ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS
The Sun Rises in Evening 08
Eighth Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - The Sun Rises in Evening by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
Please help me to be happy, to be ordinary. I find that all my upsets, conflicts, turmoils, have to do with this desire to be special and nothing else.
Sudha, it is impossible to help because you are not ordinary – nobody is, nobody can be. Everybody is unique and extraordinary. The problem arises when you start trying to be that which you already are, then you fail. If you were ordinary, there would be no difficulty in attaining to extraordinariness; there would be every possibility. But the fish is in the ocean and is trying to be in the ocean; failure is absolute – it is doomed.
How can you be ordinary? This whole existence is extraordinary. Each pebble on the shore is extraordinary; each grass leaf is extraordinary. And I am not only talking about lotuses and roses – of course, they too are extraordinary – but an ordinary grass flower is not ordinary. All that exists is divine, how can it be ordinary?
Don’t try to be ordinary, otherwise you will go on failing and you will create misery for yourself. Even I cannot help; even I cannot go against the Tao, against the fundamental law of life. Existence only creates the extraordinary; this whole existence is special. These raindrops, this morning, the people around you, this moment, is extraordinary; it can’t be repeated. No, never, not even in the whole of eternity can it be repeated. You will never again find these raindrops falling, this sound, this morning, these people. This whole situation is extraordinary; it only happens once.
You will not find another Sudha all around the world. You can go on searching, and not only in the present time but even in the past or in the future, and no Sudha will ever be repeated. This is how we are. Once you start trying to be extraordinary you will get into difficulty. To accept yourself as you are, and to accept the whole as it is, if you can understand the extraordinariness of everything that is, you have become ordinary.
It is not that you want to be extraordinary; you want to be special, compared to other people. That too is absurdity – no comparison is possible, how can you be compared with anybody? Nobody is like you. You don’t compare a dog with a parrot, or do you? There is no similarity; there is no likeness. How can you compare a dog with a parrot, or a tree with a man, or a rock with a river? In fact, no two individuals are alike; hence they are incomparable. You are you, and the other is the other.
To understand this is to be both extraordinary and ordinary: extraordinary in the sense that existence only creates unique people, and ordinary in the sense that everybody is extraordinary. There is nothing extraordinary in being extraordinary; everybody is so. The comparison disappears; and when there is no comparison, there is no possibility of the ego.
You ask me: “Please help me to be happy…” I can only help you not to be miserable; I cannot help you to be happy. But if you are not miserable, you will be happy. No direct way to make you happy is possible. If it were possible, I would have made you happy long ago. I am not a miser. I would have given it to you if it were possible to give at all – but there is no possibility.
Happiness is not something that is going to happen to you from the outside. Once you stop being miserable, happiness is. Happiness wells up within your being. It simply arises out of you; you start blooming – the hindrances have been removed.
And this seems to be your greatest obstacle: you want to be extraordinary. I declare it: you are. But remember, everybody else is too. So now there is no need to be worried, I certify you; you need not prove it. Let this obstacle disappear. Accept your extraordinariness, rejoice in it, celebrate it. Walt Whitman says, “I celebrate myself, I sing myself.” Celebrate and sing! You are extraordinary; existence has not made another person like you, will never make another person like you. It is only once that life exists as you, in you, in this form. This form is unrepeatable.
Now, what is lacking? All your misery is arising because you are trying to become it. It is your being; becoming is irrelevant. And then suddenly you will see… If you can see the point – don’t think about it, just see the point – it is so crystal clear, and a great burden will disappear from your chest. So, you are extraordinary. You will take a deep breath, you will relax, and suddenly happiness is there.
Happiness is not something that we have to produce or do anything for. It is natural; it is spontaneous. I can help you not to be in misery. Misery is your creation; happiness is existence’s creation. Misery is the gift that you have given to yourself; happiness is the gift that existence has given to you. But you cling to misery and when you cling, you feed it by your clinging. Drop it! Start dancing and singing and celebrating. End it right now. And don’t say, “Tomorrow,” because tomorrow never comes. And don’t say, “I will think it over”; either you have understood or you have missed. Thinking is not going to help – it is a simple fact.
Let me repeat it again: everybody is extraordinary, so nobody needs to try. Don’t suffer with this unnecessary inferiority. And if you suffer from it, you can go on suffering for ages; you can go on creating it, and you can go on finding new ways and means. Somebody has a longer nose than you – you are inferior. Somebody has blond hair – you are inferior. Somebody has those beautiful eyes – and you are inferior. Somebody is more intelligent – and you are inferior. Somebody is a little taller – and you are inferior. If you go on looking and searching for misery, it is available. You can find it in every person that passes by – you will find that something or other is missing in you. It is your way of looking at things that creates misery.
Forget everybody, just look into the gifts that existence has given to you, and gratitude arises. In fact, there is no reason, no raison d’etre for this existence to be, no reason for this rain this morning, for this melody, this beautiful song that clouds are singing around you. If it were not there we could not have complained. If it were not there, we could not have asked that it should be. It is simply there without our asking. It is there. We have not even knocked at the door, and the door is open. And millions of gifts are showering on you; just look at those gifts, and you will be surprised. You will be surprised at how you have been missing them. Just the joy of breathing is enough to be grateful for, just the joy of meeting a friend is enough to be grateful for, just the joy of sitting silently doing nothing, the joy of a morning or an evening, the joy of the night. Just go on looking for the joyous, and you will find it.
You only find that which you look for. You have been looking for misery. You can create misery; today it is raining and tomorrow it will not be raining, then tomorrow you can be miserable: “Why is it not raining today?” And when it is raining you are not grateful.
Start feeling grateful. Happiness comes closer and closer the more you become grateful. Gratitude functions like magnetism; the complaining mind repels happiness, it closes doors. It all depends on you. I can show you the way, but you will have to walk on it. Buddha has said: “Buddhas can only point the way; they cannot walk for you.” You will have to walk. I am showing you the way.
You have become very clever, efficient, in creating misery for yourself. Change the direction of your energies; channel them toward the joy, the beauty – this cuckoo calling from far away – and, slowly, slowly you will see that so many things were there but you were not seeing them. Your eyes were full of misery; hence you were missing. Your eyes were clouded; they were hazy, foggy. That’s why you were missing.
And one can miss by a small margin, one can miss by only a small thought. A small thought can become a barrier and you can miss the whole beauty of the vast Himalayas. You can be there – watching the beautiful peaks of the Himalayas, and the sun falling on the Himalayan snow, showering gold all around – and a thought comes into your mind, and the Himalayas have disappeared, the thought clouds you. You remember something – the other day somebody had insulted you – and that’s enough. Or you start planning for the future: “Tomorrow I have to leave,” and the Himalayas have disappeared. And the thought is so small, and the Himalayas are so big, but even a small thought can hinder because the thought is so close to you, and it can stand in between. Just a small particle of dust can fall in your eye, and just a small particle, almost invisible, can make you blind, and you cannot open your eyes, and you cannot see the sun shining.
Do only one thing: start dropping the very concept of inferiority, the very concept that you have to be extraordinary. Even this question contains it. She has signed the question “your ordinary buddha, Sudha.” Even in that, the ego is claiming, “I am no ordinary buddha. I am an ordinary buddha.” You follow me? “Buddhas are extraordinary people; I am not like them; I am an ordinary buddha.” This is claiming extraordinariness.
“Help me to be ordinary.” You want to be extraordinarily ordinary? The ego can go on playing games, subtle games. You will have to look through and through. Just remember two things. One: you are already that which you want to be, hence there is no need to do anything for it. You can call it ordinariness, you can call it extraordinariness, it makes no difference, you are already that and you can never be anything other than that. What you call it does not matter. If you are in love with the word ordinary then everybody is ordinary. If you love the word extraordinary then everybody is extraordinary. Only remember one thing, that whatsoever you claim for yourself, you have claimed for the whole. And that is the trouble – you would like to be special, not just like everybody else.
There is a beautiful parable: it happened…
A man worshipped God for many years and was always asking, “Fulfill only one of my desires.”
God must have got tired, bored. One day he appeared and he said, “Okay, you won’t leave me alone. Morning, evening, you continuously go on harping on the same note, ‘Fulfill one of my desires.’ Okay, I am here, what is your desire?”
And the man said, “Whatsoever I ask should be immediately given to me, that is my desire.” A very cunning man! God must have thought out of his innocence that he would ask for one thing; he asked for it all. He said that he had only one desire, “Whatsoever I ask should be given immediately to me.” But you cannot defeat God, because cunningness never defeats innocence. God said, “Perfectly okay. This will be so – but remember one thing: whatsoever you ask for, your neighbors will get double.”
Now, the man was finished. Months passed, and God would come again and again: “You have not asked anything.” He stopped praying, and God would come again and again, morning, evening, and he would say, “What, you have not asked yet?”
And the man became very bored with God. He thought and thought, but whatsoever he gets, his neighbors will get double. “It is pointless.” He always wanted to have a beautiful palace, but what is the point now? The neighbors will have doubly big palaces. The very idea was crushing him, killing him; he lost all joy in life. Now there was no possibility of ever being happy, and this God would come morning and evening and torture him.
So one day he said, “Okay, give me a beautiful golden palace.” Immediately his hut became a golden palace. He came out and he saw that the whole town had golden palaces – bigger palaces, doubly bigger, all golden – only his was the poorest one.
He went to a lawyer – because where else can you go when such legal problems arise? The lawyer said, “Don’t be worried” – and of course God cannot win with a lawyer – the lawyer said, “Ask, ‘Make a big well in front of my house without a wall.’” So a big well appeared before his palace and two wells appeared before everybody else’s. The lawyer said, “Now ask, ‘Make me one-eyed, let one eye disappear.’”
The man asked, “What are you saying?” and the lawyer said, “Just wait. The law is the law.” One of his eyes disappeared, and both of his neighbors’ eyes disappeared. Now, the whole town was blind, and two wells in each palace garden… People started falling into the wells, people started dying. And the man was utterly happy. He said, “Now, my desires are fulfilled.”
So, I know you will be in difficulty: I declare you extraordinary, but everybody else, all your neighbors are doubly extraordinary.
And please, don’t go to a lawyer.
The second question:
Osho,
Can I know a question the answer of which you do not know?
In fact, I don’t know the answer to any question. All that I go on doing is destroying the questioner, and the question. It is not answering. Just look at what happened to Sudha – destroyed, murdered. Is this an answer? I don’t know a single answer, but once you ask a question, you are in my hands. Then I push you this way and that, then I hit you this way and that. Ask the question and you are trapped; first I try to destroy the question, and then the questioner.
But that is the whole function of a master. The master is not there to answer your stupid questions; he has to destroy your stupidity so that no questions arise again. So you cannot ask a question without being trapped in it. The questioner is a new person, it seems. He must be a new arrival, unacquainted with the way things are dealt with here.
I am reminded of a story…
Mulla Nasruddin was made a justice of the peace, a JP. The first day he was in court a man came rushing in, and the man was only wearing underwear, almost naked, and was shouting, “I have been robbed! Catch the people who have cheated me and robbed me.”
And Mulla Nasruddin asked, “Where have you been robbed? In this town?”
He said, “Yes, in this town, just on the outskirts. I was going to Mecca on a religious pilgrimage. My money has been taken away, my clothes have been taken away, my wife also! I have been utterly robbed. You have to save me, and you are the magistrate here, so do something!”
Mulla said, “No, this case does not come under my jurisdiction. It is not under my rule. Go to the neighboring villages.”
He asked, “Why? I have been robbed here.” And the Mulla said, “No, because those people who have robbed you can’t belong to this town, they must belong to the neighboring villages.”
The man asked, “How can you be so certain?”
He said, “I am absolutely certain. Things are done totally here. If they were of this village, they would have taken your underwear too. We don’t do things so partially. Go to some other village; these people must belong to some other place. They can’t belong to my village, that much is certain. I know my people – they do things in a total way, in an absolute way. Your underwear is enough proof that you have not been robbed by my people.”
When you ask a question you are giving your head to me. That’s why a disciple asks a question. He is saying, “Cut off my head.” The question is just an excuse. He is saying, “Destroy this mind.” I am not answering you because the answer is not going to help; the answer will make you more knowledgeable. I am not here to make you more knowledgeable. All the knowledge that you have has to be taken away. You have to be robbed of it, and totally robbed of it – not even underwear has to be left.
If I can destroy all that you have been carrying all along as knowledge, if I can help you to unlearn all that you have learned, if I can decondition you of all your conditionings, then knowing will arise in you. Knowing is your inner capacity, it is your intuition.
The question is arising in you because your knowing is obstructed, because your knowing eye is not functioning, hence the question. Otherwise, you would solve it yourself, you would not go and ask anybody.
Who can solve your question if you cannot solve it? And how can anybody else solve it? Your question implies your whole life in it; it is not just a question, it is an indicator of a thousand and one things. When you ask a question, nobody else can ask that question, only you can ask it. It is specific because to ask that question you had to live a certain kind of life, you had to be conditioned in a certain way; you had to pass through certain experiences. Nobody else has passed through those experiences except you. The question arises in you; it is the flowering of all the nonsense that has been taught to you, all the scriptures that have been fed into your biocomputer, all the books that you have read, the churches, the priests, parents – all are implied in it.
A question is not a simple thing. It is a very complex phenomenon and I am not here to answer it. If I answer it, you will gather a little bit more knowledge, you will go home knowing a little bit more than when you had come. I will not have helped you; I will have burdened you more. Your knowledge is the rock that is hindering you from knowing. Knowledge is the poison that doesn’t allow you to know. The knowledge has to be utterly destroyed so that you can be left alone and naked.
One can move toward godliness only when one is utterly naked. That nakedness is innocence, that nakedness is childlike, that nakedness is the purity of the heart, that nakedness is the heart. The mind is full of knowledge; the heart is absolutely empty.
The work of a master is to help you unburden. So I don’t answer your questions, I destroy them. And if the situation is right, I not only destroy the question, I destroy the questioner too. And if you are not, then you will know what is. When you are not, godliness is.
You ask me: “Can I know a question the answer of which you do not know?” Now, why have you asked this question? It must be coming out of a great ego, as if you are in an argument with me, as if you would like to defeat me. You would like to ask a question the answer of which I don’t know – why? So that you can have the feeling that you are the person who has such a question that not even an enlightened person can answer.
You are not interested in solving the problems of your life; you are more interested in showing your knowledge. But you cannot defeat me because I don’t answer questions at all. If I were answering questions, there are thousands of questions I could not answer. But I am not answering questions at all – that is not what is going on here. This is not a place of discussion, argument. This is a place of love. You are not here to debate with me. If you are here to debate with me you are wasting your time. If you are here to be with me – not to debate, but to feel, but to be – if you are here to feel my presence, only then should you be here, otherwise not.
If I were only answering questions, then you could ask thousands of questions, and they would not have to be very great. You could ask simple questions: “Where is Timbuktu?” – and I might not be able to pinpoint exactly where it is; I have only heard the name. Timbuktu is a small place – sometimes I cannot even figure out where a certain country is. My geography is weak, my mathematics too. About history I am absolutely absurd; everything is topsy-turvy. Then you could ask a thousand and one questions: “When was Socrates married to Xanthippe?” I would not be able to answer you. You can find millions of questions, that is not the problem at all, and it is not the purpose of your being here or my being here. It is not a kind of competition between the questioner and the answerer; we are not debating anything. We are just here to be together, we are learning the ways of togetherness.
You are here to soak the energy that I am. You are here to drink the alcohol that I am. This is a place for drunkards.
Now sir, you have come into wrong company. This is not the place for you unless you are ready to move in a totally different dimension: the dimension where the question is not answered but destroyed.
When a mind comes to a state where no question is left because all questions have been destroyed, when a mind is in a non-questioning state, that is the clarity, that is the transparency, that is where satori happens, that is where one comes in contact with existence. It is not by becoming knowledgeable that you will know, it is by becoming innocent that you will know.
The third question:
Osho,
Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow? I am so tired of trips. How many more must I try, only to find they don't work either? I know the problem is in me and I know there is no problem. So now what?
Celebrate now! Sing, dance, love, be.
You say: “Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow?” Because you cannot trust me, that’s why. You cannot trust me. I go on declaring that you are buddhas, already enlightened, but you are skeptical about it. You can believe – that too very grudgingly – that a Gautam Buddha may have become enlightened, maybe, perhaps. A Jesus became enlightened, maybe. You can grudgingly concede that much, but to concede that you are enlightened is too much. You cannot give such a gift to yourself; you are so against yourself, so condemnatory toward yourself. You can immediately accept it if somebody says that you are a sinner. Just think of it; if somebody says you are a sinner you are ready to bow down. Even if on the surface you deny it, deep down you know that he is right, because from the very beginning you have been taught, you have been poisoned, that you are a sinner. The teaching has gone into your very blood and bones and marrow, it has become a part of you that you are a sinner. All the religions of the world have been teaching this for centuries. Generations upon generations have been doing one work only: condemning man.
You are not even aware of the self-condemnation that you have for yourself, the hate that you have for yourself. You don’t love yourself, so how can you allow yourself to be a buddha? Releasement can happen this moment, but you won’t allow it, hence the methods are needed. If people can trust me, then there is no need for any method. The method is not going to help the releasement. Let me remind you: the method is only going to help you trust me. So I send you into therapy groups and these people will work on you. They will only help one thing; they will help you to trust me.
The whole function of therapy groups here is totally different than it is in the West; it has a totally different meaning and significance. It is to create trust, it is to create a little love for yourself; it is to create acceptance. Then I send you into meditations; those meditations are cathartic. A cathartic meditation is just throwing off all the repressed energy that is boiling in you that won’t allow you to trust. Dynamic Meditation, Kundalini Meditation and others, will take away much energy that hinders – it will be released. Slowly, slowly you will become capable of trusting. It is only because of lack of trust that methods have to be invented. If you trust already there is no need for any method.
You ask me: “Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly?” Releasement will always happen instantly. Whether it happens today or tomorrow it will always happen instantly, suddenly. It is a sudden experience, lightning, and the whole past disappears and you are abruptly cut from the past, you become discontinuous with it. The old disappears and the new is born. And the new is not a modification of the old. It has no relationship with the old, it is simply unrelated with the old. The old has not caused it either, it is not an effect of the old; it is utterly unrelated to the old.
Krishnamurti has been saying the same thing for at least fifty years, but nothing much has happened. He goes on saying that just now it is possible – be aware, be awake. And people go on listening because the fact is that they cannot trust Krishnamurti that it can be just now. Their minds are spinning and weaving inside: “It is not possible; how can it be possible? What will happen to my past karmas? I have to undo them. And what about all the crimes and the sins I have committed? I have to be punished for them. And what about the Judgment Day? How can it happen right now?” Deep inside these unconscious rumblings go on and on and you go on listening.
Seeing the failure of Krishnamurti, I have invented methods. I am saying essentially the same thing, because the message cannot be different. But I had to invent methods so that they can destroy your mistrust. Methods will help you to become unblocked; they will help you to become more flowing, they will help you to be less frozen, they will melt you, they will warm up the process of your being.
Releasement is going to happen instantly, any moment it is going to happen. If you are ready, it is possible this very moment – not even a single moment more do you have to wait.
“Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow?” – because of you; not because of me. From my side I am very puzzled why it is not happening to you. It should happen, why is it not happening? Why do you go on listening without understanding? Why do you listen only intellectually? Why can’t you listen from the heart, from your totality? It is a constant wonder to me, a miracle that people can go on listening every day and can remain the same – hence the methods.
The methods are not for the releasement, you are not going to become enlightened through any meditation. No, nobody has ever become enlightened through any meditation, but the meditations help. They help in a negative way: they remove the rocks and the stream starts flowing. They don’t create the stream – they can’t create it. How can rocks create the stream? They have nothing to do with the nature of the stream. But they can prevent it.
Because there are things which are preventing you from trusting the moment, trusting life, trusting existence, you are shrunk in fear, in doubt. You have armored yourself in doubt and fear just to be secure, safe; you have created a great armor around yourself. Your body is no longer an opening to existence; it has become closed. Your windows, your doors, are all closed. The sun rises – yes, the sun rises in the evening – but it cannot penetrate you. It goes on rising, it goes on knocking on your door, but the knock is subtle – so subtle, so silent, that you cannot hear it in your noisy mind, in that constant chatter that goes on inside you.
These methods are negative methods. They will not give you enlightenment, but they will remove the barriers. And once the barriers are removed, once all the barriers are removed, enlightenment happens. It is nothing that you have to achieve; when you are available, the release, the liberation…
You say: “I am so tired of trips.” Really? I don’t think so. If one is really tired, then one’s trips are finished. You are still hoping maybe there is still some trip, some way of tripping so that you can attain. You are still hoping, you are looking out of the corner of your eye. “Maybe I have failed ninety-nine times, but who knows, I may succeed the hundredth time. I have failed up to now, but who knows? I may be trying the wrong methods, and there may be some right method. I have failed because I may have been with wrong masters, and there may be some right master. I have failed because I have not put all of my energy into it. If I put all of my energy into it I may succeed. I have failed because the time was not ripe for it and now the time may be ripe.” A thousand and one excuses you can always find when you want to go on a new trip. If you are really tired, then who is preventing you? Then forget all about trips. Relax, celebrate, be!
“I am so tired of trips. How many more must I try, only to find they don’t work either?” Nothing ever works; nothing has ever worked, because nothing is needed for it to work. Life is going perfectly well – there is no need to do anything whatsoever. But this vision comes slowly, slowly when you have failed again and again and again. It sinks in very slowly. Our minds are very stubborn, hard, rock-like; they are not soft soil – they don’t allow anything to sink in easily. Hence sometimes it takes lives for a person to realize that nothing ever works. And that is a great moment, when one realizes that nothing ever works, nothing can work: “My whole effort to attain was absolutely wrong from the very beginning. It was wrong because what I am trying to achieve is already the case. It is wrong because I am searching and it is already there inside me.”
All efforts are meaningless. If a person is intelligent, he will soon understand it. If he is not intelligent, he will take a little longer. It depends on your intelligence. A very intelligent person, attentive, alert, aware, will see the point in a single moment. With a single blow his head will disappear. He will see the point and all is finished: all misery, all hell, all search.
“I am so tired of trips,” you say. “How many more must I try, only to find they don’t work either?” It all depends on you. You can make a trip out of me. Now, the question is from Hal Duggan, and he is taking sannyas on the twentieth. It depends on you – that too can become a trip. From my side it is not, it is the end of all trips. It is just a declaration that enough is enough. Sannyas is a declaration that “I am not going into any more trips,” that all methods have failed and all paths have failed, that all paths lead astray, that “I am not going to be caught into any method, into any path, any longer.” Sannyas is a renunciation of all methods, all paths, all trips – psychedelic or otherwise.
But you can also make sannyas a trip, it depends on you, and then you will again miss. Sannyas is not a trip. It is the realization that all trips are bound to fail. It is coming out of all trips; it is coming home. It is realizing the fact that you don’t need to waste your energy and time in searching for anything any longer, you don’t need to go on waiting for anything to happen in the future because it is already happening. It has always been happening. Dance, sing, celebrate, be.
Existence is, it has not to be searched for. Existence already is, you are not to discover it. All that you have to do is dance a mad dance. You have to dance in such a mad way that all the doors are thrown open. You have to sing with such totality that the ego dissolves into that totality. You have to be in prayerfulness, in gratitude, with such passion and intensity that the whole starts flowing toward you – your waiting becomes a magnetic field.
Sannyas is not a trip. So remember it, it is not a trip. Don’t reduce sannyas to a trip. I am not a trip. I am not here to create new bondages for you. I am here to make you free, totally free. That’s why I don’t give you any discipline; I give you only awareness. That’s why I don’t give you any character; I give you only alertness. And out of alertness if a character arises – good. And out of awareness a character certainly arises, but a very fluid and flowing character. It is not a fixed mode of life, because all modes are dead, stagnant. A character arises out of consciousness, but the consciousness goes on changing, so the character goes on changing. The consciousness goes on reflecting each moment the new reality that is happening, and the character goes on corresponding to the new reality that is happening. There is continuous adjustment, spontaneous adjustment, between you and the whole.
The people who have fixed characters are always maladjusted because they have a fixed character and life has no fixed character. Existence is characterless, and if you have a character you will never meet existence because your character will confine you into a certain straitjacket, you will become a stereotype, you will not be a living being any longer. You will be a noun not a verb, and existence is a verb not a noun.
Existence is a process, a dynamism; and a man of character, the so-called man of character, is dull, dead. He has to be dull and dead, because if he was aware he would have to see the changes that are happening around him, and he would have to change accordingly. He has to remain drugged in his unconsciousness, he has to remain fixed with his character because he is always afraid that something may happen and he may have to change his character. He does not want to change his character so he goes on remaining unaware of all that is changing. He also creates a society which is unchanging. That’s why in the East the society has remained unchanging, it is because of the so-called “character-obsession.” If a man has to have a fixed character, then society has also to be a fixed pattern; only then will he be adjusted, otherwise there will be difficulty.
In the East, thousands of years have passed and things have remained almost the same. They have not changed, they have not been allowed to change because then there is fear. And that’s what is happening in the West now: because things are changing people are losing character, and the Western religious leaders are very worried. Life is changing fast, science has released so many energies that life goes on changing. And one has to change with it, one has to keep pace with life. If one has to keep pace with life, one cannot stay in a fixed mode. It is very easy to live in an Indian village and remain in a fixed mode; it is very difficult to live in New York with a fixed mode of life. You have to be more fluid.
So the Eastern people think that Western people don’t have any character. The reality is in fact is that the West has become more alive, more changing, and the East is still dull and dead, fixated, obsessed and afraid: “If anything changes on the outside then I will have to change inside too, because my inside has to correspond with the outside.”
Small changes bring difficulties. For example, since electricity came to India many Jainas have started eating in the night. For centuries they have not eaten in the night, they had a fixed mode, but when electricity came suspicions arose, doubts arose. Now what is the problem? Electricity is there, light is there; there is no fear of an insect or an ant getting into your food, you will not be killing anything. Now in the night you can have more light than you have in the day, so what is the problem? Many Jainas started eating in the night. And when one thing falls, other things start falling because everything is connected. Everything is connected with every other thing: if you can eat in the night and if Mahavira is wrong about it, maybe he is wrong about other things too.
That’s why the church has been fighting against science, because it creates suspicion. The church has believed that the earth is flat, and then science started saying it is not flat, it is a globe. Now if Jesus is wrong about one thing, why can’t he be wrong about other things? Then he is no longer infallible. Suspicion will arise: he may be wrong about God too, he may be wrong about the Judgment Day, he may be absolutely wrong, who knows – because he is fallible.
Religions have always insisted that nothing should change; these religions are all in the service of death. I am giving you a totally new vision: a religion of life and not of death, a religion of intelligence not of stupidity, a religion of dynamism not of stagnancy, a religion which will keep you flowing with the flow of the total, and will not in any way hold you back from the movement of the total. It will keep you in tune with the whole. I don’t give you a character; I only give consciousness. My whole emphasis is on consciousness.
Sitting is Zen, walking is Zen, talking is Zen, being silent is Zen. All should be only awareness. Awareness should be your truth. Let awareness be the only fundamental law and then you will be out of all trips, otherwise it is difficult. You can go on changing from one trip to another. A Christian can become a Hindu; this is just changing the train – the trip remains. A Hindu can become a Christian and nothing changes, only words; he will not go to the temple, he will go to the church.
And the same can be done with me too, but remember that will be your responsibility. I can also become a trip to you. I don’t want to become a trip to you; I want to become a liberation for you. From my side I want you to be liberated, but still your cooperation is needed. The very idea of liberation, and you can catch hold of it and make a trip out of it. And your mind is very, very efficient at making trips out of everything. Beware!
On the twentieth you are going to become a sannyasin. Remember, this is not a trip; this is the end of all trips. Let it be the end of all trips; for how long are you going to journey and journey and journey? Now come home, now come to rest; enough of the trips. Learn from me how to rest, how to relax, how to be.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Last night I had this dream: in the middle of the night the sun appeared, completely out of its place. This filled me with a sacred terror, which was outside of any dream. But at the center of the terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear, and it vanished, leaving me in emptiness for some moments. I felt I understood a little of how loving you madly can enable me to go anywhere.
This is a beautiful experience. Modern researchers, particularly dream researchers, have just recently stumbled upon a new kind of dream; they call it the breakthrough dream. This is a breakthrough dream.
The normal dream, the ordinary dream, and the breakthrough dream are totally different. This is the difference; this is of great importance to you, to you all. If you can bring this quality into the dream, you will be able to go beyond dreaming. A breakthrough dream is a dream in which some kind of awareness arises in you. The ordinary dream is unconscious, passive: you simply go on watching, no awareness arises in you; you are simply identified with the dream. You don’t remember a thing, you don’t remember yourself, you are not aware at all; you are lost in the dream. The ordinary dream possesses you. The breakthrough dream is different: it is not passive, it is active; it is not just possessing you, you remain in some way alert in it.
Gurdjieff used to teach his disciples about such dreaming. This is a key to work deeper into your consciousness. He used to say to his disciples, “Try to remember yourself in the dream, and the only way to do it is if you remember the whole day, only then can you remember.” So the method was that the person who was given this kind of work had to remember continuously the whole day. Walking on the street he remembers, “This is a dream. All these shops, these people, this man passing by, this noise, all this is a dream. This woman who looks so beautiful is a dream. This tree is a dream.” The whole day the man continues thinking: “This is a dream, this is a dream.” He repeats it millions of times: “This is a dream.” Naturally this idea that “This is a dream” penetrates more and more into his unconscious, and soon it is transferred to the conscious. Then, one day, suddenly – it takes three to six months of constant repeating: “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream” – one day, suddenly, in a dream he remembers, “This is a dream” and that very moment a new energy has entered his dreaming. He is alert, aware.
And this is not a new method. In the East, we have used it for centuries. In fact, the whole idea that the world is maya is nothing but a philosophic statement of this technique. “The world is maya,” means the world is a dream. You have to remember it: “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream,” and then one day, in a dream, you remember it is a dream. And then suddenly there is a gap between you and the dream. The dream is there, you are here, and there is a gap: you have awakened in the dream. And the moment you awaken in the dream, the dream loses all vitality, it disappears; it starts disappearing and great emptiness arises.
This is what has happened to you. You have stumbled upon a breakthrough dream.
Just the other day I was talking about four stages of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and turiya, the fourth. Ordinarily you remain in the waking because you can’t even remember in waking, your waking is almost asleep. You are only awake in name’s sake. Very rarely are you awake even when you are in a wakeful state, very rarely. If somebody comes suddenly with a revolver in his hand and puts the revolver on your chest, maybe for a moment you will become alert. Those moments in your whole life can be counted on your fingers.
Once I was traveling with a friend and the car fell into a river. The friend was driving. When the car fell, just for a few seconds before, everybody in the car became alert that it was going to fall. Somehow the brakes were not working, and the speed was such that on a particular turn it became absolutely clear that now… Everybody in the car became alert that it was finished.
And the next moment we were all in the dry bed – it was summertime – and the car was upside down. The moment we came out, nobody was hurt but everybody was transformed. The man who was driving told me, “You have been talking about awareness, awareness, awareness, and I have been listening to you for years. Now, for the first time, I had what you mean by awareness. For a moment, just on the verge of falling, I became aware, now I know what it is. All became silent. Although death was so close all was utter bliss.”
Very rarely do you become aware. But if you start trying to become aware – that is what vipassana is: an effort to be aware, watching; watching each act that you are doing – slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, very slowly, you start feeling a new kind of awareness, a new kind of presence. That presence makes you a different kind of individual, more integrated, more centered.
Just the other day I told you the story of the Buddhist monk who was invited by the prostitute to live with her for four months in the rainy season. Now, Prabuddha has asked a question, and he says the story was ugly: “Why couldn’t the Buddhist monk move into lovemaking with the prostitute? Why was he afraid?”
He was not afraid. And the story is not ugly. Maybe Prabuddha became too interested in Amrapali and her beauty. Prabuddha must have started thinking, “If I had been there, I would not have missed! This foolish monk… And what was wrong in it?” It is not a question of wrong or right. But the monk was so centered, the monk was so present in himself, that all that the prostitute was doing to attract him must have looked to him very juvenile, foolish, silly. What the prostitute was doing to enchant him was great from the side of the prostitute. She was an artist in the art of alluring people, of hypnotizing people, and she was a beautiful woman. It is said that she was the next most famous person in Buddha’s time – the first was Buddha and Amrapali was the second.
But if the monk is centered and has no feeling arising in him to go into lovemaking, why should he go? If he has transcended, why should he go? It is not that he was resisting; if he were resisting or repressing then it is ugly. But why should he indulge if there is no desire in him? Just because of the prostitute? Why does the story look ugly to Prabuddha? No, he was very kind to the woman, infinitely kind, infinitely loving. But, of course the love of a centered man is totally different from the love of an uncentered man. He was a buddha, that’s why Buddha had allowed him to go. He had arrived; all desiring had disappeared from him. Now it was just a toy.
The story is immensely beautiful because by remaining centered, he helped the woman. He really must have loved her because that is the greatest gift he could have given to her. If he had become involved, the woman would have thrown him out sooner or later. If he had become involved, the woman would have never gone to Buddha to become a disciple. This was the greatest gift that the monk could have given to her: the gift of Buddha, the gift of disciplehood. He made himself absolutely available to the woman, to watch, to see, in every possible way. He made his presence felt, and the woman came to know that this was something to be achieved; this was something worthwhile. All that she had been doing up to now was worthless, insignificant, nonessential. This man had essential richness, the richness of the essence. She fell in love with the monk on a higher plane. She fell in love not only with the monk, but with samadhi, with enlightenment.
In fact, that was the reason for the beauty of the monk. She had not gone into love because of the monk; the monk was just a vehicle, the energy was that of enlightenment, he was luminous. She had fallen in love with that luminousness. The body of the monk was just like a lamp and the luminousness inside was the flame. You don’t fall in love with the lamp; you fall in love with the flame. If the monk had moved, the flame would have disappeared and the woman would have found an ordinary man – very ordinary, nothing special about him, nothing valuable about him.
The more the monk remained centered… And when I say remained centered I am not saying he was making any effort to remain centered. He was centered, it was effortless, it was spontaneous; it was natural. If there were any effort involved, the monk himself would have been afraid to go. He was not afraid; he slept in the same room as the woman. And she danced naked around him, and he sat in silence and meditated. He remained alone. The woman must have tried in every possible way. It was a challenge, a great challenge to her beauty. It was humiliating in a way, insulting in a way; she must have felt hurt, her ego must have felt hurt. She tried in every way to seduce the monk but failed again and again and again. Then she must have realized that he had some other kind of beauty, he had some other kind of presence. And she became enchanted with that space; she followed him, and became a disciple of Buddha. She soon became enlightened. Amrapali was one of the enlightened disciples of Buddha.
The monk loved the woman, that’s why with great kindness and compassion he made his presence available. There is nothing ugly in it; it is absolutely beautiful. The monk was a benediction, a blessing.
But you go on moving in life, attracted by this thing and that, you are unaware. If you become aware, your attractions will start dropping, disappearing. And when you become aware in a dream, the dream disappears immediately, and there arises great silence. That silence is the third state, sushupti: deep sleep. A breakthrough dream means that you have moved into the third, and with a little bit of consciousness. That is a great experience; it is the first approach into the deepest layer of your being. Beyond that there is only one more state, turiya.
Patanjali has said that deep sleep is closest to samadhi. It is. If you take one step more, you are a buddha. Samadhi is the center, turiya is the center; around that center the first layer is of sleep, the second layer is of dreaming, the third layer is of your so-called waking. You have to go deeper and deeper. Waking is the farthest from turiya, dreaming is a little closer. That’s why psychoanalysis goes into your dreaming. Rather than thinking about your waking experiences, psychoanalysis goes into your dreaming because there you are truer, more honest, simpler, more natural. Yoga goes a little deeper; it goes into sushupti, deep sleep.
A breakthrough dream is a dream which takes you to sushupti. And after sushupti there is only a single step more. Zen and Tantra take you into that single step.
It was a beautiful dream. I will read it again: “Last night I had this dream: in the middle of the night the sun appeared, completely out of its place. This filled me with a sacred terror, which was outside of any dream. But at the center of this terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear…”
It is beautiful that you could remember in your dream, you could remember me. Every disciple has to learn that I have to be with you not only in your waking, but in your dreaming too. And if I am there, dreaming will disappear. The very remembrance will disconnect you with the dreaming layer. “But at the center of this terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear, and it vanished, leaving me in an emptiness for some moments.”
Those moments of emptiness are of the third state, sushupti: deep sleep. Now, try to do it again and again. Every night when you go to sleep, go with this thought vibrating in you, pulsating in you: “If there is a dream, I will remember.” Remember me. While you are falling asleep go on remembering, so that it soaks into your sleep. While you are changing from waking to dreaming let it be there, a subtle presence, and then slowly, slowly you can transform all your normal dreams into breakthrough dreams, and each dream will lead you into the third state, deep sleep. When you can be aware in deep sleep, even for a few moments, you are coming closer to home. And one day you will be able to remember me even in that emptiness, and that very day the sky opens up, that very moment the sun really rises in the evening.
It is very symbolic that you saw the sun rising in the middle of the night; it was in the dream state. Soon it will happen if you can remember me in the deep sleep beyond which nothing can be said, but beyond which all is, godliness is.
The last question:
Osho,
Oooh, the whole life waterfalling on me! Heaven and earth, work and play, everything I have ever been and done, all things I have ever wanted to will be, past and future swelling, swelling in balloon dancing now! This enlightenment is some crazy business!
Crazy baby, crazy, absolutely crazy! But don’t be afraid. Go into it, and soon you will see the sanity of insanity, soon you will see that it is not crazy; before you have been crazy all along. It looks crazy compared to your life that has happened up to now. People are living in madness, so when they come closer and closer to some inner light, compared to their life, it looks crazy. Once it settles, the whole of life looks crazy and only this light, this awareness, looks sane.
Buddha is sane although he himself was worried many times that he had gone crazy. Others were also saying that he had gone crazy. Naturally, when all are competing in the world, and everybody is rushing toward money, power, and prestige, and you start moving away from all this nonsense; when everybody is going extrovert, and you start moving inward; when everybody is going in one direction and you start moving in the polar opposite direction, diametrically opposite direction, it looks crazy.
Once it happened…
A drunkard was driving on a one-way street and was going in the wrong direction. He was puzzled because everybody was going the other way. The policeman stopped him and asked him, “Where are you going?”
He said, “That I don’t know. One thing is certain, that wherever I am going I am late because everybody is coming back!”
When you start moving toward meditation, suddenly the whole world, everybody, is going one way and you are going in the opposite direction. And everybody looks at you with suspicion, “Where are you going?” You will also look with suspicion at yourself, and the idea will arise again and again: “Have I gone crazy?”
But one has to learn one thing: if you are feeling happy, don’t be worried because craziness cannot give you happiness. If you are feeling less tense, don’t be worried because craziness will give you more tension, more anxiety. If you are feeling more together, don’t be worried; you are on the right track, you are moving toward well-being, you are moving toward wholeness.
And that is what is happening. You say: “…the whole life waterfalling on me! Heaven and earth, work and play, everything I have ever been and done, all things I have ever wanted to will be, past and future swelling, swelling in balloon dancing now!” Look at the beauty of the dance. Look at the benediction of nature falling like a waterfall on you. Look at the expanding consciousness swelling, swelling; it will fill the whole sky soon – even the sky is not the limit.
“This enlightenment is some crazy business!” It is, but the people who become involved in this crazy business are the only sane people, because theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the mad, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Enough for today.
Osho,
Please help me to be happy, to be ordinary. I find that all my upsets, conflicts, turmoils, have to do with this desire to be special and nothing else.
Sudha, it is impossible to help because you are not ordinary – nobody is, nobody can be. Everybody is unique and extraordinary. The problem arises when you start trying to be that which you already are, then you fail. If you were ordinary, there would be no difficulty in attaining to extraordinariness; there would be every possibility. But the fish is in the ocean and is trying to be in the ocean; failure is absolute – it is doomed.
How can you be ordinary? This whole existence is extraordinary. Each pebble on the shore is extraordinary; each grass leaf is extraordinary. And I am not only talking about lotuses and roses – of course, they too are extraordinary – but an ordinary grass flower is not ordinary. All that exists is divine, how can it be ordinary?
Don’t try to be ordinary, otherwise you will go on failing and you will create misery for yourself. Even I cannot help; even I cannot go against the Tao, against the fundamental law of life. Existence only creates the extraordinary; this whole existence is special. These raindrops, this morning, the people around you, this moment, is extraordinary; it can’t be repeated. No, never, not even in the whole of eternity can it be repeated. You will never again find these raindrops falling, this sound, this morning, these people. This whole situation is extraordinary; it only happens once.
You will not find another Sudha all around the world. You can go on searching, and not only in the present time but even in the past or in the future, and no Sudha will ever be repeated. This is how we are. Once you start trying to be extraordinary you will get into difficulty. To accept yourself as you are, and to accept the whole as it is, if you can understand the extraordinariness of everything that is, you have become ordinary.
It is not that you want to be extraordinary; you want to be special, compared to other people. That too is absurdity – no comparison is possible, how can you be compared with anybody? Nobody is like you. You don’t compare a dog with a parrot, or do you? There is no similarity; there is no likeness. How can you compare a dog with a parrot, or a tree with a man, or a rock with a river? In fact, no two individuals are alike; hence they are incomparable. You are you, and the other is the other.
To understand this is to be both extraordinary and ordinary: extraordinary in the sense that existence only creates unique people, and ordinary in the sense that everybody is extraordinary. There is nothing extraordinary in being extraordinary; everybody is so. The comparison disappears; and when there is no comparison, there is no possibility of the ego.
You ask me: “Please help me to be happy…” I can only help you not to be miserable; I cannot help you to be happy. But if you are not miserable, you will be happy. No direct way to make you happy is possible. If it were possible, I would have made you happy long ago. I am not a miser. I would have given it to you if it were possible to give at all – but there is no possibility.
Happiness is not something that is going to happen to you from the outside. Once you stop being miserable, happiness is. Happiness wells up within your being. It simply arises out of you; you start blooming – the hindrances have been removed.
And this seems to be your greatest obstacle: you want to be extraordinary. I declare it: you are. But remember, everybody else is too. So now there is no need to be worried, I certify you; you need not prove it. Let this obstacle disappear. Accept your extraordinariness, rejoice in it, celebrate it. Walt Whitman says, “I celebrate myself, I sing myself.” Celebrate and sing! You are extraordinary; existence has not made another person like you, will never make another person like you. It is only once that life exists as you, in you, in this form. This form is unrepeatable.
Now, what is lacking? All your misery is arising because you are trying to become it. It is your being; becoming is irrelevant. And then suddenly you will see… If you can see the point – don’t think about it, just see the point – it is so crystal clear, and a great burden will disappear from your chest. So, you are extraordinary. You will take a deep breath, you will relax, and suddenly happiness is there.
Happiness is not something that we have to produce or do anything for. It is natural; it is spontaneous. I can help you not to be in misery. Misery is your creation; happiness is existence’s creation. Misery is the gift that you have given to yourself; happiness is the gift that existence has given to you. But you cling to misery and when you cling, you feed it by your clinging. Drop it! Start dancing and singing and celebrating. End it right now. And don’t say, “Tomorrow,” because tomorrow never comes. And don’t say, “I will think it over”; either you have understood or you have missed. Thinking is not going to help – it is a simple fact.
Let me repeat it again: everybody is extraordinary, so nobody needs to try. Don’t suffer with this unnecessary inferiority. And if you suffer from it, you can go on suffering for ages; you can go on creating it, and you can go on finding new ways and means. Somebody has a longer nose than you – you are inferior. Somebody has blond hair – you are inferior. Somebody has those beautiful eyes – and you are inferior. Somebody is more intelligent – and you are inferior. Somebody is a little taller – and you are inferior. If you go on looking and searching for misery, it is available. You can find it in every person that passes by – you will find that something or other is missing in you. It is your way of looking at things that creates misery.
Forget everybody, just look into the gifts that existence has given to you, and gratitude arises. In fact, there is no reason, no raison d’etre for this existence to be, no reason for this rain this morning, for this melody, this beautiful song that clouds are singing around you. If it were not there we could not have complained. If it were not there, we could not have asked that it should be. It is simply there without our asking. It is there. We have not even knocked at the door, and the door is open. And millions of gifts are showering on you; just look at those gifts, and you will be surprised. You will be surprised at how you have been missing them. Just the joy of breathing is enough to be grateful for, just the joy of meeting a friend is enough to be grateful for, just the joy of sitting silently doing nothing, the joy of a morning or an evening, the joy of the night. Just go on looking for the joyous, and you will find it.
You only find that which you look for. You have been looking for misery. You can create misery; today it is raining and tomorrow it will not be raining, then tomorrow you can be miserable: “Why is it not raining today?” And when it is raining you are not grateful.
Start feeling grateful. Happiness comes closer and closer the more you become grateful. Gratitude functions like magnetism; the complaining mind repels happiness, it closes doors. It all depends on you. I can show you the way, but you will have to walk on it. Buddha has said: “Buddhas can only point the way; they cannot walk for you.” You will have to walk. I am showing you the way.
You have become very clever, efficient, in creating misery for yourself. Change the direction of your energies; channel them toward the joy, the beauty – this cuckoo calling from far away – and, slowly, slowly you will see that so many things were there but you were not seeing them. Your eyes were full of misery; hence you were missing. Your eyes were clouded; they were hazy, foggy. That’s why you were missing.
And one can miss by a small margin, one can miss by only a small thought. A small thought can become a barrier and you can miss the whole beauty of the vast Himalayas. You can be there – watching the beautiful peaks of the Himalayas, and the sun falling on the Himalayan snow, showering gold all around – and a thought comes into your mind, and the Himalayas have disappeared, the thought clouds you. You remember something – the other day somebody had insulted you – and that’s enough. Or you start planning for the future: “Tomorrow I have to leave,” and the Himalayas have disappeared. And the thought is so small, and the Himalayas are so big, but even a small thought can hinder because the thought is so close to you, and it can stand in between. Just a small particle of dust can fall in your eye, and just a small particle, almost invisible, can make you blind, and you cannot open your eyes, and you cannot see the sun shining.
Do only one thing: start dropping the very concept of inferiority, the very concept that you have to be extraordinary. Even this question contains it. She has signed the question “your ordinary buddha, Sudha.” Even in that, the ego is claiming, “I am no ordinary buddha. I am an ordinary buddha.” You follow me? “Buddhas are extraordinary people; I am not like them; I am an ordinary buddha.” This is claiming extraordinariness.
“Help me to be ordinary.” You want to be extraordinarily ordinary? The ego can go on playing games, subtle games. You will have to look through and through. Just remember two things. One: you are already that which you want to be, hence there is no need to do anything for it. You can call it ordinariness, you can call it extraordinariness, it makes no difference, you are already that and you can never be anything other than that. What you call it does not matter. If you are in love with the word ordinary then everybody is ordinary. If you love the word extraordinary then everybody is extraordinary. Only remember one thing, that whatsoever you claim for yourself, you have claimed for the whole. And that is the trouble – you would like to be special, not just like everybody else.
There is a beautiful parable: it happened…
A man worshipped God for many years and was always asking, “Fulfill only one of my desires.”
God must have got tired, bored. One day he appeared and he said, “Okay, you won’t leave me alone. Morning, evening, you continuously go on harping on the same note, ‘Fulfill one of my desires.’ Okay, I am here, what is your desire?”
And the man said, “Whatsoever I ask should be immediately given to me, that is my desire.” A very cunning man! God must have thought out of his innocence that he would ask for one thing; he asked for it all. He said that he had only one desire, “Whatsoever I ask should be given immediately to me.” But you cannot defeat God, because cunningness never defeats innocence. God said, “Perfectly okay. This will be so – but remember one thing: whatsoever you ask for, your neighbors will get double.”
Now, the man was finished. Months passed, and God would come again and again: “You have not asked anything.” He stopped praying, and God would come again and again, morning, evening, and he would say, “What, you have not asked yet?”
And the man became very bored with God. He thought and thought, but whatsoever he gets, his neighbors will get double. “It is pointless.” He always wanted to have a beautiful palace, but what is the point now? The neighbors will have doubly big palaces. The very idea was crushing him, killing him; he lost all joy in life. Now there was no possibility of ever being happy, and this God would come morning and evening and torture him.
So one day he said, “Okay, give me a beautiful golden palace.” Immediately his hut became a golden palace. He came out and he saw that the whole town had golden palaces – bigger palaces, doubly bigger, all golden – only his was the poorest one.
He went to a lawyer – because where else can you go when such legal problems arise? The lawyer said, “Don’t be worried” – and of course God cannot win with a lawyer – the lawyer said, “Ask, ‘Make a big well in front of my house without a wall.’” So a big well appeared before his palace and two wells appeared before everybody else’s. The lawyer said, “Now ask, ‘Make me one-eyed, let one eye disappear.’”
The man asked, “What are you saying?” and the lawyer said, “Just wait. The law is the law.” One of his eyes disappeared, and both of his neighbors’ eyes disappeared. Now, the whole town was blind, and two wells in each palace garden… People started falling into the wells, people started dying. And the man was utterly happy. He said, “Now, my desires are fulfilled.”
So, I know you will be in difficulty: I declare you extraordinary, but everybody else, all your neighbors are doubly extraordinary.
And please, don’t go to a lawyer.
The second question:
Osho,
Can I know a question the answer of which you do not know?
In fact, I don’t know the answer to any question. All that I go on doing is destroying the questioner, and the question. It is not answering. Just look at what happened to Sudha – destroyed, murdered. Is this an answer? I don’t know a single answer, but once you ask a question, you are in my hands. Then I push you this way and that, then I hit you this way and that. Ask the question and you are trapped; first I try to destroy the question, and then the questioner.
But that is the whole function of a master. The master is not there to answer your stupid questions; he has to destroy your stupidity so that no questions arise again. So you cannot ask a question without being trapped in it. The questioner is a new person, it seems. He must be a new arrival, unacquainted with the way things are dealt with here.
I am reminded of a story…
Mulla Nasruddin was made a justice of the peace, a JP. The first day he was in court a man came rushing in, and the man was only wearing underwear, almost naked, and was shouting, “I have been robbed! Catch the people who have cheated me and robbed me.”
And Mulla Nasruddin asked, “Where have you been robbed? In this town?”
He said, “Yes, in this town, just on the outskirts. I was going to Mecca on a religious pilgrimage. My money has been taken away, my clothes have been taken away, my wife also! I have been utterly robbed. You have to save me, and you are the magistrate here, so do something!”
Mulla said, “No, this case does not come under my jurisdiction. It is not under my rule. Go to the neighboring villages.”
He asked, “Why? I have been robbed here.” And the Mulla said, “No, because those people who have robbed you can’t belong to this town, they must belong to the neighboring villages.”
The man asked, “How can you be so certain?”
He said, “I am absolutely certain. Things are done totally here. If they were of this village, they would have taken your underwear too. We don’t do things so partially. Go to some other village; these people must belong to some other place. They can’t belong to my village, that much is certain. I know my people – they do things in a total way, in an absolute way. Your underwear is enough proof that you have not been robbed by my people.”
When you ask a question you are giving your head to me. That’s why a disciple asks a question. He is saying, “Cut off my head.” The question is just an excuse. He is saying, “Destroy this mind.” I am not answering you because the answer is not going to help; the answer will make you more knowledgeable. I am not here to make you more knowledgeable. All the knowledge that you have has to be taken away. You have to be robbed of it, and totally robbed of it – not even underwear has to be left.
If I can destroy all that you have been carrying all along as knowledge, if I can help you to unlearn all that you have learned, if I can decondition you of all your conditionings, then knowing will arise in you. Knowing is your inner capacity, it is your intuition.
The question is arising in you because your knowing is obstructed, because your knowing eye is not functioning, hence the question. Otherwise, you would solve it yourself, you would not go and ask anybody.
Who can solve your question if you cannot solve it? And how can anybody else solve it? Your question implies your whole life in it; it is not just a question, it is an indicator of a thousand and one things. When you ask a question, nobody else can ask that question, only you can ask it. It is specific because to ask that question you had to live a certain kind of life, you had to be conditioned in a certain way; you had to pass through certain experiences. Nobody else has passed through those experiences except you. The question arises in you; it is the flowering of all the nonsense that has been taught to you, all the scriptures that have been fed into your biocomputer, all the books that you have read, the churches, the priests, parents – all are implied in it.
A question is not a simple thing. It is a very complex phenomenon and I am not here to answer it. If I answer it, you will gather a little bit more knowledge, you will go home knowing a little bit more than when you had come. I will not have helped you; I will have burdened you more. Your knowledge is the rock that is hindering you from knowing. Knowledge is the poison that doesn’t allow you to know. The knowledge has to be utterly destroyed so that you can be left alone and naked.
One can move toward godliness only when one is utterly naked. That nakedness is innocence, that nakedness is childlike, that nakedness is the purity of the heart, that nakedness is the heart. The mind is full of knowledge; the heart is absolutely empty.
The work of a master is to help you unburden. So I don’t answer your questions, I destroy them. And if the situation is right, I not only destroy the question, I destroy the questioner too. And if you are not, then you will know what is. When you are not, godliness is.
You ask me: “Can I know a question the answer of which you do not know?” Now, why have you asked this question? It must be coming out of a great ego, as if you are in an argument with me, as if you would like to defeat me. You would like to ask a question the answer of which I don’t know – why? So that you can have the feeling that you are the person who has such a question that not even an enlightened person can answer.
You are not interested in solving the problems of your life; you are more interested in showing your knowledge. But you cannot defeat me because I don’t answer questions at all. If I were answering questions, there are thousands of questions I could not answer. But I am not answering questions at all – that is not what is going on here. This is not a place of discussion, argument. This is a place of love. You are not here to debate with me. If you are here to debate with me you are wasting your time. If you are here to be with me – not to debate, but to feel, but to be – if you are here to feel my presence, only then should you be here, otherwise not.
If I were only answering questions, then you could ask thousands of questions, and they would not have to be very great. You could ask simple questions: “Where is Timbuktu?” – and I might not be able to pinpoint exactly where it is; I have only heard the name. Timbuktu is a small place – sometimes I cannot even figure out where a certain country is. My geography is weak, my mathematics too. About history I am absolutely absurd; everything is topsy-turvy. Then you could ask a thousand and one questions: “When was Socrates married to Xanthippe?” I would not be able to answer you. You can find millions of questions, that is not the problem at all, and it is not the purpose of your being here or my being here. It is not a kind of competition between the questioner and the answerer; we are not debating anything. We are just here to be together, we are learning the ways of togetherness.
You are here to soak the energy that I am. You are here to drink the alcohol that I am. This is a place for drunkards.
Now sir, you have come into wrong company. This is not the place for you unless you are ready to move in a totally different dimension: the dimension where the question is not answered but destroyed.
When a mind comes to a state where no question is left because all questions have been destroyed, when a mind is in a non-questioning state, that is the clarity, that is the transparency, that is where satori happens, that is where one comes in contact with existence. It is not by becoming knowledgeable that you will know, it is by becoming innocent that you will know.
The third question:
Osho,
Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow? I am so tired of trips. How many more must I try, only to find they don't work either? I know the problem is in me and I know there is no problem. So now what?
Celebrate now! Sing, dance, love, be.
You say: “Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow?” Because you cannot trust me, that’s why. You cannot trust me. I go on declaring that you are buddhas, already enlightened, but you are skeptical about it. You can believe – that too very grudgingly – that a Gautam Buddha may have become enlightened, maybe, perhaps. A Jesus became enlightened, maybe. You can grudgingly concede that much, but to concede that you are enlightened is too much. You cannot give such a gift to yourself; you are so against yourself, so condemnatory toward yourself. You can immediately accept it if somebody says that you are a sinner. Just think of it; if somebody says you are a sinner you are ready to bow down. Even if on the surface you deny it, deep down you know that he is right, because from the very beginning you have been taught, you have been poisoned, that you are a sinner. The teaching has gone into your very blood and bones and marrow, it has become a part of you that you are a sinner. All the religions of the world have been teaching this for centuries. Generations upon generations have been doing one work only: condemning man.
You are not even aware of the self-condemnation that you have for yourself, the hate that you have for yourself. You don’t love yourself, so how can you allow yourself to be a buddha? Releasement can happen this moment, but you won’t allow it, hence the methods are needed. If people can trust me, then there is no need for any method. The method is not going to help the releasement. Let me remind you: the method is only going to help you trust me. So I send you into therapy groups and these people will work on you. They will only help one thing; they will help you to trust me.
The whole function of therapy groups here is totally different than it is in the West; it has a totally different meaning and significance. It is to create trust, it is to create a little love for yourself; it is to create acceptance. Then I send you into meditations; those meditations are cathartic. A cathartic meditation is just throwing off all the repressed energy that is boiling in you that won’t allow you to trust. Dynamic Meditation, Kundalini Meditation and others, will take away much energy that hinders – it will be released. Slowly, slowly you will become capable of trusting. It is only because of lack of trust that methods have to be invented. If you trust already there is no need for any method.
You ask me: “Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly?” Releasement will always happen instantly. Whether it happens today or tomorrow it will always happen instantly, suddenly. It is a sudden experience, lightning, and the whole past disappears and you are abruptly cut from the past, you become discontinuous with it. The old disappears and the new is born. And the new is not a modification of the old. It has no relationship with the old, it is simply unrelated with the old. The old has not caused it either, it is not an effect of the old; it is utterly unrelated to the old.
Krishnamurti has been saying the same thing for at least fifty years, but nothing much has happened. He goes on saying that just now it is possible – be aware, be awake. And people go on listening because the fact is that they cannot trust Krishnamurti that it can be just now. Their minds are spinning and weaving inside: “It is not possible; how can it be possible? What will happen to my past karmas? I have to undo them. And what about all the crimes and the sins I have committed? I have to be punished for them. And what about the Judgment Day? How can it happen right now?” Deep inside these unconscious rumblings go on and on and you go on listening.
Seeing the failure of Krishnamurti, I have invented methods. I am saying essentially the same thing, because the message cannot be different. But I had to invent methods so that they can destroy your mistrust. Methods will help you to become unblocked; they will help you to become more flowing, they will help you to be less frozen, they will melt you, they will warm up the process of your being.
Releasement is going to happen instantly, any moment it is going to happen. If you are ready, it is possible this very moment – not even a single moment more do you have to wait.
“Why are methods needed when releasement can happen instantly, herenow?” – because of you; not because of me. From my side I am very puzzled why it is not happening to you. It should happen, why is it not happening? Why do you go on listening without understanding? Why do you listen only intellectually? Why can’t you listen from the heart, from your totality? It is a constant wonder to me, a miracle that people can go on listening every day and can remain the same – hence the methods.
The methods are not for the releasement, you are not going to become enlightened through any meditation. No, nobody has ever become enlightened through any meditation, but the meditations help. They help in a negative way: they remove the rocks and the stream starts flowing. They don’t create the stream – they can’t create it. How can rocks create the stream? They have nothing to do with the nature of the stream. But they can prevent it.
Because there are things which are preventing you from trusting the moment, trusting life, trusting existence, you are shrunk in fear, in doubt. You have armored yourself in doubt and fear just to be secure, safe; you have created a great armor around yourself. Your body is no longer an opening to existence; it has become closed. Your windows, your doors, are all closed. The sun rises – yes, the sun rises in the evening – but it cannot penetrate you. It goes on rising, it goes on knocking on your door, but the knock is subtle – so subtle, so silent, that you cannot hear it in your noisy mind, in that constant chatter that goes on inside you.
These methods are negative methods. They will not give you enlightenment, but they will remove the barriers. And once the barriers are removed, once all the barriers are removed, enlightenment happens. It is nothing that you have to achieve; when you are available, the release, the liberation…
You say: “I am so tired of trips.” Really? I don’t think so. If one is really tired, then one’s trips are finished. You are still hoping maybe there is still some trip, some way of tripping so that you can attain. You are still hoping, you are looking out of the corner of your eye. “Maybe I have failed ninety-nine times, but who knows, I may succeed the hundredth time. I have failed up to now, but who knows? I may be trying the wrong methods, and there may be some right method. I have failed because I may have been with wrong masters, and there may be some right master. I have failed because I have not put all of my energy into it. If I put all of my energy into it I may succeed. I have failed because the time was not ripe for it and now the time may be ripe.” A thousand and one excuses you can always find when you want to go on a new trip. If you are really tired, then who is preventing you? Then forget all about trips. Relax, celebrate, be!
“I am so tired of trips. How many more must I try, only to find they don’t work either?” Nothing ever works; nothing has ever worked, because nothing is needed for it to work. Life is going perfectly well – there is no need to do anything whatsoever. But this vision comes slowly, slowly when you have failed again and again and again. It sinks in very slowly. Our minds are very stubborn, hard, rock-like; they are not soft soil – they don’t allow anything to sink in easily. Hence sometimes it takes lives for a person to realize that nothing ever works. And that is a great moment, when one realizes that nothing ever works, nothing can work: “My whole effort to attain was absolutely wrong from the very beginning. It was wrong because what I am trying to achieve is already the case. It is wrong because I am searching and it is already there inside me.”
All efforts are meaningless. If a person is intelligent, he will soon understand it. If he is not intelligent, he will take a little longer. It depends on your intelligence. A very intelligent person, attentive, alert, aware, will see the point in a single moment. With a single blow his head will disappear. He will see the point and all is finished: all misery, all hell, all search.
“I am so tired of trips,” you say. “How many more must I try, only to find they don’t work either?” It all depends on you. You can make a trip out of me. Now, the question is from Hal Duggan, and he is taking sannyas on the twentieth. It depends on you – that too can become a trip. From my side it is not, it is the end of all trips. It is just a declaration that enough is enough. Sannyas is a declaration that “I am not going into any more trips,” that all methods have failed and all paths have failed, that all paths lead astray, that “I am not going to be caught into any method, into any path, any longer.” Sannyas is a renunciation of all methods, all paths, all trips – psychedelic or otherwise.
But you can also make sannyas a trip, it depends on you, and then you will again miss. Sannyas is not a trip. It is the realization that all trips are bound to fail. It is coming out of all trips; it is coming home. It is realizing the fact that you don’t need to waste your energy and time in searching for anything any longer, you don’t need to go on waiting for anything to happen in the future because it is already happening. It has always been happening. Dance, sing, celebrate, be.
Existence is, it has not to be searched for. Existence already is, you are not to discover it. All that you have to do is dance a mad dance. You have to dance in such a mad way that all the doors are thrown open. You have to sing with such totality that the ego dissolves into that totality. You have to be in prayerfulness, in gratitude, with such passion and intensity that the whole starts flowing toward you – your waiting becomes a magnetic field.
Sannyas is not a trip. So remember it, it is not a trip. Don’t reduce sannyas to a trip. I am not a trip. I am not here to create new bondages for you. I am here to make you free, totally free. That’s why I don’t give you any discipline; I give you only awareness. That’s why I don’t give you any character; I give you only alertness. And out of alertness if a character arises – good. And out of awareness a character certainly arises, but a very fluid and flowing character. It is not a fixed mode of life, because all modes are dead, stagnant. A character arises out of consciousness, but the consciousness goes on changing, so the character goes on changing. The consciousness goes on reflecting each moment the new reality that is happening, and the character goes on corresponding to the new reality that is happening. There is continuous adjustment, spontaneous adjustment, between you and the whole.
The people who have fixed characters are always maladjusted because they have a fixed character and life has no fixed character. Existence is characterless, and if you have a character you will never meet existence because your character will confine you into a certain straitjacket, you will become a stereotype, you will not be a living being any longer. You will be a noun not a verb, and existence is a verb not a noun.
Existence is a process, a dynamism; and a man of character, the so-called man of character, is dull, dead. He has to be dull and dead, because if he was aware he would have to see the changes that are happening around him, and he would have to change accordingly. He has to remain drugged in his unconsciousness, he has to remain fixed with his character because he is always afraid that something may happen and he may have to change his character. He does not want to change his character so he goes on remaining unaware of all that is changing. He also creates a society which is unchanging. That’s why in the East the society has remained unchanging, it is because of the so-called “character-obsession.” If a man has to have a fixed character, then society has also to be a fixed pattern; only then will he be adjusted, otherwise there will be difficulty.
In the East, thousands of years have passed and things have remained almost the same. They have not changed, they have not been allowed to change because then there is fear. And that’s what is happening in the West now: because things are changing people are losing character, and the Western religious leaders are very worried. Life is changing fast, science has released so many energies that life goes on changing. And one has to change with it, one has to keep pace with life. If one has to keep pace with life, one cannot stay in a fixed mode. It is very easy to live in an Indian village and remain in a fixed mode; it is very difficult to live in New York with a fixed mode of life. You have to be more fluid.
So the Eastern people think that Western people don’t have any character. The reality is in fact is that the West has become more alive, more changing, and the East is still dull and dead, fixated, obsessed and afraid: “If anything changes on the outside then I will have to change inside too, because my inside has to correspond with the outside.”
Small changes bring difficulties. For example, since electricity came to India many Jainas have started eating in the night. For centuries they have not eaten in the night, they had a fixed mode, but when electricity came suspicions arose, doubts arose. Now what is the problem? Electricity is there, light is there; there is no fear of an insect or an ant getting into your food, you will not be killing anything. Now in the night you can have more light than you have in the day, so what is the problem? Many Jainas started eating in the night. And when one thing falls, other things start falling because everything is connected. Everything is connected with every other thing: if you can eat in the night and if Mahavira is wrong about it, maybe he is wrong about other things too.
That’s why the church has been fighting against science, because it creates suspicion. The church has believed that the earth is flat, and then science started saying it is not flat, it is a globe. Now if Jesus is wrong about one thing, why can’t he be wrong about other things? Then he is no longer infallible. Suspicion will arise: he may be wrong about God too, he may be wrong about the Judgment Day, he may be absolutely wrong, who knows – because he is fallible.
Religions have always insisted that nothing should change; these religions are all in the service of death. I am giving you a totally new vision: a religion of life and not of death, a religion of intelligence not of stupidity, a religion of dynamism not of stagnancy, a religion which will keep you flowing with the flow of the total, and will not in any way hold you back from the movement of the total. It will keep you in tune with the whole. I don’t give you a character; I only give consciousness. My whole emphasis is on consciousness.
Sitting is Zen, walking is Zen, talking is Zen, being silent is Zen. All should be only awareness. Awareness should be your truth. Let awareness be the only fundamental law and then you will be out of all trips, otherwise it is difficult. You can go on changing from one trip to another. A Christian can become a Hindu; this is just changing the train – the trip remains. A Hindu can become a Christian and nothing changes, only words; he will not go to the temple, he will go to the church.
And the same can be done with me too, but remember that will be your responsibility. I can also become a trip to you. I don’t want to become a trip to you; I want to become a liberation for you. From my side I want you to be liberated, but still your cooperation is needed. The very idea of liberation, and you can catch hold of it and make a trip out of it. And your mind is very, very efficient at making trips out of everything. Beware!
On the twentieth you are going to become a sannyasin. Remember, this is not a trip; this is the end of all trips. Let it be the end of all trips; for how long are you going to journey and journey and journey? Now come home, now come to rest; enough of the trips. Learn from me how to rest, how to relax, how to be.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Last night I had this dream: in the middle of the night the sun appeared, completely out of its place. This filled me with a sacred terror, which was outside of any dream. But at the center of the terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear, and it vanished, leaving me in emptiness for some moments. I felt I understood a little of how loving you madly can enable me to go anywhere.
This is a beautiful experience. Modern researchers, particularly dream researchers, have just recently stumbled upon a new kind of dream; they call it the breakthrough dream. This is a breakthrough dream.
The normal dream, the ordinary dream, and the breakthrough dream are totally different. This is the difference; this is of great importance to you, to you all. If you can bring this quality into the dream, you will be able to go beyond dreaming. A breakthrough dream is a dream in which some kind of awareness arises in you. The ordinary dream is unconscious, passive: you simply go on watching, no awareness arises in you; you are simply identified with the dream. You don’t remember a thing, you don’t remember yourself, you are not aware at all; you are lost in the dream. The ordinary dream possesses you. The breakthrough dream is different: it is not passive, it is active; it is not just possessing you, you remain in some way alert in it.
Gurdjieff used to teach his disciples about such dreaming. This is a key to work deeper into your consciousness. He used to say to his disciples, “Try to remember yourself in the dream, and the only way to do it is if you remember the whole day, only then can you remember.” So the method was that the person who was given this kind of work had to remember continuously the whole day. Walking on the street he remembers, “This is a dream. All these shops, these people, this man passing by, this noise, all this is a dream. This woman who looks so beautiful is a dream. This tree is a dream.” The whole day the man continues thinking: “This is a dream, this is a dream.” He repeats it millions of times: “This is a dream.” Naturally this idea that “This is a dream” penetrates more and more into his unconscious, and soon it is transferred to the conscious. Then, one day, suddenly – it takes three to six months of constant repeating: “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream” – one day, suddenly, in a dream he remembers, “This is a dream” and that very moment a new energy has entered his dreaming. He is alert, aware.
And this is not a new method. In the East, we have used it for centuries. In fact, the whole idea that the world is maya is nothing but a philosophic statement of this technique. “The world is maya,” means the world is a dream. You have to remember it: “This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream,” and then one day, in a dream, you remember it is a dream. And then suddenly there is a gap between you and the dream. The dream is there, you are here, and there is a gap: you have awakened in the dream. And the moment you awaken in the dream, the dream loses all vitality, it disappears; it starts disappearing and great emptiness arises.
This is what has happened to you. You have stumbled upon a breakthrough dream.
Just the other day I was talking about four stages of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and turiya, the fourth. Ordinarily you remain in the waking because you can’t even remember in waking, your waking is almost asleep. You are only awake in name’s sake. Very rarely are you awake even when you are in a wakeful state, very rarely. If somebody comes suddenly with a revolver in his hand and puts the revolver on your chest, maybe for a moment you will become alert. Those moments in your whole life can be counted on your fingers.
Once I was traveling with a friend and the car fell into a river. The friend was driving. When the car fell, just for a few seconds before, everybody in the car became alert that it was going to fall. Somehow the brakes were not working, and the speed was such that on a particular turn it became absolutely clear that now… Everybody in the car became alert that it was finished.
And the next moment we were all in the dry bed – it was summertime – and the car was upside down. The moment we came out, nobody was hurt but everybody was transformed. The man who was driving told me, “You have been talking about awareness, awareness, awareness, and I have been listening to you for years. Now, for the first time, I had what you mean by awareness. For a moment, just on the verge of falling, I became aware, now I know what it is. All became silent. Although death was so close all was utter bliss.”
Very rarely do you become aware. But if you start trying to become aware – that is what vipassana is: an effort to be aware, watching; watching each act that you are doing – slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, very slowly, you start feeling a new kind of awareness, a new kind of presence. That presence makes you a different kind of individual, more integrated, more centered.
Just the other day I told you the story of the Buddhist monk who was invited by the prostitute to live with her for four months in the rainy season. Now, Prabuddha has asked a question, and he says the story was ugly: “Why couldn’t the Buddhist monk move into lovemaking with the prostitute? Why was he afraid?”
He was not afraid. And the story is not ugly. Maybe Prabuddha became too interested in Amrapali and her beauty. Prabuddha must have started thinking, “If I had been there, I would not have missed! This foolish monk… And what was wrong in it?” It is not a question of wrong or right. But the monk was so centered, the monk was so present in himself, that all that the prostitute was doing to attract him must have looked to him very juvenile, foolish, silly. What the prostitute was doing to enchant him was great from the side of the prostitute. She was an artist in the art of alluring people, of hypnotizing people, and she was a beautiful woman. It is said that she was the next most famous person in Buddha’s time – the first was Buddha and Amrapali was the second.
But if the monk is centered and has no feeling arising in him to go into lovemaking, why should he go? If he has transcended, why should he go? It is not that he was resisting; if he were resisting or repressing then it is ugly. But why should he indulge if there is no desire in him? Just because of the prostitute? Why does the story look ugly to Prabuddha? No, he was very kind to the woman, infinitely kind, infinitely loving. But, of course the love of a centered man is totally different from the love of an uncentered man. He was a buddha, that’s why Buddha had allowed him to go. He had arrived; all desiring had disappeared from him. Now it was just a toy.
The story is immensely beautiful because by remaining centered, he helped the woman. He really must have loved her because that is the greatest gift he could have given to her. If he had become involved, the woman would have thrown him out sooner or later. If he had become involved, the woman would have never gone to Buddha to become a disciple. This was the greatest gift that the monk could have given to her: the gift of Buddha, the gift of disciplehood. He made himself absolutely available to the woman, to watch, to see, in every possible way. He made his presence felt, and the woman came to know that this was something to be achieved; this was something worthwhile. All that she had been doing up to now was worthless, insignificant, nonessential. This man had essential richness, the richness of the essence. She fell in love with the monk on a higher plane. She fell in love not only with the monk, but with samadhi, with enlightenment.
In fact, that was the reason for the beauty of the monk. She had not gone into love because of the monk; the monk was just a vehicle, the energy was that of enlightenment, he was luminous. She had fallen in love with that luminousness. The body of the monk was just like a lamp and the luminousness inside was the flame. You don’t fall in love with the lamp; you fall in love with the flame. If the monk had moved, the flame would have disappeared and the woman would have found an ordinary man – very ordinary, nothing special about him, nothing valuable about him.
The more the monk remained centered… And when I say remained centered I am not saying he was making any effort to remain centered. He was centered, it was effortless, it was spontaneous; it was natural. If there were any effort involved, the monk himself would have been afraid to go. He was not afraid; he slept in the same room as the woman. And she danced naked around him, and he sat in silence and meditated. He remained alone. The woman must have tried in every possible way. It was a challenge, a great challenge to her beauty. It was humiliating in a way, insulting in a way; she must have felt hurt, her ego must have felt hurt. She tried in every way to seduce the monk but failed again and again and again. Then she must have realized that he had some other kind of beauty, he had some other kind of presence. And she became enchanted with that space; she followed him, and became a disciple of Buddha. She soon became enlightened. Amrapali was one of the enlightened disciples of Buddha.
The monk loved the woman, that’s why with great kindness and compassion he made his presence available. There is nothing ugly in it; it is absolutely beautiful. The monk was a benediction, a blessing.
But you go on moving in life, attracted by this thing and that, you are unaware. If you become aware, your attractions will start dropping, disappearing. And when you become aware in a dream, the dream disappears immediately, and there arises great silence. That silence is the third state, sushupti: deep sleep. A breakthrough dream means that you have moved into the third, and with a little bit of consciousness. That is a great experience; it is the first approach into the deepest layer of your being. Beyond that there is only one more state, turiya.
Patanjali has said that deep sleep is closest to samadhi. It is. If you take one step more, you are a buddha. Samadhi is the center, turiya is the center; around that center the first layer is of sleep, the second layer is of dreaming, the third layer is of your so-called waking. You have to go deeper and deeper. Waking is the farthest from turiya, dreaming is a little closer. That’s why psychoanalysis goes into your dreaming. Rather than thinking about your waking experiences, psychoanalysis goes into your dreaming because there you are truer, more honest, simpler, more natural. Yoga goes a little deeper; it goes into sushupti, deep sleep.
A breakthrough dream is a dream which takes you to sushupti. And after sushupti there is only a single step more. Zen and Tantra take you into that single step.
It was a beautiful dream. I will read it again: “Last night I had this dream: in the middle of the night the sun appeared, completely out of its place. This filled me with a sacred terror, which was outside of any dream. But at the center of this terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear…”
It is beautiful that you could remember in your dream, you could remember me. Every disciple has to learn that I have to be with you not only in your waking, but in your dreaming too. And if I am there, dreaming will disappear. The very remembrance will disconnect you with the dreaming layer. “But at the center of this terror came the remembrance of you and the state you represent, which is beyond all fear, and it vanished, leaving me in an emptiness for some moments.”
Those moments of emptiness are of the third state, sushupti: deep sleep. Now, try to do it again and again. Every night when you go to sleep, go with this thought vibrating in you, pulsating in you: “If there is a dream, I will remember.” Remember me. While you are falling asleep go on remembering, so that it soaks into your sleep. While you are changing from waking to dreaming let it be there, a subtle presence, and then slowly, slowly you can transform all your normal dreams into breakthrough dreams, and each dream will lead you into the third state, deep sleep. When you can be aware in deep sleep, even for a few moments, you are coming closer to home. And one day you will be able to remember me even in that emptiness, and that very day the sky opens up, that very moment the sun really rises in the evening.
It is very symbolic that you saw the sun rising in the middle of the night; it was in the dream state. Soon it will happen if you can remember me in the deep sleep beyond which nothing can be said, but beyond which all is, godliness is.
The last question:
Osho,
Oooh, the whole life waterfalling on me! Heaven and earth, work and play, everything I have ever been and done, all things I have ever wanted to will be, past and future swelling, swelling in balloon dancing now! This enlightenment is some crazy business!
Crazy baby, crazy, absolutely crazy! But don’t be afraid. Go into it, and soon you will see the sanity of insanity, soon you will see that it is not crazy; before you have been crazy all along. It looks crazy compared to your life that has happened up to now. People are living in madness, so when they come closer and closer to some inner light, compared to their life, it looks crazy. Once it settles, the whole of life looks crazy and only this light, this awareness, looks sane.
Buddha is sane although he himself was worried many times that he had gone crazy. Others were also saying that he had gone crazy. Naturally, when all are competing in the world, and everybody is rushing toward money, power, and prestige, and you start moving away from all this nonsense; when everybody is going extrovert, and you start moving inward; when everybody is going in one direction and you start moving in the polar opposite direction, diametrically opposite direction, it looks crazy.
Once it happened…
A drunkard was driving on a one-way street and was going in the wrong direction. He was puzzled because everybody was going the other way. The policeman stopped him and asked him, “Where are you going?”
He said, “That I don’t know. One thing is certain, that wherever I am going I am late because everybody is coming back!”
When you start moving toward meditation, suddenly the whole world, everybody, is going one way and you are going in the opposite direction. And everybody looks at you with suspicion, “Where are you going?” You will also look with suspicion at yourself, and the idea will arise again and again: “Have I gone crazy?”
But one has to learn one thing: if you are feeling happy, don’t be worried because craziness cannot give you happiness. If you are feeling less tense, don’t be worried because craziness will give you more tension, more anxiety. If you are feeling more together, don’t be worried; you are on the right track, you are moving toward well-being, you are moving toward wholeness.
And that is what is happening. You say: “…the whole life waterfalling on me! Heaven and earth, work and play, everything I have ever been and done, all things I have ever wanted to will be, past and future swelling, swelling in balloon dancing now!” Look at the beauty of the dance. Look at the benediction of nature falling like a waterfall on you. Look at the expanding consciousness swelling, swelling; it will fill the whole sky soon – even the sky is not the limit.
“This enlightenment is some crazy business!” It is, but the people who become involved in this crazy business are the only sane people, because theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the mad, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Enough for today.