual thing in you is at the same time the most universal, because it is the same in everyone.
I may not be an engineer, I may not be a painter, I may not be a doctor. There are millions of ways to have a personality, but there is only one way to have individuality – and that is a total silence. In that total silence you know the individual that you are, and you also know the universal, because the universal is not different from you.
You are just a dewdrop, and as you meditate, the dewdrop starts slipping from the petals of the lotus toward the ocean. When the meditation is complete, the dewdrop has disappeared into the ocean. Or you can say, the ocean has disappeared into the dewdrop – it is the same.

---